We hope you’re having a brilliant summer so far and are enjoying the beautiful sunshine. We’ve had a busy first half of 2022 and are looking forward to what the rest of the year brings.

Before we officially get into back-to-school season, we want to share our summer highlights with the community.

Kicking off the 2022 Ideas Academy

As you might have seen, we picked 45 amazing, early-stage social entrepreneurs to participate in this year’s Ideas Academy. After an extensive selection process, which saw us reviewing over 180 applications, we officially launched the programme on the 28th of June. Over the Summer, the #SEIacademy 2022 participants have been busy with Core Learning Days facilitated by Eileen Diskin from UCD Innovation Academy and Lynn Simpson and Maria O’Connell both from The Wheel.  Participants have been taking a deeper look into the problem they are trying to solve, as well as their solutions and learning about building sustainable business models for the future. The Ideas Academy also had a community call with two SEI alumni: Sinead from Little Fitness and Conor Griffin of Virtown in August as well as 1-1 calls with our programme manager Lydia.

Internal news!

In team news, we want to wish our Director of Communications, Louise, the very best on her maternity leave. As such, the Comms Team have taken on a new staff member for the next year – meet Renée, our new PR and Communications Executive! Renée will be leading our digital work as well as assisting across all aspects of our communications strategy from PR to running SEI’s social media accounts.

We had a brilliant team strategy day at the #SEIalumni Together Academy Café, which featured some of the best food (and best service) in Dublin!

The team also took a trip to GIY in Waterford earlier this month, where the sun shone as we were given a tour of the gardens and probably the most delicious meal any of us had ever eaten! We were very impressed by the GIY team’s commitment to a zero-waste kitchen, and their ambitious plans on getting everyone growing.

What have our Alumni been up to this summer?

There have been some exciting updates from our alumni over the past few months.

Huge congratulations to Mobility Mojo! Our SEI Scale partner won the ESG SME Company of the Year award at the Business and Finances ESG Awards at the beginning of June. A fantastic achievement, this was awarded to Mobility Mojo for their “exceptional contributions towards creating a set of Environmental, Social & Governance strategies with impactful actions and results for its stakeholders at every level”. Co-founders Stephen and Noelle met at an SEI event in 2015, and have built a brilliant organisation.

In case you missed it, here’s a sample of SEI alumni updates from summer 2022:

• Tammy Darcy, founder of The Shona Project, spoke on the Change Maker’s Podcast about how she founded an organisation supporting teenage girls to become tomorrow’s confident young women.
• John Evoy of Grow Remote had an opinion piece in The Journal about the possibilities for rural towns remote working opened up.
• Dr Tara Shine of Change by Degrees was on RTÉ One The Business at the end of July for a conversation about her life and career.
• Gorm Media founder Mamobo Ogoro was invited to speak to Sky Ireland about diversity and inclusion, facilitated by Arrival Ireland.
• GIY featured on an August episode of Ireland AM.
• Rachel Tyrell officially launched The Colour Club Clubhouse in Wicklow.
• Helium Arts launched their new programme for children living with a lifelong physical health condition in Nenagh.

Watch this space…

As for the Impact Programme … watch out for an announcement on our website and social media later this summer, which will reveal the five brilliant organisations taking part in the 2022 – 2023 accelerator! You can learn a bit more about our previous Awardees on the case studies section of our website, and check out this blog post which gives a bit more insight into takeaways from this year’s applications process.

Best wishes for now,

The SEI Team!