The School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) was founded by the British Social Entrepreneur Michael Young, also known as the Lord of Dartington, in 1997. Michael Young was a social innovator who had previously launched the Consumers' Association, the Open University and around 40 other organisations.
The School opened in the summer of 1997 and welcomed its first cohort of students in early 1998. Since then, over 1000 social entrepreneurs between the ages of 17 and 74 have completed the SSE programmes. Today the SSE has active schools in Cornwall, Devon, Liverpool, London, Hampshire, Suffolk, West Midlands, Scotland and Yorkshire, as well as international schools in Canada and India.
SSE exists to provide training and opportunities to enable people to use their creative and entrepreneurial abilities more fully for social benefit. SSE supports individuals to set up new charities, social enterprises and social businesses across the UK, India and Canada.
The SSE runs practical learning programmes aimed at helping develop the individual entrepreneur and their organisation simultaneously: the approach, and belief, is that social change is people-powered, and that the most valuable assets and resources we have are human ones.
Each programme combines specific elements designed to provide an intensive, complete package of support that meets the needs of social entrepreneurs. This person-centred approach has been independently proven to create sustainable, thriving organisations that provide significant, lasting social and economic impact. A large national partnership with Lloyds Banking Group and The Big Lottery Fund enables SSE to award grants to social entrepreneurs on their Lloyds Banking Group Social Entrepreneurs start-up and scale-up programmes across the UK.
In addition to its core start-up programme, the SSE offers courses to more established social entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their organisation and specialist courses on a range of topics including; helping charities become more sustainable through trading and a leadership development programme in partnership with business psychology firm YSC.
SSE is involved in the policy and practitioners world as a strategic partner to the Office of the Third Sector, as well as through several other partner initiatives in the UK like the Shine Unconference and the Social Enterprise Ambassadors program.
The SSE Central office moved from its previous home in Bethnal Green to London Bridge in October 2011. The Central Office and London School is now based at The Fire Station, 139 Tooley Street, SE1.