Associates away weekend

"What a lovely Monday morning! I feel inspired. After a long retreat weekend with my fellow Associates and the On Purpose crew somewhere in the middle of Somerset surrounded by river, trees and some lovely and quiet sheep. It was a weekend full of deep thoughts. We were given tools and energy to take one more step towards our personal development. Now back to Old Street, HCT head quarter, I feel renewed and capable of realising great things. I thank On Purpose for this opportunity and our dear Kate for such a treat of a British countryside feel. This is pretty much the feeling of being an On Purpose Associate.”

Does Social Entrepreneurship matter?

Some think so ... some others don't ... we at On Purpose found this interesting post on a fellow blog and we liked it.

We liked it enough to want to share it and put out the question - what do you think? Is there a danger that the 'Millenial' generation are heading towards disappointment? Or do you agree with Nathaniel Whittamore that Social enterprise is the means to complete the circle? And where is the UK positioned on this?

More to come as we think these through over coming weeks....

(By the way - if you enjoy the blog piece then make sure you carry on and read the comments below ... )

Clore Social Leadership Programme - Fellowship applications open

On behalf of our friends at the Clore Foundation we'd like to pass on the following announcement:

The Clore Social Leadership Programme is now looking for its second cohort of Fellows, who will be recruited through an open application process. To be eligible, applicants must be working in or closely with the wider third sector and will have demonstrated leadership potential in some of the work they have already undertaken.

Each Fellow benefits from a personalised programme which provides challenging opportunities for development, and is tailored to meet their individual needs.

Applications for the 2011 Fellowships will open on 19 April 2010; the deadline for completed applications is 3 June 2010.

For more details about how to apply and to meet the current Fellows, visit the website here.  

Financial Certainty

I don’t know if it’s because I’d been teed up for success with my brilliance goggles, but I had a sense of continued improvement regarding my financial fluency over the course of this session.  By no means are my interpretive skills on a par with the MBA set of On Purpose Associates, yet, but it was a reassuring revelation that the basics of financial statements are ones you can learn quickly.  No doubt this was predominantly induced by Jonathan Shellard’s  enabling-, financial-literacy-for-all- approach.

Bolstered by the security blanket of uniform reporting requirements, the confidence trick one has to perform to manoeuvre between the: Cash Flow; Balance Sheet; Profit and Loss, Income statement, and; Notes, will no longer be the preserve of the financially-versed few.  

Instead, I feel confident it will become another handy lens through which to critique organisational health, with Candice's chant 'Cash is King' ringing in my ear. 

How brilliant am I?

How often do we acknowledge our own brilliance?  Not often enough, say Darius and Matt, our guides through the strangeness of accepting our brilliance as it is.  By recognizing our brilliance and stating aloud, we come ever closer to our most productive state of operating – essentially, the nirvana of our career performance.

Most people are brought up to be modest:  modesty is taught to us through childhood, with humility alongside it.  To sit in front of your peers and state the honest truth about your greatest strengths – no, your BRILLIANCE – without dampening any statements using ‘maybe’, ‘kind of’, ‘a little’, was a challenge to say the least!

Softening the experience, however, was what followed.  A feeling of being enveloped in a fluffy cloud of compliments, as your brilliance is explained to you as seen by your peers.  A sort of 360 degree only-positive feedback session.  The atmosphere was one of trust, and calmness.  I think we all felt great at the end, maybe because it was over, but maybe because we all came a little bit closer to our own professional nirvanas.

Putting a spring in our step…

As ever, we were welcomed with open arms at the recently (re)christened ‘Spring’. Fuelled by the bounty of the Vauxhall Garden Community Café, we set about further developing the quality of our relationships within our immediate On Purpose ‘family’ (Tom, and the Associates). Facilitated by the ethereal Darius (CEO of Real World Magazine), intent on nudging us from our ‘over-educated, analytical minds’, to a state of experience and instinct. I doubt any of us had anticipated how he would tease out our approach to: future personal development sessions, or; how the Associates could better support each other.


The constructive tone was set by each of us contributing one thing, from both our professional and personal lives, that had recently gone well. Having enjoyed this quick-fire check-in on how everyone’s doing, we agreed this practice would be adopted whenever we met in future.


It soon became apparent; practice was the name of the game. An array of possible techniques were presented to us by (Sofia, Matt Darius), including story telling in the first person, The Work, ritual rites of passage, meditation on personal strengths and weaknesses, Action Learning (Clore Foundation Social Enterprise Fellowship approach), group exercises around ‘I’m brilliant… You’re brilliant…’, feedback, Aikido, and ‘I’m pretending…’. It was emphasised, only through the concerted effort of practice would the learning from these interventions become purposeful to our personal development.


While peer feedback was requested by all the Associates in monthly reviews, and future personal development opportunities pay heed to the variety of techniques outlined above, the afternoon was spent with two particular practices: Aikido and ‘I’m pretending…’.


Aikido: playful arm wrestling ‘unbendable arm’ demonstrated the first four stages of achieving outcomes with increasing ease:
-Against (opposing the force of another, and straining in the process);
-In spite of (opposing/ ignoring) the force of another, while focusing your energy on your own aim);
-With (using the energy of another, to further your own aim);
-Aiki (combining with the energy of another, to create something new. The plank extension exercises looked at applying our learning to following, leading and collaborating to greater effect.


‘I’m pretending…’: create sincere intention among the group, enabling accumulative declarations by each individual.


The accrued intimacy over the course of this session will no doubt stand us in better stead to both ask for, and anticipate support requests of our fellow Associates.