We have had many talented individuals who have contributed to realising our vision.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals have also been part of the journey and we would like to acknowledge them for their support:

Participants:

A deep thank you to Hassan & Rashida Hamzah who were the ever first Skills Camps participants.

A big thank you to the Startup Brixton, Skills Camps Graduates for their championing of our work, their encouragement and ongoing commitment to move their lives forward - which fuels our raison d'être.

With a special thanks to Skills Camps Graduate Mohammed Umar, who has not only supported LCL through his workshop & event participation, but who has given voluntary support to the startup projects of his fellow graduates: Saba Weldy, Hidiat Olayiwiola, Lynnette Sebuwufu and to LCL collaborator Nicholas Okwulu.

Peer Funding:

A big thank you to our Peer Funders and their initial belief in our vision, supported us to get LCL kicked off the ground: Manjula Shaw, Hugo Bustamante, Anders Abrahamson, Melissa Bustamante, Jerry Smith & Christina Bustamante, Sandra de Andrade, Juliette Bustamante, Alex Bustamante, Hans Gaertner, Gloria Charles, Benjamin Degenhart, Pamela Ravasio, Max Schupbach, Fabio Barone, Rachel Lalchan and Jeremy Berkoff.

Peer Support:

We are deeply grateful to those who have given their support:

Transition Town Brixton: Brothers in arms and friends along the way: Duncan Law, Susan Sheehan, Sue Bell, Susan Steed.

Pam Williams of Brixton Market Traders.

Mitchell Jacobs,Dougald Hine, Julia Shelton of Spacemakers.

Dennis Burke, Darius Norell, Andrea Moretti-Adimari and Annie Willens from the Isshainkia Aikido School in Vauxhall. Sofia practices Aikido here and has received profound teaching from the Founder of this Aikido School, Sense Dennis Burke. Some of the Aikido exercises we used to demonstrate life lessons at the Skills Camps. Sofia’s fellow peers have also given a lot of support & encouragement to the LCL journey.

Ian Jackson, for his support early on in LCL’s timeline.

The Mayor’s Office, For seeing the potential in LCL and awarding Sofia as one of the Top London Leader’s of 2010.

KPMG, Matt Sevenoaks, Roop Vohra, Katie Evans, Suzannah Chick ,and Ciara O’Brien, the team who gave excellent advice and helped us to sharpen up our pitch’s to potential funders.

Tom Chigbo from London Citizens helped connect us with important links in the community.

Nicholas Okwulu of People Empowering People for his tireless work in supporting community projects such as ours.

Plaxy Wish, supported us in our outreach to the local schools. Plaxy also set up a workshop which we facilitated for children at one of her Saturday clubs.

Angela Akinyemi RIP supported us in our first stages of community outreach. We were very sad to hear news of Angela's sudden passing away. She will be dearly missed. The community have lost a true and loving asset. Angela was also a part of The Loughborough Junction Action Group (LJAG), with Lois Acton and Anthea Masey who have both promoted and participated in our events.

Cynthia A Roomes & Victoria Warne of London Community Foundation.

The lovely ladies, security guards & team from Stockwell Jobcenter Plus, Natasha, Gertrude Nwadialor, and Davina Blake - who made us feel so welcome and got excited about the Skills Camps course for their clients.

Gerald Vanderpuye, Gerald has given support to LCL on different levels. Through sharing his personal journey in to success and offering help with CVs & career searches, Gerald has supported our Skills Camps Graduates. His insightful contributions in conversations with LCL have helped shape our progress.

Margaret Gianotti for her kind & informative help navigating in the Brixton Job Centre Plus and The Green Man Skills Zone.

The Office of Public Management (OPM), Diane King and Kai Rudat, have worked with us in creating the Monitoring and Evaluation of the whole Startup Brixton Programme.

Jo Evershed, who bought quantitive analysis to our qualitative biz model.

Murat Hassan for his kind support.

Councillor Christiana Valcarcel who in her term as Mayor of Lambeth attended our Skills Camps Graduation and presented participants with certificates with incredible charisma and gusto. She extended her authentic support by inviting our Graduates to have tea at her Mayors Parlour, where she welcomed us and shared her amazing personal journey into politics. We felt a profound connection with Christiana and invited her to again present at the Graduation Awards Ceremony at our 3rd and 4th Skills Camps cohorts.

Mark Cheng from Ashoka, we have had great conversations with mark and he has helped in planning out long term goals.

Telefono de la Esperanza, A fantastic organisation to help Latino people in crisis. Antonio Jesus Redondo, also a Skills Camps Graduate and Nancy Lisando have spread the word about our work in their circles.

Designers:

David Mills for his icon designs, Charlotte Mellor Meecham for her illustrations and Rachel Lachan who gave support in other designs

Website:

Alfonso Curto for his skilful work with our website.

The Photographers:

Sara Haq, Dennis Gyamfi of Endz2Endz and Antonio Pagano for their artistic eyes.

Videographer:

Arantxa Lopez for her careful video documentation.

Bloggers:

Greg Griffith for his blogging prowess.

Radio:

Rashid Nix and Genesis Radio for the interview & promotion.

Event Volunteers:

Sylvie Jones, Marlon Medley, Modinat Olalere, Owuz Akif, Sue Bell, Lynnette Sebuwufu, Agiatu Bangura and Mohammad Umar.

Outreach Volunteers:

Swinda Marks, Christine McDonald and Shakira Williams for kindly assisting us with outreach.

Inspiration:

We would like to acknowledge Salim Virani - we have learned a great deal about the Lean Startup approach from him. Saintsal & his LeanCamp event.

We also acknowledge David Pinto for his innovative work with the Action Cycle.

Richard N Bolles:. His workbook ‘ What Colour is Your Parachute: Workbook' was an excellent resource in helping participants in breaking down & understanding what type of work they would best be suited to.

The World Cafe: The World Cafe method of creating collaborative, authentic conversations, has contributed on a profound level in our principles in how we facilitate our workshops & how we interact with our community.

Open Space: We have used Open Space technology in many of our events and workshops, which has always delivered fantastic results.

Dotmocracy: A fantastic process for making fast decisions in groups. We really enjoyed using the Dotmocracy process at our events.

And Alexander Osterwalder for his groundbreaking Business Model Canvas, and for thinking through with us how it applies to social enterprise.

We are so grateful and inspired by the pioneering work of Grameen and BRAC in Bangladesh - who have actually gotten people out of poverty on a mass scale. They are the source of our original inspiration.

Funders:

And last but not least - a huge thank you to our sponsors JP Morgan, and Team London for enabling our Startup Brixton programme to happen.

Mette Elmgaard Pedersen — Creative Visualiser

Mette came over from Kaos Pilots and contributed at many levels over two months. She left behind many visuals that we are still using. We thank Mette for her independent thinking and the beautiful visuals she left us with. More about Mette's contribution here.

Darius Norell, Andrew Armes and The Spring Gardens Collective

The Spring Project was a great home for London Creative Labs at a key stage in its development! And behind it is a wonderful group of people who share many deep values around community and personal empowerment. They have a great vision for the community space and we felt that the London Creative Labs vision could swim in that ocean.

Nathaniel White and the Decision Lab collective

Nathaniel's own mission very much aligns with that of London Creative Labs. We are partnering to create joint approaches to engaging the wider community in creating a sustainable economy

Hannah Lewis — Remade in Brixton

Hannah got excited with us right at the beginning. She 'got' it! Her insights around both the labs and the skills camps developments continue to inform the process. Hannah has encouraged us to work with what is already happening in the local area. We welcome her guidance.

Veena Vasista

Veena has been helping us in our thinking in how to apply Asset-Based Community Development to the heart of our process. She refreshes our thinking, with her Community-Organising background and helps us to link to current policies.

Lidija and Marina — The Sock Mob

Lidija & Marina are two wonderful women that have great compassion and have demonstrated this by putting it into action through their venture The Sock Mob. We look forward to collaborating more strategically with them

Philip Connolly — RNIB

We thank Philip for guiding us patiently around government thinking on jobs creation. We look forward to collaborating to generate workable and inspired solutions.

Gladius Kulothungan, David Durkee — University of East London

Gladius & David have mentored us in the process of getting the venture up and running. For this we are very grateful. We are partnering with the University in various ways and look forward to an exciting year ahead of working together.

Jobeda Ali — Fair Knowlege

Jobeda has inspired us with her own inspirational work around Ecotopia. We thank her for promoting us with her great capacity to set the context and her ability to define the challenges we face as a society. We look forward to great collaborations.

Servane Mouazan — Ogunte

Servane tirelessly supports women social leaders and has helped to get the word out about our work since the beginning through her dynamic Ogunte company. We thank her for uplifting conversations about redefining jobs for the future, and much more. We look forward to more of them.

David Pinto

David has been a key part of the journey. His ideas are very progressive and in terms of building process literacy, one of the three main aspects of LCL. One of the main contributions is in helping us to cut out a lot of noise in the collaboration process, to presence. We are happy to continue working with him. His newest development The Action Cycle is something we are thrilled to apply in our Social Startup Labs

David Hodgson — The Idea Hive

We thank David for his deep support. He has helped us to understand what it is we are trying to do, and has connected us with many of the people on this list. We also thank him for his great tweets! We look forward to future collaborations and mutual inspirations

John Caswell — Group Partners

John has inspired us with his visual thinking. Apart from his whole-hearted encouragement, he helped us to recognise we are still in a design and prototyping phase, and not to force conclusions in our work too early.

Nina Nisar, Simone Poutnik, Rowena Chapman, Rowan, George Por

Nina, Simone and Rowena, Rowan and George have inspired us with thir work with the Art of Hosting and her own personal journey around hosting conversations. We would love to partner with them to bring this deep practice to the local communities in South London. They are part of a large network of the Art of Hosting and related networks, with many other peers

Sheri Herndon — Indymedia Founder

Sofia and Sheri are in conversation about crossing the social/tech divides in collaboration approaches. We intend to widen this conversation to include more people as it is very rich and much needed!

Betsey Merkel

Betsey has inspired us with i-open; her work in nurturing civic forums. We look forward to deep sharing of our knowledge, and learning from each other along the way.

Bonnie Wong

Bonnie is inspiring in her vision for retrofitting spaces sustainably, and building bridges between the finance and social entrepreneurship world.

Kara Pecknold

Kara has been a designer for IDEO. We think she is awesome and are excited to work with her on some joint collaborations for thinking about how to engage a wider community around social business models. 

Jay Standish

It has been a pleasure to dive into conversations with Jay about mapping community assets. It is great to hold this huge question with people like him who are able to think across boundaries and are also bold enough to think that we can do it. We sense there are exciting collaborations in the mix.

Benjamin Aaron

Benjamin is an incredible young change leader with visionary thinking and a contagious spirit. He has given much warm encouragement and connected us with great people in the early stages.

Kieran Garvey

Kieran has gotten us involved with his mission to bring social business into the curricula at the London School of Economics. We are pleased to continue to help him in this aim.

Samantha Caccamo

Samantha is an ally in the work of understanding the deeper holistic aspect to the work of Grameen and Social Business. We thank her for her encouragement and look forward to collaborating with her Social Business Earth venture, as is slowly emerges.

Cassie Robinson

We thank Cassie for believing in us early, and really getting the deeper vision.

Tessy Briton

We thank Tessy for the encouragement, warmth and for her contribution both investing in us and also for blogging about London Creative Labs as a social business.

Vinay Gupta

We thank Vinay for his visions and approaches. His influence has been subtle but important, as a leading thinker on how to deal with infrastructure collapse and build community resilience

Michel Bauwens — The P2P foundation

Michel Bauwens leads a very active research and discussion network. It is a critical group of visionaries and constantly informs us. 

Suresh Fernando — Open Kollab

We thank Suresh for stewarding Open Kollab, a very open discussion list on massive collaboration. We thank him also for guiding us in our thinking about financing our venture, and his pooled fund idea that he is nurturing and encouraging us to step into

Muhammad Yunus — Grameen

Muhammud Yunus is of course one of our main raison d'etres — a role that he shares with Fazel Abed in the eyes of London Creative Labs. He sent a letter of thanks for the work we are doing with London Creative Labs to promote Social Business. What an honour!!

Stuart Thomason — formerly UnLtd, now at The Young Foundation

Stuart has supported  us with encouragement and venue and we wish him the best in his new role at The Young Foundation

Sandra Kabir — BRAC, UK

We thank Sandra for her warmth and encouragement and for inspiring us through her work in setting up BRAC UK. We look forward to future collaborations

Alexander Osterwalder

We thank Alex for co-hosting the Social Business Model Innovation workshop last year, and bringing his wonderful Business Model Canvas to our social entrepreneurial audience. We look forward to future collaborations

Chris Macrae

Chris has helped us to understand why Grameen and BRAC are so significant, from a systems perspective. We thank him for his support and for connecting us to many of the people we are now collaborating most closely with. We hope to make his work more accessible.

Anders Abrahamsson

Anders is a key ally. We have a shared aim of bringing out people's awesomeness and supporting entrepreneurs in creating sustainable enterprises