Dirk Bischof’s Post

What a win! I've always been passionate about the environment. Together with my friend Fergal McEntee, who just stood for the Green Party of England and Wales, in Putney, we ran a Solar Panel installation company for a couple of years, training UK electricians to become PV installers and helping them set-up Solar PV companies and Sustainability consultancies. We focused on delivering climate change programmes in schools and colleges and, of course, installing loads of solar PV on people's homes and schools. These homes and schools to this day, benefit from free electricity, money into their pockets and the good feels of generating green electricity for years to come. Its amazing to see that Keir Starmer's The Labour Party is not wasting any time to do whats right, strongly encouraged by Friends of the Earth. With more onshore wind coming online by removing planning barriers and actively divesting from fossil fuels, in this case coal, a just and green transition in the UK energy sector is garnering steam. Next up, nationalising UK Water companies who've utterly failed their customers and the environment. Water is a public good and should have never been privatised to enrich shareholders!!

Maybe I can wear suits more often? Great evening being welcomed by Mark Huxley FRSA, Master Entrepreneur at The Company of Entrepreneurs joint him and many other distinguished guests at their Election Court Banquet. It’s not often you get to experience a city of London institution like the The Tallow Chandlers' Company’s Hall, residing there since 1672!! Really looking forward to our work between The Company of Entrepreneurs mentoring founders with Hatch Enterprise UK - and who better than experienced founders mentoring new founders 🔥

If you're running and growing a social enterprise, fundraising is most likely part of your role or that of your fundraising and business development team. Here's a unique opportunity to come together with peers and experienced fundraising professionals with a proven track record of raising millions of GBP, looking to share their secret sauce. We've got limited seating capacity for this event in central London and want to connect with as many social entrepreneurs who want to up their fundraising game. Personally I've learned so much from Caroline, who's been my #mentor now for 3 years, to help me understand how to improve the quality of our asks, how to be more ambitious and how to build an outstanding fundraising and business development team Come meet us next Tuesday. If you're a funder and interested in (social) entrepreneurship, do come along too as we're looking to niche down on some critical barriers to overcome to build a better, more forward thinking and doing sector #TeamWorkMakesTheDreamWork

Reunions are always special for East Germans! I was so excited to meet Anja again after 20 years. We both left east Germany aged 21 in search for new opportunities. We both worked in medical market research back in the early 2000s, along with many other people, who would become good friends. We reminisced about the need to build communities that are able to support people especially on a local level and especially when things are tough, like they are now in many places across the UK. We also know that building a thriving community takes time and that diversity of thought and people can make it be a place where people bring their insights, experience and relationships to bear to help each other. When everyone contributes, everyone is helped We both know from experience that when you have very little, the little you have is best shared around, like it was before the Berlin Wall came down. Happy Friday and here’s to all the amazing people who are building thriving communities

I almost didn't go... There was the Sage Networking event happening yesterday evening but still feeling somewhat jet-lagged and it being rainy, I wasn't 100% sure I really wanted to go. So, I said to myself, if the rain stops in the next 15mins, I'll go...And, 5mins later...the rain stopped giving no more excuse to not cycle into town. And the event in central London did not disappoint, great insights, great event space and great to meet new people! Its always great to bump into Hatch Enterprise UK graduates like Trish Hewitt- LLB, MA, FCIPD alongside great people like Porteur Keene & David D'Souza, who delivered an excellent fireside chat on HR at the intersection of finance and technology, with companies needing to consider all 3 in a more holistic, integrated way to achieve business objectives. Lots to take in from the other fireside chats too but as always, getting together with people IRL again feels great and was the reason for going to a networking event in the first place :) Enjoy your Thursday!

Change always comes at a cost, to give up the old and embrace the new. Not everyone is comfortable with that

Great work The Entrepreneurs Network & Youth Business International (YBI) with some strong recommendations for the incoming government to ensure enterprise support can happen in a sustainable and meaningful way.

Two days of work in Tokyo come to an end, with some amazing meetings with corporate partners and NGO/ NPO partners alike. Rainy season seems to also have started ☔️ Yesterday we delivered another sold-out event in Roppongi talking about corporate employee engagement and opportunities for companies to engage with the impact space, like social enterprises and impact businesses. A surprising statistic that I learned in the last few days was that the Gallup Workplace survey places employee engagement globally at 23% - a historic “high”. Gallup defines employee engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” This also means that the majority of people, or 80% of the workplaces surveyed isn’t involved in or enthusiastic about their work and their workplace. In the UK and Japan, employee engagement drops to 10% and 5% respectively. However, I also learned that companies with engaged employees are outperforming their competitors across a number of metrics, from increased productivity, reduced absenteeism and higher profits. For a 10% increase in employee engagement scores, a $2,500 increase in profit can be realised per company employee, per year. For some companies employing 10s or even 100s of thousands of people, this seems significant. But we also realised collectively that engaging people at work beyond their day to day is not easy. Neither here in Japan nor in other places. We will look to share some of these (common) challenges we heard from the companies over the next few weeks as I feel there are surely interesting solutions that people already worked on or even implemented. My last 2 weeks of work are upon me, before it’s back to the UK 🇬🇧 #CorporateEngagement #People #CSR #Volunteering

This week I had the huge pleasure to lead a workshop in Tokyo together with my colleagues from ETIC (Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities) and World in You. We got to speak to some of Japan's biggest companies about their corporate #volunteering activities and challenges. Some of the biggest challenges were: - Engaging a broad staff base beyond those who always volunteer (to those volunteers who go beyond --> we know who you are and we LOVE YOU for being volunteer ambassadors!!!) - Implementing volunteering as a company policy, with dedicated, paid-for time off (vs having to squeeze it into daily work) - Measuring the impact corporate volunteering has in the workplace We've also come up with some initial solutions, which the participants got to share in groups, knowing that they are their best support network already: - Working with senior leaders as role-models who need to be seen volunteering their time in the community - Implementing volunteering policies into HR contracts (e.g. 2-days volunteering/ year) - Capturing volunteering data using e.g. Benevity and unlocking benchmarking capabilities as well as aligning volunteer & corporate giving capabilities This workshop was one of the highlights for me on this current Japan trip. I was able to share some of the best practice approaches from the UK, especially around the implementation of the UK Social Value Act and how we work with our partners such as UBS, NatWest Group, Yum! Brands, eBay, Ares Management Corporation and many more. Corporate engagement with society is no longer a 'nice to do' but is becoming more and more critical to achieve much needed progress towards shared societal and environmental objectives (e.g. SDGs, Social Value, ESG...please pick your acronym) and we need to go from achieving shareholder value to unlocking stakeholder value on a much deeper level. The world depends on it! As always, very thankful to the team at ETIC, World in You and the many people who came. As we ran out of seating capacity, here's to next week's workshops, one more time :) #TeamWorkMakesTheDreamWork #SDGs #ESG #Volunteering