The biggest celebration of social enterprise Sheffield has ever hosted: reflections from the 2026 conference By Terry Murphy, CEO, Sheffield Social Enterprise Network (SSEN)
On Thursday 26 February 2026, we gathered at Sheffield Business School at Sheffield Hallam University for the Sheffield Social Enterprise Conference. It was the biggest celebration of social enterprise Sheffield has ever hosted, and it also marked the formal opening of the 2026 Festival of Social Enterprise.
I want to start with a simple truth: days like this do not happen because one organisation decides they should. They happen because a whole ecosystem says yes. Yes to showing up, yes to sharing what is real, yes to learning in public, and yes to the messy, hopeful work of building a better city.
This year’s theme was Building the Conditions for Change: Social Enterprise in a Time of Transition. That phrase mattered, because it named what many of us feel every day. Social enterprises are navigating rising costs, funding uncertainty, demand that keeps growing, and expectations that keep expanding. We are asked to be financially viable, deeply accountable, measurably impactful, and somehow still human in the process.
A day designed for honesty, imagination, and agency
We began with breakfast and networking, because relationships are not the soft bit around the edges. They are the connective tissue that makes everything else possible.
Daniela Orrego Payan, Co-Chair of SSEN, opened the conference with a generous and grounded invitation to the room: to name the realities we are facing without losing sight of what we are here to build. It set the tone for a day that balanced clarity about pressure with a determination not to be defined by it.
From there, Jonathan Warner from Aviva formally opened the Festival of Social Enterprise and introduced this year’s theme: Building a Resilience Commons for Sheffield. What I appreciated most was the way he named the sense many of us share right now: that we are living in between stories. Old narratives are cracking, new ones are still forming, and in that in-between space, social enterprise has a particular role to play, not as a bolt-on, but as part of how Sheffield navigates the transition it is already in.
The conference then moved into a mission drift workshop led by Dr Mark Ellis and colleagues from Sheffield Hallam. This mattered because mission drift is rarely a dramatic moment where an organisation suddenly “sells out”. It is more often a slow accumulation of pressure, incentives, commissioning demands, and survival decisions that gradually reshape what feels possible. The session gave us a shared language for that tension, and helped us explore how we hold purpose steady without becoming brittle, naïve, or performative.
After lunch we heard from Rob Hopkins. This was the main event of the day for many people, and rightly so. Rob has a rare ability to help a room do something we too often forget we are allowed to do: imagine. Not as escapism, but as a practical act of leadership.
His keynote invited us to picture a flourishing future that is not defined by shiny technology or grand promises, but by the simple things we already know matter: streets that feel safer and calmer, neighbourhoods with life in them, children playing, more trees, more birdsong, more time, more trust. A Sheffield that feels more human. The point was not that the future will arrive neatly packaged. The point was that the future is shaped by what we make thinkable, and then what we organise ourselves to do.
Following the keynote, the Sheffield Sustainability Network panel asked a deceptively simple question: What does a just transition really require? Chaired by Dr Veronica Broomes, it brought together Rob alongside Alice Grant, Peter Gilbert and Anna James. The discussion looked beyond targets and technologies to the deeper conditions that make transitions fair in practice: who is at the table, who is missing, what power looks like locally, what needs to change in systems, culture and economics if we want the shift to work for people and place.
Abtisam Mohamed MP for Sheffield Central then joined us to bring a vital social justice lens to the room. Abtisam arrived specifically to contribute to the closing plenary, and she used her time to connect our local ambitions to the wider national context: inequality, dignity, the lived reality of communities carrying the heaviest burden, and the political choices that shape whose futures are protected.
And after Abtisam, I offered my own closing reflections and thanks. That closing moment mattered to me, because it let us stitch the day together: not as a neat conclusion, but as a handover. A reminder that the work continues beyond a conference, in the everyday decisions and relationships that either build the conditions for change or quietly erode them.
We then kept the space open into the evening for informal conversations, because sometimes the most important work happens when people finally have time to talk properly.
What I’m taking away
A few things have stuck with me.
The appetite is real. People are hungry for spaces where we can speak plainly about the tensions we are carrying, without pretending it is all fine. That includes funding pressures and survival decisions, but it also includes purpose, burnout, governance, and the deeper questions about what we are building towards.
Imagination is not a luxury. It is a strategic capability. When we lose the ability to picture better futures, we start designing only for risk and scarcity. Rob’s keynote was a reminder that hope can be a discipline, not a mood.
And the “conditions” are the work. A just transition is not something we declare. It is something we build through relationships, procurement systems, access to capital, community power, and the everyday choices that determine who benefits and who carries the cost.
A quick word on the feedback
Some of the messages that landed afterwards were properly heartening.
“Rob Hopkins breathed imagination and creativity back into the conversation as we travelled to the Sheffield of 2035.”
Many attendees said the day left them thoroughly inspired, and the feedback we heard across the day was excellent. Another told me the closing reflections made them laugh and cry in equal measure. We also received thoughtful suggestions for follow-on learning sessions, including exploring different ways of thinking about needs, economics, and what we measure as “success”. That is exactly the kind of momentum we want to carry forward.
Thank yous
Huge thanks to April Thompson for hosting so brilliantly, Daniela Orrego Payan for opening the day, Jonathan Warner and Aviva for their headline sponsorship of the Festival, Sheffield Hallam and Sheffield Business School for hosting, our funders and partners, our workshop and panel contributors, Rob Hopkins and Abtisam Mohamed MP for their contributions, and most of all the full SSEN team for the unseen work that made the day feel welcoming and coherent. And thank you to everyone who attended and brought such energy, honesty and generosity to the room.
What happens next
The conference was the opening moment of the Festival of Social Enterprise, which runs from 24 February to 26 March 2026, with more than 20 mostly free or highly subsidised events across the city.
If you attended the conference, I hope you will take the invitation seriously: go to one Festival event that falls outside your usual beat, and if you can, bring someone who was not in the room with us on the 26th.
And if you were not able to attend the conference, you were very much in our minds. This blog is for you too, because this work only matters if it travels.
A note on the keynote and closing reflections
I am also writing a separate piece for Now Then magazine that goes deeper into Rob’s keynote themes and my closing remarks, including the time machine framing I used to talk about baseline shifts and what becomes socially unthinkable over time. I will share that once it is published. For now, consider this the wider view of the day and the ecosystem around it.
Thank you again for being part of this. Sheffield’s social enterprise community is full of people who keep choosing care, creativity, and courage, even when it would be easier not to.
See you somewhere in the Festival.
Terry Murphy
CEO, Sheffield Social Enterprise Network