Recently checked in with one of our fellows in Birmingham, Richard Leighton, who runs We Create*, a Social Enterprise that offers young individuals the opportunity to gain access to qualifications and commercial experience in Fashion Design.

We Create* runs The Oasis, an alternative fashion shop in Birmingham that retails fashion labels designed by local young designers – some of these products are also available online. In addition, the shop also retails designs developed by participants on We Create*'s pilot courses.    

Chuffed to see that Richard is doing so well. In the coming time he's looking to expand on the many alternatives We Create* offer, like a free fashion-based business help and support service, a 12-week fashion design and its commercial development course, and projects in partnership with organisations like the Youth
Offending Service (YOS), HMS Prison Service, Social Enterprises, and so on.

We're excited about the many things We Create* has started up and expect to hear more from Richard in the coming months.

During a recent search in our fellowship database, I came across the profile of our founder, Michael Young, the Lord of Dartington. In his profile we have included a quote from one of his speeches given at SSE around the turn of the millennium, which I think is worth sharing. In a dire financial environment like today, this might be food for thought.  

Michael Young:

There is a great 'wall' coming up in a few weeks time
and only a few messages will get over the wall, or a few whispers through the
chinks. So, looked at in this way, my function here is to whisper a few things
to you, from one century to another. You are going to spend a longer time in
the next century than I am, but I think no-one here has spent as much time in
this century as I have.

Anyway, that is my message to you of the next century, from me in this
century. And I don't think the next century will be any different. The
resistance to new ideas will be much the same – and the means to overcoming it
will be the same. You will need all the guile you can muster and all the
persistence. Don't dismiss all your good ideas if they don't seem good ideas to
your friends and other people. Believe in yourself. Go for it. That's what I'm
shouting from the dockside.

Thor Steinhovden currently interns with the School for Social
Entrepreneurs in Bethnal Green, London. He recently finished a BA in
Political Science and History at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. This
fall he will embark on a MSc in Comparative Politics (Nationalism and
Ethnicity) at the London School of Economics.

The blog has been a little quiet of late as I've been travelling around, establishing some sort of weekly record of combined air and rail miles over the last week or so (Belfast, Beijing, Penzance and Nottingham). Highlights have included meeting the first cohort of students at SSE Cornwall (they survived my evaluation session successfully), hearing Nigel Kershaw talk in Stormont about how he first met our CEO Alastair Wilson at SSE ("this snotty, spotty young Scot rambled on to me….and now he's the boss!") and meeting the SSEI alumni, and hearing about the expansion of the Skills 4 Social Entrepreneurs taster programme to four tier 2 Chinese cities.

In between all of that (and there's much else to catch up on in a forthcoming round-up), I hosted a London Business School delegation of international business / government leaders, along with two SSE Fellows: Kiran Nihalani (a recent SSE Fellow) who runs Unspent Convictions CIC, and Andy Walker, who runs Southside Young Leaders Academy. We always like to showcase Fellows with different projects from different backgrounds and, in the case of Andy and Kiran, different genders and ages as well. It made for a fascinating session: Kiran's focused passion and energy borne out of her frustration with the work she had been doing and the status quo; Andy's renewed vigour and commitment at having found a new passion after a career of work. I'd urge you to check both their organisations out, and contact them; in a sense, both are working with young people excluded or marginalised from society (or at risk of being so), be that young boys aged 8 causing trouble in class, or young offenders not being given the chance to apply their resourcefulness in positive ways.

A particular hit with the delegation was the video from Andy's project, which hears from some of the boys his organisations works with; check it out:

Just a quick post to say that SSE is recruiting on two fronts:

a) Staff: we're looking for a super-keen, wonderful, dynamic, confident development person to become our Network Sustainability Officer: supporting and developing the growing UK franchise network.
See here for more details

b) Students: we're recruiting students for our two London programmes and for an amazing programme for Jewish / Muslim social entrepreneurs in New York. For more info on these opportunities, see:

• London SSE page for full details of current London programme opportunities
• The New York programme (in association with Columbia University and the De Rothschild Foundation)

Also, while I'm doing an internal bit of info-spreading, a big welcome to Hannah, our new intern over from the US. Currently beavering away on analysing a survey, responding to queries from the website, and generally getting up to speed on what the devil we do, I'm hopeful that Hannah will be putting up a few posts over the next few weeks while she's with us….

The third sector, in all its rich variety, needs big organisations and small ones addressing different needs in different ways to improve people's lives. And, as I've often said, I'm not anti-scaling, just anti- the fetishization of scale so that people feel compelled to, rather than choose to / do it when it's appropriate and in line with their personal goals.

But there are times when big charities appear simply not to bother. Rainer and Crime Concern were looking for a new brand when they merged….and they decided on Catch 22. And rewarded their branding agency no doubt handsomely for it. It's already drawn flak for what some feel is a puzzling name to represent their work.

What's angered many in the social enterprise world though (not least at SSE), is that social enterprise ambassador / SSE Fellow / all-round good guy Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa's early stage CIC is called Catch 22. I can't speak for the legal ins and outs, as I don't know enough detail (though it's interesting that this article says that the name cannot be trademarked because it is the name of a book, while the charity's new website has "The names Catch22, Rainer and Crime Concern and their respective logos are trademarks" in its terms and conditions).

What I have heard on the grapevine though is that, when Tokunbo brought his organisation to the attention of the CEO of the new Catch 22, they apparently said that they had known about his organisation but steamed ahead as he was small fry in this world. Appropriately the CEO is also a trustee of the Who Cares? Trust….

Good to see that the values of the organisation are so well represented by their action, hey? Particularly as Tokunbo's organisation also focuses on giving disadvantaged young people a break: who knows what sort of interesting partnership or collaborative deal they might have been able to do with a more thoughtful approach.