In the autumn of 2010, we brought together six teams of people working on very early-stage social ventures.

The people behind those ideas are from diverse backgrounds including software developers, designers or people who have personal experience of something they want to change. Their projects are beyond ‘just an idea’, but before serious money.

For ten weeks, we worked with our six teams through Bethnal Green Ventures dinners, 1-1 support and specialist mentoring sessions: We built a community of people to help social projects answer the question: ‘What do I do next?’ – whether that was about coding the product or service they’re building or about how they sustain an idea into the future.

You can read more about our six social ventures here.

You can find out about some of the other people who helped make this happen here.

We’re looking forward to opening a second round of applications for Bethnal Green Ventures in autumn 2011.

If you’d like to keep up to date, drop us a line at hello@bethnalgreenventures.com and we’ll add you to our mailing list.

And check out www.sicamp.org for more information about Social Innovation Camp, who run the programme.

Ten weeks and six projects later, Bethnal Green Ventures Show and Tell finale kicked off last night.

Over the last ten weeks, we’ve been working with six early-stage social ventures who are using web and mobile tools to change stuff that matters.

Some of them were little more than hunches or articulations of problems when we met; others had first users and prototypes. You can read about how they started out in previous blog posts.

Whatever stage they were in, their challenge has been to accelerate those ideas with our help into working solutions as quickly as possible in just ten weeks.

Last night was their chance to showcase what they’d created to an invited audience at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, London.

We’ll be posting their presentations up here and a write up of what happened shortly, but in the meantime, there are some people we’d like to thank who’ve helped make Bethnal Green Ventures happen.

Firstly, huge thanks to all our six teams for being our guinea pigs for the Bethnal Green Ventures programme.

Secondly, to the Young Foundation for housing us and all their support.

Also huge thanks to all of our amazing Bethnal Green Ventures speakers who came to share their stories of starting things up:

Charles Armstrong

Richard Pope

Tom Taylor

Jonathan Drori

Melanie Hayes

Ken Banks

Gavin Starks

And Eleanor Ford

And finally, to the people who’ve helped advise and support our teams from kick-off Saturday to Show and Tell, especially Tom, Tom and Dan at Pipeline Ideas and Kate Stokes at the Young Foundation.

It’s been an amazing ten weeks – but this is just the beginning. Watch this space of further details about Bethnal Green Ventures in 2011!

It’s amazing the hoops people have to jump through to get a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check to volunteer with an organisation in the UK, not to mention the costs to the charity as well as the waiting time.

With hundreds of charities and other not-for profit organisations in the UK, each having to apply to the bureau there is a lot of replication and inefficiency. It also means that time is lost when people could be volunteering and doing good in their communities but have to wait to be cleared.

Our fifth Bethnal Green Venture is about changing all of that.

Simple CRB aims to make the process of organisations and individuals obtaining a CRB hassle-free.

By building a centralised platform that can manage individuals and organisations CRB checks, Simple CRB is aiming to do this for a fraction of the cost with a quicker turn around.

The idea came from founder Anna Pearson’s own frustration with going through the CRB process herself.

Anna has been joined by Matthew Harris and Basil Safwat and the team are gathering views on people’s current experiences of CRB checks at www.simplecrb.com which will be used to develop their service.

If you’ve ever gone through the CRB process, share your experience by taking their survey and help build something better.

All our Bethnal Green Ventures ideas are early-stage; however, we still wanted to work with a mix of ideas at slightly different points along their journey to becoming real solutions.

Some, like The Good Gym, were already testing their idea with users. Others were little more than the articulation of an interesting problem that needed solving. Homeless SMS was one of the latter.

Photo credit: kjpm

Will Brayne came to us with just a hunch about a problem he wanted to explore further. Thanks to the personal experience of a friend of his, he’d become interested in the provision of information to the homelessness in London. His day job in mobile technology had led him to investigate how mobile tools were being used in the developing world to facilitate communication with hard-to-reach groups via SMS messaging by projects such as Frontline SMS or mPedigree. So Will started thinking about how you could use some of the ideas which made use of simple SMS tools in other parts of the world with the UK’s homeless communities.

The idea began as a tool to help signpost homeless people to shelter providers, but Will’s time at Bethnal Green Ventures and talking to homeless communities and service providers across London has been helping him to really understand the problem he’s trying to solve. The initial idea has come a long way and Will is making the most of his final weeks of Bethnal Green Ventures to finalise the first incarnation of Homeless SMS.

We’ve asked all six of the Bethnal Green Ventures teams to blog about their ideas here over the coming weeks.

Our third project, FLiP, is an online tool to engage young people via their social network and direct them to opportunities.

An early concept screen-shot of the FLiP homepage and the FLiP logo

FLiP uses social media to get young peoples’ friends to tell them what they are good at. This is done by rating them on their transferable skills.

FLiP aims to get young people actively engaged in searching for employment and/or training opportunities that are suitable for them to enable the discovery of their interests in the world of work.

FLiP began life when vision and communications designer Itamar Ferrer and Common Ground’s Bruno Taylor and Vincenzo Di Maria, partnered up with White October to develop the concept at the Jailbrake weekend back in March 2010.

The FLiP team continues its development with the funding support of NESTA and UnLtd, including delivery partners Camden Council and Surrey County Council.

People raise money for good causes in all sorts of ways. Some run marathons. Others go volunteer abroad in orphanages.

But then there is the rest of us. The rest of us who mean well, want to do good but chose to partake in different sorts of activities. Sometimes of these activities are things that can be the source of guilt. Watching TV, or having that cheeky second dessert before you’ve even eaten dinner.

Our next Bethnal Green Venture, Guilti.ly, is just what you need. Donate your guilt and feel good about yourself. The premise behind the project is that is that if people could shuffle off a small amount of money to charity every time they did something they felt guilty about, this could be a new way to raise funds for good causes using micropayments.

The team are currently working on a web-app that allows you to make payments with your mobile phone so it’ll be easy to donate small amounts of money, anytime you feel guilty about having that extra biscuit….

Photo credit: bochalla

We’ve asked all six of the Bethnal Green Ventures teams to blog about their ideas here over the coming weeks.

Next up is the Good Gym.

The Good Gym connects runners with members of the community who need some help. The idea is to help you do good and keep fit at the same time.

Simple.

Ivo Gormley first entered The Good Gym into Social Innovation Camp December 2008.

The thinking behind it is that gyms are a waste of human potential. They sap your energy and don’t do anything useful with it. It’s also very easy to talk yourself out of exercising when the only person it’s affecting is you. However, add an elderly person or someone else expecting some help from you and you have a reason – and a good one – to get running.

Runners get matched to people in a local area and set a frequency and distance they want to run for. Runners can then begin their fitness regime with their ‘coaches’. In some instances the runner may bring a newspaper to their coach or even help lift some boxes for them.

The Good Gym also organises group runs on the second Monday of every month. Runners collectively complete a task, such as lifting bags of soil to the top of a school to help with a rooftop garden.

The team are currently running the Good Gym in the Tower Hamlets.

You can check out their blog for more information and watch the video in this post for a taste of what it’s like to run with them.

We’ve asked all six of the Bethnal Green Ventures teams to blog about their ideas here over the coming weeks.

First up, is Sam Van Rood and The Brain Support Network:

The Brain Support Network matches and links people who have survived and recovered from a stroke with patients who have just suffered a stroke.

Sam studied law, worked as a climate-change campaigner and was the founding project manager at Faculty of 1000, a network linking the world’s top medical scientists.

But the inspiration for The Brain Support Network, came from Sam’s personal experience of suffering a stroke at the age of 35. Key to his recovery was meeting other stroke survivors – however, it took him over a year to meet anyone who had had a similar experience because there is nothing that connects patients to one another.

Now, Sam wants to create a service that matches up survivors and those already recovering at the point where they most need support – as soon as they begin to rebuild their lives. He’s gathered together an advisory board which includes editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, Dr Fiona Godlee, along with some of the UK’s leading stroke and pain consultants. His next challenge is to work out the details of the service and start to gauge demand and supply of mentors.

The Brain Support Network is one of six early-stage social ventures we’re working with for 10 weeks at Bethnal Green Ventures Nightschool this autumn.

Keep an eye on this blog for future updates!

Last Saturday saw the start of Bethnal Green Ventures.

We brought together six teams we’ve chosen to work with for the next ten weeks for an afternoon of meeting each other and eating homemade lasagne.

The aim of the afternoon was to help them work out what they should be doing over the next ten weeks. All the teams are at different stages: some have very early stage funding, some already have users, but one or two are only a bit further along than ideas.

The basic framework we’ve designed for BGV is based on what we’ve learnt from running Social Innovation Camp for the last three years and inspired by reading lots of Paul Graham’s writing and some ideas from Customer Development (or Lean Startup as it’s sometimes called), amongst others. Just as we try and bring together very diverse people (from software developers to people who work in front-line public services), we’re equally interested in what we can learn from commercial start-ups, service design or other people working on social innovation.

The basic format of our first run of BGV is based around a dinner once a week where we’ll bring in an external speaker with real experience of doing what the teams are trying to do. During the rest of the week, we offer the teams office space or they can come in and have one-to-one sessions with us to talk though any issues they have.

We’ll share more of it as we go along, but our input is only a small part of the BGV programme. The real benefit comes from getting all the teams helping each other and meeting new people. We have a nice big contacts file of people who have very kindly offered to help the teams that we can put them in touch with – more about our BGV helpers in future posts.

What we’re trying to do is create a supportive environment for people who want to start something that might just change the world and improve peoples’ lives.

We won’t go through the teams yet because some of them don’t have public websites and many are still working out how to explain to people what they are trying to do, but over the next ten weeks we’ll be putting more up here and then revealing where they’ve all got to in December.