8 short rants!

I do not understand why the UK riots or mass insurrection (depending on your perspective) happened and I do not want to contribute to the clamber of voices from  ill-informed people who seek to provide answers and solutions to ‘the problem’ before figuring out what the right questions are to ask, who to ask  and how to ask them.

I am an academic!  There I said it.  I am not however an apologists if I seek to understand the underlying psycho-social reasons for the nature of the destructive events that we saw unfold just a few short weeks ago.  I am also very clear that I can not (and have no desire) to offer a comfortable global solution for the complex issue of what to do with young people who know that they do not have a toenail hold on the world, let alone a foothold!

I spend most of my professional life trying to make a small dent in the experiences of a small number of people in order to change some aspect of their world: a change brought about partly because of my involvement in it.  I know that sounds a bit grandiose but we are all involved in this activity every single day of the week, we may just not have time to blog about it!

I affect people’s worlds in two key ways: I am an educator and have been involved in education in one form or another for a very long time indeed! I also help people reclaim aspects of themselves that they thought had been wrenched from their psychological grasp a long time ago.  A restoration of hope and self belief-that’s what I have been offering for years cloaked in the garms of education or psychotherapy.  Your choice of which vehicle you use to effect change in another person is possibly becoming less relevant for those people who seek out your help-people are always going to be more preoccupied with whether your version of ‘help’ slots nicely into their idea of what it means to be helped.

So as I start my 8 rants I will keep that thought foremost in my mind: I help through educating the self and if that sort of help is what you need then hop on board!

So my 8 rants are about education as a form of emacipatory activity-emacipation of the mind, body and spirit drawing on the inspirational work of critical thinkers in education, psychology and psychotherapy and I will also delve back into history to reconnect with the notion of education as a valuable commodity.  Historically speaking, becoming an educated person was SO valuable that the very act of seeking empowerment through education was perceived by some as an act of insurrection, especially in the hands of the oppressed.   Least we forget that if some of our number acquired knowledge (an ability to read etc), this was often punishable by incarceration, death or severe injury.

So, here’s the title of my first rant:  Rant One: The Power of Education throughout the ages

Keep posted!

Well, the self-made men and women seem to think like that and if you measure success based on the size of your personal wealth then these folk are very very successful indeed.  Again my inner Benedictine Monk says that either end of this particular spectrum isn’t a healthy place to be.  Better to achieve a balance between prosocial and asocial behaviour.  But my experiences tell a different story: it all depends on what you want to achieve in life and whether you have the ‘personality architecture’ to behave in an asocial way or whether your ‘grand design’ is maybe a little more spiritual than others.  

Information about our ’grand design’ should really be made available to all of us at birth-give us all a clue as early as possible please about what we have been designed to do so that we can avoid the pitfalls of life.  Give us an idea whether slight adaptations to the design would allow us to operate outside of our ‘personality zone’ and periodically embrace our shadow side!  I’m all for blending a bit of ‘true’ personality with my shadow side.  The blend can be useful for me when I am doing business with a close eye on my spiritual side.

My self-made man never developed insight into the importance of cultivating relationships with others but still remains very wealthy indeed and retired at 40 as promised.  We all have to find our own way of traversing life’s maze and live with the consequences of our choices.  But I bet you’re asking yourself which path you would choose if you couldn’t have them both: cultivate those relationships or forego your relationship with others and possibly get very rich indeed. 

It has just dawned on me that the protagonist of all those fables and fairy-tales who desires money over all things always meets a sticky end…I’m thinking King Midas…what do you think?

July 2011 will forever be known as a momentous month for Eshu Independent. Apart from the personal workplace issues such as staff getting married, babies being born, you know that sort of thing, Eshu Independent is starting to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with!

At the beginning of the month we began delivering on a new contract for Halton Borough Council, an innovative and responsive employer that actively supports the continued professional development (CPD)  of its staff and the staff of its partner agencies-a breath of fresh air!  Funding for CPD training can be one of the first casualty in council cutbacks, with staff funded to attend external courses that may not always consider the impact of the local context on the knowledge and skill required to deliver a particular service.  It is refreshing to work with a council that has a progressive approach to commissioning and provides staff with a number of ways to neet their CPD needs.

The following week Eshu Independent attended the Wandsworth Lifelong Learning Awards ceremony.  We knew that Wandsworth were impressed by our subject offering and the way in which we developed our learning provision but we were extremely surprised at receiving both an award for Tutor of the Year and,  one of our students received an award for Learner of the Year.  Completely unexpected but very much welcomed and we hope to continue our work with Wandsworth in the near future. 

This is a challenging economic climate for all companies but at Eshu we continue to believe that quality provision, despite the cost of creating it,  pays dividends in the future and can help establish you as a leader in your field and secure your company’s’ future.

Ok, so the title is a tad mis-leading.  I am not a Benedictine Monk and I don’t really think that in this day and age a business philosophy based on ‘solemnly stability’ (a promise to remain with one monastary i.e one community , for life) is necessarily the way to go in business.

Diversification seems to be the key buzzword of the day-create new products and services for new markets OR, better still, adapt existing products and services to meet the needs of a new market in more exciting and innovative ways.  But ‘therein lies the rub’ especially for our fledgling company with a limited marketing budget and a handful of personnel to dedicate to this task. We constantly reflect on how to attract new business but are plagued with a Benedictine Monks philosophy of what for us constitutes business success -we genuinely believe that the services we offer should actually benefit the recipient, but it is beginning to seem to us that this socially responsible attitude to business only occasionally allows you to eat on a daily basis, and for a whole week no less!

Of course we are talking about a Social Enterprise business model which is variously described as an enterprise that has at the heart of its existence , a desire to persue philanthropic business objectives and the creation of profits for your shareholders is not a primary consideration.  These social enterprises can still be Limited Companies (legally speaking) but need to have clear social objectives that also affect how they operate/deliver their services.

The law recognises this contradiction-limited companies can and do have social business objectives but funders and grant makers do not seem to understand this relationship.  We submit a number of grant applications to other philanthropic souls (grant awarding bodies/charities etc.) only to be rejected on the basis that we are registered as a private company.  Our ideas are sound, the benefits to the recipient are clear, its just our status that seems to cause confusion for some…but not for all. Recently we successfully applied for funding to deliver accredited vocational training to local learners-an initiative that was a great success and we are now delivering similar services regionally based partly on this initial foray into vocational training territory. Coincidently, our new customers need us to be a limited company with a social focus and commissioned our services based on our demonstrable evidence based approach to creating innovative ways to re-engage disenfranchised learners but also because of the protection a company with a clear legal structure provides to those people who commission services using funds from the public purse.

Social enterprises have to show both their cuddly side and rugged side at the same time and that, my friends can be very difficult!

We have a long history of delivering training courses to qualified staff working in Mental Health but have recently entered the brave new world of delivering vocational training programmes in Health and Social Care including pre-employment training for those people who would like to work in this sector.

Vocational training programmes and pre-employment training for this sector is such an important educational development but raises a number of challenges for those responsible for delivering this provision.

As a private training provider with clear social objectives, we have had to approach those challenges in a way that allow us to learn and grow from the experience of delivering these programmes and add our voice to the clamber of voices that seek to examine how we can collectively ensure that this way of learning is an effective one.

We intend to use this blog to write about all things associated with running a small but growing enterprise and the challenges we face every day in delivering our services.