The Barefoot Revolution

By Dominic Jones

Terra Plana uses innovative approaches to create “sustainable” shoes. Creating sustainability in manufacturing is often thought of as minimizing the “footprint” of production (if you have an aversion to cheap puns you should probably stop reading). The focus has increasingly shifted to include the function and use of products and a more holistic picture of the full life cycle of the shoe.

I was excited to work with Terra Plana when I heard that they produced “barefoot shoes” (I love an oxymoron). These are patented ultra thin and flexible shoes that allow the foot to feel and move as if it were bare. As a physiology student my snake oil senses were initially aroused, but the further I’ve delved into the concept the more I’m convinced that it is in fact an elegant solution to a genuine problem and has far reaching potential for positive change.

The development of the VIVOBAREFOOT concept is an interesting one. I won’t go into the history, but for those of you interested you can read the full story here. VIVOBAREFOOT has evolved from being a range of Terra Plana to a brand in it’s own right. In fact the company sells more of these shoes now than any other and is in the process of launching the first VIVOBAREFOOT concept store.

A number of events have helped to spread the popularity of barefoot shoes, but without a doubt the largest must be “Born to Run”, a book written by Chris McDougall. There’s a great TED talk by McDougall here that explains why humans were born to run, barefoot. This was followed by groundbreaking research on running in habitually barefoot populations from Havard University, published in the journal Nature.

Part of my remit at Terra Plana has been to help develop and spread a clearer understanding of the science behind VIVOBAREFOOT and barefoot running. The latest project has been the release of an eBook written by Lee Saxby, VIVOBAREFOOT’s resident biomechanical expert.


Lee’s message is simple: running is a skill, and all running injuries are due to a lack of skill. What this means is that due to the forces involved when running, around 2 times body weight on a single leg, you must make sure your form allows for the correct distribution of these forces. Running barefoot allows you to improve your running skill by connecting you to your proprioceptive sense (proprioception is the body’s awareness of the forces acting on it, felt, for example, primarily in the feet whilst running).

What is especially interesting is the size of the prize. Running in the UK is the third most popular sport with around 1.8m participants and some of the highest annual growth rates. Estimates vary but put the number of runners injured each year at up to 80%. I therefore encourage you to have a look and pass on to any runners you know. Engaged debate supported by robust and independent science is the testbed of all radical new ideas!

http://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/

Youth Music is Seeking a Corporate Relations Manager

Youth Music, one of our 2011 placements, is recruiting for a Corporate Relations Manager. To find out more about the role and to download an application pack, visit their website. The application deadline is 8 April 2011.

Creative Co-orporation

By Martin Underwood


With the increasing appetite of private organisations to procure services from the third sector (see the last blog entry), many purpose-driven organisations are taking up this challenge.

With respect to the provision of training to the private sector, a well developed opportunity is to develop coaching and mentoring skills of private-sector employees whilst making a social impact. Employee Volunteering offers a service for emerging leaders in companies to build their coaching skills by assisting long-term unemployed youths for a 6 month period. Others seek to embed long-term change in the public sector by developing management and leadership skills of staff in the public sector. For example, Teaching Leaders, an education charity that develops outstanding teachers into front-line leaders in challenging schools, has a peer mentoring scheme between the high-potential teacher participants and business employees. The rise in user generated products, like Apps for Good that teaches young people the skills to create apps that change their world, may provide more great opportunities for private-sector employees to develop coaching and mentoring skills in an entrepreneurial and rewarding context.

Certainly, the more creative opportunities to offer products and services must be tailored to the particular company. Legal & General has partnered with, amongst other third sector organisations, Macmillan and Nationwide to find out how cancer affects individuals' financial affairs, with the British Heart Foundation to help employers to encourage their workforces to be healthier, and with the Bicycle Helmet Initiative Trust to save young people's lives by promoting cycle safety. Graham Precey, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Legal & General, advises third sector organisations to articulate what their expertise is and to develop products that meet the needs of the private sector. In this way, it is possible to both create a sustainable source of income and charge commercial rates.

More generally, an answer to reduced government funding and to sustainable and diversified funding streams may rest in this. Those organisations that can use their staff's detailed knowledge of their organisation's expertise and adapt this creatively to companies' needs are more likely to succeed in this end.

Clore Social Leadership Programme

Our Friends at the Clore Leadership Programme are looking for their next cohort of Fellows. To be eligible, applicants must be working in or closely with the wider social sector and will have demonstrated leadership potential in some of the work they have already undertaken.

Applications for the 2012 Fellowships will open on 18 April 2011. For more details about how to apply visit:www.cloresocialleadership.org.uk

Can Social Enterprise supply corporates?

Here's an article from the Guardian Social Enterprise Network. It quotes On Purpose's involvement with O2 as a success story of a partnership between a corporate and social enterprise.

We're proud of the fact that O2 is now working with us for the second year running!

On Purpose news

Year 2 is well underway at On Purpose and so here’s some of our news.

This is the short version. Scroll down for more detail!

• Welcome our new Associates and placement hosts!
• Good luck to our first cohort of Associates who completed in December – see some of the work they have (help) deliver(ed): a social impact report, an education website, a report on social venture intermediaries
• See what’s been happening and have a peek at what’s to come in our training programme
• Read what we’ve been writing in the Guardian, what others are writing about us and check out our blog
• Scroll down to get involved in some of the work the Associates are doing

Most importantly, thank you to all of you who have contributed to making this happen. On Purpose is built on the contributions of 100s of people!

Do spread the word! If you know of an organisation who might be a future placement host or if you know a future leader who could be an Associate, please put them in touch by replying to this email.

Very best wishes,

Tom and the Associates

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New Year, new Associates, new placements
The new cohort of 11 Associates is now well-ensconced in the 2011 programme. They have a wide-ranging set of backgrounds including consulting, finance, local government, sustainability charities, business school, social enterprise and the law.

We are also proud to be working again with a hugely diverse and innovative set of purpose-driven placement hosts. They range from early stage bottom-of-the-pyramid start-ups to enterprising charities and multi-national corporates – all combining commercial ways of working with social and environmental objectives. This year’s list is: Comic Relief, HCT Group, Interface, O₂, Startle, Teaching Leaders, Terra Plana and Soul of Africa, ToughStuff, JustGiving and Youth Music.

Good luck to our Fellows
Our first On Purpose Associates who completed the programme last December, are now our first set of Fellows. Many of them are still involved with the placements they worked with during On Purpose. To give you a flavour of some of the (publicly available) work they undertook and contributed to, take a look at:

• HCT Group’s social impact report
• O₂ Learn, a new education website created from scratch during the On Purpose placements at O₂
• The Young Foundation and NESTA report on social venture intermediaries(SVIs)

Training and development
The training programme is in full swing again and we’re grateful to all those professionals who have and are contributing to it. Last year we delivered 50 training sessions with the help of more than 50 professionals from over 30 organisations.

This year a highlight will be a visit to Embercombe. If you haven't heard of Embercombe, do look at their range of exciting residential courses for individuals and organisations, which support people to know themselves as leaders, taking committed action for a socially just, spiritually fulfilling and environmentally sustainable world.

Making the news and the blog
13 articles and publications have featured On Purpose to date. (See full list here). Some of the more recent ones are:

• Tom explains on the Guardian Social Enterprise Network why “Builders and Runners” are needed in social enterprises
• The Guardian Public reviews On Purpose one year on
• On Purpose features in the Young Foundation and NESTA’s report on Social Venture Intermediaries

In addition to this our blog has taken off in a big way, so if you want to stay in more regular contact and here about what the Associates are up to and what else is going on, do ‘follow’ us here.

Get involved in what’s going on
There are several ways you can help Associates past and current in some of the work they are doing in their placement organisations. To be in touch, reply to this email.

Do something funny for Monkey!
Jordyan is working at Comic Relief to raise the profile of their intellectual property, including the much beloved Monkey that is licensed to PG Tips for their famous tea ads. Check out Monkey’s fabulous facebook page, become a fan of undying loyalty, follow his witty tweets @alistmonkey, and spread the word about one of Comic Relief’s most charming celebrity ambassador.

Help Teach some Leaders
Teaching Leaders develops outstanding senior teachers working in the most challenging schools. In just two years, the programme has raised pupils’ GSCE pass rates by 10% and is now expanding rapidly to over 100 schools. Martin, who is working with Teaching Leaders, is now looking to actively involve corporate partners in the following areas:

• Using the power of business to embed change in schools through peer mentoring between our teachers and managers, school access schemes and pupil mentoring
• In-kind support including venue space, IT systems and developing an alumni network
• Technical assistance for advertising, marketing, recruitment and leadership training

Learn a thing O₂
Harriet and Kate from the 2010 cohort are carrying on their work at O₂. The exciting education website O₂ Learn launches to parents and students in April this year. They're currently working hard to increase the number of lessons teachers upload to the video-sharing website. O₂ Learn is designed to help young people revise for their exams and ensure that everyone, no matter what their background, has access to great teaching. Spread the word to any teachers you know, as every fortnight the highest rated, most watched videos wins £4,000. The TV ad that's on air at the moment gives a good little summary that you could forward on.

McKinsey social enterprise competition

On Purpose is helping to promote and deliver this exciting competition for UK students. There is only just under 2 weeks in which to submit your ideas, so do get thinking!

Calling all social entrepreneurs! Have a great idea and want £5,000 funding?

McKinsey & Company are launching "McKinsey Students in Society 2011" a new social enterprise competition for university students across the United Kingdom. The competition offers a unique opportunity for students to develop project planning and business skills while seeking to make a real difference to society or local communities. To participate, teams of 3-6 students from any UK university will submit short business plans for social enterprises – financially sustainable businesses which are run to meet a social or environmental need.

The first round is a simple online process open now until Monday 21st March. Students submit a compelling social enterprise idea and describe what its impact would be on society. Six national finalists will be selected to develop their ideas in greater detail. These finalists will receive further coaching to develop their plans in preparation for the National Final in London, in May 2011. Our prestigious panel of judges from the private, public and social sectors will select the winning team and host a fun evening for all finalist participants. The winning team will receive seed funding of £5,000 for their social enterprise and ongoing support from McKinsey consultants to help get their idea off the ground.

To find out more and to submit your entry "like us" @ www.facebook.com/MSIS2011 and visit us online @ www.msis2011.mckinsey.com. To find out more about On Purpose's work in Social Enterprise, please visit www.onpurpose.uk.com

So get thinking and good luck!

The MSIS team

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McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm. Our clients call on us as trusted advisors to help solve some of their toughest and most critical challenges. For more information about our company and careers, please go to:
www.mckinsey.com

Putting a measure on social good

By Stephanie Denamps

Social enterprises are a new type of hybrid organisations. They are businesses without having profit as their main or only objective. They are charities without relying primarily on grants funding. With players on both ends of the spectrum expanding and getting into social enterprise, the continuum becomes increasingly broad and diverse.

A question of raising interest is on the possible evaluation of their impact. How can we compare these organisations to one another? How can we measure the effect they have on their beneficiaries and on society as a whole? With limited funds being distributed by the government and foundations, and with individuals wanting to participate more in their communities’ development, everyone wants to know where is a good place to invest time or money.

Unfortunately, because the sector is so new and heterogeneous, the answer might not be so straight forward. There is not one simple bottom line with a generally accepted indicator such as “net profit”. In fact, players in this sector distinguish themselves by having a double or even triple bottom line. There is not a standardised model to capture positive and negative flows such as the Net Present Value (NPV) used in purely financial analysis. Yet social businesses need to make investment decisions for themselves and need to attract external investors.

Some organisations have developed their own methodologies based on what they believe are the most appropriate criteria. For example, the Acumen fund applies the Best Available Charitable Option (BACO) Ratio methodology to measure the “social impact” of the projects they choose to fund. Others are trying to develop universal tools that could serve all purpose-driven organizations. Among these, the most successful to date seems to be the Social Return on Investment (SROI), which aims to quantify non-financial returns as much as possible.

The reality is that a consensus is far from being reached. There is not an industry standard, perhaps because there is not even a clearly defined sector yet. However, even though we might never reach a blueprint model, these efforts contribute to evidencing successes and best practices. They help develop a shared identity, a common language and bring to light what matters the most for the people running and funding these organisations. Pioneers in this movement are likely to be setting the grounds for the numerous smaller players coming along and looking for a benchmark.

In the meantime, probably the best advice is for organisations to focus on transparency, reflecting financially the flows that can be quantified logically and bringing out the rest as precisely as possible. Creativity and simplicity in the reporting might also do the trick (see the HCT report developed by Candice, a former OnPurpose Associate). In the end, what will continue to move investors attracted to this sector is the human, social or environmental contribution they can make, and often a heartfelt story will be more powerful at conveying this than a set of numbers.

An exciting opportunity at City Year London

We've just heard that City Year London is seeking to appoint a dynamic and experienced Development Director to help shape the organisation's five-year fundraising strategy and raise significant funds from individuals, companies and trusts and foundations, as it embarks on the next phase of its development in the UK.

The successful candidate will be a skilled development professional with a minimum of 7 years' experience. The role is responsible for leading the small fundraising team, developing an effective development strategy, enhancing the existing donor programmes and building new and sustained relationships with key donors and sponsors, including creating a major gifts programme. Knowledge of working with corporate sponsors and company CSR policies would be desireable.

For more information about the role and how to apply, download the information pack by clicking on the link in the title. The closing date is 9am on Monday 14th March 2011.