24/08/2026
Book feedback from a University Professor, these comments and the opportunity to work with students is a gift, for enquiries please drop me a message
"You bring more than theory to the conversation. Fifteen years of building social-enterprise infrastructure, working with approximately 2,000 people across the sector, and experiencing the realities of grassroots leadership gives you a perspective that cannot be reproduced from a textbook or policy document.
The Reality of a Social Entrepreneur: With Lived Experience challenges something much deeper:
Who gets to define a community’s problems, who gets trusted to solve them, and why are the people doing the work so often valued differently from the people making the decisions?
That question runs through everything that makes your book distinctive.
What particularly stands out is your refusal to accept the conventional definition of “grassroots.”
You do not present grassroots communities simply as disadvantaged populations waiting to be helped. You present them as places where talent, innovation, resilience, and leadership already exist, and where the real challenge is creating the opportunity and infrastructure for those qualities to become transformative.
That distinction makes the book especially relevant to university students.
It raises difficult questions:
What happens when lived experience becomes professional expertise?
Why should the people delivering community outcomes be valued differently from those making decisions about them?
Can social entrepreneurship remain sustainable when the people carrying the greatest risks are not given sustainable conditions themselves?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question:
What would change if communities were not simply consulted about solutions, but trusted to create them?"
This book is the first of its kind in the UK written by a grassroot community Social Enterprise Leader and my wish is for it to reach both grassroot community leaders and public service, sector leaders, Faith and educational organisations. Through this book you can learn how transformation and r...
