SSE's Alastair Wilson takes a dose of his medicine - he's enrolled on a social franchising pilot run by a partnership of SSE, SEC and CAN
Three of the UK’s big-name social enterprise support organisations have joined forces in a concerted effort to get successful social enterprises to franchise their good work.
The School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), CAN and the Social Enterprise Coalition (SEC) have come together in an official partnership that commits them to using their different strengths to support more organisations wanting to franchise.
As a first step, 18 social entrepreneurs will next month pilot a franchising learning programme at SSE called Scaling to Success.
And, in an act of true devotion to the cause, SSE CEO Alastair Wilson will be one of the social entrepreneurs in the first cohort of students.
He said that he was ‘taking a dose of his own medicine’ because in a ‘world where localism is everything and money is tight’ franchising was a way of sharing what works.
‘We’re not the private sector, we’re not into owning everything and beating everyone, we’re into sharing and growing a movement and equalising and devolving power with local ownership and governance and we’ve found at SSE that social franchising is a great tool for doing that,’ he said.
Wilson said he was looking forward to ‘nicking great ideas’ from fellow social entrepreneurs and vice versa and that the class, which will be run in short intense blocks, including expert speakers and dinners, should create a trading club at the same time.
The 18 social entrepreneurs will come to the course with live social missions where social franchising could play a role and those who need to, and are ready to, develop more complex plans could be graduated to one-to-one support from CAN.
The course is also supposed to help meet medium to long-term policy objectives in terms of promoting social franchising – which will be spearheaded by SEC.
SEC CEO Peter Holbrook said: ‘There is an opportunity in phase two of this for community activists and commissioners to come in and meet people who have done it and who have ideas ready to be replicated.’
Wilson said: ‘We’re going to build a movement of people arguing for this approach of social franchising.’
The pilot course starts in December and Wilson said that SSE has already had enquiries from social entrepreneurs wishing to join the second cohort.
Wilson said this would happen next year but only after they had ‘evaluated the heck’ out of the pilot course.
‘Being such a slow learner, I may have to join the second cohort as well,’ joked Wilson.
To read more about CAN’s work on social franchising, read Social Enterprise’s Lunch with Andrew Croft.
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Comments
Franchising rural broadband
It was a 'franchising' strategy that we'd begun with in a business plan for rural broadband back in 2004. Our community re-investment model was to be deployed in a cellular approach to render profit to local CDFIs and for funding expansion of social enterprise into Eastern Europe.
Re-reading it recently, I'd been amused by this paragraph:
“Traditional capitalism is an insufficient economic model allowing monetary outcomes as the bottom line with little regard to social needs. Bottom line must be taken one step further… by at least some companies, past profit, to people. How profits are used is equally as important as creation of profits. Where profits can be brought to bear by willing individuals and companies to social benefit, so much the better. Moreover, this activity must be recognized and supported at government policy level as a badly needed, essential, and entirely legitimate enterprise activity”
http://www.box.net/shared/y3tpik8eg6
Looks like we got what we asked for in the end, though in our wildest dreams we'd never imagined it would be from the Conservative Party.
In being based on a developing market estimated at £2 billion, 5% market share would then have yielded £70 million annually for investment in social enterprise, comparing favourably with Big Society Bank's expectation for a similar one-off investment from those who are no longer with us.
The paper, now in the process of being updated to reflect 'Next Generation' technology is still applicable, should there be others who want to share.
Jeff Mowatt
People-Centered Economic Development
p-ced.com
people-centered.net