Living Values, Being Bold

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SSE attended the Living Values conference, organised by Community Links (and supported by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation). It launched a report, based on a collaborative enquiry, about the importance of values to the third sector, and how they are central to our work and thinking. The set of values the report says are common to 3rd sector organisations are:

– empowering people
– pursuing equality
– making voices heard
– transforming lives
– being responsible
– finding fulfilment
– doing a good job
– generating public wealth

In addition to these (which few people would find much to argue with, or indeed not be able to place their organisation within), the report says that these values are not unique to the sector, but the combination and prioritisation of them is.

A further key message was that values are not an abstract set of nouns at the top of a piece of paper, but are the basis for all activities, underpinning everything an organisation does. As David Robinson said in the final session, “Values are not separate from everything else we do; they underpin it all”.

It was an interesting day, particularly relevant to the world of social enterprise…because social entrepreneurs tend to face the mission drift challenge consistently, given their opportunistic nature and will to act. Understanding and communicating and measuring things against a clear set of values then becomes of increasing importance. If you are drifting or being pragmatic in the short term to achieve a longer term goal, at least know that that is what you are doing.

There was also some interesting discussion about how the founding entrepreneurs (who may be closest to the original values) can effectively capture those repliche orologi di lusso and communicate them to those who follow on from them. Something, incidentally, which I singularly failed to do at my previous organisation….

The other message was BE BOLD: make your values explicit in what you do….on the basis that those organisations that do so are most successful in the long run. It is about, as Matthew Smerdon put it, “being able to demonstrate our legitimacy” as a sector, showing our governance and activity is grounded in values. And to learn confidence from the public sector, not being timid or diffident.

Also much discussion around government contracts / commissioning processes, and how to influence those BEFORE the tenders emerge. And how, as it were, to put a value on our values (and how government tenders can provide space/opportunity for this to happen)….which seems key to me. As Craig Dearden-Phillips put it, ” we need to measure the added value that flows from our values”.

I could write more (on ethical dilemmas, value-led approaches to including users), but the report, which should be available via Community Links’ website soon, will cover much of this and more. No matter where your organisation is at, it makes important reading.

Social enterprise makes the honours list

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Congratulations from all at SSE to Adele Blakebrough, Chief Executive of Community Action Network, on being awarded an MBE, no less, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Well-deserved recognition for her personal role in promoting and supporting social enterprise. CAN continues to expand its dizzying array of activities, particularly focusing on the CAN Mezzanine Co-Location model, which has proved such a success at London Bridge.

In other Queen/award-related news, we are similarly delighted that Shpresa, the organisation of SSE Fellow and Trustee Luljeta Nuzi, has been awarded the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service in 2006; for "enabling the Albanian speaking
  community in UK to settle and fully participate in society".
Read an account of Luljeta’s amazing personal journey on the SSE website.

Lucca Leadership

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Interesting meeting with Tim Munden of Lucca Leadership today. They are an international organisation which runs week-long transformational leadership courses…

“…which enable young people of all nationalities and backgrounds to
discover their purpose, clarify their vision and develop the skills
needed to make change happen for the benefit of their communities,
nations and, ultimately, humanity itself”

Read more about their vision/approach, and their different programmes.

What struck me in our conversation was the common ground between their work and ours at the SSE. Using a project as a vehicle for learning, recruitment on the basis of values/qualities/life experience, diversity of intake, and the importance of reflection and dialogue. All makes me wonder whether programmes for social entrepreneurs (who could equally be called community leaders, or entrepreneurial leaders) would benefit from a greater emphasis on a transformational leadership
process. As the Lucca website puts it,

“It is an approach to leadership that creates sustainable solutions,
and avoids solutions that benefit some at the expense of others.”

Which could, in some cases, be a way of defining social entrepreneurship as well.

Social Entrepreneurship Monitor

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New research out this week from the Global Entrepreneurship Consortium (no, me neither), namely the Social Entrepreneurship Monitor. It’s basically a subset of the London Business School’s more general research into entrepreneurship (based on surveys of the general adult UK population) but it has some interesting findings worth pulling out. The data occasionally appears very, well, general, and the definitions of entrepreneurship arguable, but here goes:

– rural locations may be more socially entrepreneurial than urban regions

– women are proportionately more likely to be social than ‘mainstream’ entrepreneurs

– those who are labour market inactive are more likely to be social entrepreneurs than mainstream entrepreneurs

– social entrepreneurs can become more disillusioned/disheartened as time goes on, leading the report to suggest that "policy needs to focus on maintaining and developing the strenght of attitudes amongst the population of social entrepreneurs, if the population of social enterprises is to continue"

– social entrepreneurs are ‘community-centric’ and rely heavily on networks and support structures for their work

– over half of (established) social enterprises are charities, with a third "not for profit", and small percentages of co-operatives and limited liability partnerships (are they not "not for profit"?)

– financing remains the central issue…

There’s more in the report, but some interesting stuff here, particularly around which groups are more likely to be socially entrepreneurial, and the importance of support to maintain attitude and motivation, as well as deliver knowledge and skills.

Activist or Entrepreneur: the dual identity of social entrepreneurs

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Paul Light’s ongoing research into social entrepreneurs (or, the chapters appearing on the blog) provides much of interest for those in the sector. The latest post discusses the dual identity of social entrepreneurs, which a US paper divides into “entrepreneur” or “activist” (Simms/Robinson 2005)

Their theory is that, although these two identities (and possibly others) co-exist in social entrepreneurs, they must decide which of them comes first. The hypothesis is then that those who choose the “activist” to be primary will end up creating non-profit organisations, while those who choose the “entrepreneur” to be primary are more likely to create for-profit organisations. This seems a bit simplistic (is it really a simple choice between “profiting from a problem or contributing to a solution”?) and it might be argued that there is perhaps more of a continuum with activist at one end and entrepreneur at the other….(which would dovetail with our view of social entrepreneurs operating across various sectors).

What is curious to me is that the authors of the paper, and Light himself, separate out social impact and financial independence:

“The perceptions of benefits and risk [for social entrepreneurs] are driven by very different
goals—i.e., income and financial independence or social impact and
recognition.”

Well, yes and no (on a day to day/short term basis) but the amount of social impact to be had will be directly related to the sustainability/ongoing financing of the organisation. So financial independence is directly related to social impact (the goals are twinned), and to separate the two in this way seems slightly simplistic. Ultimately, what is being talked about is the old mission matrix which has CORE MISSION to FAR FROM MISSION along one axis, and £LOW to £HIGH on the other axis. You then plot different replica orologi activities/projects/opportunities against it, taking current situations into account.

The activist-entrepreneur continuum is an interesting way to think about that combination of social mission and financial independence, though…..