Interview With an Entrepreneur: Nick Temple

At times, being an entrepreneur can be a confusing and lonely profession. But there are organisations that exist to help foster entrepreneurial people, providing much-needed training and support. Founded ten years ago by Michael Young, the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) is an action-based ‘school’ with an ethos of learning by doing. It aims to be as inclusive as possible so that people with great ideas, from any background, receive the help they need. Nick Temple is Policy and Communications Director at the SSE. Zenobia Talati talks to him.

Name: Nick Temple

Age: 31

Job Title: Policy and Communications Director

Organisation: The School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE)

From its humble beginnings in Bethnal Green, the SSE now operates on a franchise basis in six locations around the UK. They each run year-long programmes, without any formal curriculum, and students attend sessions about one day a week.

All students come to the school with a project idea they are working on, usually at an early stage of development. They are assigned a tutor who is similar to a one-to-one business coach but who also offers personal support and understanding. Most of the SSE employees have first-hand experience running social ventures themselves, for example Nick ran a small non-profit organisation relating to ecologically friendly funerals for five years before joining the SSE. Students also benefit from the help of an appropriate mentor from outside the SSE.

There are many elements to the SSE programme for instance expert witness sessions, where experienced social entrepreneurs share their stories and action learning sets in which each student has an hour and a half to bring any problem they are having to the group, whether personal or organisational.

Nick says that “arguably the most important thing that we do is put 18-20 people together for a year. The relationships they build and the networks they bring are crucial. There is a real diverse mix of people, so we get refugees, the long term unemployed, retired doctors, graduates…”

Nick recognises that many of the best ideas for social ventures come from the bottom-up, from the people who are actually immersed in the issues and experiencing the problems first-hand. “For a lot of our students their drive and motivation is rooted in something very personal and particular and they have been shaped by their life experience is some way,” he says.

Former students from the SSE have gone on to set up a diverse range of socially motivated organisations. For example, GP Paul Hodgkin set up Patient Opinion, a website where people can share their experience of health services and rank the care they received. Chrissy Townsend set up the Teviot Action Group (TAG) in Tower Hamlets as a direct response to unacceptable levels of crime and unemployment, and to address issues resulting from the high percentage of single parents and people with mental health problems. Another former student, Adam Dirir, set up Somali Eye Media, which is the only Somali media organisation in London and is dedicated to providing the UK Somali community with an independent media network.

The SSE has quite an inclusive definition of social entrepreneurship and believes that social entrepreneurs can operate on a local, regional, national or international level. Nick says that some projects scale up and grow while others are perfectly fit to a particular locality or a particular area and will sustain.

“You don’t have to achieve Richard Branson’s profits to be an entrepreneur, so why is it not the same for social entrepreneurs? There is a risk if you go that route that the only people who get the support are those who are educated, who have the access and who can afford to do something voluntarily. There is a risk that what should be a very inclusive movement can become a bit exclusive. We are against that and for giving as many people an opportunity as possible.”

Promoting diversity and being inclusive is an important aspect of the SSE model. As far as possible, all the places at the SSE are fully funded and they also have a budget for childcare and transport. Nick says that most MAs in Social Entrepreneurship generally require a first degree and people who can afford to pay the fees and that radically reduces the diversity of the people you are going to get.

“A lot of the people we work with wouldn’t call themselves entrepreneurs. We have to do a bit of de-mystifying about what we do. So you can say to someone, are you thinking of setting up a project that addresses a problem on your estate and that’s very different to asking ‘are you a social entrepreneur?’.”

Nick says the SSE students are recruited on the basis of their characteristics. “We’re trying to look for the classic entrepreneurial traits. Attributes like nerve, persistence, vision, commitment,” he says. Paper qualifications and how rich you may or may not be are not as important as commitment. And he says they have a very low drop-out rate.

The SSE was one of the first organisations to use the term ‘social entrepreneur’ when it started but social entrepreneurship has become more of a populated field now. Nick says there are quite a few websites available for social entrepreneurs as well as short workshops but he says many people don’t have the confidence or support to actually use this information. “The problem that we’ve seen is that there is a lot of content downloaded at people, almost to a fault. But they are not really empowered to put it into practice.”

Unlike most other professions, entrepreneurs are self-appointed and do not get elected or interviewed for the job. Because of this, Nick says that being an entrepreneur can be very difficult position because you need to develop a sense of legitimacy and earn the right to act. The SSE can act as an important support network, allowing people with a shared mission to drive social change to learn from each other, improve self-esteem and gain confidence over time.

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