The Social Apprentice: the human face of ambition?

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In response to a piece the other day about how the TV show The Apprentice demonstrated that "Blair’s Britain was all about profit", I wrote in a letter, printed in the Guardian, which set out an alternative point of view, and the potential for an alternative type of show: the Social Apprentice.

The basic idea is for 14 social entrepreneurs to take the place of these business high-flyers driven by pure profit. Tasks could be similar, if themed: participants sent out as chuggers on the streets, or organising a big fundraising event (as they will have to in this coming week’s episode), or developing a new product for a social enterprise, or rebranding and so on….the ultimate prize could be £100k towards starting up/expanding their own organisation/initiative, or a job with Anita Roddick or Muhammad Yunus or Al Gore, or someone else doing interesting things socially and environmentally.

People always say at ideas like this (and I’m not pretending I’ve come up with this….BBC/ITV/C4 have all discussed various versions of this or Dragon’s Den with us and other organisations…) that the show will be too worthy and dull, and everyone will get on because they’ll be so ‘nice’, and they won’t have strong personalities etc….these people have obviously never worked in this field. They should come and sit in on a session here at SSE and tell us there’s no passion, ambition, personality or conflict in this world.

Why call yourself a social entrepreneur?

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I was reading through the comments of an interesting post over on the Let There Be Light blog, titled Do Social Entrepreneurs exist? Nothing like a provocative title to get the comments flowing.

An interesting comment by Jim Fruchtmann who, I think, runs Benetech, who says there are two reasons to call yourself a social entrepreneur (in his opinion):

"1.  You get to meet people who are much more like you than typical nonprofit or for-profit leaders, and
2.  It’s a fund raising hook."

Is it really that simple? Certainly the amount of hype/buzz around social entrepreneurs and social enterprise at the moment (check Cameron’s recent speeches) gives it a cachet of some sort I guess…but ultimately, I find this fairly reductive. I recently met someone setting up a new initiative that was fairly entrepreneurial and clearly charitable/social in mission….she just wanted to get on with it, but everyone kept mentioning ‘social enterprise’ to her. My advice was to ensure that she had a USP, could make her case, evaluate her work, prove it in a pilot and promote it effectively + have a robust strategic plan. And that legal structure/titles would follow from whatever work/governance/funding she chose to pursue.

There are no great funding pots that become available as a social enterprise / social entrepreneur-led organisation (although some funders might be attracted by applications that are, to use Gilligan-speak, ‘sexed up’ by such words)….the former point though is valid: meeting other people of similar mindset, attitude, drive and commitment. That really IS what it is all about….

Upstarts and Green Fellows

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Some announcements of distinct relevance:

– First up, the nominees for the Edge Upstarts Social Enterprise Awards have been announced; there are some SSE connections which we are happy to see; 2 out of the 3 nominees for trainee of the year (Michelle Baharier and Bernadette Wright) are SSE Fellows from London and Salford respectively; also, up for the prestigious Social Entrepreneur of the Year award is current London student Simon Fenton-Jones……best of luck to all.

Also heavily represented are our friends at Training for Life, who are up for an award, along with their CEO Gordon D’Silva, and their flagship enterprise, the Hoxton Apprentice.

– Secondly, in the US, Echoing Green (who’ve been working with and connecting social entrepreneurs for many years) have announced the finalists for their 2006 Fellowship Finalists. You can see the first finalist here, and then click through to the rest…Some really impressive people/projects here (mostly US-based) competing for some serious money. They cover a range of areas including leadership in Africa, clean technology in Latin America, helping Palestinians travel freely and supporting farmers in North Korea… well worth a look, as is the whole Echoing Green site

The myth and truth of the heroic individual

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Geoff Mulgan, of the Young Foundation (our landlords and colleagues here in Bethnal Green) writes interestingly in the Guardian yesterday about social innovation (a summary, effectively, of their recent Social Silicon Valleys pamphlet). Effectively, the argument is that social innovation (of which social entrepreneurship/social enterprise is a substantial part) has been underrecognised, undervalued, underresearched and undervalued, as compared with technological/product/scientific innovation. Mulgan believes that the time is right for a revolution, no less, in the way social innovation is supported + how research and development in the field are put into place.

Intriguing stuff. One bit that stood out for me was the following:

“But social innovation still tends to be left to energetic individuals (and, indeed, much of the limited support that there tends to be focused on individuals despite the abundant evidence that lasting social change usually comes from movements, networks and teams).”

This relates to something that I brought up in the last post about this belief, on occasion, that the School believes in the concept of the heroic individual who solves everything. I think there’s something of that in the paragraph above. Really, though, SSE approaches the development of social entrepreneurs as a group experience in which networks are paramount, and in which they form their own teams and, in some few cases, start movements.

It seems to me that the key is not to diminish the focus on support for individuals leading social change, but to ensure that the importance of building networks, getting people to buy into what you do, creating teams of support/champions, knowing when to expand/delegate successfully, and so on, is embedded in that support. Having just come out of a stakeholder evaluation workshop with SSE students and Fellows (of which, more soon), the thing that came out above all else in terms of importance to (and impact on) them and their project was networks, teams, support…indeed, one of them used the term ‘team’ to describe the people she now has around her.

What it comes down to, to purloin a phrase from elsewhere, is an investment in people. Should there be more investment in research of unmet needs? Yes. More collating of new innovations? Yes. More testing of models? Yes. More development of organisational solutions? Yes. But no matter how powerful and innovative the idea, how desperate the need, or how failsafe the model, it is the people involved who will most likely determine its success. Not heroic individuals striving on their own, but remarkable individuals who are engaged with the community (thematic or geographic) they are aiming to serve, who have an innovative solution to an unmet need (big or small), and who have the drive, commitment and characteristics to build a team and network around them to make it happen.

After all, if you look at a lot of the social innovations in the article, how many would have happened without such social entrepreneurs: Curitiba? (Jaime Lerner). New Lanark (Robert Owen). Grameen (Muhammad Yunus). Open University (Michael Young).etc…….Could they/did they do it on their own? No; they built teams, tapped into networks, started movements, piloted ideas etc. But nor would it have happened without them.

 

Social entrepreneurs: hard heads and high minds

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Just a quick note to point out that Third Sector magazine has a feature on social entrepreneurs this week, which provides an interesting overview of the field of social entrepreneurship, and features SSE heavily (indeed, the title of the piece comes from our "for the high minded and the hard headed"strapline). As ever, featuring SSE heavily only makes it a more interesting read ;0) You can also view the article via the main SSE website.

There is also an interesting article by the indefatigable Laurence Demarco on the Senscot website (here), which also raises the question of placing too much emphasis on ‘heroic individuals’. This is something that sometimes gets thrown at the school, and we do believe in the capacity of the individual entrepreneur to lead and drive change (and that people make a model a success, and not the other way round), but our ethos is also firmly on group learning, peer support and networks of development.

That is why we feel the cohort of students going through the year-long programme are so important: for it to be a true learning journey, a colelctive experience and for those relationships to develop. More on different models of leadership another time….