Last Thursday, I went to the Social Enterprise summit regional workshop that I mentioned. Apparently, SEC are hoping that ministers Mandelson, Purnell, Byrne and Blears will be at the summit, along with people from various famous co-ops.
I took along some email feedback I received on ’supporting new blood in social enterprise’ about needing help to bridge the gaps (financial, social, training) between taking on new members and them being productive enough to “break even”. Happily, that was echoed and reinforced by other delegates – I shared a table with people from Trinity Community Arts, AvonCDA, Sofa Project, Somerset Co-operative Services and Community Action.
Emboldened by that, I ranted about the Business Support Simplification Programme (which seems to mean that only BusinessLinkSW has any gov.uk money in our region and they’re being really poor at co-op support) and I threw a couple of ideological-explosives into the consultation, suggesting that franchising has failed as a way of spreading social enterprise and we need to start offering General Public Licensing of our business models, because we’re not franchising businesses and most of us don’t want to be. I wonder if that idea will detonate somewhere helpful.
The Social Enterprise Coalition officers had some details of the support programmes that are already announced. One of them is a “golden hello” where the enterprise gets money when a new person joins. It’s run by jobcentreplus. So yesterday, when I was at a Business Link “Real help for business” event, I asked the jobcentreplus officers there about it: apparently it’s useless to TTLLP because all our workers are partners and not employees. I was expecting more support for co-ops from a Labour+Co-op government, but it shouldn’t’ve been a surprise after the budget.
After that, I don’t think it’s worth posting details of the other SE assistance programmes mentioned: they’ll probably turn out to be equally useless for co-ops and I don’t want to waste your time. I’ll rant about that and the BusinessLinkSW event another day or in another place. Ask me if you want details and I’ll put them in a comment or email them.
And in that spirit, it’s back to programming for me!
Hi, I’ve started this as a discussion on the SEC forum. Please come and join me.
http://secx.client.fatbeehive.com/forum/index.php?tid=133
Jeff – can’t see your discussion on the SEC forum and the link doesn’t work for me. Which one is it? Has it been moderator-hidden?
MJ It’s still there under the title “Social Enterprise in the recession” which I believe the summit is about. I missed the opportunity of joining in when the topic was brought to Bristol unfortunately, and would be interested to know what that brought up.
We’ve been applying social enterprise in Russia and Ukraine over the last decade and what I wanted to relate was the success in Russia which leveraged a microfinance bank and 10,000 small business entities in the city of Tomsk. This is under the projects section on our website link.
Jeff
Jeff – Something freaky is going on. I can’t see any discussion under the title “Social Enterprise in the recession” and the most recent discussion update I can see is 1 week ago by Jan Golding.
If you email SEC, I expect they’ll send you their discussion paper for the summit.
Freaky it is. I can see no Jan Golding.
The ultimate control mechanism, perhaps – a forum where only you see your own posts. Nothing would surprise me.
Jeff
Anyway MJ. I may as well make an intro here. We formed as P-CED UK in 2004 as a guarantee company from roots as a software development business which began in 87.
We’d started as a Guarantee company deciding that what we wanted to do, for the benefit of many overseas wasn’t compatible with a coop mutual model. I note you operate as an LLP and wondered if you knew about opencapital.net and Chris Cook.
The guarantee company painted us out of the picture after spending 3 months developing a community broadband proposal, they would only fund bona-fide coops.
Two weeks ago we respresented ourselves with an opening plenary at a conference in Sumy Ukraine about Economics for ecology, which seems to have much in common with one held in Oxford just 2 days ago.
http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/sumy/
Jeff
http://oxfordhub.org/oxsef
.