Marcus Jamieson-Pond is the Founder of Convergence, a group to discuss how to implement ‘corporate social responsibility’. Marcus organises a series of regular meetings in London with interesting and relevant speakers, who are able to talk about their direct experience in running social enterprise activities. Marcus believes that social enterprises are pivotal in this initiative. For example, private companies could outsource their entire CSR to social enterprises:

Contracting social enterprises offers businesses a very tangible opportunity to deliver shared value / long-term capitalism, without the need for all the time and money that goes into developing and delivering high profile internal programmes. At best, it could be like outsourcing your entire CSR department and not paying for it!

Marcus Jamieson-Pond – founder, Convergence

Marcus began Tuesday’s evening meeting with a simple question:

When you were 10 years’ old, what did you want to be? Why haven’t you done what you wanted to?

This week’s meeting was about aspiration. The speakers were:

Sonal Shah, Executive Director of Capital Community Foundation (CCF).

Ben Payne, co-Director of Ministry of Stories.

Sonal Shah

The Evening Standard has been running a campaign called the ‘Dispossessed’. The CCF was instrumental in setting it up. Sonal provided that anyone has worked with disadvantaged people knows that there is no magic wand.  She cited  ‘Just another emperor: the myths and realities of philanthrocapitalism’ by Michael Edwards, which discusses the concept of a ‘civil society’ as an iceberg, where the larger organisations form the peek above the baseline, and hold the collective work of a democracy.

Sonal argued that the hardest-to-reach Londoners need to be targeted some ideas. Her thesis is that the appetite for applying market principles to social change runs the risk of dampening community activism, such as the 999club from Debtford. The current language treats this citizen action as a poor relative, because it is not easy to get fast results, obtain good metrics, makes it harder to make a business case.

Sonal identifies three things in particular. She believes that, as funders, collectively you must retain a place for small grant funding, which is a vital tool in addressing disadvantage.

She feels:

• Small organisations are vital for addressing disadvantage. They are closer to their beneficiaries, and can reach the sorts of people outsiders and professionals may not be able to. They can be responsive to the needs of the individual. The ‘Yes Project’ in Camberwell is a good example of this.
• Stakeholders may feel excluded. It affects the way governments fund projects, and how citizens get involved. There are three things to be concerned about; scalability and replicability according to the funding landscape, self-sustaining and reducing funding in the longterm can be difficult (this approach may not suit all people – small organisations may not be able to compete against the big people), and the pressure-by-outcomes is difficult (quantifiable measurable outcomes can mean that organisations go for the low-hanging fruit).
• It is important to engage them.  It is important to fund this work with flexible, small grants. The grant-making ethos is difficult. You need to be able to read between the lines, and go beyond the numbers, and perhaps take risks. It is necessary to talk in depth about lives changed in small organisations. People should be looking to reach such stories.

Sonal ultimately feels that we need to change our language – “you sometimes don’t need to invest but give, not about innovative but giving things to work, big is not necessarily best, ‘one size fits all’ is not necessarily true.”

Ben Payne

‘Ministry of Stories’ is based in Hoxton Street, working with children from Tower Hamlets and Islington.

Their website provides the following:

We’re here in Hoxton because we love stories. And we know others do too, so we aim to help young people write their own stories. Why? Well, let’s start with a true story…

Its roots are at 826 Valencia – the one thing that he couldn’t give teacher friends help with writing. The owner of that shop had a planning issue – instead they pretended to open it as a pirate-supply store. Two things happened – the children loved it, as the children were walking through the door into a story. People in the store wanted to buy the pirate gear – therefore all the writing workshops could be for free. There are currently eight of these centres.

In London, with the help of about a hundred volunteers, Ben and colleagues changed a site from an employment centre to a ‘shop for monsters’. Hoxton and Shoreditch has a very high density of writers and artists, which belies a great need, with children from low levels of income and low levels of literacy.

There, writers can spend two hours with access to a volunteer illustrator. The business model is of sufficiently high calibre, that the Ministry of Stories have become a national portfolio from the Arts Council, with funding from the next few years. They are very interested in corporate backing in the CSR department as they have 1200 people subscribed to be volunteers. ‘Mortal terror’ is one of their biggest sellers; they are shown in all their glory on this page. They have been bringing in money from individual donors.

Nick Hornby has inspired other Ministries – ‘Ministry of Happy Endings’ and ‘Ministry of Rightful Comeuppences’. He has been heavily involved in the Ministry of Stories project. The ‘Ministry of Stories’ also boasts an extensive list of high-profile ambassadors including Roddy Doyle, who founded the 826-inspired project Fighting Wordsin Dublin; author Zadie Smith; writer, playwright and actor Meera Syal and former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo.

Jonathan Douglas from the National Literacy Trust has previously made it clear that literacy is not one issue – it has a context of biological and relationship changes, from primary to second schools. It’s not simply about skills – and we need to look at how we do things as a community.

Finally, the ‘Ministry of Stories’ needs volunteers: http://ministryofstories.org

(c) LegalAware 2011