Welcome to the first Have I Got Social Enterprise News For You of 2015. I had two resolutions this year: not to leave writing this until Friday morning (broken already) and to check thoroughly for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Oh well…
Here’s this week’s news…
- 2014 (remember then?) saw the proposal of a new ‘Profit with Purpose’ business model, and there are a couple of cracking blog posts from SSE Fellows on the topic this week. First off, Robbie Davison doesn’t pull any punches in asserting that in ‘2014 little has changed in social finance and now we have profit with purpose vehicles – let’s hope 2015 turns out better…’.
- Meanwhile, David Floyd tackles the all new, all singing business model in ‘Purpose Unclear‘ – the comments below the article are well worth a read too. (My own view on the topic? I just hope that someone starts a social enterprise oceanarium called ‘Profit with a Porpoise’).
- The Guardian have rounded up their top 5 international social enterprise stories of 2014.
- If you are in need of some HR advice, SSE Fellow Sonia Wilson is offering free telephone advice to small charities and social enterprises between 10am and 12pm every Wednesday until the end of February. Visit populo.org.uk for more details.
- YTFN are looking for social change organisations to pitch for £1000 funding at their next event at the London School of Economics on March 3rd.
- Some useful tips on making partnerships with corporates work in ‘Small meets big: How partnering with large corporations can scale impact of sustainable entrepreneurs’ (If you’re interested in more, we are running a brand new ‘Working with Corporates‘ workshop on Feb 27th.)
- SSE Fellows have been in the news this week: Bethany Ainsley, of Nouveau Fitness, gets a great write up in The Journal while Annie Francis and her organisation Neighbourhood Midwives were included in an article in the Mail. Kieron Tilley and Mat Corbett and their organisation We Walk The Line were profiled by the Big Issue too.
- If one of your new year resolutions is to do more exercise and you need some new clobber to work out in, you can now buy all your sporting gear online from social enterprise Circle Sports, founded by SSE Fellow Turly Humpreys. There’s some really good stuff on there. (although *warning football chat* £10 seems a lot for a Liverpool football shirt…Come on you Spurs).
- On 31st January the Catalyst conference will be taking place in Cambridge – it looks like a really good day.
- SSE Fellow Caroline Hearst is running a number of Autism Awareness sessions in the next few weeks in Reading and London. Quite a few of the team at SSE have taken part in a session previously and speak very highly of them.
- BBC News, BBC Radio Four, JustGiving, Save the Children, Sounddelivery, MNDA and more will be offering practical advice and skills for telling your organisation’s story at The Social Media Exchange on Monday 9th February. The day is organised by SSE Fellow Jude Habib.
- To celebrate its 15th anniversary, the Jack Petchey Foundation has a new programme of grants available to organisations in London and Essex working with 11-25 year olds.
- We have collected in all the responses to our training survey and will share the results soon. Well done to Robert Fallon, Matthew Edwards and Vivienne Gray, who each won a place on a one-day workshop. Also a winner is Emily Wood, who won £150 of John Lewis vouchers for taking part in our External Evaluation survey.
- Finally – we’ve still got space on our Action Learning Facilitator Training, which takes place at the end of the month. Full details here.
Have a good week!
