Category Archives: Social Enterprise

Social enterprise and public service delivery

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Yesterday, SSE attended the Smith Institute's launch event for its new policy pamphlet, Social Enterprise for Public Service
(pdf download). Good line-up, including Stephen Bubb (ACEVO, Futurebuilders), Minister for the Third Sector Kevin Brennan and his opposite number in the Conservative party Nick Hurd. Each of them, plus Paul Palmer (Cass Business School) and Tom Titherington (Network Housing Group), spoke for 5 minutes, before it was opened up to questions.

Worth mentioning that the SSE chapter in the pamphlet looks at a few questions of relevance + pertinence to social entrepreneurs: whether entrepreneurship can be commissioned and procured; how can such 'unorthodox' people work with 'orthodox' civil servants; how can they gain legitimacy + credibility when self-appointed; is measurement more important than legal structure; and how can pressure to scale and conform be avoided?

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Shining in Leeds: a capital investment

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ShineOverview
Lots to catch up on from various travels around the country. On Wednesday, I did a session with some UnLtd Awardees in Leeds (on policy and lobbying as part of our Office of the Third Sector Strategic Partner work), which gave me not only the opportunity to deliver this exciting powerpoint, but also to meet up with the Camberwell Project crowd at the amazing building at Shine.

And what an amazing building it is. Formerly a school in the Harehills part of Leeds, the building was nearly demolished for good at the turn of the millennium but saved by the intervention of Yorkshire Forward (the regional development agency) who put up £1m. Over the past year or so, the building has finally been transformed from a derelict building into high specification offices and conference facilities (and I've watched enough Grand Designs in my time to know high spec). But that was only possible because Camberwell had spent the three previous years getting the money together: £4.5m from public and private sources.

It's a massive achievement and, best of all, the building was busy and in-use with kids running around, office space in use, meeting rooms full and so on. What better place to hold an event in Leeds, or to site yourself as a new social enterprise in that area? I've been a fan of Camberwell since meeting Todd and Chris way back when (and now Chrissie and Dawn as well…), but it was great to personally see the fruits of all their labours, and the scale of their ambition being realised.

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There’s no poor people in Denmark (and other learning)

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It's been a gallivanting around kind of time of late, and much to reflect on, not least meeting up with Peter "Sunlight" Holbrook and Jonathan "The Hub" Robinson in the last week or so, two very different but passionate social entrepreneurs. I felt like I learned a great deal from both….will blog on this soon.

SSE was also invited to lecture on Roskilde University's MA at its Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, so I headed out to Copenhagen this weekend (Roskilde is just outside the city). It was an amazingly huge campus: reminded me a bit of Warwick University with its vast swathe of concrete buildings (the taxi driver and I had some fun finding "pavillion 10"; he was also responsible for the "there's no poor people in Denmark" comment, btw) but it was also completely empty (it being a Saturday), so all a bit freaky at first. Thankfully, I found the group I was speaking to (along with Roger Spear from the Open University, who was a welcome and friendly face: we had an interesting chat about different pieces of research) and ventured forth.

Always a bit strange as a practitioner 'lecturing' on a course which is primarily academic and theoretical in its approach. I got the feeling that they probably knew considerably more than me, but hopefully my thoughts (on where new entrants to social entrepreneurship come from + how to engage them; and, separately, on future trends) were useful. It was useful for me to crystallise and build on some thinking we have been doing recently around this, and to draw together some work from OTS (their COI research report on Social Enterprise at the Crossroads segments where new entrants/actors might come from), some recession-focused tools for Fellows, some thinking on future trends and other policy work. It's a little hodgepodge, maybe, but here's the slideset that went with the words / workshops etc:

SSE Roskilde University Slideset

It was great, also, to chat to, debate with and meet some of the Danish social entrepreneurs (because there are genuine social entrepreneurs on the programme as well), not least a guy called Thomas who set up the Danish version of the Big Issue and has been hugely involved in the Homeless World Cup and Homeless Football League in Denmark. Inspiring guy: and good restaurant recommendations as well ;0)

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Apprentices and Fellows

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Still way behind on blogging a whole load of stuff. From the East Midlands SSE new SMART SE project to CIC caps and the SE 100 index. But most of all I wanted to blog about our previous Fellows seminar.

We're running a series of 'M' seminars (money, macro, management etc) for SSE Fellows (those who've completed an SSE programme over the past 10 years) at the moment, and the first, on money, involved the charismatic and passionate Tim Campbell (of Bright Ideas Trust) who had some good tips around negotiation, around what to invest in (and about how Bright Ideas are judging this), about the influence of his own upbringing on how he approaches money, and about how steep his learning curve was in some of the financial areas. Our Director of Learning Marcia did a great job in getting some good questions from everyone beforehand, so that everyone could make the most of his time (which we got more of than we asked for). Here's a clip of Tim, who's also a social enterprise ambassador, talking about Bright Ideas Trust in a video made by one of their beneficiaries:

Following a charismatic TV celebrity and leading entrepreneur, sadly for our Fellows, came yours truly. I was talking about some tools to work with in the recession / current economic climate, namely the legendary Mission-Money Matrix (and a new recession version) for decision making / prioritisation / strategy…and a further partnership spectrum, which I think is useful for those looking at collaborating / partnering in different ways (which will inevitably be happening more, IMHO). It seemed to go down fairly well. See what you make of the slideset (and credit me if you use…!):

Mission, money + partnership

We also took photos of those who attended (and printed them out with our nice new Canon Selphy printer: neat bit of kit!). So hello to Mobeen, David, Mark, Andrae, Kathy, Jen, Rosa, Oleander et al, but star of the show was definitely Juliet's son who not only earned money by bringing Fellows tea and coffee throughout the afternoon, but also had the best photo taken. Clearly, as the caption says (Year of Fellowship: 2021), Jaan is one for the future.

IMG_0038

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Thursday round-up: business, BeyondSport, books and Bubb

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Lots to catch up on in the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship world….so without further ado:

– More Voice 09 reaction from Patrick Butler at Society Guardian, Eastside Consulting, guest speaker Robert Egger, in Social Enterprise Magazine and an excellent round-up from Craig Dearden-Phillips

– I enjoyed Mike Chitty's passionate response to Rob Greenland's post on "the table collapsing for social entrepreneurs"; well worth reading both of these.

– There was special Social business supplement in the Guardian this week as well. Was good to see some different writers in there, especially Martin Clark, who I have a lot of time for. Worth checking out his book the Social Entrepreneur Revolution as well. [update: Rob Greenland has this up as downloadable pdf on his blog]

– I met up with a couple of other interesting people this week: one was James Baderman who has done a great deal to support social entrepreneurs both via What If and also increasingly freelance in recent years. He's currently involved with Beyond Sport, which is well worth a look…particularly if you know of any sport-related social enterprise projects…..

– …the other person was Charmian Love over at Volans; they've got a really interesting report (the Phoenix 50) coming out at the end of March, and it was great to hear from her about their future plans

– Recommended reading for social entrepreneurs from Social Edge. Almost, but not quite, as good as the SSE bookshop…. ;0)

– I can't bring myself to mention Twitter at any length yet. But we are there @SchSocEnt

– At Voice 09, it was also great to see Sean Coughlan from Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, who I hope to see when I'm over the other side in March. They announced their new awards scheme at the start of February, so if you know of any great Irish social entrepreneurs…send them here

– In addition to the £42.5million in the recession action plan, Capacitybuilders have announced an extra £1m to go direct to local support providers

– I haven't read Philanthrocapitalism yet, but it's certainly causing some strong opinions to fly at the moment. Check out Rod Schwartz's take on it…in parts one and two…and follow the links to the author's responses.

– 10 online resources for social entrepreneurs. Clearly, by some error, it doesn't include this blog / SSE, but we'll forgive them for putting a handy list together….

– And for those who enjoy Bubb's Blog, it behoves me to point out the new satirical version, Bogg's Blub. No word on the author yet, though perhaps a minister reacting to having their tie choice savaged? Or has a special post been created at NCVO? It can't match the original for entertainment, but is neatly written with a sharp eye. Most recently, in a bizarre art-imitating-blog-imitating-blog scenario, the original blog wrote about how a spoof had emerged, prompting the spoof to write about how "a certain fictional character Stephen Bubb has been spoofing my own thoughts with a joke blog". If you're still with me, you might be amused…..

Till next time       

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