There has been some movement at the Gelli Aur Country Mansion, with the Golden Grove Trust seeing the departure of all but one of its directors Mr Christopher Salmon. New to the board of directors are Adelle Blakebrough listed as Director from the 4th of December along with James Ronald Seaton.
Adele Blakebrough is the CEO of Social Business trust (SBT). Prior to joining Social Business Trust, Adele was the co-founder and Chief Executive of CAN, one of the UK’s leading organisations for the development and promotion of social entrepreneurs where she worked with the Reverend Andrew Mawson, now Lord Mawson. Adele was also the CEO of the nationally renowned Kaleidoscope project in Kingston-Upon-Thames, a voluntary organisation working with 350 heroin users daily. She holds a masters degree in Theology and is a trained Baptist minister.
In 2005, Adele was awarded the prestigious BITC Sieff Award for engaging business for social benefit and in 2006 she was awarded an MBE for services to social enterprises. As CEO of SBT she persuades very successful bosses to give up their time to mentor and advise non profit organisations and they have to pay for the privilege of doing so. Adele was interviewed recently on on BBC Radio 4 and said, “I am motivated in that we want to find high growth potential social enterprises in the UK and to help them scale up their impact to national level.
What I am trying to do is get a dream team of corporates to come together and use their skills and deploy them in social enterprises using their professional expertise to help high-growth potential social enterprises scale-up: Not painting fences or digging trenches but actually using their business skills.” Some of the big companies signed up already include Baine, British Gas, Clifford Chance, Credit Suisse EY and Thompson Reuters. She said, “Between them they should have the skills all social enterprises need.
We are able to work collaboratively with these services to deploy their services and skills and it is a win win for them as their employees are asking for more volunteering work placed opportunities.” The U.K. and Welsh Government are faced with making major cuts to services for the most vulnerable people in our society. Touching on finding alternative solutions for dealing with the forthcoming problems Adele said, “The problems we have with educational disadvantage and elderly care is that this cannot just rely on the public purse. Corporates are stepping up and realising they have to do something.”
Adele is a member of Big Society Capital Advisory Board and a nonexecutive Board Member of Impact International. Impact is a global people development company, established in 1980 in the UK. Operating in over 50 countries from 18 offices covering Asia Pacific, the USA and Europe. They are one of the smallest companies to sign up to the United Nations ‘Global Compact’ and have won a number of awards for being a Great Place To Work, as voted for by their employees.
They are committed to becoming a model of sustainable enterprise, integrating social equity and environmental sustainability into their work so as to achieve better and more profitable business results. They believe from real experience, that other commercial organisations can embrace this concept of ‘doing well by doing good’.
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