Podcasts and audio links and updates

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I linked the other day to some recent podcasts on Social Innovation Conversations and that got me thinking about the various other bits of audio I’ve been listening to of late; some of this is repetition of previous podcast posts, but anyway:

– You can do a lot worse than Peter Day: both his InBusiness and his Global Business programmes. And, topically enough, the last programme of the latter was from the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship. Shame that a UK-based programme on the subject was so US-centric but maybe next time….

– SmallBizPod is good (as is the blog and their news RSS feeds); hope that Alex Bellinger will put online some stuff from the Shine Unconference which he came to

– Also enjoying the Bottom Line with Evan Davis; always interesting when the 3 CEOs he has each week are from organisations of vastly different scale and sector…

– Others to watch out for are the various US magazines (Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review) and universities (MIT etc) which are putting more and more material online.

– Finally, for a bit of light-ish relief, the Bugle which, in my humble opinion, is carat-gold genius.

Heavyweight week

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Been quite a week here at SSE. Both London programmes are sharing a joint study session today: John Bird‘s voice is echoing through the courtyard into our office as I write. And this morning Colin Crooks of Green-Works was the expert witness. Colin’s a great guy: he’s built such an impressive organisation over the last eight years, and he had some interesting things to say over lunch about franchising (a topic we share!), about diversification, about boards and board management, and about growing office recycling in the years to come. And that was just lunch, so I’m assuming the session with the students was enlightening and informative.

Another thing Colin mentioned over lunch was their new(er) work overseas. In particular, they’re doing some extraordinary work in Sierra Leone, where they are basically kitting out a whole town through re-using furniture from the UK: a library, a hospital and 37 schools. Humbling stuff.

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Yesterday we helped facilitate a day for the Social Enterprise Ambassadors which also had some big players in attendance: not only the ambassadors themselves, but also 25 high-ranking civil servants from across different government departments, two ministers (Ed Milband and Phil Hope) and Gus O’Donnell, head of the civil service (as someone said to me, he’s taking time out from running the country). So quite a powerful and intimidating group to work with….but it went well. The programme has taken a while to bed down and to get going (though announced last June, the appointments/launch took place in October-time), and everyone’s committed to making the most of the next two years.

In some ways, the ambassadors programme reminds me a bit of SSE, in that a group of entrepreneurs are, by their nature, not always the easiest group to lead and facilitate….and the group dynamics can take a while to settle (the old forming-storming-norming-performing stuff), particularly when the group doesn’t meet very often, and it’s difficult for all to attend each time. So still a bit of forming and storming yesterday (from some) and more norming (from others). And hopefully performing over the coming months. :0)

Ended the day at the Edge Upstarts Awards. Congratulations to all the winners (who will no doubt appear on the website soon) who included Lily Lapenna of MyBnk, Carmel McConnell of Magic Breakfast, and Forth Sector. And now we’re off to address our sleep deprivation………….

Monday round-up: tribute, Twitter, tracking

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A long overdue post: been utterly swamped the last week. But….back in the game:

– The shock from Sarah Dodd’s death has still not dissipated. There’s now a blog to leave tributes, and links there to an online memorial fund + photos (you can upload them to flickr and tag with ‘sarahdodds’)

– Haven’t been able to do a trawl of the honours list yet. I did note that Social Enterprise Ambassador Claudine Reid picked up a gong of some sort….links to follow soon.

– Should you tweet? A guide to Twitter for non-profits….I’ll say no more

– Interesting piece on social entrepreneurship in Director magazine by Rebecca Harding.

– Winners of the Spark award programme were announced recently. it’s a homeless / social enterprise combo, and delighted to spot a couple of SSE Fellows amongst the winners; congrats to Dave Miller’s Bikeworks and Simon Fenton-Jones’ StreetShine

– How ethical business was bought by big business: article in the Independent that’s worth a read, if you didn’t know that Cadbury own Green & Black’s, and Unilever own Ben & Jerry’s that is….

– The reason why, if I start up a charity / social enterprise, it will help dogs…..

– Edge Upstarts Awards shortlist announced

– Understanding social enterprise: for those of you who love the world / debate of definitions….

– How you can give with one-click (but please don’t just do that)

– there’ve been some good podcasts at Social Innovation Conversations recently: if you’ve lost track of this site, it’s worth a (re)visit. recent speakers include Paul Farmer and recent topics include the delightfully titled "Evaluation for Normal People"; given I head up our evaluation, I won’t take that personally….

Lots more, but I’ll catch up with that towards the end of the week. Hopefully more time to blog a more interesting post soon. In the meantime, check out the video from the Shine Unconference by Smarta (thanks Smarta):

A sad way to start the week

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I was full of optimism coming to the office this morning: a beautiful sunny day, after a great, relaxing weekend, and a relatively light schedule this week to plough through work. So I came in early and trawled through the blogs, and ran across this post from Rod Schwartz:

A Tribute to Sarah Dodds

[NB: UPDATE: there is now a site set up to post tributes here and a memorial fund to donate to online]

Apparently, Sarah, who was UnLtd Ventures Director until very recently (she was set to move on to pastures new), was involved in a cycle accident last week. Sadly she died this weekend. I didn’t know Sarah as well as Rod or some others, but she started work at UnLtd around the time I joined SSE, so our paths have crossed a lot over the past few years. As Rod details in his post, she was an exuberant, larger-than-life presence with a healthy irreverence; combined with a sharp brain, this led to plenty of interesting (and entertaining) conversations at events and conferences. It is always shocking to lose someone of a young age with so much ahead of them; so am a bit stunned by that this morning.

SSE‘s thoughts are with her family, friends and colleagues.

Thursday round-up: Sunlight, shares, scale, SROI

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Quick round-up, as there seems to be lots coming in and lots of interest:

– Peter Holbrook has written a blog post about David Cameron launching the Tory green paper at Sunlight Development Trust, and has some interesting initial thoughts from a practitioner’s point of view on its recommendations; more reaction on Bubb’s blog (who’s on rare form of late), here, and here.

– Paul Miller of School of Everything has written an interesting post about why their organisation is a company limited by shares and how they balance the need for start-up investment (in a silicon valley web2.0 type way) with a social mission at their heart….

– Fall-out from the ECT news continues; apparently the recycling arm is keeping its CIC structure, despite (or as well as?) being taken over by a private sector operator….will be interesting to see how that turns out. In the meantime, here’s a piece in New Start about it all; as I mentioned previously, this can be seen as a positive as much as a negative, but I do think that the issue of scale is at the heart of it all

– On which subject (scale), some food for thought: The Fetishization of Scaling Up (Small is beautiful versus Big is essential….and local+local+local = global…) and a magazine/event called De-Growth

– The SROI-UK conference has spawned a network: SROI-UK is chaired by the evaluation legend Jeremy Nicholls, who we’ll be doing some work with in mid-June

– DEFRA announced a big £4.6 million deal for the various third sector waste and recycling networks who have come together to form a new organisation, REconomy. Huge kudos to (former SSE Director of Learning) Matthew Thomson for masterminding the deal: word on the street is that the celebrations were substantial…..but well-deserved.

– Interesting article by Matthew Taylor of the RSA on the (independence of the) third sector and the need for accountability and transparency

– How to set up a refugee community organisation; consult this guide?

– And a brief final thought: Word of mouth is not created, it is co-created