Enactus in the National Finals

Is very chuffed that two of my universities where I am the Business Advisor have gotten into the Enactus National Competitions. LSE and Bedfordshire. I was informed about this yesterday and I am looking forward to coaching them through the competition. And hopefully one of them will go forward to the International Competition.

Its truly humbling to see these very passionate and committed students learning about capitalism, entrepreneurship, economics, management to transform lives and shape a more sustainable world. Truly amazing to see how we harness the power and make things happen. 5-6 years now and every year, these students make a giant amount of difference to the homeless, the students, the poor, the mentally ill, or what have you.

What’s Enactus? I quote

 

Enactus is an international non-profit organization that brings together student, academic and business leaders who are committed to using the power of entrepreneurial action to improve the quality of life and standard of living for people in need. Guided by academic advisors and business experts, the student leaders of Enactus create and implement community empowerment projects around the globe. The experience not only transforms lives, it helps students develop the kind of talent and perspective that are essential to leadership in an ever-more complicated and challenging world.

Our Commitment

Together we pledge to take action. Together we commit to apply our passions and talents and ideas to impact as many lives as we can. Not to hand out help to people in need, but to work side-by-side with them to create opportunity. So every person and community we touch is empowered to live up to their fullest potential.

Creating apps for families in financial distress

As you might know, I am working with Home Start Hillingdon as well as LSE SIFE. I got these two organisations together. Home Start Hillingdon helps families with young children which are in distress. LSE SIFE wants to do something for the community using free enterprise. What better way to do this than to have LSE SIFE to push for improved financial and debt management of our families in need?

So LSE SIFE are working on coming up with a financial education package for our volunteers in HSH which will be deployed soon. In the meantime, I was very impressed and very very happy that these young un’s in LSE have started developing an app for debt management. Now isn't this impressive? Its just early days yet, but I am seriously impressed.

Good for you chaps, very good indeed. If this works out, I am going to try my level best to ensure that LSE SIFE pushes this out nationally if not globally.

What SIFE is doing with IT4CH

SIFE Nottingham is working with IT4CH to help provide training to kids who are unemployed or whatever, this training is to fix computers which we provide, South Notts College provides the training, while SIFE helps procure the equipment and mentoring the kids on to further employment. A win win indeed.

Very chuffed with what the kids in SIFE Nottingham have done.

Trustees and education

We are advertising for more trustees at Home Start Hillingdon. Here’s one which went into the Women in Technology Group.

3 - Enthusiastic volunteer trustees required for Home-Start, the UK’s leading family support charity
Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity - they support families struggling to cope with young children who with serious problems such as mental illness, alcoholism etc. Home-Start train volunteers (who are themselves parents) who then work with social services, health, police, etc. to recover the family and avoid the children being put into care (each child in care costs up to £50,000) and Home-Start have managed to intervene in about 100 families per year over the last 12 years or so in Hillingdon. They have had a few trustee retirements recently and they would like to increase the number of trustees who have experience in fund raising. This is a high governance charity (since they work with children) and would appeal to people who want to gain board level experience of running a firm. They also have three MPs as their trustees and work closely with the local council. It would also ideally suit people who are within commuting distance of Hillingdon (north west London) as they hold their monthly meetings there and fund raising takes place in and around Hillingdon. In particular Home-Start Hillingdon would like to seriously increase the amount of technology they use - such as having revenue generating efforts through a web shop, having a better website, providing financial education to their families via mobile or e-learning, providing e-coaching, assisting the volunteers with knowledge sharing on the website, better Facebook/social media interaction etc. So somebody who has an interest in applying technology to assist and help fundraise would be ideal. Trustees can expect to spend around 12 hours a month on this rewarding role which enables much needed support for vulnerable families. For more information please contact Bhaskar Dasgupta, an existing Home-Start Hillingdon Trustee, on 07545 236 207 orbhaskar.dasgupta@hsbc.com or Tanya Link, Office Manager at Home-Start Hillingdon, on 01895 252804 or office@homestart-hillingdon.org.uk.

In other aspects relating to HSH, I had a nice meeting with LSE SIFE team and HSH Senior Coordinator and we agreed to push for more financial education training to our great volunteers and the families. We will do the first pilot run in Q1 2012 and then see how we can improve the offering. If it works out, it would be brilliant. The LSE SIFE team has been doing great, they have hooked up with Microsoft, did a great job in reviewing the current offerings for financial education out there and have got a full fledged team working on this. Good stuff chaps.

The background to this is important. The families which we help, are usually one step away from calamity and total disintegration. While the volunteers help in recovering these families, if we can give them some help with improving their financial condition, that would be brilliant. The kids wont have problems, well, not too many, but will be able to get the little bit extra. So I am very chuffed about this..

Two wins and a great feeling

It was a good week indeed. Firstly, we received information that the funding for the HSH charity is now confirmed for another year at least and that is excellent news, we were on the verge of starting our close down process which would have been tragic for all the families in severe distress we support and our employees. But very happy about it and now we are going to really fix this place.

In particular, what I want to do is to launch an initiative where we train our families in proper financial management and literacy. This will improve their lives and be able to handle financials. Lack of financial management in families is one of the biggest causes and symptoms of family distress. Plus I should be able to get some funding for this. So I have engaged the LSE SIFE team to see if they would be able to find out what is out there in terms of financial education for families and explore ways that we can deliver thi provision. Should start hearing back from them soon.

I am having a chat with a chap from India who has done some amazing work with technology for social purposes, that is promising indeed, hopefully we will get some traction on that end and can get the IT4CH charity to fund it.

Found out some people in India who are working in the area of West Bengal and education, hopefully will be able to speak to them next week to determine some more local details on what can and cannot be done locally. Also speaking to somebody who is in the government to see what are the requirements that charities have to fulfil to operate in Didi’s state.

Tomorrow we have the launch of the Transformation Trust’s pilot with LSE SIFE with the trading futures game, that promises to be an excellent large impact initiative which, if it works out, will hit almost 800 schools and we will be able to improve financial literacy and hopefully get the students interested in trading.

Might also be helping to run a strategy session for STIR sometime this side of the year. I just hope my imminent knee operation doesnt muck up all these plans..

Good stuff, but I am personally very happy, extremely happy with the fact that HSH got funding, now we can make it sustainable and real high impact. Very very chuffed. It took a heck of a lot of huge effort, pain and work to get there. I was quite depressed and disheartened for several weeks, we lost people, we lost trustees and we lost hope (almost) but we succeeded. Pushed very hard, spoke to the MP’s, spoke to the council, spoke to funding agencies, spoke with the employees, constantly emailed and spoke with the trustees, big big job done by the Chairman. Big Society, here we come. Very happy.

Expanding, extending, setting up and pushing forward

Curiously, we don't educate our kids in England in basic personal finance education. I still fail to understand the arguments against it, if there is one thing that people need to know, its personal finances, specially given the issues around too much credit, too little savings, too much debt, its not good. Within LSE SIFE, the chaps are trying to expand the usage of trading futures game, the game which helps to teach kids about economics and investments. Look here for what our cousins over the pond are doing: We should learn from them.

Virginia. When the state of Virginia moved to require financial literacy for its high school students, it was met with some resistance. Some felt that the material could be adequately covered in math and civics courses, while local school boards didn’t appreciate being told what to teach by the state. At this time though, Virginia does have a curriculum for middle and high school students that covers topics like opening an account at a financial institution, balancing a checkbook and filling out a loan application. Additional topics include consumer rights and responsibilities, debt management and understanding contracts.

Pennsylvania. One high school is adding a course, but doesn’t have the funding to hire more staff.

Maryland. Several years ago, a Maryland school board president expressed concern that a single course wouldn’t be enough to fully educate students about financial matters. He also pointed out that the course is relatively expensive at $600,000 — and he feared it wouldn’t be effective.

Missouri. Students in Missouri can take a personal finance class in the tenth, eleventh or twelfth grades. They study budgeting, banking services, and saving and investing. Other themes include credit and consumer skills. Also, goals and decision making as well as career planning are covered.

Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute is worried that the state’s lack of a requirement for economics and personal finance classes and inadequate number of trained teachers for the subjects will be detrimental to the residents and to Wisconsin’s overall economy.

Tennessee. Students here are expected to learn about money management, income, saving and investing, and credit and spending.

Utah. Utah teaches its students about basic budgeting, investments and even bankruptcy education.

Illinois. This state requires a consumer education course of 50 minutes a day for nine weeks for its high schools. The students are taught about credit scoring, income taxes and the role of consumers.

Georgia. They have an economics course that incorporates personal finance into one of its themes.

Got some major initiatives brewing with LSE SIFE as well, lets see what happens. SIFE Nottingham is also working with us to operationalise the training school with South Notts college with contributions of technology from the IT4CH charity. That’s very promising.

What else has been happening? Well, as I mentioned last week, I am hoping to help this new charity which does sterling work here in UK schools and helps to improve literacy in West Bengal, India. Had some good conversations around how best to structure the board, what do you need in terms of trustees and their skills, etc. etc. I also cautioned about operating in India, its not a trivial exercise and India is scattered with wastelands of foreign charities who came to grief. For example, see here. Also see the original article on the Bill Gates imbroglio. If such a brilliantly managed and funded charity can come to grief, then smaller ones are far too easily screwed up.

The response to us asking for more women trustees for IT4CH has been fantabulous, we now have 3 absolutely brilliant ladies who are interested in helping out with exciting projects. Cant wait till the trustee meeting on the 9th of November to introduce them to the rest of the gang and take this forward.

We also met with somebody from my old alma mater, Manchester Business School and figured out some good ways to take the alumni bit ahead with the firm.

Much to do, so little time…

VC, Trustees, money worries, inspiration and education

Boyo, this has been a rather busy time. Lets see

• The video conferencing pilot at IT4CH at a hospital is going to start soon. The idea is that we will provide laptops with webcams attached to long term ill kids at home, a VC company will provide the little VC suite in the hospital school and thus the teacher can teach a much bigger pool of children around the catchment area. Neat, eh?
• We will also extend this idea to the WCIT school. We will buy the integrated webcams for them.
• We are interviewing for trustees at IT4CH, we already have 5 male trustees, but I think having more women trustees is good for diversity and different perspectives. So I met up with this lady, Maggie Berry, who is the CEO of Women in Technology. Brilliant stuff they do, I hope to help them out a bit more. We need more women in technology and in banking definitely. Anyway, the appeal will go out in their newsletter soon and in the meantime, she gave me an intro. I met with an amazing lady, she might join us at IT4CH as a trustee. I really liked her, her background and her technology experience. Very chuffed.
• Met up with our MP, Minister and Patron of the HSH charity. He was quite encouraging and promised us help. He also wants to setup something so that local charities and local businesses can cluster and meet. Something like a Business/Social exchange. Hopefully something will come up from there.
• Went to talk to new members of LSE SIFE, i am always impressed with what they get up to. Very very humbled and very happy about these kids who are so willing to do something for society, raise money and be good solid value generators. And yes, they are capitalists, in all the good sense of the world. I am going to help them along much more as much as possible.
• Had a whole bunch of fresh MBA students from Essex down at the shop, we had a good discussion on sustainability. Its amazing how many students are interested in sustainability, eco-stuff, etc. Got couple of MD’s in as well to speak to them. They loved it. Also had a meeting with the advisory board.

More progress at SIFE

The chaps at LSE SIFE are quite ambitious, I love that. This trading game project is really catching fire. They went and sold it to a Malaysian University SIFE unit and they are spreading the word there. More about that later as my hopes to help them in Malaysia needs a bit of digging first.

Second, am going to go speak to the new SIFE recruits and get them all excited motivated. Plus if things work out, I will run investment classes for the volunteers. Teach these undergraduate students how to invest. I wonder if I can replicate what I did with Kannu with them?

Third, there seems to be very good progress with the Transformation Trust and extending the trading game to other schools in London. Watch this space.

The lady who introduced me to the Transformation Trust, Annie Natarajan, has managed to rope me into another initiative. lol, as a member of their advisory board. That’s also quite exciting, to help schools across the world to share best practises. I just got involved briefly in the initial proposals and Annie tells me that we have already got the first donation. Well done. The pilot will be touching some schools in India, Kenya and Brazil. Cant wait to get motoring on that.

Fourth, SIFE Nottingham is working on a pilot project with IT4CH with Pat. They are also pretty aggressive, they are trying to work to getting more donations of computers into our storage offices which we can then sell to get funds to purchase equipment for hospital schools and poor sick children at home.

Fifth, SIFE Nottingham has decided to do a project in Sri Lanka. Here’s the blurb on the email that they sent:

A group of 13 SIFE Nottingham students returned from Sri Lanka 4 weeks ago. To summarise our project, Future for Jaffna is a charitable organisation established under a trust deed. We aim to empower widows of the civil war in North Sri Lanka to create their own businesses, ranging from food processing to sewing and tailoring businesses. The ultimate aim is to establish a community and entrepreneurial/business centre in Jaffna, where the widows can sell their products, and where people can receive help in setting up their own business. Finally, we are looking into an environmental sub-project, mobilising rural communities through the production of biofuels.
We are partnering with a local charity, CORD Sri Lanka who monitor livelihood projects with widows. Their widows receive funding via a rigid scheme from the Bank of Ceylon; we do have more specific details on this scheme.
We require funding for the business start-ups for Future for Jaffna to be successful. This may be via a local bank, offering an independent finance scheme, or through raising funds through sponsorship and donations, and setting up a microfinance scheme. A key objective for us is to raise £5,000, at which point we will meet the £5,000 income requirement for registration by the Charity Commission, opening the floodgates to funding opportunities.

So I have got them hooked up with some of my colleagues in Sri Lanka. I think this should be a good thing to help push forward. Still under discussion on how exactly the firm can help them but broadly, i think we could provide advisory services to these poor ladies. I didn't know we were the only international firm operating there. Good stuff, makes me proud to work for such a nice firm.

I love September, after the hiatus of the Summer, its good to get back in track.

Updates

I realise that I haven't updated this blog for a long long time. So what’s been happening?

IT4CH

The IT4CH charity is trundling along fine. We are currently looking for a deputy to the CEO as well as some volunteers who can assist in getting more equipment into the warehouses that we have got scattered around the country. I think we found one person but she had to unfortunately duck out as she has to move away. Drats.

We met up with the head of SIFE in Nottingham and he has promised to work with us to see if we can improve the quality of computers we get, increase the number of donations we get, get some properties that we can store them in and also to see if we can enhance the training opportunities. Good start anyway. If this works out, then we can think about rolling this out nationally to other SIFE chapters who might be of assistance.

The Transformation Trust.

I met with Nicky Old, a very inspiring lady from The Transformation Trust. She got introduced to me via our mutual friend, Annie Natarajan. Nicky invited me earlier to the BT Tower where I took loads of pics. The Transformation Trust is doing a fantastic job with hundreds of schools around the country but they wanted to do something which can improve financial literacy amongst the schools. I immediately thought about seeing if we can use the Trading Game from LSE SIFE for this.

So anyway, that meeting happened between the Transformation Trust, LSE and SIFE and good steps were agreed. We have decided to check out the trading game to the London based schools that the Transformation Trust has links with. Then we can think about rolling this out. I fully expect that we will be able to touch 40-50 schools, which means about 2000 students at the minimum will be trained up on markets, how to trade, understand finance and economics, understand how to go to college and study, savings and investments. All in all, a very good step. Fairly chuffed with this step. If need be, i can help arrange for the presentations and discussions at work.

Home Start Hillingdon

We had a bit of a strategy session where a bit of head banging went on about how to do the funding over the next 3 years. Quite an interesting challenge we have here, to improve the position of the charity to cover for the funding gaps which have arisen due to the reduction of public sector funding. So I have been trying to get hold of various bits and bobs, like getting a friend of mine to agree to sponsor a web shop, need to figure out a way to get some funding to train our families / volunteers to create stuff so that we can sell, get some more sponsorship monies from people who might be willing to run / bike to raise some dosh. Got a whole list of tertiary items in track. So lets see how that works out. Its a long way to go and the funding cuts dont help at all.

Universities.

Had a nice session with the MBS chaps who popped over to work and i arranged to have 4 other MBS alumni who work in the bank to speak to a bunch of new chaps. Also got one of our MD’s to speak to them about life in general, she was brilliant, people loved her. We were also going to have another session with mentors and mentees but that fell through unfortunately. Oh! well.

I don't know if I talked about this or not but popped up to Colchester to talk about transformation to a bunch of public sector and SME owners. Am also going to do an introduction to their new MBA entries at the bank and also another talk in September to Essex alumni.

Mentees.

Couple of the mentees are trundling along. One lady got a new job, its not as good, but its a job, so now she can carry on the search for a new one. Another lady wants to get a better job so will introduce her to couple of my contacts in the information security world. I got some good contacts out of a dinner I attended at a CIO forum recently on identify and access control. So things are moving on.

SIFE LSE- National Competitions

I got this news from the team today. Very good stuff. Best of luck to the chaps.

On behalf of Myles, I am delighted to announce that the LSE SIFE team have made it through to the semi-finals of the National Competition!!
The next stage, the semi-finals, will be held in the morning and the finals will be in the afternoon – for those of you who are unaware, the winning team of the National Competition will represent the UK in the Global Competition in Kuala Lumpur later this year.
I’m sure all BAs will join me in congratulating the team for getting this far and wish you all the best for tomorrow – we’re behind you 100%!

This week’s update

Bit of a mixed bag this week. While one of the charities is going through some serious funding issues, that means that I as the interim treasurer is having to pour over financials and making the usual mess of it. Its so important in this day and age to make sure that your funding and your expenses are matched, otherwise we end up in severe trouble and then the basic existence of the charity itself is threatened. Specially the fact that your funding is very lumpy and not so certain while your outflow is smooth and very certain. The basic difference between your fixed and variable costs. Not good. The more I learn about this and the fascinating links with the public funding the more astonished I am.

On the SIFE front, went to hear the LSE team present to the business advisors. They did a fantastic job, I was so proud of what they have achieved, very professional and slick. I like!. My boys and girls, very nice. I do think they will do brilliantly at the national competition. We also need to print off their Annual Report. Will try to get a copy online.

On the IT4CH front, got the 1000 PC units from the bank, now the challenge is where to put them all, usually we get them in dribs and drabs, but now we got the full lot. So we need to worry about it a bit, but Pat is on the case.

This time when I am in India, I will try to pop into Disha to see how they are getting along. Long time no talk to them. I wonder how they are getting along. Ma and Baba are not getting a bit old to go check them out so have to go there myself.

Teach First

Well, I have been working with SIFE LSE to get them working with the teachers in the teach first organisation. The concept behind teach first is to take 500-600 absolutely brilliant teachers per year, give them individual coaches, give them a good grounding and then deploy them to the most challenging and difficult secondary schools in the country. The SIFE team is working to get the trading game into the schools via this channel.

But besides this, I thought that I should get a bit involved as well, so have put in a bid to be a coach for one of the teachers. Lets see how that works out. I am quite excited about this opportunity to work closely with these Brits who will teach for England. Now that’s the kind of passion and commitment that is rare in this world and if I can help in some little way, so be it.

Teach children how to manage finances

This article made me a bit upset. We are trying, via the SIFE trading game, to get more students up to speed on their financial situation, learn about how to handle savings, manage expenses, so on and so forth. Why on earth do we not teach our kids how to manage their finances? This is ridiculous. I quote:

The case for this is really strong. A paper out by the Financial Services Authority today says that most consumers don’t understand basic financial terms.  They don’t know what compound interest is, and they can’t work out whether the loan rate on the credit card is a good deal or not. They don’t know enough about bonus rates on savings products, so they frequently stay with their bank long after the savings rate it offered stopped being competitive. They don’t understand risk and reward in investment, so they are surprised when their fund, cosily named ‘Cautious’, falls 40 per cent in value.

We should be doing more to teach our kids how to manage their money so that they dont have bad financial histories and have to rely on the state because they cant be financially independent. The education secretary should really rethink this.

Shambling around doing stuff

It is slowly picking up speed on the charity front after the slow down over the summer. So what have I been up to?

1. Well, had a nice session with the SIFE LSE team who were formed for the first time this academic year. The financial trading game is going on fine, the interaction with TeachFirst is good and should pick up speed. Then we had a long chat about potential environmental projects and a shed load of projects popped up during the discussions, ranging from helping ex-convicts to homeless people to ex-soldiers who want to get back into civilian life and and and. Anyway, the chaps have decided to go away and check out the options. Spoke to one of our COO’s and he has kindly offered to sponsor a good sustainability project that has a clear business case (revenue, costs or both). So this promises to be good fun.

2. Help for Hero’s, we had a good quiz night and managed to raise more than £2000 for this charity. Good stuff, I think i will do a bit more for these fellows, lets see, I have some ideas which are brewing away.

3. Meeting somebody for the 100books projects next week which unfortunately sort of got paused because the main pusher of the project had to move jobs. But hopefully we can resurrect it and make something of this. Watch this space.

4. The team from Nottingham University SIFE team have met with Pat Ryan, who is our CEO of the IT4CH charity. They are apparently quite happy and excited to join into the charity and and and. Quite happy with this.

5. Talking about IT4CH, after pimping myself, managed to raise a £1000 cheque for the charity, that should help. We have also got a great volunteer who is speaking to various IT firms in London who could be potential donors of equipment.

6. An interesting project popped up at work during a sustainability meeting, and that’s a proposal to reduce the grammage of our printing paper from 80gsm to 75gsm. This could aim to reduce costs, save 15-12 tons of paper consumption daily. So am sponsoring this at my business unit to see if it works, if the client facing chaps don't object and the printing works. Quite a good idea, eh?

7. Didnt mention this before, but hosted a team from Essex University who were interested in knowing what we are doing with our sustainability piece within the bank. Quite an interesting talk, got two MD’s in as well to speak. This is one of our biggest selling points to graduates who love to join us because we live and breathe sustainability. Its indeed part of the DNA. Have you checked out our sustainability activities and report?? We walk the walk and talk the talk

Charitable activities update

Gosh, I haven't updated this blog for a long time. Well, have been on holiday, no? :)

1. IT4CH trustee meeting

Had an interesting time when I chaired the trustee meeting. Met with a volunteer who is offering to call up IT companies in London to get hold of their old kit and perhaps give donations. I find it humbling to see and meet with these volunteers. They, for no other reason, but to help out others who are more unfortunate than others, spend their own money and time. Wonderful, and this is what I love about humans, despite their propensity to hack off other’s heads and do mayhem, they also love to help others. Attaboy! I am also going to start writing one photo essay on each volunteer or donation per month, hope to get more content generated for the website. Have you visited it yet? More photos coming up soon. Also attended and spoke at some banking and IT dinners. The good part of this is that they pay the charity a honorarium when I do this. Killing two birds with one stone, eh?

2. Swansea teaching

Will be making my annual pilgrimage to Swansea to talk to the young ones about how to succeed (lol), how to manage their money, and what kind of financial management should they learn. Also about career choices and stuff. Will let you know more when that happens, its sometime in October.

3. SIFE Annual launch

Had a nice time with the business advisory group meeting with the SIFE UK launch, met with several students who were all passionate about helping others with doing business projects. One young lady from Durham wanted more help, so might pop up there one day to see what I can help with. My own group relating to LSE here is spinning up, they are hiring more people at the freshers fair for the LSE SIFE group. Will be meeting them next week. So I am quite happy and looking forward to doing much with this project.

4. MBS mentoring

Have signed up to do mentoring with my old alma mater in Manchester. So have submitted few selections for the students. Found it curious that many students were selecting every bloody industry for career choices under the sun. That’s not good, one has to be focussed. You cant say that you want to be in banking and in pharmaceuticals. It shows signs of a confused mind.

5. For some reason, the 100books initiative has gone a bit cold which is a bit of a shame. I was really looking forward to working with that one. Oh! well, no worries, next time :)

I am also inundated with requests to fund people’s bike rides, climbs, marathons, and and and. While I do try to help, its not fun to turn down many. Keeping my powder dry and money for the ones which I am looking at..Another reason why I didnt give any money to

Anyway, more later :)

Charity Photographic competitions and other news on the charitable front

I am conscious that i haven't posted here for some time, it has been manically busy at work and then I left for holiday so wanted to drop a line on what I have been up to in the past month or so.

1. The IT4CH charity is now moving from up north down to London, it just makes it easier for our CEO and our team to do this from London.
2. We are also negotiating with several local authorities to lease their buildings for us to keep our spare equipment in, this promises to be of much use.
3. I put in some funding proposals for carbon change improvement products back in the firm, but dont think they got selected. Shame, next time I will do better :). Am trying to see if we can get some of this stuff formally pushed and funded in a separate matter
4. SIFE is powering up for this academic year, as usual, I will be at LSE but have also offered to help Essex out. As I mentioned before, i am considering doing something with them on the academic and research front and I thought it might be able to kill 2 birds with one stone.
5. The discussions with Manchester Business School proceed sporadically, I am specially happy about an internship/graduate recruitment proposal, lets see, early days yet.
6. And finally, am thinking about submitting my photo essay on the Whittington Hospital in North London to this photo competition. I realise what we do with the kids is not so visually attractive, perhaps Disha would have been better but its way out in India and dont know when I will be there next. I quote from the site:

PhotoPhilanthrophy believes in the power of photography to inspire hope and understanding and to connect people around the world. All subjects photographed should be treated with respect, compassion and dignity. PhotoPhilanthropy reserves the the right to reject any submission based on quality, content or theme. All submissions will be reviewed by the PhotoPhilanthropy team for accuracy of information. Written essays may be edited for clarity.

Submitted photos must depict the work of a charitable organization (designated by 501c3 in the US, or international equivalent) and be presented as a photo essay. All photographs in the essay must have been taken within the last 3 years. Photographers may enter two essays in the same year. An essay entered in a previous year of the competition may not be re-entered.

For all submissions, collaboration with the charitable organization will be verified.  For this reason it is mandatory to submit a contact name and email of the person you worked with at the organization.

Upon completion of review, accepted photo essays will be posted on the PhotoPhilanthropy website.

What do you think? do you think I have a shot at it with the photographs from the hospital? I realise the differences between the visual impact of a hospital in north London versus say a charity in a hauntingly beautiful but bloody poor place in say Nepal or hot/dry/dusty Sudan, but what the heck, all part of the learning, eh?

The influence of a teacher stops at eternity

You might recall that we are trying to improve the financial literacy of British children by an investment trading game that we run for school children. One of the ways we are thinking about expanding the scope is by training teachers to do this rather than rely on the LSE SIFE team.

So one of the things that the firm sponsors is TeachFirst. This is an initiative which tries to bring teachers into challenged secondary schools in the UK. The charity assists in helping top graduated become excellent teachers. Not too many, 5-600 teachers per year and the idea is to make a small but significant difference. So we had a nice little meeting with them, along with the LSE SIFE team, we discussed ways of getting the trading game packaged up and then given to the teachers, we discussed ways of getting a competition going and again, funding for this wouldn't be a major issue.

Also spoke to our internal brokerage about seeing if they could support us, but lets see where that goes.

I am quite chuffed about this all, if we can get these 5-600 teachers yearly to use the trading game and push it out to the students, hey, big impact :) Very happy.

News on the #charity front

Apologies for missing out the last week’s update, I have just moved off from my current project and am spinning up a giant new transformation programme which is making my hair hurt, eyes itch and toes curl. Nothing big or huge to report on the past two week’s progress but some little ones.

1. In last year’s SIFE competition, London School of Economics team, which I had the privilege to advice, won the rookie competition and the HSBC financial literacy prize. Very chuffed indeed. Very good work, girls.

2. The SIFE team and I are meeting TeachFirst on Monday. To see how we can get the trading game and our financial literacy mission into the teaching of these excellent high calibre teachers. If 800 of these excellent teachers annually pick up our game and we squirt this out to the schools, this will become brilliant and big.

3. Am also working on how to see this teacher pack business become global in nature, but very hush hush for now :)

4. Have also been thinking about old laptops. The fact that I found out that so many students are unable to study at home because they dont have pc’s (IN THIS internet DAY AND AGE!!!) is shocking. Or even at work, quite a lot of schools are disadvantaged in this. Do not have good equipment. So am working with our IT department to see if we can kick loose some 100-200 old laptops for one school as an experiment. We are going to go meet the school in 2 weeks time, so wait for that :)

5. I attended a charity fund raiser for VSO. Quite impressive. Getting more details on it. And it was a chocolate tasting event, so wait up for that essay.

SIFE Financial Literacy Awards

Over the past few months, I have been working as a business advisor to a newbie team from the London School of Economics who have developed a trading game for school kids. This is under the SIFE programme, or Students In Free Enterprise which is sponsored, besides other firms, by my firm as well. While the teams are basically off to do good things to encourage enterprise, my firm sponsors a prize for the best financial literacy programme. As it so happens, I volunteered to be a judge at the financial literacy programme judgement.

There were a total of about 16 odd teams who had applied, then the SIFE management did a first cut of them to bring them down to 11 and then another cut down to 5. These teams were then put forward to a group of bankers who were the judges. (I obviously recused myself from the LSE presentation)

I sat there and was listening to the students who have actually delivered a variety of programmes. Some examples:

1. Working with entrepreneurs and small firms in distress to improve their financial management of their businesses

2. Working with micro lending firms in Ghana, Philippines, India, Bangladesh etc. to improve their handling of their finances and that of their clients. A great example came of their work when the typhoon struck the Philippines and devastated one of the groups that the micro lender was helping. But because they had savings and some idea of cashflow management and assets, they could recover from the disaster and were back in business chop chop. Now that’s making a real difference.

3. Immigrants / asylum seekers and refugees who are waiting for processing are stuck in tower blocks, with nothing to do, cant do jobs, in damn near poverty levels. So this university teacher got together, gave them financial management teaching, helped them setup a baking and cooking business and the women have started to generate up to £100-200 per sale in profit. Small numbers, but great work. This will help regenerate the area, create a community around these women and are also creating an international cook book. Fascinating idea, eh?

4. Several projects related to teaching kids on how to setup their own businesses, such as creating jewellery out of recycled materials and then sell them at school fairs.

5. A team was training kids on demand and supply, how trading works and got them all excited about this.

6. Getting chemistry students to create drugs and then bring in Glaxo and Kings College London (my current alma mater) to assist in show how that drug can be commercialised. Now that’s a brilliant idea, no? take chemistry students from the technical to the business to the commercial. Now if that isn't going to encourage entrepreneurship and value addition, then what is?

This is all being done by students in the undergraduate degree courses. And they are doing stuff that adults are not. They have the passion, I loved to see the determination and happiness and dedication and enthusiasm shining from their eyes. Based on the back of a fag pack, just these 5 teams that I saw have made a difference, a real tangible difference to about 10k people around the world. Now that’s creditable.

Also I am very chuffed that the LSE team was recognised as the best team :), very happy for them, those boys and girls did very well, very impressed. Here are some stats from this report.

Through the HSBC Financial Literacy Programme, SIFE teams apply for grants ranging from $250 to $1000 to help fund projects of their own creation that stimulate economic opportunity by helping others develop the personal financial management skills necessary to achieve financial independence. 

• More than 1,506 grants awarded.
• 2,202 projects completed.
• 25,250 college students participated.
• HSBC contributed more than $3 million to SIFE and to support teams' efforts.
• In 2009, HSBC disbursed 287 grants to college teams.

All in all, I am very proud of these kids. They are doing something for their community. Not sitting back and just wasting time on beer or what have you. Making the world a better place. I speak to so many kids and students in my career. Very few actually have the gumption, courage and determination to succeed. Having a social or charitable conscience usually means that they are going to be good employees or great friends. And it is not difficult at all, its quite easy to help. So my plans are to see if we can help other universities and actually try to increase the coverage as well as the depth of offerings to actually reach out to more people (both here in the UK and in India)

Prove that you made a difference

 

In the last post on this topic, I talked about how we are looking to help the LSE SIFE Team identify whether or not they are actually making a difference. At end of the day, we need to make sure that we are actually providing information, training, documentation etc. within the trading game, so that the students are actually learning things. We cannot really subject them to an examination, but what we can do is to have them fill out a questionnaire. When we met, the team mentioned that their questionnaire wasn’t really helping. Either the students were marking all on the high side or not marking at all. So we offered the help of our communications expert to evaluate and validate their questionnaire.

We met three members of the team yesterday and had a good conversation. I was reminded of the fact that I have quite a similar conversations with every project. The basic question that we ask in project or change management is, ok, so you want to run this project, but what do you want to achieve? What do you think is “good” is? What we don’t want to do is to be Columbus, start off not knowing where we are going and on reaching not knowing where we are, on coming back not having an idea where we had been and we do this all on somebody else’s money. So, it’s important to know what we are going to measure and what we are going to deliver, otherwise how will we know that the project is successful? Show me the money. Talk is cheap, prove that you made a difference. Show that what you did actually did something.

In my experience, that is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks. Speaking with the project sponsor, it takes time to extricate what benefits are going to be seen? Are we talking about process efficiency or reduction in operational loss, or revenue benefits, or what? It’s vital to clearly identify the benefits that we will deliver. And frankly, it has to be short and sweet, not a full tome. In other words, your sponsor should be able to explain the benefits of the project in 2-3 top level sentences, in about the time it takes for the sponsor and her boss to take an elevator ride (hence elevator speech).

Same with the SIFE group, Hay, Katie and I discussed what they are trying to achieve and how they can measure it. We gave them ideas like, find out how many students want to go on to do a higher degree BEFORE they do the trading game and then ask them AFTER the game about: “How to use a control group to measure progress and performance if you don’t want to submit pre and post questionnaires to the same audience. How to have mini case studies, use cartoon characters, how to put questions like “I feel confident that I am….” “I know about xyz”, talk about 1-5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree) scaling versus a yes / no answer choice.”

We further discussed the HSBC competition, their presentation and preparation needed. There is so much to do! I look forward to meeting the full team of business advisors this Thursday and will report back then.

Late breaking news: there are definitely angels in the bank who look out for business advisors. An angel emailed me out of the blue with some brilliant suggestions and actual help which can further improve this project. More on that in the next post.