Never getting board

The Divine Sophi, a welcome addition to any creative meeting especially as she brings the choc!

The Social Enterprise London board has always been a source of inspiration to me. From the very beginning, it has been made up of some of the country's foremost social entrepreneurs. Co-chairs Mark Sesnan of GLL and Sophi Tranchell of Divine were supporters from the start, seeing the importance of a London-based agency promoting social enterprise. Other social enterprise stars joined the party later. These are busy people with often large businesses to run and in today's economic climate no one is unaffected by recession and has time to spare for the non-essentials.

So I continue to be humbled by the active and energised support of all our stalwarts. We had such a productive meeting this week, again well attended (SEL board meetings have never come close to being inquorate) and with some really strong and creative contributions. Sophi was very generous with the chocolate, which added to our clear thinking, and my thanks to June O'Sullivan for the use of her Marsham Street LEYF nursery as a venue.

SEL is going through a period of change in that we know our job is to ramp up social enterprise development, but the reality is there is very little money out there to pay us to do what we do best. We have known for some time that we face a double, triple even quadruple whammy as central government cut 90% of the contracts they had previously deployed to support social enterprise and regional growth by shutting, among other programmes, the RDAs, business links, Government Offices and Future Jobs Fund. Local governments are coping with swinging reductions in their budgets and have similarly cut much of their economic development initiatives. Those contracts that remain on offer from government or grant funding bodies now face hysterical levels of competition due to their scarcity and most crucially social enterprises themselves have diminished resources to pay for the business support they need. Any plan to achieve sustainability through the direct payment of fees needs to ask itself some hard questions.

What we face is a perfect storm with social enterprise in general and SEL in particular being asked to do more than ever with unprecedented low levels of resource. I have always been a fan of Blue Peter but even I am not sure what I can do for social enterprises with a cereal packet, toilet roll and some sticky-back plastic.

What we do have, however, is a solid reputation for delivery, a loyal membership and a perfect board. Their combined skills, experience, commitment and enthusiasm is an extraordinary resource in itself and one I shall be deploying heavily in the months to come. I have to say that although the cuts are a real pressure point, I enjoy the entrepreneurialism the new climate has teased out. I do not subscribe to the view that only the best survive tough times as I have already seen some good social enterprises go to the wall because social value is still a concept ahead of its time, but I do think at times like these you find out what you do best and who your friends are.

Its going to be bumpy and to ride this out, our offer to our 2,600 members must to be spot on. Watch this space, we will be calling on members for feedback and welcoming all interaction. You are going to be hearing a great deal from us so please do let us know if you like, or not, what you hear.

Racing through Social Enterprise Day with men with moustaches

Latzo lorverly prizes at Livity, Brixton 

For the last few years, Social Enterprise Day has been a real celebration for our world. It's a day when a great many social enterprises make the effort to showcase some or all of what they do. At SEL, we did our bit with a Guardian-supported launch of Spin-out and deliver, our latest publication on new forms of public service providers that go it alone to focus on social value, and an open day at the SEL offices.

At the youth and media company and SEL member, Livity, CEO Sam Conniff had Super Mario in and some guy in a red hat from the Cabinet Office to announce this organisation has organised youth consultation across the UK with Nintendo. This will co-design practical ideas that will make a real and lasting difference to young people. Nintendo intends to start piloting these co-created solutions for and with young people in their own communities as soon as next year.

Over the other side of town, SEL Director June O'Sullivan of LEYF gave this year's Margaret Horn Lecture at the RSA on LEYF research that explores social franchising as a model to tackle the challenges of child poverty. Read her lecture: 'Child poverty: Why social franchising is a giant step in the right direction'.  This event was chaired by Matthew Taylor, chief executive at the RSA.

Spin-out and deliver at the Guardian

Our own Guardian event sparked some really good debate and Matthew Booth, Head of Policy at Ealing Council was fantastic. He explained what was happening at the council and his frank and enthusiastic approach was a breath of fresh air. Participants got stuck in and a good discussion followed that I really enjoyed. As ever Andrew Burnell of City Health Care Partnership was on great form. Andrew is on the board of the Transition Institute (TI) and is as good an advertisement of public sector spin-outs that believe they are the next generation of public servants as you are ever likely to get. He was sporting his Movember moustache which, while impressive in a challenging facial hair sort of way, was no match for the tash of Super Mario. (Movember is an initiative that encourages men to grow moustaches in November to highlight issues and fundraising around men's health.)

Andrew will also be speaking at the TI launch of Social value ethos, its first publication on Monday at GLL facilities in Marshall Street, Westminster. Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society (as seen above and a person who started following me, @aogdennewton on Twitter yesterday), and Sir Stephen Bubb, CEO of ACEVO and TI board member, will also both be there.

Hearing about social enterprise

Back to Social Enterprise Day. I left the Guardian to race back to SEL offices where the staff had done a lovely job smartening us up for a social enterprise drop-in day. We had no idea how many would come, so were chuffed when over 50 social entrepreneurs came through our doors. Mei Hui, SEL's Senior Business Advisor, gave a presentation to over 30 of our guests and the rest met SEL staff and enjoyed some networking.

I had to break of to do a Live Guardian Q & A on, ironically the future of business support for social enterprise following the sad closure of our sister organisation RISE in the South West. During that discussion there were plenty of comments to the effect that everything we do should be paid for at the point of contact. Sitting in on Mei's presentation and listening to the comments from participants, I was struck by how much advice those new social entrepreneurs needed and how utterly unable the vast majority were able to pay for it. In this harsh new economic climate, it is hard to think those people are not our audience. After all, wasn't supporting community development through enterprise why we were set up in the first place?

When Mei, Jillian and I shut up shop at around 7.30pm, we congratulated ourselves on an excellent social enterprise day and wondered about next year: what would the world of social enterprise look like then?

Spin out and deliver

Allison Ogden-Newton on the launch at the Guardian of the latest guide to public sector service spin-outs

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• Allison Ogden-Newton
• Guardian Professional, Thursday 17 November 2011 08.00 GMT
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Some services, such as childcare, are mostly undertaken by independent providers. Photograph: Photofusion Picture Library / Al/Alamy

So often the story of social enterprise seems inextricably linked to public sector reform, and while there is actually so much more to the growing world of ethical business, what is happening in the arena of public service is undoubtedly big stuff.

Today is Social Enterprise Day and will be celebrated all over the world as a day that matters. For our part Social Enterprise London is launching Spin Out and Deliver here at the Guardian which is our nattily entitled latest thought piece on what is actually happening to those who are leaving direct employment in public services and becoming independent service providers. We started on this journey 15 years ago with our first guides on services such as childcare which we thought could be done more efficiently by those outside the public sector whether they started there or not. Today we learn that leadership is the key, that identifying and supporting those able to inspire and drive the project is the single most significant contributor to success.

To give you some idea of the scale of change, as an example, Social Enterprise London is working with four local authorities across the political spectrum, that between them plan to spin out 22 services. I would take this as evidence that services will be done differently in future, the only arguments left to have are, should services be delivered by social or shareholder-driven value enterprises? And, how can we make sure our services continue to improve in terms of their social impact? At Social Enterprise London we are part of the Transition Institute, an information platform for reform in public services that promotes social value focused delivery. At the institute the mantra is transform not just transfer. We showcase trailblazers who have made it work and help each and every spin-out to learn from those that went before. Some of these new service providers you might recognise, likeLEYF, the market leading early years foundation, and some like Circle Partnership, the health-based company you may not. The report tells us that there is still a great deal of confusion about models and if we are to help these new entities to be sustainable that is a worry.

One of the key things prospective spin-outs told us was their frustration at the lack of specialist support. Even when they found organisations like Social Enterprise London they had no budget to pay for the work they needed doing, and the agencies that could have assisted them like Risein the south-west had experienced 100% funding cuts. This is a growing pressure point. The economic crisis has created a demand for specialist advice and eliminated the public funding to support the propagation of that expertise. It is too easy to say that if that advice is any good the market should pay for it as the market really means fledgling spin outs and growing numbers of start-ups with no budget.

Our live Q & A here at the social enterprise network today is an ideal forum to discuss this. I wonder how many think community business and public sector transformation can really happen on the cheap?

Allison Ogden-Newton is chief executive at Social Enterprise London

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the social enterprise network, click here.

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  allisonogdennewton

  17 November 2011 3:19PM
  Thanks to everyone who came to the launch of Spin out and Deliver this morning and participated in this afternoon's Q & A which had in the end 73 comments and not all of them mine! It's great to know that social enterprise is getting that level of interest.

  I hope you are having a Happy Social Enterprise Day we are at SEL!!!
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• mjraywsm

  17 November 2011 4:09PM
  Are the guides social? Can others take them and update them after the publishers have gone? In other words, are they under something like Creative Commons Share-Alike?

  Small correction: RISE did not have a 100% funding cut - only the RDA grant had gone. They held other public contracts. Although the cut has proved catastrophic, I'm not sure if we know the exact number because RISE is refusing to release the promised full accounts yet. It was still charging subscription fees and trading, taking money from many businesses who could ill afford it, right up until the EGM... the EGM where windfall payments were proposed. Maybe RISE was an I-can't-believe-it's-social enterprise?

  Happy Social Enterprise Day too! software.coop isn't doing much this year because the RISE rearguard campaign has drained us and we're preparing for the International Year of Co-operatives 2012.
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• JeffMowatt

  17 November 2011 6:37PM
  Allison, The web site for Transition Institute refers to the concept of Creating Shared Value, an academic theory from Harvard business school. The reasoning however for embedded social value and rethinking capitalism, derives from our papers and strategy proposals spanning the last 15 years from the point that the P-CED concept was proposed in a paper for the White House.

  More relevantly in 7 years UK operation we have demonstrated this as a working model within the supply chains of several international corporations.and the UK public sector.

  Why does a UK social enterprise organisation endorse the unproven theories of an American university when it could stand by the UK social enterprise which has been the change?

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Why social value is more important than 'social enterprise'

Allison Ogden-Newton finds that social entrepreneurs are relaxed about changes to Chris White's public services bill

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• Allison Ogden-Newton
• Guardian Professional, Thursday 20 October 2011 14.20 BST
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Allison Ogden-Newton, chief executive of Social Enterprise London

If, like me, you have been referring to Chris White's public services (social enterprise and social value) bill as the social enterprise bill, after this week you will have to think of something else to call it. We now know that mention of social enterprise – that bit that many consider as the radical element of the proposed legislation – is to be removed, leaving only reference to social value, which strikes me as a touch of "don't mention the war".

I have to confess that Greg Clark, the minister for decentralisation and cities, told me in December that the government intended just such an amendment, so I was slow to realise that this was news. In truth, the bill is doing better than any of us dared hope and, as to be expected of all private member bills, it has been subject to extensive amendments – but a social enterprise bill that no longer refers to social enterprise has to be a joke, right?

To find out I spoke to June O'Sullivan of the London Early Years Foundation, an organisation that delivers early years services targeted at the most deprived families in five London boroughs. As ever, she cut to the chase. June told me, "What I want from any kind of bill is a level playing field. Local authorities are looking for the best service they can afford and while the social enterprise element of what we do interests councils, when we get feedback from successful contracts, it's all about the service we provide, nothing else."

I asked June what she would like from the legislation and she told me that anything that removed procurement barriers like a mandatory £20m turnover to tender, and added, "getting the concept of social value into their [local authority] heads wouldn't hurt".

This idea was echoed by Mark Sesnan of GLL, a company that manages 100 leisure facilities promoting community health and youth employment, making GLL probably the UK's most successful social enterprise delivering public services. Mark told me: "Having social enterprise in there was powerful, but removing it is not terminal. We welcomed the bill because it asked for government to look for more than just price in contracts. If it still does that then that's great, continuing to describe such activity as social enterprise would have been the icing on the cake."

Mark and June work closely with cuts-ravaged local authorities, which gives them a profoundly pragmatic view. Sarah Richards, director of sustainable environment and enterprise at Essex county council, told me, "We are really interested in social enterprise and its inherent social value and while we might have struggled in response to mandatory legislation, we genuinely welcome any support to our growing relationships with Essex's social enterprise community."

As for removing references to social enterprise, it is my view that as long as our community continues in its struggle to agree a definition of social enterprise, that was always going to be tricky. The impact of what we do, the difference we make to vulnerable people's lives remains the real show and, as for language, June said it best when she told me: "It's not a battle worth fighting; if we try, it will lose us the war".

Allison Ogden-Newton is chief executive of Social Enterprise London

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the social enterprise network, click here

Back to school blues, the true cost of childcare and learning to get along

I got a call this afternoon from our eldest: he had been locked out by his brother and was stranded at the back of the house. From the office I called home and demanded  a repatriation of the garden dweller. It's back to school and things are a little tetchy.

Navigating the change in temperature from holiday to school is this week's challenge in my first back-to-school without any childcare. Although the kids are really growing up and my husband is front line in the school shuttle service for our youngest, there is still a gap between the supervision necessary and an appropriate adult to provide it. But like so many working parents with teenagers, we shall have to limp on and hope for the best.

From first-hand experience I know childcare is expensive but was still shocked to hear from last week's Daycare Trust and Save the Children report that UK residents pay the highest childcare costs in the world. Restricted access to affordable, quality childcare is the single largest reason that women do not return to work after having children. The loss to the workforce of so many qualified, experienced women  must signifigantly reduce productivity, which has to be a bad thing. I know some men also give up work, but should anyone have to make that choice? Which is not a choice at all if it is done as a matter of necessity.

SEL board member June O'Sullivan, CEO at LEYF, the London Early Years Foundation, was everywhere in the media last week, discussing the report. June is one of the country's experts in early years' provision and the effects of restricted access to childcare and she spoke so well about the need to create affordable childcare and support more families through the early years. Once again, a social enterprise leading the way! June told me that LEYF had also been in the news this week when a visit by the then PM Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling (another two boys who struggle to get along) to a LEYF nursery was the footage used to cover the Darling diary book launch. June has since had a visit from David Cameron, I wonder what the children make of it all?