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Apr 09

Brixton Green Employment workshop tonight – Tues 9th April

Posted on April 9, 2013 by colin

Brixton Green Employment Workshop
Lambeth Voluntary Centre
35 Brixton Station Road
SW9 8PB
7:00pm Tuesday 9th April

Tree Shepherd’s Colin Crooks will be one of the speakers tonight at a workshop hosted by Brixton Green and run by Social Life, a social enterprise which aims to work in partnership with the community to transform Somerleyton Road. This will be an action planning workshop on employment training and local businesses.

For more information about Brixton Green and the workshops, please visit www.brixtongreen.org.

And to attend this evening’s workshop, please email hello@social-life.co or call Brad on 020 7183 5838.

Apr 02

How to Make a Million Jobs – the tour continues

Posted on April 2, 2013 by colin

There’s no sign of a let-up in the ‘How to Make a Million Jobs’ book tour! The book has received glowing reviews and its author, Colin Crooks, has been speaking to enthusiastic audiences up and down the country since the book was published last September.

Here are a few snippets from reviews of the book:

“Colin has crafted a compelling argument for a radical change in our approach to tackling long term worklessness.”

“Reading Colin’s new book has been inspiring.”

“This book honestly turned all my previous thinking about unemployment on its head.”

“Colin Crooks has truly gone to the coal face and found a very precious gem.”

Colin has been a social entrepreneur for many years and these events are a chance for him to share his experiences of the negative impact worklessness has on those unfortunate enough to find themselves unemployed for a long stretch of time, and the positive impact work has on those same people when it finally comes along.

Colin will be speaking as a guest of Save The Children this Thursday, 4th April, and he will be giving a masterclass at University of East Anglia’s London branch on 15th April. Guest speaker invitations are always welcome, so don’t hesitate to get in touch at colin@treeshepherd.org.uk if you would like Colin to speak at your event!

And if you haven’t read the book yet, it is available to buy on Amazon.

Apr 02

Colin Crooks & the Friends of West Norwood Library

Posted on April 2, 2013 by colin

Friends of West Norwood Library AGM
Saturday April 20th, 11:30am
Old Library, 16 Knights Hill SE27 0HY

Tree Shepherd’s Colin Crooks has been invited to be guest speaker at the upcoming Annual General Meeting of the Friends of West Norwood Library. Colin will be presenting key findings from his book ‘How to Make a Million Jobs: A Charter for Social Enterprise’ and will be leading a debate on how the issues of worklessness and deprivation can be tackled in the West Norwood area.

This event is open to all, regardless of whether you are a member of the Friends of West Norwood Library.

Come along and join the debate!

Apr 02

Colin to give evidence at Salford Cooperative City Commission

Posted on April 2, 2013 by colin

Tree Shepherd CEO Colin Crooks has been invited to give evidence at a city commission hearing on 23rd April 2013 assessing the ways in which cooperative approaches can help in ensuring everyone in Salford has the skills they need for creative, meaningful and rewarding work. The Salford Cooperative City Commission was set up by the City Mayor in August 2012, and the 23rd April hearing will focus on the issue of skills.

The Commission has decided to focus initially on three key issues:
(1) every household in Salford should have the opportunity to lower their energy costs and reduce their carbon emissions;
(2) everyone living in Salford should have the skills they need for creative, meaningful and rewarding work; and
(3) every family in Salford living with a long-term health condition should have maximum control to manage these conditions in partnership with health and social care professionals.

Colin will be there to share his experiences and views, and we will be sure to report back afterwards, so watch this space.

Mar 21

Best jobs creator in the UK? Guardian/Tree Shepherd competition winner

Posted on March 21, 2013 by colin

Colin Crooks – listening and learning

Last autumn, Tree Shepherd and the Guardian Social Enterprise Network launched a competition to find the best jobs creator in the UK. The quest was to find a social business that had developed innovative solutions to creating employment in challenging circumstances. The winner was the TABS training school, a small organisation with a tiny budget based in a run-down school in the heart of the Rhondda Valley in Wales, where the workless rate is above 22%.

Founder Paul Nagle outside TABS

TABS was set up by Paul Nagle in 2000, and Tree Shepherd CEO Colin Crooks visited TABS to see for himself how they have helped people to set up businesses and create employment.

In case you missed it, the full story, posted by Colin on the Guardian SEN website, is here.

Jess – excited by running her own business

Mar 14

Review – Colin Crooks talk in PM’s constituency

Posted on March 14, 2013 by colin

Tree Shepherd’s Colin Crooks recently gave a talk in the Prime Minister’s constituency. The PM unfortunately couldn’t make it, but the local press were there. The review below was published in the Chipping Norton News.

A ‘million jobs’ in Chippy

‘How to Make a Million Jobs’ is a book by social entrepreneur Colin Crooks, who came to Chipping Norton’s Jaffé & Neale in January and spoke with conviction. Colin has led social enterprises that recycle paper and refurbish office furniture, bikes, computers and electrical equipment for resale. He drew heavily on personal experiences of employing people who lacked basic literacy and numeracy skills and were unemployed with no experience of working, including ex-prisoners. All were trapped in the cycle of deprivation that can include poverty, ill health, family breakdown, substance abuse, poor environment, criminality, homelessness, violence and social breakdown. Colin believes that worklessness, which leads to a feeling of worthlessness, is at the heart of this cycle. He told several moving stories of individuals, who had lost all hope, had been able to transform their lives through what he terms ‘patient employment’, i.e. where the employer invests time in the individual and provides bespoke on-the-job training where its purpose is clear and related to employment progression.

The book shows that the number of people of economically active age in the UK who are un- or under-employed is actually around 6.5 million: far higher than official figures. Various government initiatives have failed to create jobs for the most needy and, he says, money is siphoned off by intermediaries. Similarly, private sector development, such as Canary Wharf and Salford Quays, has not benefited the low skilled unemployed. Colin’s challenge to us, and government, is to start by creating 1,000 new jobs in the 1,000 most deprived communities in the UK (hence the million jobs). He says this can be achieved by redirecting funds from existing Government schemes direct to employers, establishing Social Enterprise Zones or supporting local enterprise in area-based initiatives. He suggests, for example, that recycling is not only a sustainable but also a labour-intensive sector; that local sourcing of food, services and construction should be favoured because the local multiplier effect benefits the local economy; that private and public sector organisations should set associated targets. A book very much in Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ vein, of immediate relevance to society today, it is a challenging but uplifting read.

Thanks again to Chipping Norton News for providing the review!

Mar 01

Community Entrepreneurs forge new business ideas – day 3

Posted on March 1, 2013 by colin

Day three of the Community Resource Entrepreneurs programme – created by Tree Shepherd, LSx, and LCRN, and supported by the Small Business Research Initiative.

Day 3 – Business clinic and MOT

Our groups are really starting to form their ideas now. They used the last week or so to good advantage to develop their vehicles and to research their markets. Six of them are even forming a loose bus-like co-operative.

So the day 3 business clinic was the perfect opportunity for our groups to get some more bespoke advice and guidance on their particular business idea.

Several members of the co-op arrived in the morning. They had clearly taken onboard Colin’s parting advice from the previous session and had agreed the roles that each of them would play within the co-operative. In this session, Simon from DesignIT asked them some tough questions about exactly what the motivation of the co-op was. Were they all agreed on its main objective and could they all “sing from the same hymn sheet” when they went door-knocking? Over a period of an hour or so the defining nature of the co-op started to shine through from the sometimes contradictory mist of ideas that the group had. It would be committed to serving the needs of the local community and would work hard to understand those needs as they changed.

At first glance the “needs of the community” may appear quite vague but as we honed down on how the group would know what the needs were and how they might change over time, the phrase started to take on a real clarity. Firstly, it would mean that the group would need a very open structure and be very consultative. Secondly, they realised that with the resources that they had they would need to fuse the community research with the main revenue raising effort – i.e. they would have to collect metals from the community they wished to serve at the same time as they established what the community wanted most.

With this established, it was important not to lose any momentum. Colin worked with the co-op to agree some short-term trials that the group could put into practice and from which they could learn. With the support of Ben from LSx they rapidly put together a short shopping list of the essential protective clothing they would need to put their plan into action.

Next in for the clinic was Abi who surprised everyone by announcing that she now planned to start something herself and, even better, had already started collecting! In the beginning Abi had come to find out more information but now she was keen to start collecting aluminium foil from a variety of contacts that she already had. The clinic for her had now become quite operational which was so exciting.

Steve from Lewisham had also made good progress and he had thought through all the aspects of our outline business plan template. With a session at the clinic he was able to precisely define his market and had gained a real insight into how his overall aim of increasing community engagement could be served by his recycling initiative.

So at the end of the day 3 clinic all our participants had made real progress towards getting their business vehicles on the road.

Day 4 would provide an acid test. This is the day when they meet up-and-coming managers from Sony Music, who would test their ideas and help them to create a message that would really differentiate them in the market.

Feb 26

Community Entrepreneurs forge new business ideas – day 2

Posted on February 26, 2013 by colin

Day Two report of the Community Resource Entrepreneurs programme – created by LSx, Tree Shepherd, and LCRN, and supported by the Small Business Research Initiative, a part of the Technology Strategy Board.

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Day 2 of the Community Resource Entrepreneurs course kicked off from where the first had finished. The delegates had clearly not stopped thinking about metal and how they were going to collect it. Their outline plans from last week had been developed and were really starting to take shape.

Colin reminded them that they had made tremendous progress; “most people don’t have one business idea in their lives and you have not only developed an idea but you have started to imagine yourselves doing it, and that is a long way along the road to making it happen”. And talking of roads, the group had each designed the vehicles that their business was going to look like and knew where they wanted them to go and who was driving them!

So having done the hard part – having the idea – day 2 was going to be about how to put it into action. Day 2 was about the business plan and about busting the myths that surround the “business plan”. No, it doesn’t have to be thousands of words using fancy, technical language. In fact it’s quite straightforward. The business plan is a way of ordering your thoughts around: What do you want to do? How will it make money? and who are you selling the service to? Oh yes, and remembering the analogy made by Simon May (from DesignIT) of the one zebra in a herd with his backside facing out: “What makes you stand out from the crowd?”

In other words, today they were going to make their vehicles roadworthy.

“What do you want to do?” is often a bit more complicated in a social enterprise sense than when you ask that question of a budding small businessman. Of course, you need to generate an income, but what is that income for? To create employment? To protect the environment? To raise funds for the community? It’s essential to have a very clear understanding of why you are setting up, as that will determine so much about how you manage and oversee the organisation, who you recruit to work with you, and how you market the business. One of the major issues for social enterprises is that they often want to achieve a multitude of objectives. Colin was clear – “You have to decide which objective is the most important and then focus your planning (and the income generated) on achieving that objective.”

Armed with the clarity of what you want your organisation to achieve, you can very rapidly start to envisage who you will need to recruit to help you and what sort of equipment you will need. Ben from LSx helped the group think through people issues and how they would manage them, and Mike from LCRN took them through the practical questions that they would need to address about transport, storage, health & safety and, of course, licences and red tape.

And throughout the day the group was reminded to think about their target market and how they were going to persuade that market to use their service rather than anyone else’s.

The afternoon session started with a salutary tale from one of Colin’s early recycling businesses as the group was asked to consider the risks involved in setting up and developing their enterprise. A worrying way to kick off the afternoon you may think but as Colin said “thinking about risks now can bring forward a lot of creative ideas of how to do things differently, and of course will reduce the chance of things going wrong” and being frank about risks also enables you to focus on getting things right from the start.

The group was now ready to start to think about the money. They all knew what they wanted to achieve, how they wanted to do it and who they were going to do it with. In the final session they started to put costs to their model and to gauge their income.

The room buzzed with intense discussion as everyone thought through their business model and how it would work. Their plans were really coming together and the questions were all focussed on the realities of getting a business off the ground.

The programme moves now to a more intense “one 2 one” phase where each group starts to make their vehicle ready to drive away. The LSx-led team will help them to make sure they have the right driver and navigator, the right fuel and that the suspension is sturdy enough for the road ahead.

In the final group session, they will road test their vehicle past some senior blue chip company executives to make sure that it’s attractive to their chosen market and that it catches the eye.

Watch this space to find out how they all get on.

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To see Day One’s report, click here.

Feb 19

Cynthia Anderson on a “not-to-miss talk” in Herne Hill

Posted on February 19, 2013 by colin

Colin recently gave a talk as a guest of the Herne Hill Society. Here is a review of that talk, kindly provided by Cynthia Anderson.

The title of the first Herne Hill Society talk of 2013 attracted my attention immediately as a not-to-miss talk, and indeed so it proved.

Colin Crooks, a local resident, former Lambeth Councillor and businessman, spoke without pictures or powerpoint and without notes, and held the attention of the audience throughout. He began by introducing himself and his career prior to starting his own business.

His business had begun as a part-time venture, a small office and an old Ford Transit camper van, collecting used paper from banks and similar organisations and taking it to a paper merchant in Coldharbour Lane. The business grew, to such an extent that he was able to give up his regular job and work full-time on this project that really interested him.

The next part of the talk was about his experiences with recruiting and training his staff. By and large, he needed unskilled workers: for example, people to sort and weigh paper and cans for recycling, and van drivers. He soon found that there were many unemployed people desperate to get a job, and whenever he advertised, there would be many applicants.

Unfortunately for all concerned, many people were unqualified to take on even unskilled jobs, being “functionally illiterate”. He told us of one driver who punched him twice in the cab of the van, out of frustration for having to reveal that he was unable to read an A-Z. Having learnt from this experience Colin always now checks in the course of an interview for drivers that the applicant can read a map.

By this time, we understood that Colin was passionate about the problem of unemployment, as it affects his business, unemployed people and their families, crime — the whole of society in fact. We were not surprised to learn that he had gone on to research the data regarding unemployment, unskilled workers and their qualifications.

He provided us with definitions, facts and figures, all fascinating stuff. For example, 9.8 million people of working age have no qualification of any kind; 19 million people have full-time jobs (or read this as only half the population of working age having full-time jobs); 6.5 million people would like to work; there are half a million vacancies; 38% of people in the Coldharbour Estate have full-time jobs. If we needed persuading, he emphasised the deleterious effects of unemployment: far from enjoying a lie-in every day as “strivers” set off for work in the early morning, the unemployed person suffers from a variety of problems chiefly derived from a loss of self-respect, including loss of self-confidence, depression, obesity and apathy.

And, finally, he offered some ideas to solve this problem. The Government has focused on creating jobs, but has not been able to provide enough jobs that are attractive to unemployed people. Instead, job-creation thinking should concentrate on what motivates people; to match jobs to people, rather than people to jobs. Motivated people are enthusiastic, creative, eager to learn, and keen on training. Colin provided a couple of examples of stroppy teenagers who had blossomed once given work and responsibility that they relished.

People who want to know more should read his recently published book How to Make a Million Jobs: A Charter for Social Enterprise.

Tree Shepherd

Nurturing local solutions to worldwide problems.

Tag Archives: colin crooks

Brixton Green Employment workshop tonight – Tues 9th April

How to Make a Million Jobs – the tour continues

Colin Crooks & the Friends of West Norwood Library

Colin to give evidence at Salford Cooperative City Commission

Best jobs creator in the UK? Guardian/Tree Shepherd competition winner

Review – Colin Crooks talk in PM’s constituency

Community Entrepreneurs forge new business ideas – day 3

Cynthia Anderson on a “not-to-miss talk” in Herne Hill