Judges

Zulfiqar Ahmed

Zulfiqar is Director of Programmes & Development for UnLtd – The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs where he heads up UnLtd’s awards and support programmes in the North, Midlands and Northern Ireland alongside leading on business development across England. He graduated from Liverpool with a 2.1 in Technology Management and worked as a systems analyst for a major bank prior to moving to Pakistan, to work on government and business led ventures in infrastructure development and agriculture. Returning to the UK he began a new career in the voluntary sector, heading up projects development for economic development agency, QED-UK, where he developed education, employment, enterprise and community programmes. Zulfiqar has a number of business interests in the UK and South Asia ranging from land and property development, farming and clothing manufacture. Zulfiqar joined UnLtd in 2002.

Nigel Kershaw

Nigel Kershaw, Chief Executive of Big Issue Invest and Chair of The Big Issue Co. Ltd. is a leading practitioner and advocate of social enterprises that offer business solutions to social problems. He is a Cabinet Office Social Enterprise Ambassador and in 2008 received the Good Director for Enterprise honour award from the Institute of Directors.

Nigel is also a Director of the Social Enterprise Coalition and a director and advisor to a number of social enterprises. He has also been a non-executive director of a London borough’s regeneration company and Chair of the Board of the London College of Communications (London University of the Arts).

Sue Matthias

Sue is the acting editor of the New Statesman. She joined the New Statesman as Deputy Editor in January 2005 after leaving AOL UK, where she was Head of Editorial Standards. Previously she was assistant editor of the Independent on Sunday, associate editor of the Sunday Express and consultant editor for several magazines including the award-winning Eve magazine. Sue is currently Chair of Women in Journalism.

Allison Ogden-Newton

Allison Ogden-Newton, Chief Executive of Social Enterprise London, has built SEL into a cutting edge social economy development agency with an international reputation for innovation. Allison's vision for SEL is to drive sustainability in the third sector and innovation in the public sector, and change the way the private sector does business. Supported by consultancy income and public funding, SEL delivers management products with commercial value to the growing social enterprise market place. Allison has a Masters in Industrial Relations from Warwick Business School, and is a Graduate of the Institute of Personnel Managers. She is a member of the Government's Women's Enterprise Taskforce and a Board member of amongst others, ACEVO, the London Rebuilding Society and the Social Enterprise Coalition.

Andy Powell

Andy Powell has worked in a wide range of organisations including a college, small business and IBM, before becoming chief executive of a UK-wide charity, Action Resource Centre. As chief executive of NTO National Council he was responsible for significantly raising the status of National Training Organisations and their eventual transformation into the current Sector Skills Councils. In this role he sat on a number of government committees advising on areas such as foundation degrees, occupational standards and NVQs. Andy has been involved in Edge from the very beginning and firmly believes that the only way to change the education system is to understand the system from the inside but operate from outside it – on the Edge.

MT Rainey

MT (Mary Teresa) is founder and chairwoman of Horsesmouth.co.uk, a social networking site for universal online “mentoring” which launched in January 2008 and is growing fast with over 6000 members already.

Previously MT has had a long career in the advertising world. She founded Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe in 1993 and built it to a top five UK advertising agency. She left Rainey Kelly in 2005 to set up horsesmouth.co.uk as a social enterprise combining a passion for media with a longstanding interest in social technology.

MT is a Founding Trustee of Timebank and a Trustee of the think tank Demos. She is a recent Chair of the Marketing Group of Great Britain; a Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow and a Member of the National Skills Commission.

Tom Savage

After graduating, Tom started a social enterprise called Blue Ventures running conservation expeditions for volunteers with friend Alasdair Harris. Since then, Blue Ventures has gone from strength to strength winning numerous prestigious awards.

As well as Blue Ventures, Tom has founded Tiptheplanet a green wiki site with over 10,000 tips and growing. Tom also helped run Social Enterprise Day as well as guest editing the Cabinet Office's Trailblazers magazine, as well as co-founding a new social enterprise, The Ten Pound Challenge CIC.

This year, Tom was featured as a chapter in Gordon Brown's book, Everyday Heroes and has started a new business Bright Green, which helps find talent for organisations in the environmental and CSR sectors.

Alistair Wilson

Alastair Wilson, Chief Executive of the School of Social Entrepreneurs (SSE). SSE’s core service is a year-long ‘action learning’ based programme consisting of a combination of expert and witness sessions, project visits, individual tutoring and mentoring. Over 350 students have taken SSE programmes and a recent evaluation found that over 80% of the organisations and projects they started are still in operation.

After working as a Marketing Manager for ICL/Fujitsu computers, Alastair spent a year as a student of SSE. This led him to start up Homeless Direct, a capacity building project which supports local providers of emergency care for homeless people in recruiting donors and volunteers. After three years, he returned to the SSE initially as Development Director and later as CEO. Alastair is also a trustee of UnLtd, The London Funders Group, the Social Enterprise Coalition and the Sheila McKechnie Foundation.

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