Peter Holbrook is CEO of the Social Enterprise Coalition, the UK’s national body for social enterprise, a position he has held since January 2010.
The Social Enterprise Coalition is the UK’s national body for social enterprise and represents a wide range of social enterprises, regional and national support networks and other related organisations. The Coalition’s key activities are centred on informing the policy agenda, influencing the political agenda, promoting the benefits of social enterprise through the media, campaigning and events, and undertaking research to expand the social enterprise evidence base. As the CEO of the Coalition, Peter will be working to promote social enterprise as a model for changing both business and society.
Prior to taking on this role Peter was CEO of the Sunlight Development Trust, one of the UK’s most dynamic and successful social enterprises. Sunlight is based in Gillingham, Kent and works to tackle long-standing health and social inequalities in the community. It was originally established by Peter as ‘project sunlight,’ who started as project manager and developed it, from inception, to become one of the country’s most high profile ‘community anchors’ and one of the region’s most rapidly developing and diverse social enterprises.
Peter has previously worked for a number of non Governmental Organisations such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and various disability charities and has experience of working in overseas development, community development, public health and social enterprise. Peter started his career with Marks and Spencer PLC and also spent time with Body Shop International.
Dear Mr Holbrook!
We obtained information about Your organization in British Council . Beforehand beholden for any help. We are non profit organization “Fund support of citizens of Odesa”, Ukraine. Our organization searches partners for realization of project of social enterprise. We want to realize a commercial project after the giving of services of washable to the habitants of student dormitories. There are 18 higher educational establishments in Odesa. More than 100 thousand students are in Odesa. In Odesa there are not cheap laundries accessible to the students and of scanty means habitants of city. The income of project we will exploit for realization of social and ecological programms.
Yours sincerely ,
Irina Suyetina
co-ordinator of projects,
Fund support of citizens of Odesa
Hi
I am a college student in South Korea.
In UK, the social enterprise was already developed and the size of that is big, I think.
But, in South Korea, the word ‘social enterprise’ is not popular. Most of students don’t know about that. So I wonder if you can answer some of question about social enterprise.
If you help to answer, I’ll really appreciate your help.
1. How can the social enterprise in UK be developed by now? What do you think? have any special features?
2. I read context in the Voice11. I really wanna more specific information about the Voice11.
3. I know that Social enterprises are businesses trading for social and environmental purposes. Then, Is it any differences between social enterprises and profit making cooperation?
4. Also, the main aim of social enterprises is for social and environmental purposes. If so, what field do the enterprises invest?
5. And then, do they invest themselves? for what purpose?
Thank you for answering my questions.
Don’t forget that God will bless you for your help.
Peter
Just wanted to say, as a stated personal view, that unless the Government provides a substantial promotion of social enterprise and its distinctive differences and USPs over conventional PLCs and traditional for-profit limited companies – to raise the public’s awareness, profile and appreciation of what social enterprise really stands for – there won’t be any significant change in the public’s comprehension of what Government means by the term ‘Big Society’. To my mind, one is conditional on the other. If there could be a concerted drive to educate the public on social enterprise in its various forms – not to be confused with all the other often misplaced rhetoric words of ‘mutuals’, ‘cooperatives’, voluntary organisations and so on – this would ultimately improve the standing of Big Society and Localism.
Clive
Dear Peter,
I noticed you were doing a presentation at the CFDG in my home town of Manchester and wanted to send you an email that may be of interest to you. I am hoping to gain some interest in my business, but I’m literally scraping myself up from the bottom and you seemed like the right guy to approach. As I cant afford to get in !
My name is Don, I used to work for the BHF in Lancashire as a clothing collector. As you may well know, the role involves distributing around 500 bags per day and then collecting the full bags some days later.
I was doing this last summer in the few hot days we had and into the early winter. I soon built up regular customers and was getting into my stride. After a while, I realized that there was a lot of competition for the donations between different charities and that the amount of charity bags in peoples doorways were increasing. A few householders that I spoke to on my round would say that they were getting more than 2 per day.
Although my duties were to also collect the unused bags. In reality, people just weren’t putting them out. I was lucky if I collected 2 or 3 a day. I thought this obviously must be a massive waste of money to the charity. On average, I would have been getting 40 filled bags out of 500 posted. My target was 10% and this meant around 90% of bags were wasted.
So I contacted a few charities to see if they would be interested in having their bags back if they were to be collected and re-boxed in day order. The feedback was pretty good but I knew this would be a big operation. Therefore I decided to take a chance and leave the BHF to set up what is now called “Sackm8”.
I’ve been working on the business now for 6 months, it has been quite difficult financially, as I have had no income other than benefits and a family to support. I went to the bank for funding, but they wanted to see proof of interest in the model. We are now up and running and have just started collecting bags for Action for Children, The Christie Hospital, National Blind Children’s Society, SYCF and the World Cancer Research Fund. We have a few other charities and recycling companies coming online soon too.
The plan for the next 6 months is to attract more charities to our service. Basically, if we can get more charities to join us, we can lower our unit price and save them even more money.
At present I am a sole trader, but I intend to form the company in year 2 as a Community Interest Company (CIC)
We can collect all distributed bags anywhere in the UK and sell them back to the organisation at up to 50% less than the original purchase price, thus saving them up to 50% of their costs for bags from the moment we start.
There are further advantages to our service, but essentially, our service is eco friendly and is guaranteed to save a lot of money.
I was invited to join a mentoring organisation weekend in November 2010 with Mowgli. This has inspired me to battle on without any funding or support except for my wife and my mentor.
You can find out more on Twitter @sackm8 or feel free to contact Mowgli mentoring at http://www.mowgli.org.uk or my mentor Karl Belizaire http://linkd.in/khbelizaire or direct to me at info@sackm8.com.
Regards, Don
Hi Peter
I wanted to enquire whether you would be interested in receiving a copy of an upcoming report looking at Delivering Growth through Localism.
I see from your blog posts and the array of topics discussed, that this may be something of interest to you and your readers.
This report is being officially launched on September 13th and is long awaited by professionals in the planning, housing regeneration, public sector and sustainability fields.
Supported by Berkeley Group Holdings PLC, it has been formed by a number of key individuals. The contributors to the Growth and Localism report have worked together, combining ideas, sharing experience and bringing together public, private and voluntary sector ideas and case studies. The document is designed to help those wanting to deliver more homes, create jobs and regenerate our towns and villages and in doing so, help to strengthen the economy through growth in this new policy era.
If ‘Delivering Growth through Localism’ is of interest to you and you would like to receive a copy, I can direct you to where it can be downloaded upon its availability in September.
Upon reading, if you feel that you would like to review or comment on its contents, or indeed that it would be something your readers may be interested in, it would be great if you would consider using your blog as a platform to start a conversation.
In the meantime, please do join out LinkedIn Group http://linkd.in/rbZM7y, created as a platform to harness conversations and to build a community of opinions, looking at the topic of Localism in the UK. Please do join the conversation!
I look forward to hearing from you and please let me know if you have any questions.
Kind regards
Lucy