The Meeting Marathon – Day 2

09:00 The Hub opens its doors and the hosts Holly and Maria prepare the space for the working day: checking the toilets, washing dishes, arranging papers, refilling copying paper, etc. Lucy from the FunFed starts preparing the pancake dough.

09:30 Maria, Holly, and me sit down to have a quick chat about hosting tasks this week. Holly has just been a host for about a month now and she is naturally living the principles of hosting. Afterwards, Maria and me design my learning process for the rest of the week: we organize my questions, arrange meetings with the rest of the Hub team, and I get assigned to a little Hub project for this week.

13:00 It’s pizza Tuesday today. The Hub has arranged a special deal with a pizza place and members can order pizza together every Tuesday. I have a chat with Keith over lunch about the Social Enterprise Academy from Scottland.

15:00 I meet again with Maria to discuss roles, responsibilities, competencies, and selection of Hub hosts.

16:00 We go straight into the next meeting: the weekly Hub Team meeting. 9 people attend and the main topics are updates from the Hub in Bristol and the Hub King’s Cross. We spend quite some time discussing the question for King’s Cross: which companies does the Hub want to work with? The Hub is backing ideas/people vs. getting funding from corporates.

17:45 Within seconds the meeting room is converted into a larger space for 30-40 people who arrive for the Hub Evening and Pioneers of Change gathering “Disruptive Social Innovators”. We explore these questions together:

• How to create and maintain truly systemic social change?
• How do you disrupt people’s value systems?
• As social entrepreneurs, do we want a social franchise (taking control) or a social movement (letting go)?

And we meet Cath with her little shop Unpackaged. Her project was born in the Hub (her shop is now just around the corner from the Hub) and it is very inspiring to listen to her story that is only at the beginning.

21:00 The last meeting of the day is with Lesley and Alex from the London Pioneers of Change hosting team. They share their experiences of the recent “Art of Hosting Pioneers of Change” workshop with me.