Blogs

As part of our new series providing advice and insights on social enterprise, Julie Harris talks about what got her started and her top tips for others starting-up... My experiences of working in the public sector had led me to believe that there had to be a better way of achieving social impact, and my background and experience in helping to run a family business taught me all the skills needed to make COSMIC a success. There’s still so much potential for people to s...

READ MORE »

Sometimes good fortune just falls in your lap and today it did in the form of Divine Chocolate. I was just about to start planning my first visit ‘ambassador’ to Lawnswood School, where I’ll be talking with business students about social enterprise,  when the Sunday Times dropped through the letter box.  One of my favourite features is ‘A Life in the Day’ and I duly turned to the back of the magazine to read about Comfort Kumeah a Fairtrade cocoa farmer from Ghana. She work...

READ MORE »

I first started to do some mentoring in 2000, supporting the government’s network of IT centres which were being opened up across the country to help get people online.  They wanted mentors to help organisations develop their ideas and business plans.  The first assignment was to drive through the snow to Longtown on the border with Scotland in early March to help a stressed out school development worker submit a funding application.  I let her know that it wasn’t really what ...

READ MORE »

Mentoring a number of individuals representing many different route ways to the sector (including volunteers, undergraduates, private business owners and post graduates) recently left me with an interesting dilemma that I have been thinking about. Individuals with social ideas are being pushed into ‘social enterprise’ as a way of getting funding even though they do not understand the implications of joining the sector is about income generation not funding.  This particularly seems to b...

READ MORE »