Hello, I’m Rob and I’ve spent most of my life trying to do good through business.

I’ve worked in social business for getting on for getting on for 25 years. I started out working at a fairtrade cooperative in Leeds in the late 1990s.

I then spent ten years supporting social entrepreneurs to set up and grow successful social enterprises.

And from 2010 to 2023 I ran an award-winning social enterprise that runs all sorts of great projects - from bringing empty homes back into use to setting up a project to share thousands of items of school uniform for free.

In May 2023 I left the social enterprise I co-founded in 2010 - a tough decision, but the right one to give the social enterprise the best chance of continuing to do good work.

Moving on

·
June 8, 2023
Moving on

You haven’t heard from me for best part of a couple of months. That’s largely because I haven’t had much space in my head for much else other than sorting things out for me leaving the organisation I helped to set up 13 years ago. We went into detail on the background to the situation on

I’ve been writing about social business for over fifteen years

Over the years I’ve become known for my honest reflections on the work that I do - and have written for publications including The Guardian, New Start Magazine and The Yorkshire Post.

I mostly write about social innovation

I’m interested in finding innovative ways to tackle social problems - as this is what I’ve been doing for most of my working life. So that’s what I tend to write about here, with a particular emphasis on the biggest challenge we face - how to respond to the climate crisis.

Tuning in

·
January 22, 2024
Tuning in

It’s been a while since I last wrote. A new part-time job means I need to find a slightly different routine to make sure I find the time to write. So this week’s post is a bit of mixed bag of various things that have caught my eye over the last few weeks.

It’d be great to be in touch

If you’d like to, please subscribe to get full access to my newsletter - which I’ll aim to send once or twice a week.

User's avatar

Subscribe to The Social Business

A newsletter full of hope, inspiration and stories of people and places making good stuff happen - with a particular focus on how we can tackle the climate crisis.

People

I'm a Leeds-based social entrepreneur, exploring how to come up with creative ways to tackle the big social and environmental problems we face.