Welcome to SE Forum’s Annual Meeting on Sunday 5th of April!

We will kick-off the meeting with a workshop to determine SE Forum’s vision and goals and finish up with the annual meeting. The meeting is open for anyone to join but only registered members are allowed to vote. You become a SE Forum member by first depositing 100 SEK to bankgiro 5629-9902 and then mailing your contacts to medlem [at] se-forum.se.

Place: The meeting will take place on Idungatan 4B (Nearest subway station is Odenplan) map.

Time: Sunday 5th of April at 3 pm until 6 pm

Please let us know if you are coming by sending us an e-mail to: create [a] se-forum.se

If you can’t join us on Sunday you are still welcome to mail us ideas, project requests, tips on speakers for the SE-Bars and so on. If you would like to nominate someone to the board, please contact Jakob Sundberg by sending a mail to create [at] se-forum.se with Att: Jakob in the subject. Motions to be taken in account for the annual meeting are to be sent to Jonas Pinzke (create [at] se-forum.se with Att: Jonas in the subject) one week before the meeting.

Regarding the vision-workshop:

The term social entrepreneurship has spread over countries, sectors and under different names. New organizations and companies are getting interested at the same time as more and more entrepreneurs come to the conclusion that they in fact are social entrepreneurs. But can anyone be regarded as a social entrepreneur or is it according to us in SE Forum some criteria that needs to be met? And what role shall SE Forum play in these new times?

You are invited to a vision-workshop! Under guidance from Harry McNeil we will in a creative way define SE Forum’s vision (What do we strive after?), mission (What should we accomplish?) and what SE Forum’s short- and long term goals are and how we should achieve them.

It will be an exiting afternoon and we hope to see you all there!

Welcome!

Mattias and Magnus really inspired me at the latest SE-Bar. Once the principle of Cradle to Cradle design came into my head I haven’t been able to let it go. It’s overwhelming to think that we can create a waste-free society but at the same time it renders hope that the earth isn’t a lost cause after all.

One beautiful thing about Cradle to Cradle is that the blame-game regarding handling mans impact on nature is thrown out the window. It isn’t about compensating for the flight you took to your vacation by giving money to a tree-planting program in Africa. It’s about designing everything so that it has no effect on the environment or actually contributes to it. That way the more we consume the better it is for the environment. And this really takes it to its edge: If we design everything correctly from the start it goes beyond sustainable – It contributes and is beneficial instead.

I recently saw the dutch documentary ”Waste = Food” where Dr. Michael Braungart says: ”If I would ask you, How is your relationship with your girlfriend? And you would say sustainable, then I would say, oh, Rob I’m so sorry for you, If this is the key thing, sustainability then it’s just the minimum, you can somehow deal with it, it’s maintanence. No, sustainability is the minimum but from there it starts”.

He gives an example of an ice cream wrapper that they have designed that is liquid at room temperature, only solid when it’s frozen. If that isn’t enough it’s also filled with seeds. What you do is: take your ice cream out of the freezer and unwrap it, throw the paper on the ground. Within hours it becomes liquid biodegrades and you have just planted new seeds in the same way as birds do when they eat berries, carry the seeds in their stomachs and ”plant” them somewhere else. Through technology, man becomes natural again.

The two speakers from the latest SE-Bar have now set up a network and a website for Cradle to Cradle interested in Sweden with more information and links.

Waste = Food

William McDonough presents Cradle to Cradle on Ted Talks:

by Daniel E

SE Forum has joined as supporters to Entréchange; an initiative from Nustart aimed at presenting and promoting entrepreneurship as a feasible and powerful driving element towards sustainability and social change.

Entréchange invites students to join in case studies, solving problems that social entrepreneurs might face. Three companies provide the cases for the students to work on: MyC4 (former speaker of one SE Bar), akvo.org & Rehact.
It’s a two day event on the 28th of March and 3rd of April.

Daniel Eidhagen from SE Forum will participate as Key Note speaker on the 28th of March and Harry McNeil, co-founder of SE Forum, will participate as a panel member for discussions on social entrepreneurship on April 3rd.

The second half of the event is open to the public between 13:00-16:00 on April 3rd. Come and listen to the students present their cases and inspiring talks on social entrepreneurship by Tim Vang (co-founder MyC4), Magnus Lindkvist (Trendspotter) and Thomas Bjekkeman-Pettersson (co-founder Akvo).

More information on Entréchange can be found on their website:
http://www.nustart.sg/entrechange
Download flyer for the event here(.png)
Download invitation for the public part of the event here (.pdf)
Registration for the public event can be made here

by Daniel E

In the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, this tuesday (17/3), you could read the headline ”Highlight competent women in the companies” (Lyft fram kompetenta kvinnor i bolagen). It’s the headline of Birgitta Wistrand’s (former member of Swedish Parliament and board chairman of Fredrika Bremerförbundet) reply to a previous article on the need for more female entrepreneurs in Sweden.

Wistrand says that it is a long step for a small company owner to become a board member in a listed company. She asks the question: ”Why don’t we [the companies] highlight the most obvious resource, namely all the competent women that already work within the companies” (free translation).

This is precisely what our next SE Bar is about. Invited speakers are from the company Wiminvest which works with mid-sized to large companies helping them identify competent women within these companies and lift them to higher positions. It goes to show that the topic of women in business is as hot a topic as ever and we are looking forward to a good turnout and discussion on Wednesday (25th of March) at the SE-Bar.

You can find the article here (in Swedish)

You can find more information on the next SE Bar to the right.

Daniel E

Wiminvest

On Wednesday the 25th of March SE Forum invites you to SE Bar. As usual we will have an inspiring social entrepreneur invited as speaker to tell us about their business. Come and learn how your company can work for a better world and meet others interested in social entrepreneurship. The SE Forum board will be there to answer questions about the organization and how you can get involved in exciting projects.

Speaker this time is Sofia Falk, founder of the successful company Wiminvest. We will hear the start-up story of the company devoted to putting more women into leading business positions. They do this by starting from the beginning and getting companies to early invest and develop the talented women they want to see in management and in their boards in the future. According to Wiminvest, Sweden doesn’t need more facts, statistics and data to show that we have too few women in the boards. We need to do something about the fact that seven out of ten women decline when offered board positions. That’s why Wiminvest help middle-sized to large companies to develop their 25–35 year old female talents. Through Wiminvest they recieve the opportunity to train their skills and grow into a position with result-responsibility. The effort is made before the women have been formed by the norms of the workplace and before they have chosen to change workplace. Furthermore the company management gets to meet the women to understand what support they need on their way upwards.

The SE Bars take place on the last Wednesday of every month 5.30 -7.00pm at restaurant Publik (the top floor of PUB-huset) in Stockholm.

As always, you will meet other people interested and involved in social entrepreneurship and get a chance to discuss ways to get engaged in SE with people from SE Forum. As usual the talk is free of charge and feel free to bring others that might be interested.

Welcome!