£4000 to Start a Social Enterprise – SSE comes to the West Midlands

The School for Social Enterprise (SSE) is launching in the West Midlands and only has two weeks to go!

SSE West Midlands are currently recruiting social entrepreneurs and also want to see organisations / support providers that are interested or want to find out more.

Here’s the detail from our friends at SSE

Things are moving fast now for the new school and we have decided to hold some taster sessions for potential students to find out a little more about the school and what we offer them during the upcoming Lloyds West Midlands SSE course (www.yourideastartshere.co.uk) in the West Midlands.

 

Come and meet us at the following venues:-

• Wednesday the 20^th March — The Renewal Family Centre, Vulcan Road, Solihull,  B91 2JY   17.30 – 19.30*
•  Monday the 25^th March — Room 201 UCB Building, Colmore Row, Birmingham,    B3 2AP     14.30 – 16.30*
•  Wednesday the 27^th of March — Goldmine Centre, The Vine Trust, 33 Lower Hall Lane, Walsall WS1 1RR   17.30 – 19.30*

*As this is a new school to the region we have also booked the venues for a three hour session prior to the taster sessions to enable interested parties (eg. established social entrepreneurs, social enterprise and business advisers, local authorities, charities and third sector organisations etc) to just drop in and find out more about the school.

For further details please see the attached flyer

 

Social Enterprise Growth Awards – Open Now

Just a quick post that I think a number of you will be interested in.

The Santander Social Enterprise Growth Awards are open now. If you meet the criteria you could be awarded £5k for developing your enterprise.

Criteria as we know it:

• Organisation must be a social enterprise
• Organisation must be West Midlands based for this fund [there are usually other regions open at the same time, so check your local area if you are from outside WM]
• Organisation must have a turnover of less than £100k
• Organisation must be trading and less than two years old
• organisation must work directly with the community in one of the following areas:
•            improving social inclusion
•            supporting disadvantaged people
•            creating a greener environment

Download the guidance here!

Download the application form here!

One more thing, good luck!

“Forget the Grants”

“Forget government grants” that was the message from the Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd at the Social Finance Fair at the beginning of the week..

The fair was organised by Social Enterprise West Midlands (SEWM), the regional network for social enterprises, supporters and entrepreneurs in the midlands.

Over 200 people from across the sector attended to listen to the Key Note from Nick Hurd MP and to hear from social enterprises that had achieved success in social investment, including the midlands own My Time CIC, a social enterprise providing counselling and other support services for those with poor mental health.

Delegates were fed and watered by many of the midlands catering social enterprises who put on a fabulous variety of food that was simply delicious.

Other social enterprises including Development in Social Enterprise took part in a social enterprise exhibition demonstrating the wide ranging businesses and services that are provided by the social enterprise sector in the West Midlands there were:
Catering businesses
Business support
Textiles
Website development
Social media
Wifi and telecommunications providers
Bakers and Macaroon makers

So perhaps it is time to forget the grants and consider how your business (and by business I mean any not for personal profit organisation) can contract, attract investment, consider crowd source, or even loans to grow and sustain your enterprises. Whatever you do it’s sound advice to ensure you consider your funding mix, as one thing is for sure, the cuts are going to continue for a few more years yet, so even if you’ve managed to hold onto a grant for now, the chances of it going or being reduced in the near future is a “clear and present danger”

If you need help to review your business strategy call us 0121 667 6810 or visit us www.disecic.org

Big Funding News!

Just a very quick post. The Big Lottery have announced today an additional £50m of funding to help VCO’s cope with the funding cuts. Organisations will be able to apply for up to £1ok to help them look at sustaining their services in the future through enterprise. It’s a sort of Lottery ‘transitional fund’.

I will check it out some more soon, but thought it worth a little post.

See here http://bigblog.org.uk/

Big Society Capital

Big Society Capital, formerly known as Big Society Bank, had its regional [WM] launch at All Saints Action Network today and I was fortunate enough to be there dead centre on table 5. The event was organised by Social Enterprise West Midlands and there’s also a little coverage on Midlands Today which can be seen here.

What’s it about?

Big Society Capital is the long-awaited social investment programme that will use dormant bank accounts and some other finance from Merlin banks. Altogether this amounts to £600m worth of social investment capital. It must be noted here that this is investment and therefore has expected returns on investment, it is not grants. After all BSC will need to pay for it’s estimated 40 or so staff! [see also below a second tier of administration]

How does it work?

Nick Hurd MP and Nick O’Donohoe [CEO] introduced the aims and objectives of Big Society Capital and outlined how it expected to work.

BSC is not going to invest in social enterprise directly, but will do this through intermediaries such as Community Development Finance initiatives [CDFI's] and other social investment intermediaries such as Clearly So, or Big Invest. One thing to note here is that both Nick’s said that there isn’t enough intermediaries and many are not big enough and therefore some elements of the work will be to increase the size and capacity of intermediaries. Market opportunity number one, it strikes me that crowd funding sites, business angel organisations etc… could be ‘quids in’ here [couldn't help it].

Timescales

Don’t be holding your breath now, but it may be worth getting your business plan in order to become investment ready. Whilst BSC is now in existence and has around 6 staff [which will grow as indicated earlier], there are though a number of hurdles that need to be straddled first:

• There’s a state aid problem to get through first – to be honest I was a little lost here as investment that requires a return to me can’t be seen as aid, can it?
• Then theres a little thing called regulation i.e. FSA regulation that still needs to be progressed and
• then there’s cabinet approval

Nick O’Donohoe suggested a timescale of 4-6 months, so set your Outlook calendar to remind you in the new year and get your business plan sorted! [Don't forget my CIC can help with Business Planning]

One more market opportunity [that although crossed my mind] I can’t claim full credit for as it was also pointed out a little later by Nick Hurd MP. If you’re in the game of looking at ‘pay by result’s’ contracts which many of us are, perhaps there is some discussion to be had with the intermediaries to create consortia and ‘risk capital’ to take on some of these contracts?

I’m sure I’ll update some more on this as it progresses. Think I need to do a piece on crowfunding too!

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