SE Folk Weekly Update (Mon 4th Oct)

Welcome to this week’s Founder’s Update.  Despite only being a couple of days in, we seem to have been full on for October.  Alongside supporting our individual members, we’ve been really busy having development conversations with various stakeholders and potential supporters.  One of those development areas is Social Prescribing.

Social Prescribing

Today I joined the Thriving Communities Development Program (TCDP) for the first session, which was a welcome session.  In the coming 6 months I’ll be attending various workshops and seminars and breakout sessions, to pass on the learnings and developments on Social Prescribing to our SE Folk community. Whilst I am on the East of England Program, through the coordinators I am hoping to be able to access a national network, along with sector specialists.

The emerging specialist areas appear to fall into the following;

1. Sports and Physical Exercise

2. Natural Environment. (Being badged up Green and Blue Social Prescribing)

3. Money and Finance

4. Arts

5. Historic Environment and Heritage.

For now, I’ve added a link and details to our dedicated forum on Social Prescribing, and will keep the community updated with any information as it arises through our networking events and through the platform.

This week

Tomorrow evening we have Lynn presenting, sharing news on her latest campaigning around the topic of Poverty and Chocolate.  Please join us if you can.  Founders Hour 7-8pm. It’s a space to hear from a Founder to share their journey so far, and knowledge in their specialist area.

On Thursday I’m running the first workshop in our series this month on working with Volunteers.  This week I am concentrating on the different types of volunteers and how you can assess the opportunities in your organisation to make use of them.  Thursday’s session is 1-2pm.

Next Week

Next week our Founders Hour is being host to Jill, from Ethical Education Enterprise based in the Greater Manchester Area.  Jill delivers a number of services to charities and social enterprises covering health and safety, food safety, and safeguarding, so please join us to learn more about her work and potentially how she could help you.  You can find out more about Jill’s organisation here https://ee-enterprise.org.uk/

Next Thursday we move onto Volunteer recruitment, and we are joined by SE Folk member Jay from JCFT.  As Founder of the trust that runs many social community projects, Jay has been working with volunteers from the start, so has experiencing in the recruiting of volunteers before and during COVID.  Jay is going to share this approach and experience, and hopefully some good experience we could all gain.  You can find out more about JCFT here https://www.jcfoundationtrust.org.uk/

Other News

Outside SE Folk, last week we launched our new website for Be Inspired, which has been really helpful in allowing me to explain how we help different social organisations at the various stages they are at. 

It’s also allowed me to have a dedicated space for our Resilience Program for social leaders, and I’m pleased to say the first group started last week.  So, you will see some new faces in the community as these Founders start to build their network within SE Folk.  We still have spaces left for another group due to start shortly so if you know of anyone who is struggling with their social enterprise or charity right now and needs more support, then please pass on my details or share them our new website.  You can visit our new site here www.beinspiredtoday.org

Final, on Friday I pitched to the Social Entrepreneurial Incubation Program, which is a network of social entrepreneurs working with universities across the world in the social enterprise space.  The opportunity was to be supported by students from these universities with the development of our organisation, so I’m really keeping my fingers crossed that we have been successful in gaining this support and knowledge from the students.  I’ll keep you posted on that.  You can find out more about SEIP here https://www.seincubation.com/

Thanks again for everyone who has continued to help us develop our network, and for those sharing on social media and introducing others to our mission.  We are all about enabling others, so we greatly appreciate those that are trying to enable us.

Look forward to connecting and chatting in the week ahead.

Thanks

Rob

Co-Founder of SE Folk

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