Very little to report this week, I’m afraid. I’ve mainly been in meetings, which don’t generally generate the most interesting material for a weekly newsletter. I think I’ve covered the language that people use in meetings (“holistic approach”, “take this offline” etc etc) in a previous edition and I don’t want to bore you with repetition.
I will endeavour to do something a bit more exciting next week. It’s my birthday next Thursday so I’m sure I’ll have something to report from that…
Enjoy this week’s news and have a great weekend…
Trip Advisor
We’re looking for environmentally friendly / eco friendly / social enterprise hotels or accommodation in Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds for a programme and we’re drawing a bit of a blank. If you know of anywhere we should be looking at and you could email [email protected] it would be very much appreciated.
Weirdos and misfits with odd skills
Long sentence alert: Lloyds Bank Foundation and National Lottery Community fund are looking for researchers, digital agencies, individual freelancers or consortia to develop a set of common principles, language, standards and approaches to measuring organisational development. It’s too complicated (for me) to explain succinctly here but if it sounds of interest, you can get all the info you need here.
This is the one
Or at least it is if you are a charity or social enterprise in Manchester: building company Sir Robert McAlpine are offering grants of up to £3,000 an access to a volunteer workforce to projects that address local needs.
Are you wanting to scale impact, increase capacity and diversify income?
You are? Good, because the search is on for changemakers across the UK who are leading social enterprises, charities and community businesses that create social and environmental impact. Register for SSE’s biggest UK programme: the Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland Social Entrepreneurs Scale Up and Trade Up programmes, jointly funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.
You get a Match Trading grant up to £7,000, learning programme (14 days spread over a year), business mentor and a supportive community of other social entrepreneurs.
You can register your interest now and we will email you when applications open in March.
Trading places
We are also looking to recruit 10-15 London based organisations working with young people aged 4-18 for a new Transition to Trading programme we are running in partnership with Childhood Trust. It’s aimed at organisations that are actively planning to, or already trying to, diversify their income streams and transition to a model that includes trading income, either by growing existing trading activity or developing new earned income models. You can find all the info you need (including a webinar recording) here.
The deadline to apply is 9th March, an application form is available here.
Dig this
Spring is in the air (or at least it is until the now traditional weekend storm). It won’t be long until you can dust off your trowel, sharpen your shears and head out into the garden again. And if you happen to be in Preston on April 21st you can also head to SSE Fellow Donna Rowe-Green’s Horticulture for Health training day and learn how to use gardening to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities. It’s all run through Donna’s marvelously named social enterprise Rosemary and Time.
Tick tock
No time to mess around with this one (the deadline is Sunday) but the Inclusive Economy Partnership are looking for high impact innovators, working in transition to work, mental health or financial inclusion, who are ready to scale. They have the opportunity to take part in Boost, a scale-up programme offering a range of expert workshops, 1:1 coaching and mentoring.
Bookmark
Power to Change have released The Community Hub Handbook, ‘packed with information, case studies, checklists, templates and practical tools…to run a thriving community hub and ensure its future is secure’.
