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Last updated: 28 January 2010
29 January 2010
Little did Angela Smith know when she agreed to take part in the Social Enterprise Ambassadors’ job swap programme that her job swap would involve spending two days with Sophi Tranchell, the Managing Director of Divine Chocolate; one day at the Cabinet Office and one day at Divine’s offices (including an obligatory chocolate tasting, of course).
The first day of the swap took place on Tuesday 26 January, with Sophi accompanying Angela on a series of meetings to discuss the work of the third sector and promote social enterprise. They took part in a breakfast roundtable discussion with key business leaders, discussing how businesses could involve social enterprises in their supply chains as a way of fulfilling their corporate and social responsibility and buy products and services more ethically.
Angela and Sophi later met Ian Lucas, Minister for Business and Regulatory Reform at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, over lunch and talked about ways mainstream businesses can work with social enterprises more effectively.
On the second day of the job swap, on Thursday 28 January, Angela accompanied Sophi on a round of meetings at Divine, seeing the wide range of partnership work that Divine pursues with the private sector to help promote fair and ethical trading and to educate the public about social enterprise. They had a particularly productive meeting with Penguin Books, generating ideas for how Penguin could get involved in Divine’s plans for marketing their Easter eggs.
The highlight of the day though was the morning chocolate tasting session, where Angela and Sophi tasted a selection of flavours under development for the US market.
The purpose of the job swaps is to engage high profile business leaders in the work of social enterprise, helping raise awareness of the diversity and entrepreneurship of the social enterprise sector by allowing the members of the interchange to shadow each other for a day.
The series of job swaps has already taken off to a successful start with Nigel Kershaw, Chief Executive of Big Issue Invest, swapping jobs with Michael Morley, Chief Executive of Coutts. More job swaps are being arranged for the coming months.
Social Enterprise Ambassadors programme