Following the huge success of the first networking event in October, UK AWARE is pleased  to announce the second in the Catalyst series which will be taking place on Thursday 20th January at The Hub in King’s Cross.UK AWARE is delighted to welcome Chris Arnold as our keynote speaker. Chris is the founder of the ethical marketing & advertising agency Creative Orchestra (the world’s first not for profit ad agency) and a former Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi.

• network and build relationships with other green and ethical organisations
• hear world class speakers with a proven track record offering knowledge and wisdom from past experiences
• pitch your ideas to the floor to gage response from trusted peers
• meet corporate innovators
• equip yourself with the tools to thrive and survive in the current difficult economic climate
• connect, innovate and share experience and contacts amongst other like minded organisations

Capacity is limited, so register for your free tickets now to avoid disappointment.

Tabitha Potts, owner of Mimimyne (http://www.mimimyne.com), the online store for kids, is now Tower Hamlets Representative for Mums Business Club (http://towerhamlets.mumsbusinessclub.com). The first Mums Business Club Tower Hamlets Networking and Coffee Morning for mumpreneurs, start-up entrepreneurs and business people in Tower Hamlets will be held in the gorgeous venue of Ping Pong Dim Sum in Appold Street, near Liverpool Street Station, on Tuesday 14th September from 10am to 12noon.

There is a £4 entry fee per visitor and Ping Pong Dim Sum are providing free tea and coffee while the networking meeting and expert speaker sessions go on. The first confirmed expert speaker will be Leanne Dal Santo of Smartbags (http://www.smartbags.co.uk) who will talk about how she started up her eco friendly company and combines it with working from home and taking care of her two young children.The second confirmed speaker is Hannah McAlick of Oh Baby London (http://www.ohbabylondon.com) who will be talking about her fantastic store on Brick Lane and how she finds time to design babywear and be the main carer to her two children.

Attendees will be able to learn about how to set up a small business, work from home and be their own boss while still managing to have a family life. Men are welcome too!

Ping Pong Dim Sum has a baby buggy parking area, a toilet with baby changing facilities and a lift to the Private Dining Room on the first floor where we will be meeting. Children are welcome but are parents’ responsibility! Each guest who chooses to stay on and buy a delicious lunch at Ping Pong Dim Sum after the networking session will be offered a complimentary cocktail, alcoholic or non-alcoholic.

Mimimyne (Me Me Mine Ltd) is an active member of Ethical Junction, learn more

An invitation to a Mumpreneurs
Networking Event in East London as part of Business
Mum Week 2009!

Wednesday 7th October 12 noon to 2pm
Venue: Ping Pong Dim Sum (Private Room) 3 Appold Street London EC2A 2AF
tel: 020 7422 0780 Nearest Town: London

Informal networking lunch for mumpreneurs/ businessmums and women
running or interested in running their own businesses, come along and
meet Antonia Chitty, author of The
Mumpreneur Guide, who will be giving her top tips for mumpreneurs.

Antonia Chitty will have a prize draw for her book, The Mumpreneur’s
Guide, retail cost £18, and some other prizes, so bring your business
cards to enter the draw!

Alison Rothwell, of the SEO Training Club, is also going to attend and
give her tips on Twitter for business.

Lana Hersak-Mullins, Business Counsellor for the East London Small Business Centre
will give a short talk on what is currently on offer to entrepreneurs
in East London, and will be happy to answer any questions women might
have about starting up a small business.

The event, in the gorgeous private dining room at Ping Pong Dim Sum (www.pingpongdimsum.com),
is free to attend although you will have to pay for your own lunch,
however the menu is very reasonably priced and delicious! Free copies
of eco-directory The Book of Green
and the Business
Mums Journal will be available to take home.

Allen & York, leaders in their market, specialising in the Built and Natural Environments, Energy, Health & Safety and Waste worldwide, have been acknowledged as ‘First Class’ for great work practices and employee care.

Best Companies Accreditation has been established to acknowledge excellence in the workplace recognizing organisations by Star Status by focusing on workplace engagement in the UK.

2008 saw 653 companies applying for ‘Star Status’ with only 307
achieving success by being awarded a ‘One, Two or Three Star’ Award.

For a Company to take part, there are necessary elements for
eligibility that an organisation must have; been in existence for a
minimum of 3 years, at least 50 full time employees and any mergers or
acquisitions to have been completed by 31st August 2008.

If a Company is suitable, an employee survey and company questionnaire
is carried out to identify workplace performance and best practice
according to eight factors; leadership, management, career progression,
employee work-life balance, team work, Corporate Social Responsibility,
commitment employees have to their Company and employee benefits
offered.

Having been rewarded with a ‘One Star’, Allen & York are now one of the few elite
organisations that drive sustainable business performance through
‘Workplace Engagement’.

“By being accredited annually, we can identify tendencies and
developments within our organisation that we can measure our
performance against. It also gives employees the opportunity to let us
honestly know how they feel towards us as their employer.” Mark Allen,
Managing Director at Allen & York.

The Sunday Times ‘Best Companies to Work For’ is a list of the top 100
Companies in the UK celebrating the best small, mid-size and large
workplaces alongside Best Companies. The list is compiled annually by
Best Companies and published in The Sunday Times which continues to build in
prestige.

“A One Star accreditation, the Best Companies signal of a ‘First Class
Company’, in 2009 has been a great achievement. With great competition
and as the status of the Sunday Times list grows, we just missed out on
being one of the top 100 Companies this year.” Mark Allen continued by
saying, “As staffing partner to many of the high profile names on the
list, going forward we are naturally aiming to be one of the Top 100
next year as it remains our belief that the most valuable asset is our
people.”

Networking Event, Piccadilly House, Manchester
Wednesday 18th February, 6pm – 8.30pm
Find Out more > > >

To
succeed in business, entrepreneurs need to make sure their companies
differentiate themselves from the rest. What are the strategies,
tactics and ideas that can make you stand out from the competitors?
Come and join us on 18 February to hear how award winning entrepreneur
Sandy Lindsay of Tangerine PR developed their USP and got ahead of the
rest.

Networking Event, Piccadilly House, Manchester
Thursday 19th March, 6pm – 8.00pm
Find out more > > >

Come along to network with like-minded entrepreneurs and get some top tips from our guest speaker, Chris Hough, on how to make your business stand out on the web.

Collaboration: an essential for sustainable practices?
London, 12th February, 14:00 – 17:30

What are the recent experiences and best practices from public and private sectors?
How can organisations collaborate for greater impact?

There is a dramatic increase in attempts (and directives) to collaborate – both internally as well as externally. Open Minds has undertaken research in relation to this theme to establish, from people’s real experiences, insights and guiding principles that might help in ensuring the best possibility of collaborative efforts being successful.

Examples from UK public and private sectors as well as from India are
showing that collaboration, rather than competition, is proving to be a
far more effective strategy than competition.

Effective collaboration is going to be essential in helping address
some of the more complex challenges both within and between
organisations as well as in the broader sustainability field. We are
also keen to see how complexity science principles might help underpin
such attempts.

ASP collaborates with Open Minds and The Environment Council to run a half-day workshop in London on February 12th

Contributors (speakers)
Simon Hamilton, Director and Founder of Three Hands
Mike Jones, Director Learning & Leadership, Open Minds
Mark Lawrence, Head of UK Operations (logistics), Marks & Spencer
Sian Peake-Jones, Director and Founder Open Minds

Objectives
Identify the growing need for more successful forms of collaboration
Explore Open Minds’ research findings
Share participants’ own learnings and experiences
Understand the Open Minds’ Learning Network
Create connections

Outcomes
Participants will:
Understand how sustainability practices are inherently dependent upon new collaborative models
Learn about the research open Minds has undertaken collaboration:
The importance of Context
Logic as an inhibitor
The role of relationships and connectivity (and the strength of ‘weak’ ties)
Bounded freedom – unleashing the magic of self-organisation
Uncertainty as a given – ‘Black Swans’ (and staying open to surprises)
Edge effects – interfaces and boundaries as source of innovation and breakthroughs
Patterns and success indicators – recognising what’s in the process of breaking down as well what is breaking through
Share their experiences and learn collectively from others
Understand the distinctions between collaborations in different sectors  

Participants will be:
CSR and sustainability practitioners
Stakeholder engagement and communications practitioners
Academics working on related topics

Click here to find out more > > >

Several million ethical consumers offer two ways to boost your business prosperity…

There is a new Ethical Junction member company going live very soon. It is called Your Ethical Startup (YES Club) and will be encouraging people to set up their own ethical businesses. Don’t worry! – rather than creating competition for existing Ethical Junction members, it will be focused on increasing awareness among consumers of the need to spend their budgets more thoughtfully from now on. In this way, YES Club is intended to create MORE business for existing ethical traders. It is also designed to enable more mutual support between ethical enterprises, this will be facilitated by the YES Forum, to be launched at the same time as YES Club.

YES has something you might find extremely
interesting: access to several million ethical consumers. If you would
like to attract some of these to your business as paying customers via
the new company, you might wish to consider the following:

1. Offering a discount to YES Club and YES
   Forum members. A discount offered at the YES launch could win you many
   new customers who will stay with you for years to come.
2. Running an event – perhaps a seminar,
   workshop or conference – during Spring or Summer of 2009. Again, YES
   members would need to be offered a discount. If you can trade it, you
   can teach it – why not open up a whole new revenue stream? And if
   you’re already running courses or other events, then this is your
   chance to promote them to several million new ethically-aware customers.
   

Please let us know as soon as possible if you
are interested in participating – the YES website launches shortly and
we would like to include as many special discounts and events as
possible.

Please contact YES here: info@ecobloomfield.com

And the message is environmental destruction

Despite an increasing choice of e-cards on the Internet, more than a billion Christmas cards will still be delivered this year.

The Woodland Trust continues to organise a really good recycling scheme so that old cards can be left at high street stores, but cards obviously impact the environment adversely in their production as well – using trees, water and fuel.

Paper production is responsible for about 20% of the worldwide wood harvest, and about 93% of that paper actually comes from virgin trees. Apart from the large tree loss, the timber-based paper industry is the third largest emitter of global warming industrial pollution, with CO₂ emissions projected to double by 2020. 

In 1997 Friends of the Earth said that Britain’s Christmas would use the equivalent of around quarter of a million trees, and they named and shamed major retailers for not stocking recycled cards and wrapping paper. However, eleven years on, there is still only a very small number of cards on sale in the high street, made from recycled paper.

Another environmental downside to the manufacturing of most Christmas cards is the use of toxic inks and fixing agents. Chlorine-free cards made with vegetable based inks and recycled paper carry a much lighter environmental load.

Buying recycled Christmas cards made from post-consumer waste, saves virgin resources that would otherwise go into the creation of new cards. It also encourages recycling by increasing the demand for post-consumer waste goods. You can find 100% recycled Christmas Cards (and envelopes), printed with vegetable oil based inks and non VOC washes, in a fully compostable clear outer wrapping at The Natural Shop.
www.thenaturalshop.co.uk

Networking event Wednesday 10th December
The Vault and Gardens , Oxford from 7.30am – 8.30am

Contact Sophie Christopher – Bowes for further details or just turn up on the morning.

• How would you like to grow your business by 20%, 30%, 50% or 100%?

• Where would your business be without NEW business?

• How sustainable is your business?

• How ethical is your business?

No matter what size your business, we want members from all walks of life who want to grow their businesses ethically and consciously and who want to make a long term contribution to the sustainable future of our planet.

You may have just started in business or been in business for a long time. Professionals, tradesmen, artists and artisans – we need you all, our diversity is our strength.

Why Ethical?

promoting ethical enterprise and lifestyle

ethical, conscious and businesses at the forefront of carbon reducing, climate aware, eco friendly, community awareness will be those that survive and prosper

Our aim is not only to promote each other’s business but also to encourage and promote an ethical conscious approach towards our Planet Earth and all sentient beings. This means promoting the environment, reducing our carbon footprint, promoting sustainable and peaceful communities and a holistic approach to life.

The Ethical Business Club is not for profit – all monies raised are spent at the direction of the members to promote the club, its members & their businesses. It is very much a members club run by its members for its members.