Social Enterprise Summit + World Forum Opens Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the first day of the Social Enterprise Alliance’s annual Summit, a national conference that features a wide variety of presentations, workshops and networking in this field. This year’s Summit is being held in San Francisco. More information is available at www.se-alliance.org.

If you can make it to the conference, great, I know you won’t regret it. I might see you there. Incidentally, I’ll be co-presenting a workshop on Thursday morning on business planning for established social enterprises. My case study will be on the Greyston Foundation, operator of the Greyston Bakery, which is a social enterprise in Yonkers, New York that supplies all the brownies that go into Ben & Jerry’s ice creams. My colleague, Tamra Ryan, will be talking about the Women’s Bean Project, and in particular their recent nascent jewelry venture.

But if you can’t make it, you can still connect via the wonders of social media. Here’s one way to do it. SEA’s two Huffington Post contest winners will blog live from the conference. You can either follow the SEA blog or subscribe to SEA’s RSS feed to read their daily posts. Check them out at: http://www.sea-alliance.blogspot.com/

Even though I’ll be attending the conference, I plan to read them just to see how their observations differ from mine.

Alternatively, if you’re Twitter-inclined, check out TWITTER #socent10 at http://twitter.com/socent10. Or Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Social-Enterprise-Alliance/59580246388?ref=ts

Frankly, I have no idea if these postings will be entertaining, informative or, well, something else, although I expect to find the blogs from the conference quite interesting. I would recommend connecting at least a couple times during the next few days to see if there’s some stuff there you can use in your own social enterprise work. We’ll see whether social media brings some value to those who cannot attend in person. I hope so.