On Purpose Round Up

It’s July and we are officially past the half way mark of the On Purpose year. Our Associates have just bid fond farewells to their first placements and transitioned into their second placements. In between all the handovers we have amongst other things, been brought up to speed on networking by Steven D’Souza, the author of Brilliant Networking and taught how to apply Action Learning Sets by Janie Wilson.

We were also lucky enough to spend some time in the sunshine in Embercombe in Exeter where we explored leadership in all its forms. Since then, we’ve all had moments to reflect and to put into action what we have learnt from our excellent facilitators and fellow Associates.

[caption id=”attachment_3214" align=”aligncenter” width=”640" caption=”On Purpose Associates at Embercombe”]

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Some Associates have done this by sharing their thoughts and experiences of leadership. In June, two of our Associates, Maria Skanavi and Ed Shepherd wrote about their experiences of working with values driven businesses and leaders in the Guardian Social Enterprise Network. Ed and Maria emphasised in their article the importance of ensuring that employees understand an organisation’s social vision and are able to bring stakeholders to the party.

Isabelle de Morlhon has similarly blogged on the importance of values in an organisation and what she has learnt from her time spent working withThe Shaftesbury Partnership to integrate values at the organisational level. Creating social value is more broadly a theme that continues to resonate across the work of Associates and the broader policy context in which we work and learn. Let’s hope the second half of the year will see even more opportunities for the Associates to add value wherever we go!