Lord Andrew Mawson OBE

Executive Chairman, Well North and Director, Andrew Mawson Partnerships

I’m a serial social entrepreneur, and best known for founding the Bromley by Bow Centre in East London, the Community Action Network (CAN), Poplar Harca (social housing company) and Leaside Regeneration.

For many years I’ve promoted East London via Water City CIC and sit as a Director on the London Legacy Development Corporation. I’ve been a crossbench peer since 2007, and recently joined Lord Heseltine’s new commission which is seeking to regenerate 100 housing estates across England.

My 2008 book ‘The Social Entrepreneur: Making Communities Work’ aims to provide a practical guide to social entrepreneurship and demonstrate, through my own experiences, what can be achieved with perseverance.

I’ve recently been appointed as Chair of Well North, a return to my roots as I was born and grew up in Bradford. I’m passionate about using my knowledge, contacts and practical skills as a social entrepreneur and place maker to help unleash healthy communities across the North of England. I firmly believe nothing is impossible, and my favourite saying is, “live dangerously or do not live at all.”

Our approach at Well North is reflected in this comment by former US President Theodore Roosevelt at The Sorbonne in 1910:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”