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Nick Temple
CURRENTLY POLICY AND COMMS DIRECTOR AT THE SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS IN THE UK
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Nick commented on the article |Hi Nat - see also this article on how the British Council has been working, with the Chinese government + various NGOs out there, on promoting social entrepreneurs. SSE helped co-design the 'skills for social entrepreneurs' mini-programme, so am heading out there again next week to find out how it went.
http://www.socialenterprisemag.co.uk/sem/news/detail/index.asp?id=992 -
Nick commented on the article |
Sorry Nat: could you sort my links out!
P.S. I also meant to say that having beneficiaries / users on the board can't always sit easily with every member of that board making a financial contribution....? -
Nick commented on the article |
Hi from the UK. We have our own independent charity review site over here, <A href="http://www.intelligentgiving.com">IntelligentGiving.com</A> which has plenty of other info and advice as well. It focuses on the transparency / reporting of charities primarily, rather than the Charity Navigator type of admin:funding type ratios.
There's also <A href="http://www.philanthropycapital.org/">New Philanthropy Capital's</A> work which does reports (ostensibly for philanthropic investors) on good charities operating in particular fields.
I think the "are there any beneficiaries / clients etc on the board" is a relly good one. We've made that a key rule of thumb for our social franchise of SSEs. Currently, we have 3 SSE Fellows on our board, and our CEO is also one.
On the "I won't invest in a charity whose board members don't invest in the charity", this is more of a US practice (though perhaps a good one), so you would struggle to find any UK charity you could invest in Renata! I guess the investment from the board can also be in terms of connections, time input, pro bono services and so on as well.
I guess my line tends to be that it's about (measured) social impact, about quality delivery, about transparency and openness, about robust systems and governance, and about good communication of all of the above. -
Nick commented on the article |I think you are definitely right to point that out Kevin. Certainly the flip side of my "long tail" / 1000 flowers bloom argument is that this will cause a huge amount of duplication, wasted resource etc. And that these smaller solutions will never truly address the scale of the problem. Similarly, it's also fair to say that scaling is more/less difficult (and more/less appropriate at times) depending on your model, your stakeholders and so on.
I guess I would just say that some social entrepreneurs are not held back by a system at a certain level, but because that was the level they wanted to operate at; addressing a particular local need in an innovative way that creates positive social impact. -
Nick commented on the article |
I guess my answer to the question posed would be "not all of them, but a lot of the organisations that fund and support them are".
The point is that most social entrepreneurs, like most entrepreneurs, will operate at a local / regional level. Many set out to address an unmet need at that level and don't have the ambition , willingness or capacity to expand / replicate.
Similarly, too many support / funding orgs assume that scale means expanding an organisation rather than replicating an idea through other methods (on the spectrum between open source and central control are a whole range of franchising, licensing and partnering options).
To say this is not to be anti-scaling; clearly we have big problems in a lot of areas, and some organisations / leaders have the ambition, capacity and model to scale. At SSE, we've done (and are doing!) this as a social franchise in order to expand in line with our principles, and to ensure we don't become a hugely hierarchical / bureaucratic organisation at the centre.
The final thing I would say is that what we also need to scale up is the numbers of people involved in this movement. Because this movement can transform through how it operates as well as through the services it deliver; and the people usually referred to as 'beneficiaries' can also be social entrepreneurs (something Paul Farmer pointed to in his speech at the Skoll Forum earlier this year). If we make people feel like it's an exclusive club for huge social enterprises led by stellar social entrepreneurs, that won't happen.
Finally, I'd point to my post / slideshow dealing with all of the above in the <A href="Long Tail of Social Entrepreneurship">I guess my answer to the question posed would be "not all of them, but a lot of the organisations that fund and support them are".
The point is that most social entrepreneurs, like most entrepreneurs, will operate at a local / regional level. Many set out to address an unmet need at that level and don't have the ambition , willingness or capacity to expand / replicate.
Similarly, too many support / funding orgs assume that scale means expanding an organisation rather than replicating an idea through other methods (on the spectrum between open source and central control are a whole range of franchising, licensing and partnering options).
To say this is not to be anti-scaling; clearly we have big problems in a lot of areas, and some organisations / leaders have the ambition, capacity and model to scale. At SSE, we've done (and are doing!) this as a social franchise in order to expand in line with our principles, and to ensure we don't become a hugely hierarchical / bureaucratic organisation at the centre.
The final thing I would say is that what we also need to scale up is the numbers of people involved in this movement. Because this movement can transform through how it operates as well as through the services it deliver; and the people usually referred to as 'beneficiaries' can also be social entrepreneurs (something Paul Farmer pointed to in his speech at the Skoll Forum earlier this year). If we make people feel like it's an exclusive club for huge social enterprises led by stellar social entrepreneurs, that won't happen.
Finally, I'd point to my post / slideshow dealing with all of the above in the Long Tail of Social Entrepreneurship.
http://tinyurl.com/267kgn</A>.
http://tinyurl.com/267kgn -
Nick commented on the article |Spot on, I think. When people ask me what success looks like for people coming through the School for Social Entrepreneurs programme, I say that if they come out of the year knowing what they are not good at, being prepared to admit it, and being confident / resourceful / networked enough to know how to go and get it (or add it), then that's a good outcome.
Very much chimes with what you say here.
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