In Stockport, a group of community groups, organisations and not for profit business have come together in a social collective to explore the use of social accounting in their work.
Attendance at the Network is open to everyone and this has led a mixture of local people… some of whom have some knowledge and experience of social accounting and others who have none at all.
However, everyone brings associated and transferable knowledge and skills to the table, including change management, developing teams and people and communicating with trustees and funders.
Having now met for a few months, we are now making our way through the SAN Ten Simple Stages of Social Accounting. This means that we can pool our knowledge, experience and resources and help each other to explore how the various social accounting tools can be used within various local groups and organisations.
A key interest for Network members is the involvement of stakeholders and how they might be included in local social accounting work. For some organisations, this is about identifying their stakeholders. However, for small community groups, who might share similar or the same stakeholders, there have been some exciting conversations about how they might collaborate to work with common stakeholders.
The Give2Gain CIC has been facilitating this group so far. The next steps for the Network are to look at how the members can become more self-organising, and as their confidence develops, how they can take on more responsibility for keeping the group motivated and meeting.
Lynn Sbaih
Social Audit Network SAN 