17/02/2010
Project co-ordinator Dave Callender has been accepted onto the Environmental Program on a full bursary for 12 months run by the School for Social Entrepreneurs www.sse.org.uk.
Liverpool SSE is based at Blackburne House, a leading social enterprise and learning provider. Blackburne House seeks to transform people's lives, in particular the lives of women and socially excluded groups and encourage their independence through the provision of training and opportunities of every kind.
Dave is working the vision, the business plan, the procedural administration, the legal structure and the likely revenue streams that the Beacon Centre will be adopting from within Blackburne House and its mentoring environment. The course opens doors to a wealth of not for profit businesses, social entrepreneurs, community projects, visionary community activists and action learning sets that drives the learning and mentoring process forward. It has provided the research going into the intended project with a secure base and platform from which to develop the ideas.
Over 20 individuals each with their own social project themed to the environment are part of the course. The bonding and the journey that each of these people are taking creates the fabric that is the learning process.
17/02/2010
Over the last few months the Board running the project research have adopted a number of strategies to shape their plans.
A number of workshops have been attended on many subjects as we attempt to upgrade our skills base, network and refine our plans. Most of these have been run by www.wcva.org.uk , www.ncfi.org.uk and www.walescoop.com and have tackled the themes:
Several more have been booked including:
Secondly the Board has conducted a number of visits to land projects all over the UK but particularly in Wales seeking best practice procedures, the practicalities of land-use as a community resource, looking at different business models, assessing the viability of existing models and their relevance to this model, looking for mentoring opportunities that can teach us how to do things in a wide ranging fact-finding mission that has informed and guided the project plans sometimes directly and often very subtly. Amongst the many bodies we have visited are:
In the next few months there will be other site visits in Wales.
Thirdly each of the Board has taken an area of interest and is slowly developing the skills and knowledge that will be brought to each strand of the project. So for an example, food provision is the thing that motivates Vee Longton, she has a skill, an incredible skill for producing the most incredible food, ethical, organic, yummy. That is her resource, what can we do with that resource, we can produce it for visitors, for volunteers, for the conference centre and training programs Empower will run from the site, we can supply off site catering, we can centre it to themed awareness days or events on the site to celebrate Pancake Day or whatever. We can produce a business plan for this project, we can tailor Vee’s passion to training programs around Health and Well-being, we can offer hospitality and basic catering courses and paid placements to adults with learning difficulties…..We identify the resource, we set out how the resource can generate revenue, we explore each of those revenue paths, we identify the skills and expertise we need to gain or bring in to deliver each path and then we draw up the business plan. And each of these resources we will be adapting for a community use.
In the next 16 weeks 3 key issues will be addressed and implemented:
The support structure for induction, assessment and all procedural policies will be prepared for the first land placements the Centre will be welcoming after purchase.