As I'm sure all you long term subscribers will have noticed, I've been blogging less and less about the Urban Survival Project over the past few months. It's not that I suddenly lost interest and moved on to other things, but more to do with the fact that ...
- When I looked at it closely, I couldn't see a way of reducing costs down to the small scale £10-30k funding available for social enterprises. For a good example, see my post on my experience with UnLtd
- I similarly couldn't make a compelling case for financial return on investment for VCs that might provide the quick ROI to convince them to invest in the scale needed £100-£300k. It was easy enough to see scope for ROI, but the social imperative is a major psychological hurdle for most investors and you have to be really compelling to overcome that.
- I never did meet any philanthropists regardless of scale.
So I've been taking a different route, building connections and working on related youth and social projects until there was some sensible glimmer of hope that made it worth pushing effort into developing the USP idea further.
Fortunately it looks like that might just have happened. I came across Google's Project 10 to the 100th the other day, which is a project to fund large social enterprises and looks like it might be just the thing. Check it out - http://www.project10tothe100.com/. I'll write more on it later but the strapline is "May Those Who Help The Most Win" - sounds perfect!!
Be ready for much more USP this month :)
