If you are looking for business support to help develop a new or existing social enterprise, then download our guide.
It summarises business support services available from BSSEC members and others and also includes sources of information on legal structures.
We don’t pretend the guide is exhaustive but you’ll find it a good start in finding out who’s out there and what they offer.
An announcement by the Cabinet office — dating back to last April — has just been brought to my attention (thanks to Chris Newis at BDRC).
Apparently, My Civil Service Pension (MyCSP) is the first central government department to be spun-out as a mutual joint venture.
The new business is owned jointly (according to ComputerWeekly!) by its 475 staff, a private sector company, and the government. Logging on to the MyCSP website I see that it now announces “working in association with Capita Hartshead”, so I suppose we can assume that Capita won the tender to be the private sector partner in the joint venture.
Pinsent Masons’ Out-Law.com site also covers the story — and much more recently (Feb 2012), quoting a government spokesperson as saying that the plan is to have “one million public sector staff part of similar arrangements by 2015″. That would represent 15-20% of the public sector workforce.
Labour has said (according to coverage in the Guardian) that ministers are not really promoting true co-operatives but instead is redefining co-ops to include entities that are majority-owned by private shareholders but where there is a minority stake held by workers.
I don’t know enough about the mutual joint venture model the government is pushing but it does seem worth wondering whether it includes an asset lock that prevents the enterprise being “demutualised”. Does anyone know?
Phil Bartlett, employee leader and chief executive of MyCSP, is quoted as saying that the mutual idea had “captured people’s imagination”. This seems a slight exaggeration given that coverage of this development has been pretty muted.
The Public & Commercial Services Union (PCS) says that the majority of its members are opposed to the new business structure and has called for an overtime ban from October 2011. PCS says MyCSP is merely a “quasi-mutual private enterprise” and “not real mutual in the accepted sense of the term”.
I have mentioned the Office for Civil Society’s Transforming Local Infrastructure programme before on this blog (in this post, for instance).
Well, this morning I heard the best news in ages — the bid submitted by Birmingham’s TLI partnership has been successful, securing just under £600k for the transformation of how third sector and social enterprise support in Birmingham is delivered.
Congratulations to BVSC and to all the partners involved in this.
Of course, now the genuinely hard and challenging work of transforming infrastructure services begins, but for a moment let’s just bask in the glory — it isn’t often we can. Not only was the Birmingham bid successful, BIG’s assessors say that of 140 applications nationwide Birmingham’s was amongst five top scorers. And because it was amongst the first assessed, it was also used as something of a benchmark against which to compare others.
This is not insignificant in helping to raise Brum’s profile as a centre of sector expertise and innovation.
It is also just worth reminding ourselves of the hurdles successful bidders had to clear. Although the funds are administered by BIG and applications were assessed by a team of BIG assessors, we were also told that in this instance BIG’s role was to make “recommendations” to OCS, and that the final decisions rested with ministers.
We all know that securing resources to deliver support — including SE support — is getting harder. This probably isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future and therefore we need to change the way we ‘do’ support. This is where TLI comes in. It provides resources with which to change how support is offered in the future, including the development of new techniques, approaches and ‘legacy’ products and services that will be more sustainable in coming years.
Make no mistake: getting TLI is a big deal for social enterprises and third sector organisations in Birmingham and we have justifiable reasons to feel proud.
Update 02/02/12: See the full list of successful partnerships here.
Running all next week, from Monday 6th to Friday 10th Feb Aston University is hosting its Go Green week.
With eco-markets, alternative G8 talks (Rob Newman on ‘Capitalism or habitable planet’, for instance), a bike sale, green campus guided walks, Jiri Rezac’s highly acclaimed photography exhibition, Tarnished Earth (sponsored by The Co-operative), and much, much more, this will be a week of events that anyone involved in any kind of eco-campaigning, enterprise or activism will want to be part of.
Visit the Go Green website or click here to view or download the programme.
I love the 60s retro-chic of the Chamber of Commerce — mainly because I have a soft spot for its architect, the gloriously named John Hardcastle Dalton Madin, who died earlier this month.
Anyway, that’s really neither here nor there… I was at the Chamber to have breakfast with Vicki Fitzgerald, chief exec of Gateway Family Services, which is now based at the Chamber, and we were having an extremely interesting discussion about why blogs should be considered “proper work”, perhaps especially by CEOs who need to create a stronger profile for their organisation and a recognisable “public voice” for themselves.
Because the advent of blogging and tweeting and other social media really have changed expectations regarding what managers and leaders will do to raise the profile of their organisations and get clear, strong messages out there. Sadly, for most chief execs this just represents another burden in an already overstretched working life, which is a shame because I have become convinced that blogging really can help put a human face on an organisation (it can even help put a human face on some chief execs).
Anyway, Vicki obviously went away thinking hard about our conversation and followed it up with an excellent post about why innovators should be “target specifiers” and not just target followers. You can read it here.
I’ve just noticed (from Pauline Roche’s LinkedIn feed) that civil society minister Nick Hurd is tweeting about SE business support. He wants to hear from “people who know what they’re talking about”.
He asks (amongst other things):
Who knows — I may even break my own self-imposed Twitter embargo to reply….
In fact, I’m writing something even as we speak, but it probably won’t be tweeted — that would be a step too far…
UPDATE 01/02/12: You can read what I said here.
Third Sector Online carries an interesting story today. It claims that an unnamed voluntary sector source has said that at least one private sector company has been shortlisted to administer a new Big Lottery programme called ‘Assist’, aimed at helping infrastructure providers to become more effective.
Third Sector Online’s source said this raised concerns about lottery money being used to help private sector companies sell services to the voluntary sector.
The fund was announced in December last year and although it was mentioned in the Big Lottery’s discussion paperBuilding capabilities for legacy and impact (currently out for consultation and you can can download BSSEC’s work-in-progress response here) there is still precious little info in circulation about this £6m fund. Building capabilities says only that the fund “will help local support providers become more effective with help from national experts and peer-to-peer support”.
If anyone has heard anything further about this please comment here or email me and I’ll try and build this story up a bit.
Sad news yesterday from our friend and colleague John Ling at BXL Ltd, which has been forced into administration by inherited TUPE pension deficits and loss of service delivery contracts.
Third Sector Online covers the story here and there is a detailed post on John Ling’s blog here.
Mike Cleveley, commercial director at BXL is acting for PwC the administrators and strenuous efforts are being made to protect the remaining 26 jobs and sell the business as a going concern.
Our best wishes to all involved at BXL and let’s hope that a way is found to protect not just the remaining staff but also the essential services they provide in youth training and employment support. If not now, when?
UPDATE 26/01/12: It’s worth pulling the following out of the comments section where it may get lost — and I’m sure Jan Golding won’t mind. She posted the following remarks:
“I know nothing about the detail of the BXL situation but we are working with many organisations who are contemplating situations in which TUPE would be relevant. We are contantly troubled by the lack of risk assessment undertaken by organisations before entering into a transfer and taking on automatically the full employment liabilities that come with the transferring staff. Employers seem to think they can pick and choose these – and they can’t.
If there is one piece of learning I would wish for all civil society leaders, it would be organisational risk assessment. Any organisation comtemplating a situation that may involve TUPE can contact us for a free 1 hour of advice on 0845 543 8429 and we can explain the risks specific to their transfer.
My thoughts are with the staff of BXL – I hope a way can be found to protect their employment and continue their great work.”
In October 2011 BIS published Business Support for Social Enterprise: Findings from a Longitudinal Study, by Gordon Allinson et al from the Policy Research Group at the University of Durham can be downloaded here.
It’s rather long and the exec summary probably tells you most of what you want to know.
The report is useful in that it derives from a substantial study and confirms trends that those active in business support will have discerned for some time now.
Where I differ with the authors’ findings is their conclusion that for most SEs mentoring-type support and online tools/resources are likely to be the preferred means of access to business support.
Stating the conclusion baldly like this probably does the report a disservice in that there is a significant layer of detail underpinning its findings, but I couldn’t help feeling that in this particular instance the conclusion was a convenience rather than one borne out wholly by some of the other details. While these methods of course have their place, I am always surprised that studies such as this fail to grasp that support for SE (and arguably for conventional businesses too) needs to be part of a planned developmental process. Sporadic mentoring only goes so far.
Read it (at least the exec summary) for yourself and see what you think…
This extraordinary story in the Guardian yesterday answered three questions that have been puzzling me.
It concerns a discussion paper published by the new health watch-dog, Monitor, that clinical assessment of NHS providers should be replaced with a financial assessment by credit ratings agencies such as Standard & Poor’s. The Guardian covers the story in greater depth on its inside pages.
The credit rating agencies, of course, are the same agencies that said bundled sub-prime mortgages — so called CDOs — were triple-A securities. Yes, CDOs — the very same toxic debt that almost toppled the global banking system and that the credit ratings agencies demanded extra for assessing because of their complexity, as John Lanchester’s book, Whoops!, revealed.
So, what three questions did this answer? Well, I have been wondering whether Monitor can be said to be politically independent. The answer to that question now seems clear.
I have been trying to keep up with information on NHS ‘reforms’ and decide for myself whether they are, as critics including the RCN, the RCM and the BMA increasingly fear, almost entirely market-driven. A financial rather than a clinical or care quality assessment? That would seem to answer that question too.
And I have always wondered whether turkeys ever do vote for Christmas. Well, the turkeys at Monitor have.
In this, the UN International Year of Co-operatives, it is fitting — but frankly unexpected — that David Cameron should take the occasion of his speech today on “moral capitalism” to announce a new Co-operatives Act which will streamline the existing seventeen items of legislation and make it easier for people, including public service workers, to start new mutually owned co-operative ventures.
Co-operatives UK has welcomed what it calls an “historic announcement”.
Social Enterprise UK chief exec Peter Holbrook has said that the government is lagging behind the people as far as “moral markets” are concerned and that consumers have been voting with their feet for years in buying in ever increasing numbers from co-ops, social enterprises and ethical businesses.
“We should use the crisis of capitalism to improve markets,” the PM said, “not undermine them.” The speech is nothing less than an attempt to revise and reconstruct the Conservative position on market capitalism.
In it — and this is no mean feat — Cameron manages to distance the “popular capitalism” espoused by himself and the coalition government from that championed under Thatcherism, renew his dismissal of Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” statement, and damn the previous government as a party of unfettered “turbo-charged capitalism” that made “a Faustian pact with the City”.
This will go down as one of Cameron’s defining speeches and deserves to be read in its entirety. You can do that here in the New Statesmen. The BBC covers it here.
Social Enterprise Mentor is Birmingham’s leading networking event for those in, interested in or supporting social enterprise and is returning to 2012 with two very special events.
Join us for our first visit to Wolverhampton on Tuesday 7th February 4.00-5.30 at The Light House Cafe.
We start the year with a ‘New Start’ theme as we host the launch of Andy Beaton Consultancy – a new consultancy founded by Andy Beaton, offering “straightforward advice and support for the Third Sector”. This is a great opportunity to meet Andy in a relaxed atmosphere and enjoy the unique atmosphere of Social Enterprise Mentor networking .
So if you’re a regular Social Enterprise Mentor networker or if you work in Wolverhampton’s third sector and would like to meet likeminded professionals, come along for an informal coffee and conversation!
Social Enterprise Mentor turns two in February 2012; so join us for a very special networking event to celebrate 2 years of Social Enterprise Networking in Birmingham (and beyond) with free coffee, cake and the great conversation. So join us for our second birthday celebrations on Wednesday 15th February 3.30-5.00 at The Custard Factory.
For more details and to register for the free Wolverhampton or Birmingham events please visit Social Enterprise Mentor.
The use of interns — particularly in the more glamorous industries such as publishing, media and especially fashion — has taken some stick recently. There are many companies, and some of the wealthiest, who are using (more accurately, exploiting) interns as a new form of free labour.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. The intern relationship can deliver dividends all round. And it can be done well, and done right. iSE is about to demonstrate how in a forthcoming seminar on the issue. See below.
Click on the graphic to read the flyer full-screen.
Click here for a full training programme.
Click here for a booking form.
Further to this post in which I noted that a recent Public Administration Select Committee report had called for a single minister to be put in charge of the ‘big society’, Pauline Roche quite rightly queried why — or how — this wasn’t Nick Hurd’s job. I thought it was a good question.
The answer, or at least a possible answer, is reported in today’s Third Sector Online which reports that the ministerial committee set up by Hurd to over see big society policy implementation and cross-departmental involvement hasn’t met for ten months….
To my mind this explains why the PASC was calling for someone to be given specific responsibility for ‘big society’ issues rather than general responsibility for civil society issues…
Update 16/01/12: Some interesting comments on this. One or two people have pointed out that the ‘big society’ has little political credibility…
But that is exactly what is interesting about it. That a centrepiece of Conservative thinking, championed personally by the PM, should in such a short time become a fault-line not just in coalition thinking but within the Conservative Party suggests that bigger stakes than just this particular idea are at play. There has been a very good R4 programme about the roots — and future — of the big society idea, and still time to catch the second episode on the BBC iPlayer here.
I managed to miss this — and I suspect that with the Christmas break many others will have done so too. Thanks to Ash Mehmood at Birmingham City Counciul for the pointer.
The Big Lottery announced on the 28th December that the Big Society Investment Fund has used the first tranche of cash from dormant bank accounts to invest in three ‘big society’ projects. They are:
The UN has declared 2012 the international year of co-operatives and throughout the year there will be events, promotions and publicity to spread the message of co-operation and raise the profile of co-ops right around the world.
Events kick off today with a live webcast broadcast on the Guardian website — you can sign-up to take part or to simply watch the webcast here.
The webcast, Can co-operation rebuild British business starts at 13:30GMT and the panel includes Ed Mayo, general secretary of Co-operatives UK, Dame Pauline Green, president of the International Co-operative Alliance, Li Chunsheng, vice-president at the All China Federation of Supply and Marketing Co-operatives, and Charles Leadbeater, leading authority on innovation and creativity.
Co-operatives UK has set up a news-hub for events and information here.
Did you know that new research has revealed that there are now three times more members of co-operatives in the world than there are individual shareholders? That’s right: in some parts of the world, co-operation already is the dominant means of doing business. [Full report here.]
For more information visit Co-operatives UK, the UN, the International Co-operative Alliance, and The Co-operative. Co-operatives UK is also offering free publicity packs to help members and supporters celebrate and promote co-operation — order your pack here.
In recent years many in the co-operative movement feel that co-operatives have not enjoyed the same prominence in public policy that has been accorded to social enterprise, despite being perhaps the earliest expression of social enterprise and the original “mutuals” that the government now professes such keenness for. 2012 is an important opportunity to address this.
Last week I circulated an email to advise people that Third Sector Online had just announced that the second tranche of the Social Action Fund was about to open to applications.
The announcement included a quote from someone at the Social Investment Business, the distributors of the fund: ”We aim to fund well-established national or regional organisations, usually under large branded schemes. A strong preference is given to schemes that have agreed match funding,” they said.
I subsequently received an email from Marcia Lewinson at Women Acting in Today’s Society that was a heart-felt howl of frustration. She said:
The above says it all! Where is the support for organisations that have local relationships, understand local need, have the ability to recruit and retain volunteers and can do all of the above?
Small independent charities and business are getting squeezed out of the market!! Frustrated…
Marcia is absolutely right, of course. The more I thought about it the more I found myself thinking how at odds all this guff about ‘scale’, ‘replicability’ and big ‘branded schemes’ is with David Cameron’s aspirations for the ‘big society’.
It betrays the same kind of obsession with management consultancy-speak and grand schemes that dominated government thinking in the 1980s.
If you share Marcia’s frustration then why not write to Nick Hurd and tell him? Writing to the Social Investment Business is unlikely to change anything because it is doing what the government has told it to, but voicing your frustration to the Minister responsible might just help.
This really does seem one of those instances where policy implementation is glaringly at odds with the aspirations that prompted it in the first place.
Further to this post, leaders from across the care sector have published an open letter in today’s Daily Telegraph calling on all political parties to work together to find a long-term solution to the funding and delivery of elderly care.
The government plans a white paper on social care reform for April and this, along with the publication of the Dilnot Commission’s inquiry into social care in the summer of last year, finally seems to be prompting proper debate.
If you’re wondering what Dilnot recommended as regards the funding of social care, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a very good analysis — here.
How social care is funded is obviously of vital importance but Dilnot seems to focus on this to the exclusion of how that care is delivered. Given that 84% of social care is already delivered outside of the public sector health system, and social enterprises and third sector providers already have a significant stake in social care, the sector really should be focusing its lobbying and influencing efforts on this issue and making the case for a not-for-personal-profit delivery model.
There is a real danger that the more market-oriented care becomes, the less of a vocation it is — and the less we can assume it to be under-pinned by the values of dignity, respect and compassion that we all want to see. A model of social care based primarily on profit can’t work. Commercial, for-profit providers can only maximise their profits if they drive down the costs of care (by ensuring that care takes less time, for instance), or drive down the costs of wages. Neither is a recipe for more care and compassion. But social enterprises, by retaining more surplus in the business and taking less out in the form of owners’ profits or dividends at least in theory can unlock greater resources for care at the point of delivery.
What is really needed is for existing social enterprise and third sector providers to give real, living examples of why and how their not-for-personal-profit model works better.
We wish all our readers, friends and supporters a Happy New Year. May it be socially enterprising, co-operative, prosperous and peaceful.
Drop-by frequently for fresh news, views and opinion in 2012.
I recently received the following message from Frances Kenwrick at Business in the Community:
It is my pleasure to introduce Business in the Community’s Employee Volunteering Newsletter for the West Midlands.
For ease and convenience we have loaded the newsletter on Scribd in order to avoid sending you what was a rather large file — please click on this link to read the newsletter.
You can download the original file — which displays at greater resolution than it does on the Scribd page — by clicking the green download button at the bottom righthand side of the Scribd page.
Future editions will be resized for direct emailing.
If you have any short volunteering stories and / or photographs that you would like to see in our next edition please email me the details.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at BITC.
Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Fran Kenwrick
You can email Frances at: Frances<dot>kenwrick<at>bitc<dot>org<dot>uk.
Health Exchange CIC is seeking to contract a Driver for its small van and mobile exhibition vehicle.
The Mobile is a standard IVECO Luton van with extendable “pods” and can be driven by anyone with a full, clean, UK car driving licence.
The driver will also be trained as a supporter to work on Health Promotion events around the City and Black Country. Initially the contract will be on a self employment basis for an agreed number of days per month (minimum 10 days), but may result in employment being offered to a suitable candidate (on completion of training and accreditation).
All contractors are required to be CRB (enhanced) checked. 
Interested? Either contact us through our website or email Ravi Ruberi: ravi<dot>ruberi<at>healthexchange<dot>org<dot>uk
Birmingham Boys’ & Girls’ Brigade is putting the creation of jobs for young people at the top of its agenda and is using social enterprise to do this.
At the heart of the organisation’s Grow-A-Job campaign is a relatively simple idea. We all at various times donate clothes to charity shops — or increasingly have them collected from our doorsteps. But did you know that these collections are done largely by commercial companies and that the charities they act on behalf of get only about 10% of the value of the donated clothes? That’s right. 100 black bags of donated clothes are wroth nearly £600, but charities are paid about one-tenth of this.
If everyone in Birmingham who normally donates clothes gives these to the Grow-A-Job scheme instead, then the Boys’ & Girls’ Brigade can help create new jobs for young people by putting every pound to work in the cause of youth employment.
Click here to read how the Grow-A-Job scheme works.
And click here to read a Christmas message from Ann Reaney at the Boys’ & Girls’ Brigade — Ann will visit your office, company, community group, voluntary organisation or social enterprise to tell you more about how they are using social enterprise to create opportunities for young people both in the UK and overseas.
A couple of interesting, thought-provoking things have caught my attention in recent days.
The first was Professor Hugh Cunningham’s excellent R4 programme, How new is the new philanthropy? The second part of this series aired yesterday and is still on the BBC iPlayer. Sadly, the first part doesn’t seem to be.
What I found interesting about this were the subtle ideological differences the programme managed to draw out and make explicit.
For instance, Cunningham explores Victorian philanthropy and charts the shift which took place in the nineteenth century from rich families helping the poor (often with religion attached and underpinning notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor), to poor people helping each other — the roots of co-operative and friendly societies and the emergence of mutual aid.
It seems a long way from this emerging culture of mutuality to a ‘new philanthropy’ that seeks to ‘monetise’ social problems and earn a return from their ‘solution’.
MIranda Sawyer in the Observer has some interesting things to say about the programme here.
The other thing was a Guardian piece called “The Ikea Anarchists”, about the Deterritorial Support Group (DSG), a largely student activist movement.
DSG is exploring the lost art of political sloganeering and agitation with new, slightly tongue-in-cheek provocations for the Facebook and Twitter age. DSG says of itself that it comprises “anti-authoritarian communists” opposed to the calcifying bureaucracies of political parties and trades unions that on the one hand seek to “represent our collective will, while perpetuating capitalist social relations with the other”.
Perhaps as much Marx Brothers as Marx, the DSG seems to have much in common with the Situationists of the 50s and 60s, and in particular the theories of Guy Debord, one of the Situationists’ chief strategists and provocateurs.
Political propaganda is always a fascinating commentary, often revealing more about the political culture of an age than hours of sterile interviews with Ministers and frontbenchers.
Of course, it is easy to dismiss the DSG as a bunch of clever-clever students with too little real work to do — but in some respects that’s the point. They do have too little work to do. They are the new generation of graduates without prospects.
I’ve just come across People Can, a social enterprise and charity working across the country to help those with the fewest chances use social enterprise to improve their lives, their prospects and their communities.
I must admit that I previously hadn’t heard of People Can, or the social enterprise tools and resources it produces. People Can was formerly known as Novas Scarman and employs some 250 staff across the country.
You might care to have a look at the Box Clever Range, tools and materials for social enterprise training and awareness-raising at the community level. For more info contact Pollyanna Wilkinson, People Can’s business development manager, on 0115 948 4600 or email info<dot>midlands<at>peoplecan<dot>org<dot>uk.
Yesterday we held a first for us at iSE — a pitching and networking event for social enterprises to come along and tell others why they should buy their products and services.
Each person had three minutes to tell their story and then feedback was invited from those assembled on what they had heard.
People brought along samples for tasting, touching and sharing and there was a tremendous energy and buzz from all concerned. We have already been asked to do a repeat which we are keen to support and nearly 30 people attended!
One participant, Martin Hogg, said, “Today’s networking was fantastic. A real spirit of support in the room and great to hear what others are doing. You and Lizzie really have created a distinctive showcase event that people loved.”
I think there’s real potential in developing these kind of business-based, inter-trading type events, and we intend to continue doing this under the Shop for Change banner. There’s a real appetite amongst social enterprises to pitch their wares and explain what they do — and perhaps more importantly their prospective customers want to hear what they do too!
There was very good coverage in the Guardian on Wednesday 14th December of the Public Administration Select Committee’s (PASC) report on the government’s progress in implementing ‘big society’ policies.
Despite four ‘big society’ relaunches (and counting), the PASC was highly critical and said an overhaul of how the government communicates and implements ‘big society’ policies is essential.
It has called on the government to create a single ‘big society minister’ to lead on the ‘big society’ — or risk seeing it flop for a fifth time in a welter of confusing messages and contradictory policies.
For those wishing to follow the arguments in detail, the full PASC report is here and the PASC’s recommendations are summarised here.
