Global Cool…but not in school

Posted on February 6, 2007 by sse

Steve Bridger heralds the arrival of Global-Cool over on his nfp2.0 blog. I’m not sure how to describe it really. The website is kind of celebrity offsets meets change-the-world-in-simple-ways meets ecotainment. Or something. Here’s the (very well-designed) site for you to make up your own mind. It’s a pretty clear and good addition to what’s out there already, although nothing groundbreaking as far as I can make out. There may be those who want the Scissor Sisters to tell them to turn their lights off, and if it reaches more people in a clear and entertaining way, then all power to them. Of course, there may also be those who question why, from a £20 donation, £3 goes to Global Cool Productions Ltd and £1 on administration. That’s 20% of your donation not going to alternative energy/energy-reducing projects…..(the admin’s fair enough, and the production company will “put on more carbon-neutral shows and make more programmes to create a bigger noise to turn more people into planet-savers”).

[Incidentally, it’s founded by the guy who founded Future Forests as it was then called….]

I’m not going to bang on about whether it’s ethical to offset or not; you can read plenty of stuff about that in every paper under the sun. But it also seems to me to be connected to something else Steve mentions in his article: that the UK government are going to distribute a copy of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary to every school in the country. Now, of course it is important that children are educated about the challenge of global warming and climate change; and of course it is important that this is communicated in effective ways. But is this really necessary? Aren’t kids, in fact, the one group of society that DO fully understand, having had it drilled into them consistently at school in geography, science etc….? Several articles recently have detailed how children have started campaigning at home, prompting one parent to write in to a school saying, “Can you please inform Paul that it is allowed to have the light on to read at home?” Does that child really need to watch Al Gore?

The fact is that sending out DVDs is just information provision; but the point has already tipped: you can’t move for environmental debate, recycling schemes, offsetting of flights, healthy organic food, and so on. It’s not information and promotion of the cause that is needed, surely; it is action and, probably, legislation. How about ministers committing to a set (collective) number of flights per year? How many ministers rent a plane everyday around the States? How about taxing companies who won’t match M&S zero carbon initiative? What about the Global Cool people giving £19 of the £20 to carbon reduction, instead of more publicity and programmes? What a better example it might set for them to walk the walk, rather than talk the talk. The point is that it is not easy (we have these debates in this organisation as well), but has to be addressed. David Miliband is strong in the department, communicates and debates well, and has a lot of good ideas (individual carbon quotas etc.) but it would be great to see some of them, challenging as they are, put into action.

Friday round-up: responses, debates and new thinking

Posted on January 26, 2007 by sse

A brief Friday round-up before the computer ices over:

– A couple of things I previously blogged about have sparked responses / continued in debates. Firstly, the i-genius debate continues both in the comments of David Wilcox’s original post (I particularly liked Tom from MySociety‘s "Yikes, it might be the best site in the world, but it doesn’t seem to
really chime with British social sensibilities. I’d go red at the face
with the idea of adding myself to a site with a name like that. The
hubris!") and in a follow-up post with an e-mail response from the site’s founders. Read on, but give the site a try too….

The second thing was my mention of the Shaftesbury Partnership’s distinction between system social entrepreneur and community social entrepreneur. A summary of my post might read "kind of agree, kind of disagree"….anyway, they’ve posted up a response on their blog which goes into some depth answering some of the questions I raised. I will respond to this more fully, but will do so in a separate post with some proper thought behind it, but am enjoying the conversation.

– George Bush used the words "social entrepreneur" in his state of the union address (thus causing havoc with my Google Alert feeds); I’ll leave it at that

– Davos Conversation, a kind of online forum of the World Economic Forum, if you want to know (some of) what’s happening

– the 59 smartest non-profit organisations online claims to be a list of "organisations who are winners because of their web
2.0 smarts and a willingness to engage their constituents far beyond
asking them to dig into their pockets.These are organizations that give their volunteers and members a voice and get out of the way. They’re pros at mobilizing awareness online. They’re experimentors. Innovators. On a mission. They’re fearless." That paragraph is a bit American, and so is the list: I counted about three non-US sites; I don’t know whether that’s the real proportion (certainly the US leads on this stuff), but I doubt it. Still, lots and lots of interesting content through all these links….

– some interesting stuff on action learning via School of Everything via David Wilcox ; more on this soon as well, I hope

– something causing a bit of debate is a report from the City Parochial Foundation called Building Blocks about second-tier organisations which has some interesting findings including:

– small groups clearly benefit more than medium-sized organisations who struggle to fund their infrastructure support needs
– small groups in particular feel their voices are not heard and it is funders and outside agencies which decide what they ‘need’
– frontline groups value one-to-one help, from knowledgeable,
experienced, committed, and skilled individuals/bodies which are not in
competition with them for funding

CPF provide some funding to our London programme [disclaimer alert], and we are featured in the report as an example of good practice [double disclaimer!], but there is real validity in the points above. And it should be those that are reported, as well as what has become the headline (Cut back second tier non-profits, says major funder).

– and finally, an interesting article from Simon Jenkins in the Times (from October 2006: finger on the pulse, as ever), which includes, on the second page, the following:

"Someone should spur a revival of community participation in Britain.
A crash course in parish innovation is needed similar to that which
swept Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s, enveloping communes,
municipalities and mayors. It should capitalise on the wealth that is
pouring into many British villages and on the time that many retired
people have to spare. Most rural communities in most parts of the world
look after their old people without having to call for help from a near
bankrupt nationalised industry.

Nor is all lost. The admirable Leicestershire village of
Sheepy Magna raised £45,000 in 2003 to convert part of its church into
a one-stop community enterprise, with internet access, a baker’s shop,
a Fairtrade market and, of all things, a sub-post office. It took
nothing but determined local leadership. It can be done, even in
England."

Rural social entrepreneurs come forth…..

What is a system social entrepreneur?

Posted on January 8, 2007 by sse

Stumbled across an interesting new blog just before Xmas, entitled The Shaftesbury Partnership. It’s a name that conjures up any number of interesting possibilities, but is in fact a kind of ethical business consultancy working primarily with what it calls “system social entrepreneurs”. The people involved include Nat Wei, co-founder of Teach First, and programme director of Future Leaders (recently featured in the Guardian).

So what is a system social entrepreneur? I think it’s worth pasting up their entire post on this:

“Social entrepreneurs are those who take
aspects of entrepreneurship most commonly but not exclusively
associated with the private sector, using it for social good. In its
most enhanced form, the business model underlying such entrepreneurship
includes an element of income self-generated from the social economy.

There are two main types of social entrepreneur (though on rare
occasions both types can appear in one person): community social
entrepreneurs and system social entrepreneurs. Community social
entrepreneurs are locally based, working at grass-roots level. System
social entrepreneurs have both the skills and the inclination to grow
initiatives to national size, affecting the entire system. System
social entrepreneurship tends to take a strategic top-down approach
working on issues that governments and the public see as some of the
most intractable and challenging, but by working with community
entrepreneurs on a grass-roots level it hopes to make real impact as
well on the ground reaching parts that governments and other
traditional agencies find harder to reach.

For large-scale social improvement (in the public sphere and
elsewhere), both community and system entrepreneurs are needed, working
together to address poverty.”

It is the differentiation between ‘system’ and ‘community’ social entrepreneurs that I find most interesting here. Some might argue there is an element of elitism here (note that community social entrepreneurs don’t have the ‘skills’ or ‘inclination’ to take things national / scale up, according to these definitions; giving them the opportunity to learn those skills, and gain confidence and ambition to use them might be a thought), but there is also more than a grain of truth. Certainly Teach First and Future Leaders have been strategic, top-down approaches to addressing unmet needs, and appear to be working well (I met Brett Wigdortz, the CEO of Teach First, at a conference recently and was impressed breitling kopior with him and their work). But the division seems slightly too stark to me here, and perhaps over-emphasises the ‘rarity’ of community social entrepreneurs who start local but grow to become national.

Think of Anita Roddick who started with one shop in Brighton, or John Bird, who started with a monthly publication in London. Or, more recently, Colin Crooks, who started Green Works with one small local outlet. Whilst it is true to say that the majority of SSE Fellows are what might be termed ‘community social entrepreneurs’, there are certainly a fair proportion who would probably balk at that term. Also worth noting that our recent evaluation (by the New Economics Foundation) addresses this point:

“Sometimes SSE fellows are described as being simply local community activists working for local people solving local problems. This evaluation aims to contribute to the debate as we find that whilst social entrepreneurs are working locally they often face challenges produced by processes beyond their immediate sphere of control. Some fellows are seeking to counteract disempowerment by ‘scale jumping’ to assert their specific concerns and actively seek to shape and change public policy at local and even national and international levels.

There is also danger that the ‘local-people-solving-local-problems’ view may strengthen a dangerous assumption that social enterprise is the panacea that will solve social ills on the ground, thereby relinquishing responsibility for addressing these ills directly, or more importantly their underlying and systemic causes.

The SSE programme is designed and delivered in a way that is sensitive to the diverse needs and attitudes of the students who are striving to achieve positive change for communities. The spirit of the SSE experience is in the way it seeks, through the endeavours of its students, to reverse trends of social exclusion, poverty and disempowerment at local, national and international levels. SSE guides students through a process of personal transformation, organisational development and by supporting a community of social entrepreneurs as part of a network that can work on a long-term basis to create wider and lasting change.”

The other interesting point for me is that the description of a system social entrepreneur here sounds very much like strategic social innovation, rather than person-led social entrepreneurship involving risk, opportunism, personal responsibility, challenging the status quo and so on….but then perhaps going down that road is too stark a differentiation from my side as well. The bottom line is that we need entrants to this movement from all backgrounds, working at all levels to solve complex problems; and working together where it brings benefits and improved results.

We-think throws its pages open

Posted on October 9, 2006 by sse

Charles Leadbeater, author of the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur and other myriad texts of interest, is publishing an interesting new book, entitled We-Think, next year. It seems to be bringing together various strands from his recent work into a coherent whole, particularly the Pro-Am Revolution stuff he did with Paul Miller at Demos.

To get a sense of what the book is about, here’s the introduction which bears a long quotation…:

"The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is collaborative.
It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The
opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time.
The number of people who could be participants in these creative
conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications
technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier
for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be
innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without
having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills
without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the
ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are
not new – peer review for example has been around a long time in
academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life,
Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and
combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale.

The
guiding ethos of this new culture and forms of self-organisation is
participation. The point of the industrial era economy, was mass
production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford. In
the world of We-think, the point is to take part, to be a player in the
action, to have a voice in the conversation. And in a participation
economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but
tools so they can take part and places in which they can play, share,
debate with others. Workers could be instructed, organised in a
division of labour. Participants will not be lead and organised in this
way.

The people who take part in these collaboratives are
neither workers nor consumers. They are participants and contributors.
If the 20th century marked the rise of mass consumerism, one feature of
the 21st century will be the rise of the mass participation economy:
innovation by the masses not for the masses. Innovation and creativity
have been elite activities, undertaken by special people – writers,
designers, architects, inventors – in special places – garrets,
studies, laboratories. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass
activities, dispersed across society. We-think is an effort to
understand this new culture, where these new ways of organising
ourselves have come from and where they might lead. They started, as
most radical and disruptive innovation do, in the margins, in open
source, blogging and gaming. But they will increasingly become the
mainstream by challenging traditional, hierarchical, top down and
closed organisations to open up. They could change not just the way
that the media, software and entertainment works but also the way we
organise education, health care, cities and indeed the political system."

Which all looks and sounds very interesting. And in the spirit of creative collaboration, Leadbeater is making the book open to read, comment on and print out. Of particular interest to the social entrepreneur will be the sections on Open Work and Open Leadership; you get a taste of the latter from a recent article entitled "Jimmy Wales, not Jack Welch" (pdf…)

[via Designing for Civil Society, via the Open Blog etc….]

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We-think throws its pages open

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