Champions crowned at SE100 event

The three winners of the RBS SE100 Index picked up their champion awards last night from civil society minister Nick Hurd.

Yesterday, we revealed the top 100 highest growth social businesses in the UK. These 100 highest growers achieved average annual growth in revenue of a staggering 79 per cent.

The combined turnover of all 350 social businesses that submitted information to the index was £812m and the average turnover of all organisations on the index was more than £2.4m.

You can find out more about these facts and figues from Social Enterprise Live or from the 60-page RBS SE100 Index data report, downloadable using the link below or from our supplements page.

Hurd and Ian Cowie, CEO of business and commercial banking at RBS, handed out awards to the RBS SE100 Growth Champion, Impact Champion and Trailblazing Newcomer at last night's event.

Mow & Grow, based in Lowestoft, which gives those furthest from the job market – including ex-offenders and the long-term unemployed – training, jobs and life skills mentoring through gardening vulnerable people’s homes, was crowned Growth Champion.

Its income grew by 710.73 per cent and it created hundreds of new training positions from the end of January 2009 to January 2010.

Liverpool based FRC Group was crowned Impact Champion thanks to its efforts in measuring and reporting the social and environmental impact of its furnishing and recycling businesses.

Create Foundation CIC, of Leeds, was named the Trailblazing Newcomer, the award given to organisations with fewer than three years of accounts, thanks to its impressive impact reporting and its 88 per cent growth in turnover recorded from 2008 to 2009.

The three champions will now share £25,000, 25 days business consultancy and the growth and impact winners will also receive free trips to next year’s Social Enterprise World Forum in South Africa.

Hurd, at his first major engagement since taking office, urged the social enterprise sector to 'step up and embrace' the SE100 and said social enterprises have 'never been more important'.

School for Startups founder Doug Richard also spoke at the event and said it was the 'beginning of the end' for social enterprise - meaning that soon all businesses will have a social impact and we will have an 'anti-SE100' shaming those that don't.

'If we're counting a few tonight, we'll be counting an army in a few years,' he said.

Hurd and Richard also appeared in our SE100 films celebrating the themes of ‘growth, impact and ambition’.

SE100 2010/11 is now open.