Divine Chocolate announces transatlantic merger, TOMS Shoes come out on top in a Good Company poll in the US and Bridges Ventures invests in education.

The On Purpose Associate leadership programme for professionals seeking careers in social enterprise has launched in the French capital and seeks its next cohort of change makers. Ellie Ward talks to CEO Tom Rippin.

From wakeboarding in Scotland to browsing the arts and crafts stalls at The Open Market CIC in Brighton, here's our pick of the top social enterprise days out in time for the bank holiday.

This month, the University of Greenwich in London is hosting its first Social Enterprise Festival as part of a wider strategy to integrate social entrepreneurship into its academic agenda.

For the past three years the teams at Allia and Canaccord Genuity have been engineering a new social investment machine that is opening up big bucks for charities and making social investment more appealing to mainstream investors.

If you want to "transform lives in a way that hasn’t been achieved before, you need the disruption that social investment creates," says Jeremy Swain from Thames Reach. He talks investment readiness and SIBs with Ellie Ward.

International cosmetics company LUSH has opened its biggest shop to date on London’s Oxford Street. Pioneers Post talks to founder Mark Constantine and son Simon about ethical supply chains and driving social change through business.

Former CEO of the Big Society Network Paul Twivy has blamed the intiative's failure on a "series of broken promises" made by government in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.