Jack Graham On Discovering Your Path To Changing The World Through Empathising With Your Social Issue

Jack Graham is the founder of Year Here, a postgraduate course in social innovation and startup incubator based in London.

Year Here is the birthplace of some of the UK’s most promising social ventures, like Birdsong, Chatterbox and Fat Macy’s. Alongside Year Here, Jack is a social innovation consultant – for Public Practice, FutureGov and A/B Partners, among others. He is a Clore Social Leadership Fellow and, in 2014, he was named one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals by The Observer newspaper.

Jack discusses the roots of his passion for change, how this led to him becoming a champion of social enterprise and his advice for individuals to discover their place in the sector and generate an impact.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off our interview, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise?

[Jack Graham] - Of course. I actually started my career in international development. I was working for various NGOs both in London and overseas. Eventually, I ended up working for a small HIV and AIDS NGO in Zambia, and eventually fell out of love with international development as I had a lot of questions about its efficacy and also my place in that world and industry.

In 2008, I returned to the UK with my tail between my legs, not sure what I would do next but knowing that I would definitely continue to pursue social impact in some shape or form.

I was feeling a bit disillusioned about international development, so I ended up at a place called The Young Foundation, which at the time was led by a guy named Geoff Mulgan, who had previously been Tony Blair's Director of Strategy. The Young Foundation was named after a guy called Michael Young, who among many other things co-wrote the 1945 Labour Party manifesto which gave us the welfare state and the NHS in the UK. That place was a bit of a think tank, but also did some more practical stuff as well. The bits of the organisation that I was in focused on social enterprise, and that was really my first exposure to social enterprise.

Some issues or questions that came up during that period were that we were thinking about social issues that were affecting people, and those people weren't in the room.

The room had a lot of highly educated people (I think I was one of the first people who hadn't gotten a degree from Oxford or Cambridge) coming up with ideas for policies and programs that would affect vulnerable marginalised people who weren't there and weren't part of the conversation. That didn't sit comfortably with me, and I think it also really cemented some thoughts I had around the charity model and its flaws. I really became a social enterprise advocate after that experience, hence me setting up Year Here in 2012.

That's a really good background there, and a lot of really big considerations that you had to make quite early on. It's great to see how long you've been involved in the social impact space as well.

You are now the CEO and Founder of Year Here, an innovation incubator focused on teaching social impact through providing hands on experiences. In your own words, how does Year Here guide ventures through that start-up process and then overcoming challenges common to social enterprises?

I guess the founding philosophy when it comes to Year Here's approach to venture creation is that innovations should start with insights. [That's about] really understanding, listening and learning from the people who are most effected by whatever social issue you're working on, whether that's homelessness, education inequality or community resilience. You start by understanding the issue through getting alongside the people who are most affected by that issue. The Year Here program starts with a frontline placement, so our fellows are in pupil referral units for kids who've been expelled from mainstream education, they might be in community health centres and they are day in day out working alongside the people who are most affected by that issue.

That means that they hopefully get a chance to empathise with the lived experience of that reality, but they also get some insight into the system that yields the often-negative outcomes that they're trying to tackle.

Also, I think it’s really important they get the fire in their belly to do something about the issue, because when you've actually developed relationships with people and understood and empathised with their experience, whether that's say a kid from a chaotic family background or an isolated older person, then I think you're much more motivated to do something about it. What you do will then not be based on assumptions about how people live, it will be based on egalitarian relationships with people and a deeper understanding of their reality. That's the first piece of the puzzle, that frontline insight I think is the most important step. We then take them on to a consulting phase. They're working on briefs that are set by larger clients, often governments, housing associations or large charities.

That's an amazing opportunity for them to begin having a systemic insight, and then understand that they need to work out which bit of the system that they want to attack in some way with their social enterprise.

Also, they can get an understanding of the market they might be operating in. Often, in the consulting phase of the program, they may be working with organisations that will go on to become their clients when they set up their own social ventures. The third and final phase of the program is our venture lab, which is where we are explicitly challenging them to come up with their own social venture idea. Really importantly, they also prototype it, so within a few weeks they should be out of the building and testing their products and services with real users, getting feedback and iterating them. By the end of that phase, they have a really validated and strong pitch, so about half of them will choose to carry on with that after the program has finished.

That's a really great summary Jack, thank you so much for that. For all of our listeners, they will be able to have a look at Year Here at the end of the article and see those fantastic programs and the venture lab that you're running. Jack, what has driven your passion to become a mentor in social innovation and a successful founder yourself?

I grew up in a fairly socially conscious household. My parents were involved in the anti-apartheid movement and my mum was a social worker, so I think that it was in the family. I have three brothers and a lot of us are focused on social impact in some shape or form.

But I think a question that has always been on my mind really is what's the best route to social impact. Is it about being a government or is it about charity or is it about activism?

I think in my lifetime, I'm a millennial and an old millennial at that! But, in our generation, we've seen some of the traditional methods of social change, like politics, protest and philanthropy really fail us, I think. When I think about protest, I was in the UK and we had the anti-tuition fee marches or the anti-Iraq war marches, and they all failed despite getting millions of people out on the streets. Politics has been a mess for well over a decade now, and I think when it comes to philanthropy and charity, it's become a bit more of a mainstream opinion that there are lots of problematic power dynamics at play in charity, as it's quite a Victorian model. I think social enterprise and innovation more broadly feels like a bit of a beacon and a new way of doing things.

I have been really interested in this idea of social business as a window of opportunity for people to act with autonomy and to test new ideas really quickly.

I think it's also a space where innovation is really rewarded, so if you've come up with a great idea that leads to better results that can grow really quickly, hopefully you have the potential to outsmart and redesign traditional power dynamics and systems that propagate inequality and injustice. I guess that's my journey to social enterprise really.

I really love being able to hear about your passion and how it began so early on.

You talked a lot then about the past, especially the history and the early days of where social impact was being seen and how we tried to generate social impact as a society. Now, if we're looking instead into the future, where do you see some opportunities for the social impact sector to evolve, specifically in the UK, or even globally over the next decade?

Good question. Looking back before I look forward, over the last 18 months I would say there have been a few campaigns that have really caught quite a lot of the traditional charities and social impact organisations by surprise. Certainly, one was Black Lives Matter, and also in the UK we've had a campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford that was against food poverty. I think the speed at which those campaigns have caught the public's imagination have almost put to shame the more traditional charities and social impact organisations who should have been fighting those fights themselves.

I think that speaks to a wider problem about are we shooting for social justice or just social impact? For example, you can feed X number of kids or create Y number of jobs, but are you really shifting the systems of inequality that give rise to those issues in the first place?

I think and hope that we're going to move into a world where charities and social enterprises are a bit more comfortable with taking on an activist approach and mindset to their work. I think that's…

where social enterprise can go wrong, is that it can be propping up rather than challenging systems, which we can all see are unjust and lead to all sorts of negative outcomes including environmental damage, inequality, et cetera. Hopefully the next phase of social impact and innovation is going to be about thinking really critically about your role in the system and how you are going about challenging it.

I totally think you can do that through social business, but it doesn't necessarily follow that because you're running a social enterprise you are addressing those systems of inequality.

You have to really think it through, and I don't always see that. I would like to see many more social entrepreneurs thinking that way.

That's fantastic Jack, those are some great observations you just made there.

So, in this space right now, what advice would you give to someone wanting to start up their own business or create their own social innovation?

This question is difficult, because basically my short answer is always do Year Here, and basically, I feel I am just explaining Year Here! But I will instead think of a longer answer. Obviously, I say this because we have designed Year Here to be the best platform for exactly that, so inevitably my answer is going to reflect the design of the program.

I would say it really starts with this idea of loving your problem, and really getting to know the issue that you're focused on from every different angle.

If you're looking at homelessness, then it is about understanding the lived experience, but it's also about understanding what the architecture of the problem is. How does this problem exist? It might be thinking about family breakdown or drug and alcohol misuse and how it connects to the housing crisis and all these different factors. It's about really obsessing over your problem until you understand it inside out, and this has got to be the starting place in my view. Another aspect I think that's super important and often gets ignored or forgotten is to understand the market.

If you want to run a social enterprise, in fact, if you want to run anything, you're going to need some money.

Where is that money going to come from, that's what we call the market. Understanding the different markets that you might be selling into is super important as well.

I often see social enterprises are the intersection of where you're meeting a social need but also exploiting a market opportunity. You have to give equal weight to both of those two things for you to find the right formula.

Then, it's about testing and learning, and that should all happen with users, the people that the idea is designed to support or help in some way. Getting out there early, prototyping, trying stuff, getting feedback, trying again and being quite bold in the iterations between your first, second and third prototype is critical.

Then, I think when it comes to the launch moment, which for us is towards the end of the program for the fellows, I think it takes an awful lot of courage because ultimately, you’re foisting something on the world that the world hasn't necessarily asked for. As an entrepreneur, you often find yourself in sales mode in a very traditional sense when you're trying to sell your services. But also, when you're at an event or you're meeting up with family friends or whoever, you are often explaining what you do and justifying what you do. That can be quite tiring, so you need to really believe in your idea and be courageous to step out of the norm. If you just have a job that people understand such as being a lawyer or nurse, then people will say, "cool, that's great." But, if you are an entrepreneur, then people have got lots of questions that can be quite challenging. You have to be courageous and linked to that. It's really useful to have a community of peers.

I think that's one of the hidden benefits of Year Here that people don't quite realise until they've done Year Here, that is that you then have this network of people who are in the same boat as you. It is so incredibly valuable, and it's something that I did not have when I started Year Here, but obviously with every cohort of fellows that graduate and then another five or six ventures that are starting up, each of those entrepreneurs has each other to bounce ideas off or shoulders to cry on, but also, they can ask practical questions like ‘who's got a safeguarding policy that I can draw from?’ That environment is super useful, so I think having some courage and doing it with your friends is the last piece of the puzzle.

A really great set of advice Jack, thank you so much for sharing that.

What are some projects that you've come across recently which you believe are creating a positive social change?

Obviously, I’m going to pick a couple from the Year Here portfolio. I think it's maybe not an obvious choice, but there is one called Supply Change which is a bit more of a behind the scenes unglamorous social enterprise. But actually, I think they are doing some really important work. Supply Change is essentially trying to look at public procurement, so the public sector and the charity sector more broadly purchases a whole bunch of services every year. That's everything from cleaning services for hospitals through to construction services for a housing association that's building a new housing estate. There's a huge range, and I think it goes into the billions of dollars that the public sector spends on these services. There is actually a piece of legislation in the UK that means that those services must in themselves have a social or environmental impact, but actually making that a reality is much harder.

What Supply Change is they're essentially a digital marketplace that matches up public sector procurement teams with social enterprises that can meet that need.

Instead of procuring your gardening services let's say from a regular commercial enterprise, you actually can procure that from a social enterprise that also employs disabled people who struggle to find work in the labour market. That's a really great way of ensuring that we can eke out even more social impacts out of every taxpayer penny that's spent. I think what is smart about that is it's about matching up these procurement teams that have very specific needs that they have to have met, and often social enterprises are smaller organisations that might not know what that checklist is. Supply Change is really helping to bridge that gap with obviously the long-term goal being that all of our public procurement will eventually have a deep social impact and in so doing everybody will support the social enterprise sector to grow. There's Supply Change, but then there are others that are I guess more direct to beneficiaries. A great example of that is Appt-Health, which is a health tech start-up that came out of the Year Here program a few years ago and was set up by a guy named Hector whose frontline placement was in a GP surgery.

Dami and Amy Consulting Public In Placement.jpg

He was trying to encourage local patients to come in for diabetes management appointments and various other appointments with their doctor. The traditional system for doing that is really poor. It's three phone calls, and then if there's no response then they strike them off the list. He was in Borough in a very diverse area where lots of patients spoke English as a second language. It was a very ineffective system, so he first of all just very simply switched it to text message, which itself improved the uptake and then he started using behavioural science to work out what are the right messages and language choices to encourage people to come to their appointments. Now, that's entirely AI powered, so he is using artificial intelligence to work out the most optimal set of messaging to encourage patients to come to their appointments. That really moves the NHS from being a reactive service to being much more preventative, so asking how can we support patients to manage their own health in smart ways? I think there are tons of opportunities in terms of how we can apply tech to social issues. Rather than creating another platform to help us buy takeaway food, get our laundry or solve some other middle-class inconvenience, how about we apply some of that technology to problems that really matter that probably have less of a spotlight on them but are super important in terms of tackling inequality in this country?

To finish off now what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

A book that I read the year before last that has really stuck with me is Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas, which is a really great take down of the social impact sector and its hypocrisy. This might sound strange for somebody who's obviously a social impact champion like me promoting that book, but I think that it is a really good wake up call for people to be really critical about what part of the system are they playing. It talks a lot about billionaire philanthropy and how that's often related to tax avoidance and all sorts of other things.

That's a really great book, but there's also lots of talks by him online, so if you don't have time to read the book, you can just watch a little video of him online. A completely different resource recommendation from me that we use a lot in Year Here is Business Model Generation, which is a great practical book for understanding business models. Although it's focused on commercial business models, I think it is really applicable to social business as well, so that's a great one. Then for two more autobiographical books, one is Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. This was his first autobiography, and actually having read a few of them I think it is his best.

It's just great when you think about somebody's journey towards answering that question of how best can I have an impact? He was a community organiser and then obviously eventually became president, so I think just following that journey is super interesting.

My final recommendation is very different, it's called Body Counts. It's by a guy called Sean Strub, who was and an AIDS activist in the eighties. He is still alive today, and he talks about the AIDS crisis in the eighties and how they responded as activists through a group called Act Up. There was just some amazingly creative activism, and it's also just incredible to understand this era which I think a lot of people are now forgetting or losing touch with. This era was when a vast number of gay men lost their lives, and only a very small number survived. Sean Strub is one of those, and I like reading the stories of people who have gone on that journey of working out and asking, "how can I best tackle these big issues that I care about?" Those two autobiographies I would also recommend.

Thank you so much for making the time to come in and share your generous insights. There were some amazing observations that you had about the social impact sector amongst other things, and also Year Here which is such a wonderful incubator program. On behalf of Impact Boom, I would just love to personally say all the best to you in the future, and we cannot wait to see how you succeed in the coming years.