Category Archives: Social Entrepreneurs

Aston thriller

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Have spent an interesting day here in Aston, meeting the various students who have started the programme whilst letting them know about the SSE Learning Web of online resources (extranet, blogs etc.). You can see the cohort here  (profiles to be updated) and the kind of areas they are working in.

We’re delighted to have a working presence up here in the heart of the West Midlands, so full kudos to Peter Bishop who has worked tirelessly to make it happen…underpinned by support from SSE Fellow Calvin Young. And another SSE Fellow, Inderjit Sahota, is involved as a tutor.

All goes to show the importance of people as the engine of replication, and the value of the interlinked network of Fellows and students and staff and schools as it continues to expand.

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Unclaimed assets: social investment bank

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Seeing as every bit of research there has been puts forward funding as the major barrier for social entrepreneurs achieving what they might, new funding streams are always welcome. So the news that £400 million of unclaimed assets in UK bank accounts are possibly to be used to form a "social investment bank” to help finance
charitable and voluntary projects by "providing seed capital and loan
guarantees". At least that will be the recommendation today of The Commission on Unclaimed Assets…
[read the FT and Guardian take]

It’s not been fully clarified exactly what the fund’s main objectives are, though Ronald Cohen has chaired the commission (of Bridges Community Ventures, who we’ve mentioned a couple of times recently), and reports say it has been based on the US-based Local Initiative Support Corporation, which provides financial advice and funds to community groups and charities, and has invested over $6 billion in the last 25 years.

Incidentally, the £400 million figure is only for accounts that have been dormant for 15 years. The actual amount in unclaimed assets could be in the billions….

UPDATE: piece in Society Guardian by Matthew Pike on this….which talks excitingly of what the UK Social Investment Bank might do:

"Using unclaimed assets funds, the proposed SIB would capitalise and
co-ordinate the efforts of new and existing providers of funding,
finance and support to the sector – covering the full range of needs,
from grants to loans, lease financing, quasi-equity and equity. But it
would also act in the manner of a private investment bank, able to
package and guarantee investment opportunities for private capital as
well."

And there’s a website, UnclaimedAssets.org.uk, where you can respond to the consultation paper (pdf)

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Enterprising (and Echoing Green) People

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SSE loves an award, so always happy to point out those who’ve earned some recognition in whatever form….

– the Enterprising People Partnership  in Bristol has been named as the “most enterprising place in South West England”, making it the regional winner of the DTI’s ‘Enterprising Britain
2006’ competition, “an annual national contest to reward towns, cities
or areas of any size across the country that are best improving
economic prospects and encouraging enterprise in their regions”. More info about EPP via the link

– Echoing Green, the US-based organisation, announces its line-up of Fellows for 2006 (we blogged about the nominees before). Echoing Green was set up in 1997 to “spark
social change by identifying, investing and supporting the world’s most
exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch”.

– And from their site, not an award but certainly recognition, some young social entrepreneurs were on the cover of Newsweek the other week, an article which is worth a read; look forward to UK-based magazines following suit soon ;0)

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Trawling the magazines…so you don’t have to

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Trawling through the trade press the last hour or so (Social Enterprise Mag, Regeneration & Renewal, New Start, Third Sector et al), like panning for gold…

– SSE gets mentioned in a couple of times, with reference to Gordon Brown at the Fife School (launching a directory of social enterprises), and to current student Ola Onigbinde in an interesting piece about faith/social enterprise by Francis Davis (links to follow)

– piece by Craig Dearden-Phillips also appears, which I blogged about before…should stir up some debate!

– Ronald Cohen also makes an appearance in Social Enterprise Mag, to add to the interview in the Guardian today: aiming to do for social investment what he did for venture capital….

– interesting piece about Ecuadorean social enterprise in New Start by Rob Greenland

– + a piece about how creative enterprises are particularly suited to regenerating rural areas…worth tracking down

– R&R has an article about the ‘fragmentation’ of the social enterprise support scene in Birmingham and Solihull (download research here (pdf))

– Social Enterprise Coalition’s ‘Keeping it Legal’ (about the different structures available) gets noted a few times…£15 (£7.50 to members)… or, I think, downloadable above (tel. 020 7793 2323 for info)

– Investing for Good is setting up an online social investment market

– Cranfield is setting up a Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility thanks to a gift from an alumnus…

– A special feature on co-operatives, going back to Rochdale, 1844 (and, therefore, my History GCSE)

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Fellowship of the Spring (well, Summer)

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The SSE Fellowship is an increasingly valuable resource and an increasingly powerful and inspirational network of social entrepreneurs and community activists. So graduating from the SSE programme (pdf) and becoming a Fellow is a cause for great celebration, and, often, a moving day for all those involved.

I was at the East Midlands SSE yesterday, as an expert witness on evaluation (with due thanks to NEF, whose presentation and materials I largely used….), and they have a dozen or so students who will be entering the Fellowship on the 21st July. Which is just one day after….

…the Fellowship ceremony for one of the current London programmes, the Ready Steady Grow 2005-6 cohort. Which will be at the Amnesty UK building in Old Street on July 20th. Which will swell the ranks further, and add to the array of successful organisations and, just as importantly, skilled and confident people who the SSE have helped achieve their goals.

Fellowship has been on my mind recently, as we conduct our longitudinal evaluation work, and have been chatting to several Fellows from Fife, London and elsewhere, all the way back to 1998. I’ve also been trying to track Fellows’ projects using our Del.icio.us bookmarks; see Fellowship for the websites of some of their projects (NB – this doesn’t even scratch the surface yet).

As research continues to show the need for peer-led support and of networks to entrepreneurs, and SSE sees year-on-year the importance of the cohort in reducing isolation and providing confidence, as well as providing new opportunities for collaborative working and trading, the importance and value of the Fellowship will only continue to grow.replicas de relogios

Rumours that our new offices will be based in two towers are wide of the mark, though….

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