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: