Hello everyone,

I am so sorry that it has been so long since I last wrote something. I'll make up for it with this one I promise. Although that means that this one is going to be pretty long so bear with me.

Oh man where to start...I guess with work since that is the whole reason I am here. To be honest, it is amazing! I love my job. The people are amazingly nice and now that I'm getting into the swing of things it feels like I've been there a lot longer than three weeks. I also now have a much better understanding of what it is they do as an organization and will try to sort that out for those of you who are still a little confused. This is a description that we have published:

"Social Enterprise London (SEL) promotes social enterprise solutions to economic and social issues in the capital. With a membership of over 420 social enterprise organizations in the London Social Enterprise Network, SEL serves as the representative voice fir social enterprise in London."

also, social enterprise is defined as:

"A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximize profit for shareholders and owners."

For example, on Tuesday we held a conference for anyone who works in the social enterprise field to come and listen to presentations about things like getting funding for their organizations (since most of them are non-profit), training programs for their staff and support networks that were available to them. They also had an opportunity to network with each other in hopes of being able to support each other. It was a really amazing opportunity to actually meet with a lot of the people who work in this third sector and hear about what each of their organizations do. As this is still an up and coming sector there are still a lot of people who don't know what it is all about or how to go about starting up a social enterprise, and that is what we are here for. If any of you don't have the website and would like to take a look at our web page it is www.sel.org.uk

Now as far as what I am doing, it is a little bit of a mixture right now. I helped out with the conference on Tuesday, although most of the work was done by the time I arrived. I have been doing some research about social enterprises in the health sector for a research project that another person in the office is doing, some database entry, and other support roles. I will also be helping with all of the other conference that we will be holding throughout the summer. What I am really excited about though is the research project that I will be doing. It was started by the previous intern and will hopefully wrap it up. It looks at the difference in employee satisfaction between social enterprises and other sectors. There has been very little research done in this area but it is in high demand as more and more people become aware of it. The girl before me did a lot of background research into many different HR laws in the UK including information on discrimination, salaries, hours and much more. For my part, I am going to take that and make up two online surveys to send out to the people in out database, one for the employees and one for the employers, that will ask questions about these topics as well as stress, work/life balance, motivation and other factors in the work place. Once I have all of this information I will write up a report on it and if I get it done on time I may even get it published the journal that they put out. I am the only person working on this project so besides the occasional meeting I will have with a couple of my supervisors it is pretty much up to me how I want to go about everything which is an awesome opportunity as an intern.

Oh man, I think that is enough about work for now. Now to my sightseeing. It has been slowed down some since work started, but as you can tell from my pictures I am trying to make the most of my weekends. In my London book there is a list of free museums and I am going to try and go to as many of them as I can. Both that I have gone to so far, The Natural History Museum and The British Museum, were on the list. Last Saturday I woke up early for a full day of sightseeing (which I actually did on my own and it was so relaxing and peaceful which is not something that I can say about my apartment). I went to a market in Notting Hill which is known for its antiques and strolled around that for a couple hours. It was really big and the number of people could probably rival the Ann Arbor Art Fair, but it was very cool and they had some really cool stuff to look at. After that I just went walking around the Borough of Notting Hill. It is a very quiet little part of London that is very residential. I was also on a quest to find the bookstore that was used in the movie Notting Hill (with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts) but I couldn't find it. Some of the other girls on the trip have though, so I will get there eventually. After that I went walking through Kensington Park and through the grounds of Kensington Palace (where Princess Diana lived), then on to Hyde Park. The two parks are actually connected and together are absolutely huge. Since it was a Saturday, it was full of people relaxing, playing soccer/cricket (haha)/volleyball, biking, running, etc. I watched some people playing cricket for a while to see if I could figure it out but came to the conclusion that it was way too confusing.

***At this point I had written a couple more paragraphs, but for some reason my computer decided to erase them. As it is late I really do not feel like re-writing them, I will just do a brief over view.***

Monday: went to the British Museum. It is amazing.

This weekend: Not sure, maybe Buckingham Palace, many more pictures to come.

Other news: London is amazing, although I miss dryers, tupperware, Taco Bell, and the relative quiet of East Lansing during Welcome Week.

I'm pretty sure that was the basic idea of it all. If I forgot anything I will add it to my next post. Love you all and miss you!

Cheers,

Jen

P.S. 23 days, 8 hours and 28 minutes until ALL public places in the UK go smoke-free.