Failure is a word that has a lot of negative connotations and is a word that many people are uncomfortable using. At a recent interview I asked applicants “what was their greatest failure” and many replied that they did not like the word and did not associate anything they did with failure.
Unemployment is a ‘disaster’ and a ‘very special problem’. That’s how Professor Richard Layard of the London School of Economics describes it. Unemployment is painful, it destroys income, relationships and meaning,
Just before Christmas, we learned more about the Prime Minister’s plans for the 120,000 ‘troubled families’ who, among other things, cause excessive costs to public services estimated to be £9 billion per
The Shaftesbury Partnership regularly hosts a ‘Learning Lunch’, where a leader from one of our wider family of organisations gives a presentation on interesting work that they have been doing. This has been a really valuable way of cross-fertilising knowledge between organisations.
I’ve been thinking recently about chewing gum. I chair the Trussell Trust which runs the national foodbank network. It’s a social franchise and I’m pondering just how elastic it is!
With economic woe comes talk of ‘brain drain’ - the notion there’s a problem - in fact a vicious circle - in a business sector or even national economy, when good people start leaving.
Here at The Shaftesbury Partnership, we spend a lot of time thinking about social enterprise. Over recent months, we’ve particularly been reflecting on the role of social enterprise in tackling the problem of entrenched, long-term unemployment.
As part of our upgraded website we have started a blog. Our work has exploded over the last few months and a blog is a great way to keep our friends up to date, and also share some of our learning as we develop our social ventures.
At a conference about community budgets earlier this month, Eric Pickles said he was “in a hurry” to deli
