Social Saturday 2015 is coming on 10 October

Social Saturday is a nationwide day dedicated to promoting social enterprise.

Following the enormous success of the inaugural Social Saturday 2014, Social Enterprise UK, and more than 70,000 social enterprises across the country are preparing for this year’s event. 

Their activities will raise awareness of the significance of the social enterprise sector to individuals, communities and the economy as a whole.

A social enterprise is a business model that works to achieve a social mission. Profits are usually reinvested in social causes and sustaining the business.

When you buy from a social enterprise, you buy social. Buying social means you provide an unemployed person with a career opportunity, or provide a homeless person with a bed for the night, or help the environment, as well as saving money and challenging profit-driven only businesses through competition.

Social enterprises have been working hard to elevate communities since the nineteenth century when workers in Rochdale formed a co-operative in response to the exploitative working conditions. However, social enterprise as we know it today re-emerged in the mid-nineties.

When a new social enterprise emerges, entire communities reap the benefits. Varying in size, purpose and industry, they range from small social enterprises like Poached Creative to nationwide enterprises like the Big Issue. 

Being a social enterprise ourselves, specializing in writing and design we completely understand the importance of buying social. We are also pleased that in recent years social enterprises have become an integral part of everyday life in London. 

Over the years we have had many partnerships with social enterprises across the country, including Social Enterprise UK – who we proudly created the original Social Saturday marketing materials for. We buy social whenever we can. 

To mark the occasion, in the lead up to Social Saturday we will shed a light on different and unique social enterprise in our local area of Hackney. 

The Hackney Pirates

Part of the Hackney Pirates Ship of Adventures
Courtesy of The Big Issue Online Journalists

The Hackney Pirates is an enterprising charity working to develop the literacy, confidence and perseverance of young people in Hackney, so that they achieve both in school and in the world beyond.

The educational social enterprise was thought of by Catriona Maclay, who at the time was a teacher at a primary school based in north London. Through her experience as a primary school teacher she realised that a change in the learning environment could benefit pupils aged 9-12 and make them more receptive to learning.

The Hackney Pirates began as a pilot scheme supported by Bootstrap, now it is well established. They work together with local schools, volunteers and families providing local kids with the dream class room: a Ship of Adventures complete with secret passageways, an underwater cave and a ship’s cat. 

During the voyage participating pupils receive support in order to enhance their writing and reading. They are also encouraged to take part in a unique creative publishing project in which young people work with professionals to write their own books, CDs and websites, allowing them to practise their writing skills as well as see the whole project through to publication.

Catriona Maclay, Founder of The Hackney Pirates says:

"We believe that young people learn best when there's a little adventure involved, and when they can see that their work has consequences in the real world, so our publishing projects are a great way for young people to develop their literacy while also building up their confidence and perseverance.

 If you would like to spend your Social Saturday supporting The Hackney Pirates, then pop by our Ship of Adventures - a unique gift-shop, book-shop and cafe where you can see all the fantastic work of the Young Pirates on display."

Read our Social Saturday blog #2 on Circle Sports.

Poached Creative - celebrating five years

It’s Monday. Deputy director Angela is putting the finishing touches on a quote for a client and our designer Khaleeda is advising a young illustrator about a job application. Our writer, Catriona, is interviewing someone from an NHS trust while our writing mentor, Grant, is penning a letter on behalf of someone at his hostel. Press office volunteer Billy is tweeting about our upcoming party. All this sounds like a normal, productive office.

Looking back five years, I’m amazed that we have an office at all. Then, we were squatting in someone else’s building with a couple of computers and a dictionary. I was the only person you could call ‘staff’ and I was unpaid. We had two trainees, one of whom was Angela.

Poached Creative was born out of my desire to put communications jobs within reach for long-term unemployed and disadvantaged people. As Editor at Shelter and the NHS Confederation I had hired many people into our editorial team but none of them had experienced homelessness or serious health conditions. This was what I wanted to change.

In five years we’ve built a solid client base of about 30 clients, more than 75 per cent of whom have come back to work with us again. We’ve settled into a permanent office in Hackney and opened a satellite office in the South West. We employ eight staff.

We’ve created an international campaign for Social Enteprise UK and partnered with The Big Issue and BBC Learning to deliver journalism training. Charity clients include Peabody and Plan UK and we continue to work with a range of smaller charities and social enterprises at discounted rates.

The RBS SE100 ranks us as No 1 marketing and communications social enterprise and among the top 10 in London. This year we’ve also become an accredited London Living Wage employer.

Many of our past trainees and volunteers still work with us and it’s this two-way street, of both learning with and contributing to Poached Creative, that I’m most proud of.

The people we’ve worked with over the last five years have not only benefitted from our work but shaped our future. Take a look at their case studies.

Surviving the first five years

If there's one thing we've learnt about surviving the first five years of social enterprise it's that we wouldn't be here without our friends.

Our partnership with Lucy Ferguson from Mediorite (formerly YH World) has been the difference between success and failure for Poached. Without our shared office space, staff, clients, ideas and plans, Poached Creative would not be here today.

Thanks to:

• All our dedicated staff, freelancers, trainees and volunteers who've contributed so much to our development.
• Our brilliant clients, who've supported us and with their business, enthusiasm and feedback.
• Funders/in-kind supporters: Careers Development Group (CDG), UnLtd, arc/BITC, Future Jobs Fund, Social Enterprise UK, Cranfield Trust, Mediabox, Hackney Council, Hackney Libraries, Lighthouse (Poole).
• Partners: Mediorite, MCR Print, Agile Collective, Pixel Parlour, Hackney Citizen, The Big Issue, St Giles Trust, Art Against Knives, Off Centre.

We’ve come a long way in five years and we couldn’t have done it without your support.

Special thanks to Dominic Rose and Michael Quinn for their unfailing support and superb catering skills.

Guardian visit for The Big Issue journalism trainees

Journalism trainees at Poached Creative learned how to pitch stories and got the chance to see how a major news organisation operates at a visit to the Guardian's London headquarters last week. 

The visit was part of Poached's training programme for The Big Issue, which aims to teach online journalism skills, including writing and photography, to people of diverse backgrounds, including the long term unemployed, in order to get them real world skills and job experience that can be used as a stepping stone into paid work. 

The Guardian visit was an opportunity for the trainees to see how the news industry operates on a large scale and to receive advice from experienced journalists. I was glad to see that the skills we are learning will translate to a high level work environment. 

I was especially impressed by the Guardian’s online strategy and I think it’s something we can learn from. They are a digital-first company and devote significant time and effort towards their website and interactive media, which is reflected in their readership, which hovers around 200,000 in print and over 5 million daily visitors online. 

The ease of editing articles online compared to in print means that Guardian articles on the website, especially breaking news, often receive updates as developments occur. 

Even the titles of news articles are changing as newspapers move online. It’s no longer enough to include a catchy pun or phrase; instead the headline must have terms that will easily be recognized by search engines, something to remember as we write our own stories. 

After a short history of the Guardian and a Q&A session with our guide, we had the opportunity to ask questions of Guardian journalist Maya Wolfe-Robinson, a commissioning editor for Guardian law and Comment is Free. 

She explained how to pitch opinion pieces and said it is important to be clear about what issue you want to debate and what your angle is. And she stressed that journalists do not have to come from traditional backgrounds and that having a unique perspective on an issue can make for a powerful story. 

The visit encouraged me to try pitching stories to a variety of news outlets and emphasized the most important trait for journalists: persistence. In order for anyone to succeed it is essential to keep building a strong portfolio.

Social Enterprise Day 2013

The contribution of social enterprises was recognised in Parliament today with a special event held in the Commons by the APPG on Social Enterprise to mark Social Enterprise Day 2013. 

Highlights of the day included: a new supply chain guide for businesses by Social Enterprise UK, a new Buy Social animation narrated by John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, and Social Enterprise Belu Water won a contract with the Houses of Parliament.

MPs and business leaders attended the event at the House of Commons, hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Social Enterprise, to learn more about including Social Enterprises in their supply chains. They heard from speakers including Karen Lynch, CEO of Social Enterprise Belu water, Hazel Blears MP, and Jo Swinson, Minister for Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs.

Poached Creative's work was a key part of Social Enterprise Day 2013. We designed and produced the new materials to support the second phase of the Buy Social campaign - encouraging corporate businesses to buy from social enterprises. This included new display boards featuring Edwin from Give Me Tap, a We Buy Social badge for commercial organisations to show their commitment to social enterprise and Buy Social postcards to promote social enterprise to the public.

A new supply chain guide to help businesses learn about including social enterprises in their supply chains was designed by Poached Creative and we featured alongside several case studies for our work designing the first Social Impact Report for Landmarc, the UK’s 3rd biggest Land Manager.

Jo Swinson encouraged the businesses in attendance to 'buy social':

“Customers and investors are increasingly thinking beyond simply the prices they are paying and the returns they are seeing. They rightly want to know what steps a business is taking which will have a positive effect on the environment, society, their local community and the employees, before making their decision. In order to build a stronger economy and fairer society we need more diverse businesses - social enterprises very much fit the bill.”

Social Enterprise Day marks the one year anniversary since the Buy Social campaign, conceived and created by Poached for Social Enterprise UK, was first launched. Peter Holbrook, Chief Executive of Social Enterprise UK, said:

“Just like having a carbon footprint, every business has a social footprint and this can be strengthened by the purchasing of goods and services from social enterprises. Lots of social enterprises are small to medium sized businesses that operate locally and so what might be a relatively modest spend for a corporate can make a very big difference to a social enterprise and their impact on a local community.”

Find out more on Social Enterprise UK's  Buy Social page  and join the conversation on Twitter using #buysocial