Author Archives: sse

Busyness is business

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It’s been a busy few weeks here at SSE HQ: on top of our biggest graduation event ever, it is reporting season (aka the end of the financial year), which means spreadsheets and outcomes till the cows come home. It has been nice to look back at one three-year grant and see how closely we have delivered on what we said we would (it helped fund network development / franchise package)….though I am pretty much in the fifth circle of box-tick, form-fill hell by now. Still, worse to have no funding to report back on, so I’ll cut the carping.

Alongside that, I’ve presented to Finnish and Chinese visitors, delivered a policy and lobbying workshop up in Birmingham (and re-found an SSE Fellow: hello Parminder), and put in motion the changes to our extranet. Also, preparation for the Skoll World Forum of Social Entrepreneurship. Alastair, our CEO, and I will be presenting on the ‘fringe’ at 8am on Thursday, I am led to believe. Those who’ve suggested we deserve our place there for comedy reasons should know that there is nothing funny about an 8am presentation….ever. If you’re coming, come along and see how much caffeine I’ve managed to down.

I’ll also try and write up some thoughts here as the event goes along. This will be my 5th forum (yes, I’ve been to every one), and it’s certainly changed a bit over the years. For a start, it was free the first time (thankfully, as I was running a tiny non-profit at the time), but is now a price that would make Rob Greenland blanch. And after Ben Kingsley, Robert Redford and Al Gore in previous years, ex-president Jimmy Carter is making an appearance this year. SSE is going, largely because of networking, particularly in relation to potential international partners; and because there’s a lot of interesting thinking to get a handle on (if I can follow it). It’s useful, particularly, to get a sense of how people view what you’re doing when coming to it completely fresh with none of the baggage and politics (i.e. from abroad)….and also for us to remind the ‘scaling up’, systems-changing brigade that social entrepreneurship is also about inclusion, opportunity, and grassroots, local, sustainable change. (I will be taking the soapbox).

So, no time for now to review Andrew Mawson’s book, the Social Entrepreneur (teaser one line-review: lots of Mawson, but also lots of passion and insights, + is very readable in snappy, bitesize chunks; worth buying), or to look forward to the first UK Ashoka Fellows (announced / revealed on Friday), or to tell all about the forthcoming Shine unconference (Facebook grp).

And no time, indeed, to discuss how SSE was present when Stephen Bubb (chair of Adventure Capital Fund, taking over Futurebuilders) met Richard Gutch (outgoing chief exec of current Futurebuilders) at the recent ACEVO conference for the first time since the surprise switch was announced….though I can confirm that hell did not freeze over, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse did not appear….

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SavvyChavvy

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On a list of things I thought I’d never link to, a site with the name SavvyChavvy would probably feature. But it’s not a micktaking site or a spoof online joke: it’s a serious initiative to connect gypsy and traveller communities in the UK who are, by their very nature, often particularly isolated from each other. It allows young travellers in particular to connect to their peers, which is often as much about connecting East European Romany to their UK counterparts.

Does this section the community off in itself? Well, possibly, but providing them with a safe space to connect and communicate away from the excesses of Facebook groups and comments (there have already been ‘spoof’ profiles set up within the site, prompting new culturally-specific questions) seems like a sensible thing to do, especially when coupled with on-the-ground internet training. You can only join the community if you’re part of the traveller community at SavvyChavvy.com (it’s a social network built with Ning) but you can see some accompanying video clips here, and how the local South East TV news reported it.

Hopefully it might also go some way to reclaiming, or repositioning, the word ‘chav’, given that it is largely thought to come from the Romany word ‘chavi’ for a young person.

Congratulations to Jake Bowers and SSE Fellow Nathalie McDermott on a great initiative.

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The Bubb enters the fray…

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Just a quick note to say that Stephen Bubb, legendary CEO of ACEVO has entered the (non-profit) blogosphere, starting with a suitable low-key post with hardly a name dropped….oh, ok, maybe the odd minister or two…and the Queen. Couple of sideswipes at others, talk of a dog and we’re away.

Anyway, promises to be an interesting read, if it continues regularly and, more seriously, it’s good to have the organisation that represents leaders in the third sector showing a bit of leadership in this area……. Check it out here.

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Congratulations to 40+ new SSE Fellows

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So another 40+ social entrepreneurs completed the SSE programme at the London School on Friday, and celebrated that fact at our largest ever Fellowship event at Coin Street’s fabulous new neighbourhood centre. With so many new Fellows, the event was split into two separate rooms, before coming back together for the customary drinks, food and networking. Each person is given three minutes for their powerpoint presentation (rigorously enforced…) to talk about themselves, their project/organisation, and (occasionally) a bit about how the year at SSE has been for them.

I only saw the ‘weekly’ programme presentations, but can honestly say that they were all superb, and feedback from those in the other room was that the ‘block’ programme was of a similar standard. Most valuably for me, it was a huge reminder to me why I sit in dry policy meetings or extended discussions with investors and councils and RDAs about expanding the SSE network: simply to give more people like this the opportunity to develop themselves and their idea to fruition. I was asked to provide some ‘unsung hero’ examples for an article the other day, and it is an easy task when faced with such a group of people.

I could have picked out any number of highlights, and I’ve listed all the new Fellows below (do check out their pages / sites), but here’s just three: Genevieve Dowokpor, who runs Youthology, and showed great poise and class in giving half of her time over to some of the people she works with (later, she would announce that she’d raised £28,000 per year for 3 years from a philanthopic fund); Esther Ofora, whose personality lit up the room and whose passion engaged everyone; finally, Will Rogers, who spoke powerfully from the heart and moved the audience with his emphasis on telling his true story (and helping others do so).

And that seems like an appropriate theme for the day: over 40 different true stories of change, of challenge, of (tough) choices. I look forward to seeing all of them continue to write and live those stories as SSE Fellows over the months and years to come.

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Block Programme Fellows:  see here for all personal profiles or project websites linked below

Olukemi Akinruli – Nous Aussi
Mark Doughty – Living Well with Arthritis
Beth Barton – Healing Futures
Sule Elkatip – Talk Turkish CIC
Lucy Hooberman – Mentoring Worldwide
Jim Pope – PACT: Prisoners Academy for Creative Training
Sabrina Ben Salmi – The Mobile Single Parents Project
Duncan Law – Transition Town Brixton
Jacqui McIntosh – H. E. A. D. for Black Youth (heritage, education, aspiration, development)
Cerdic Hall – HeartSounds
Sarah Wang – Creative Intelligence Agency Ltd
Kate Ryan – Streetbeatz.org
Amanda Roberts – Bud Umbrella
Zoella Freeman – Fun Edu Tainment
Andy Gibson – School of Everything
Lauren Craig – Thinking Flowers?
Andrzej Garus – Primus Personnel
Orode Faka – Infinite Arts and Media
Des Powell – Tracks Of Our Life / Youth Music Initiative
Andrae Palmer – Ground Up Development
Surya Turner – Suryaco Ltd: arts and personal development
Marian Spiers – The Photosynthesis Project
Andrew Walker – Southside Young Leaders Academy

 

Weekly Programme Fellows: all individual profiles, or click on links below where possible

Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa – Catch 22 Magazine
Winnie Williams – Halisi
Fatima Khasimi – SMILES
Jacqui Flynn – Raina’s World
William Rogers – True Story
Ike Onubogu – CLUE Academy / Generation Xchange
Micol Carmignani – training programme in radio broadcasting
Leon Pearson – VegZed
Puck Markham – Community Money CIC
Genevieve Dowokpor – Youthology
Moses Okello – Musa House
Rosa Goncalves – Kidbrooke CIC
Joan Ferguson – diabetes awareness  / support
Esther Ofora – ECHO Regeneration Consultancy
Rachel Nabudde – Learning Continues
Juliet Challenger – Living Works
Nnamdi Edauemi Dime – Positive Pastimes UK
Oleander William – Creative Lifestyle
Jo Dempster – Global Youth
Satwinder Singh – Renaissance Foundation

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Kids Company: Sex Pistols or the Clash?

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Last summer, maverick Kids Company founder Camilla Batmanghelidjh launched a media campaign to achieve further government funding for her organisation. My post at the time ended with the words "Ultimately, we’ll see how it turns out; I’d imagine they will get
another 3-year government funding package, particularly given their
work hits one of the key priorities….But I wonder if
the long-term effects of this move might not be wholly positive".

Sure enough, last week it was announced that Kids Company was going to receive £12m over the next three years; one organisation amongst five sharing £27m (44% to Kids Co.). Which is no doubt good news for Kids Co and the other four organisations (if not the other 85 who submitted an expression of interest), and signals a real investment in delivering appropriate services to young people across the board. (It also means that Camilla’s threat to strip in Parliament won’t happen).The reason I’d written that "the long-term effects might not be positive" was because I felt that this was not a sustainable way of working for the sector: as someone put it at the time, should we all enlist Max Clifford, rather than fill out applications?

Interestingly, Craig Dearden-Phillips of Speaking Up (one of the other funded organisations) has written a blog post which reflects what I imagine to be a wider view from the youth sector: it’s titled "Why Kids Company Excite Me….But Scare Me Too", and gives a real insight into those views, so I’m going to quote a couple of chunks of it:

"While part of me rejoices at an exceptional character like Camilla
facing down Government, part of me is a bit unsettled by it too. Should
a talent for PR and platinum inside-connections get you this quite this
much money? A lot of people are privately spitting feathers. Yeah,
sure, some are jealous but others just feel this kind of largesse to a
small organisation serving a few hundred kids across a few postcodes to
be grossly unfair. And they do have a point: How, I wonder, does a
community group on a council estate in Hull closing its doors in April
feel when they see Camilla playing the government (and, indeed, the HM
Opposition) like a salmon?"

Craig goes on to tackle their approach to impact measurement, replication, funding and, of course (and related to all of these), founder syndrome:

"My final point is about how KC needs to redefine the role of Camilla.
KC is the creation of its brilliant founder who has unbounded
commitment and energy. To get out of the starting-blocks, the drive and
hands-on approach of someone like her is absolutely necessary. Beyond a
particular point, however, it is damaging. Once out of the baby phase,
leadership needs to be shared-out, the entrepreneur needs to step into
an outward-facing role and the `grown ups’ need to be allowed to get on
with the serious business of running an operationally and financially
sound organisation. Believe me on this point because I have got form!
As a Recovering Founder, I know the pitfalls of `Founderism’. From the
bits I have heard from people who have been at KC in the past, the
organisation shows all the signs of Chronic Founderism. If KC is to
grow and help more kids in more places, Camilla needs to start a Twelve
Step Programme for Founders – now. I can recommend a good one…"

I won’t add much to that, as I think it speaks strongly enough. We will see what happens in three years’ time and whether, as Craig puts it in his conclusion, Kids Company "do a Sex Pistols – and crash and burn in a self-indulgent heap. Or, like
the Clash, evolve into something incredibly special and lasting".

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