Blogs

I defected from the public sector in 1999 and started up Unique Coffee Bar because I thought there was a better way to work with young people than the Youth Service – although I have to say if the Youth Service hadn’t given me a secondment and kept my old job open for three years, Unique probably wouldn’t be here now. Unique was 100% grant reliant at first which I soon realised wouldn’t be sustainable. We created an Alternative Education course which we sold to local schools and that pu...

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Finding my first mentor was a complete accident. A few years ago I had a call from EMDA’s ‘Business Champions’ to ask if Unique could benefit from a mentor. At this stage (about 2005), I can honestly remember thinking ‘I don’t need a mentor, things are going great’. In the end I said ‘yes’ as I had a member of staff who I thought could really benefit from some support – so that was that…until the guy actually turned up for the meeting a few weeks later… Unfortunately, ...

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Imagine if every kid leaving school in the UK not only knew about Social Enterprise but had actually experienced running a Social Enterprise first hand for themselves. Now imagine if that happened every year, year in year out - in five years time we would have a load of young people who would understand implicitly that working for or running a Social Enterprise is just another normal choice – absolutely part of the mainstream. Now imagine the effect in ten years, twenty years – youn...

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Last Thursday I gave a presentation to a group of high achieving private school students in Lancashire. Despite my best efforts, I single-handedly failed to convince them that social enterprise was a real choice for them! Why? Well frankly because they said they would prefer to make loads of money. I was quite surprised by this – I genuinely (perhaps naively) thought my passionate tales of social and environmental wrongs put right whilst making profit would inspire something more than a pr...

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