sutton038

So I haven’t managed to get a blog post out for a couple weeks. That’s partly because I’ve been having some cash-flow management problems, due to some crap planning on my part and some unfortunate payment delays. This is an ongoing issue in freelance life, to smile through gritted teeth when someone at an organisation tells you the admin guy went on holiday and forgot to process your invoice. In a situation when one’s reserves are marginal, small frictions in the system can wipe you out. Needless to say, when my landlord sent me an sms a few weeks ago saying ‘You haven’t paid your rent, and you have six months of bills to pay too,’ I got a deep down chill. My landlord is a cool guy. He only has one name, and our contract is informal at best, built on trust and belief in human nature rather than legal structures. That’s why he gave me some leeway, and that’s also why I didn’t want to abuse that trust. So I called up my friend George, and asked him what I should do. He wrote a song for m...

London is the home to a small but growing ‘social finance’ community. It’s an imprecise term, but in general social finance is seen to encompass finance for social causes, finance for public services, finance for social enterprises, and finance for vulnerable communities. That covers a pretty wide scope, ranging from crackpot schemes to move back to a barter economy, all the way to mainstream debates about alternative finance sources for public services. On Wednesday I attended PopSe! , a ‘popup think-tank’ on social enterprise. The theme of the day was social finance, and in particular, the issues around the UK government’s plans to set up the ‘ Big Society Bank ’. That’s a pretty politicised name for a bank, and gives rise to interpretations of it being the thin edge of a wedge the government is promoting to take the slack from its public service pull-back. To be accurate though, the Big Society Bank is not really a bank. It’s more like an investment fund, and it will start with £100...