29 January 2010

First of all, hello out there! I'm not sure I can really believe I'm here...I'm sure that some of you might feel the same way!

This is my first blog as chief executive of the Social Enterprise Coalition, and I plan to do this regularly, so hopefully if you find this interesting, you'll come back. And if you don't like this, I hope you come back and give me a second chance, but regardless, let me know what you think. Comments are encouraged.  And I don't plan on monopolising this space - staff members and other guests will also be contributing after we get going.

We have a little ways to go with getting our page design set, but I wanted to get something up this week, so forgive our ‘under construction' look.

My first few weeks here have been absolutely packed with meeting loads of people and travelling around a bit across the country. It's been hectic, but one of the things I really want to do as CEO is talk to our members, to as many social enterprises as possible, and to the supportive bodies in the regions of England and the nations.  

Part of the reason it's been particularly busy is that Voice10- our annual conference - is due to take place in Cardiff this coming Monday - 1 and 2 February. Wales is a great place to be for Voice - the Welsh Assembly Government is really supportive of social enterprise, and there are so many great examples there - two people speaking at Voice are Nigel Annett from Welsh Water and John Bennett from Pack-IT . It's a great juxtaposition - Welsh Water must be one of the biggest social enterprises in the world and Pack-It won the 2009 Social Enterprise Award for Best Small Social Enterprise. They both do amazing things.

Also at Voice - alongside RISE, we're launching (drum roll please) the Social Enterprise Mark. The Mark will identify businesses which meet key criteria for social enterprise, and consumers will recognise that businesses displaying the Mark are trading to benefit people and planet Lucy Findlay of RISE has been blogging about the Mark, so I encourage you to check out her thoughts here.

The Mark was on my mind last weekend when I read an article by Jonathan Guthrie in the FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5ae018a8-0951-11df-ba88-00144feabdc0.html. I love that the FT is writing about social enterprise, but I don't love it when they call Green and Black's a social enterprise.  They're tasty and organic, but only one bar was ever fair trade and that was Maya Gold. Neither fair trade nor organic alone = social enterprise.

Social enterprises as businesses are fundamentally about social change - rather than the owners choosing to contribute toward it. What I want the Mark to do is cut through the confusion and the misinformation out there - as social enterprises, it us up to us to say what we are and what we believe. And that's when we can scale up the change we're already making and have a national and international impact.

Your thoughts?

< Back