SKETCH Presents: The Social Venture Forum: Recent Episodes
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Get insight and listen to interesting discussions about the key aspects that affect the rise of social enterprise in a multitude of ways. List and learn more about the journeys of social entrepreneurs, business support agencies and local government in their quest to support responsible businesses.
SKETCH is presenting another interesting discussion event on Inclusive Evaluation – with two of QMUL’s experts in alternative approaches to Evaluation – Dr Lilian Schofield and Dr Sadhvi Dar.
This episode was hosted by SKETCH ambassador and MSc candidate Towett Ngetich.
In this episode, we talk about CleanTech and ClimateTech. What role does social entrepreneurship play in tackling climate and environmental emergencies?
Panellists:
Peter Bruce-Clark (Keynote Speaker), Partner at Social Impact Capital, a research-driven venture capital firm supporting founders in building world-changing companies. Peter has a wealth of expertise in social impact and cleantech investing, as well as being a Queen Mary alumni.
Kyle C Grant, Founder at Oxwash. After a career at NASA, Kyle founded Oxwash during his Synthetic Biology PhD at Oxford University. Armed with just a bike and a backpack, Kyle started collecting and washing clothes for fellow students, this quickly snowballed into a growing on-demand laundry business as interest grew. Kyle’s passion for sustainability and tenacious entrepreneurial attitude continue to propel Oxwash to lofty heights.
Shruti Iyengar works in the Investment team at Sustainable Ventures (SV) where she supports a portfolio of 30 companies across 5 verticals - food/agritech, circular economy, future energy, building tech and mobility - areas including investment readiness, business development, and fundraising support. She also leads the Sustainable Accelerator's (SA) impact measurement work and developed the recently launched SA Impact report.
Priya Prakash is a designer-tech inventor building nature-based systems. Prakash is OnDeck ClimateTech Founding Fellow and D&AD Jury President for Impact 2021. As designer-founder of award-winning D4SC - Design for Social Change - A London based urban-tech R&D company she has been featured in IBM’s People for Smarter Cities, United Nations AI for Good, BBC, Wired, Guardian and the Queen’s 2017 Honours list. Prakash ranked no.3 in 2019 UK Tech by FT. Previously Priya led global design teams launching affordable smartphones for Nokia and was the lead designer / co-inventor of BBC iPlayer.
In this episode, we discuss the impact investments have to generate positive, social and environmental businesses. Featured are postgraduate students from around the world who have benefitted from impact investing, like Towett Ngetich, the founder of Uthabiti Beauty, a startup in Nairobi, Kenya that helps woman gain access to safe healthcare products. Tune in if you're interested in learning how you can gain funding for your business or startup through impact investing or if you want to hear how the nature of investments has evolved over the past few years.
In this episode, we discuss the place of evaluation for social ventures and understanding the impact of their work. This episode highlights the need to move away from money-driven objectives that only benefit the shareholders and more towards socially responsible goals that consider the stakeholder’s desires. Service Delivery Manager at UK Bowel Cancer - Fayyadh Shamsuddin explains the importance of understanding the stakeholder’s perspectives and building a relationship with them before attempting to make a social change within one’s business. Tune in if you're interested in driving social change within large corporate organisations in order to make the work environment engageable for their stakeholders.
In this episode, we discuss how funding can have an impact on businesses with social aims.
Featured are:
Lav Minic, Co-Founder and CEO of Foundley, and Jim Shaikh, CEO of Yoomi;
Both entrepreneurs earned funding in their early stages to develop their business and expand their operations.
In this episode, we meet Biophilica - winner of the inaugural round of funding through the QM Social Venture Fund.
Biophilica is a biotechnology company that had created a new plant-based, recyclable, compostable, low-resource leather alternative that is completely free of plastic polyurethane.
We then host a panel with a number of social entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in the entrepreneurship space to discuss what it means to be socially responsible and sustainable.
Tune into this episode if you are interested in discovering various paths to reducing the business industry's negative impact on the environment and society as a whole.