There will be a meeting to discuss the specific direction that the NBSE model will be heading in. We will need to form a strong structure before a business plan and funding can be established and this will be carried out after the findings from the meet.

If you would like to be involved, are passionate about North Birmingham or feel you could add knowledge on gaining public funding and/or building a social enterprise please join our Facebook group and come along to the meeting.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday 11^th June at a location to be confirmed.

I guess initially I’m excited by the engagement potential that social media has to offer. Furthermore, I can see the potential it has within lifelong learning, health matters and unemployment within the community. I’ve found that i’m already implementing some of this stuff so it was a case of sourcing out some like minded individuals to see if we can progress on some of the ideas.

I’m currently looking into funding options, qualification accreditation and ‘Communities of Practice’ as a potential delivery model…or something like that … Key words for me this morning are Engagement, Empowerment & Confidence!

By the way, I don’t foresee my blog posts as being formal. As we’re using it as a reference tool too, I need to just get the stuff down pretty quickly.

The Social Enterprise option came about because both me and Kevin are keen for this project to benefit our local communities. We hope we can find support for our endevours!

On Thursday 8th May, Stuart Parker and I (Kevin Rapley) met up at The Station in Sutton Coldfield to discuss some ideas that Stuart had on social media and how it could be used to create a social enterprise that will be centric to North Birmingham. The areas that were immediately in our thoughts are the Aston, Erdington, Castle Vale and possibly parts of Sutton Coldfield. Stuart is interested in targeting the unemployed and under privileged. Our goal is to teach these groups the benefits of social media and how it can be harnessed to give a voice to the community in a manner of different ways. Stuart brings with him a wealth of knowledge in adult IT teaching, including the unemployed, I will let him speak more about this.

As a web designer and developer, I am immersed in social media and building internet solutions on a daily basis. This blog will be used to document our development of a social enterprise for North Birmingham, including how we go about funding, developing a business plan, raising issues in the locale, growing the ideas and getting others involved in making this happen.

This is my first port of call. If you are passionate about building a stronger community in North Birmingham or are just interested in getting involved with what we are doing then we would love to hear from you. Stuart and I have got quite a task ahead of us with learning about the funding side, how to go about this and what the prerequisites are. Again, if you have any knowledge of building a social enterprise model we would be very interested in learning from you.

We hope that this blog will act not only as a diary of our progress, but also to increase awareness of our plans, recruit others that would like to get involved and also provide a resource for any other communities that wish to implement the social enterprise model in their area.