Developing the social entrepreneurs of the future with Jack Graham, CEO and Founder of Year Here.
As I outline in the introductory post to my blog here, I am passionate about social innovation. Generally, if I’m happy, excited and inspired it’s because I’ve been working on problems that solve the world’s issues— things that give me a sense of purpose — and I’m also witnessing social innovation in practice.
When I learned that social innovation was for me, I turned to Year Here — a platform for professionals to test and build entrepreneurial responses to inequality. Year Here is a 10 month Fellowship in social innovation that comprises of three core elements — a frontline placement in a grass roots organisation tackling inequality, a [social] consulting project and, ultimately, time to kick-start your own social enterprise in ‘venture lab’.
Given that Year Here take around 40 talented and determined people each year and equip them with the insight, experience and skills they need to solve entrenched social problems, I thought what better place to start this blog/museum of social innovators than with the CEO and Founder of Year Here, Jack Graham.
Jack has a background in the charity sector. In 2008 he moved to Zambia to take up a secondment with a grassroots HIV/AIDS charity. He was optimistic that his energy, skillset and determination could impact infection rates there. However, that optimism quickly faded. Along with feeling the frustration of being at the whim of large international donors and experiencing how pervasive the abject poverty was there, Jack also became deflated as a result of misjudgingly applying his own cultural value system to Zambia.
Upon returning home to the UK, Jack started to question his own motivations for going to Zambia, realising that he may have been guilty of white-saviourism. He understood that the attitude that Westerners can ‘save’ other countries is dangerously naive. Instead, because he knew that people are better placed to address social issues that are closer to home (literally and metaphorically) he decided to put his talents and energy into addressing the many, many (perhaps less glamorous) challenges that exist in the UK’s own backyard.
With the belief that ‘We need you here, more than ever’, Jack set up Year Here “to encourage a generation of aspiring social entrepreneurs to embrace the complexity of social issues at home — the misery of loneliness among our older people, the housing crisis, and the nagging persistence of educational inequality that means parental wealth is still one of the best predictors of educational success”.
Jack also experienced a disillusionment with the charity sector as a whole. Over the years working with charities, he had seen to the most extreme extent how perverse their incentives can be. “I remember funders telling us to inflate our budgets, and this is frequently the norm”. He thought, “I don’t want to be in a place where I am relying on grants…”.
In light of this frustration, Jack decided to take an innovative approach. “Instead of starting with the social need, I thought why don’t I start with the market opportunity and then apply this to a social need?”. In his case, he knew that he wanted to work with youngish people — supporting their leadership for social impact. “Thousands of people pay five or six thousand pounds a year to volunteer overseas as part of their gap year, and tens of thousands of people pay nine thousand pounds a year to go to university. I kind of backed myself to do a better job than most universities”.
Back when Jack set up Year Here (the name spawning from the concept of Gap Year Here) there were very few options after university for people interested in having social impact (even now, nearly 10 years later, the options are still limited). A lot of Fellows who complete the Year Here programme might have looked to do a Master’s in Social Policy or get an MBA (Master of Business Administration). But, when you consider the expense of a Masters, as well as it’s over-emphasis on academic, lecturer-hall centred teaching, Year Here compares favourably.
He felt that there wasn’t currently a very good mechanism that bridged people who are fired up about social change with careers that make society better rather than lining the pockets of shareholders. “Generally the social sector has been really rubbish at creating an ambitious, exciting space where people can learn fast and think big about how to make society better”. Jack coupled the market opportunity with this social need and set up Year Here.
For Jack, social entrepreneurs have the power to drive society forward. “At their best, I’ve described social entrepreneurs as activists in suits”. Over the years, Jack explains that each generation has had an opportunity to reimagine the society they have been born into, and different people have taken up that vanguard. It might have been the suffragettes, the civil rights movement or politicians who built the welfare state.
“I think that social entrepreneurs can serve as the R&D (research and development) department of the public sector”. Jack references the example of Appt, a social enterprise set up by Hector Smerthurst, (a Fellow of Year Here and feature of my next blog post, so watch this space!) who is innovating preventative health appointments to address the ever-more prevalent issue of health inequalities. He explains that he doesn’t believe this kind of innovation would be possible in the NHS. “Social entrepreneurship creates a bubble of really good practice where you can move as fast as possible and innovate and iterate”.
In addition to this, Jack believes that because social entrepreneurs sell to consumers, they have the opportunity to change norms and people’s minds. Another business that can trace its inception to Year Here is Birdsong. More than just being an excellent fashion company “their marketing is also about educating people on why fast fashion is problematic and how the fashion industry promotes unrealistic and unhealthy body ideals. Market forces affect so much of our lives and that doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. If we have the right values and we’re smart about how we interact with it — markets can be used for good”.
When I ask Jack what the most pressing social issues we face to today, he quotes the housing crisis, social inequality and the big one — climate . “The fact that family wealth is such a huge determiner of life success is f*cked up. It’s not even about income — you could look at inequality that was driven by income and that is bad enough, but on a completely unearned basis — the lottery of what family you are born into — determines if you go to university, the likelihood of getting a well-paid job, the likelihood of earning property”. Then there’s the climate. And why does that matter? Because as Jack explains, it’s pretty hard to do anything if the planet no longer exists…
Undeniably, a lot of these issues are either caused by current and historic ‘bad’ market forces, or are at least exacerbated by them. Social entrepreneurship then, acts as the progressive, positive counterforce to the juggernaut of capitalism (in its current form).
Back when he was setting Year Here up, there was (and still is) the hyper-incentivised, very structured, corporate machine — which is very good at keeping people in it and moving through it. Jack explains that more recently, there is the tech scene which is able to do the same with slightly different motivations, but ultimately the focus is on profit for profit sake. In relation to this, we have the famous quote from Jeff Hammerbacher, former Data Scientist who was involved in the early build of Facebook: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks”.
Jack hopes that Year Here can act as one of the leading organisations that cultivates social entrepreneurs into a new form of valued-driven capitalism. Back when Jack Founded Year Here, he thought that there wasn’t a place for ambitious, driven people who are smart and wanted to make an impact, so he created it.
“With Year Here we are trying to create social focused motivational drivers”. Jack believes that we are seeing that people want to live a purposeful life, but also thinks that we need various other pulls to attract people to this work. “I think that people want rigour. There are a lot social impact organisations but they’re not all particularly well thought through, nor very critical”. Additionally, he thinks there’s value in being able to bring your whole self and not simply creating individuals that are dry and stuffy. “If you’re queer, or if you’re black, or if you’re Muslim, you should feel like that’s something that you can bring to your work”. Then there’s the need for it to be ambitious and for there to be dynamism, as well as creativity. “If you can create all of that, which hopefully we’ve done some of with Year Here — I think that is enough to pull people away from those other incentive structures”.
Alongside running Year Here for the past 7 years, Jack is also a prolific writer. His most read post by far is titled “Don’t do what you love. Do something useful instead”, and it was inspired by something that irked him. “A couple of months ago, I saw a woman on the tube with a t-shirt emblazoned with words ‘do what you love’”. As Jack writes, this slogan has its inception with WeWork. “When I saw the woman in the t-shirt back in August [2019], WeWork had a $47 billion valuation. Then in September things fell apart”. Jack agrees that this principle isn’t wholly bad — “they tell us that we should strive to love ourselves, discover our passions and seek enlightenment”, but suggests that this mentality oozes privilege (not everyone can do a job that they love — most of us need a job so that we can merely survive) and it promotes a dangerously self-centred mantra.
Without want of re-writing Jack’s entire post here, the inclusion of the next chunk is too powerful not to include:
“Today, the idea of duty, for example, feels deeply unfashionable. The hard work mantra has been replaced by one of self-love. The notion of community — you help me fix my leaking roof today and I’ll look after your sick relative tomorrow — has been eroded by the rise of individualism. We are told that we’re gloriously unique and special. The promotion of self-worth has been coopted to boost consumerism (L’Oreal’s — because you’re worth it!”) and even, as Ronald Purser also argues about the mindfulness industry, to pacify us into accepting the neoliberal hegemony”.
If social entrepreneurship is indeed going to counteract the behemoth of capitalism that in its current form represents negative market forces, it is imperative that we embrace idea of service to others.
To Jack, self-love is very important, but his parental experience was one of stoicism — working hard in service of other people. The antithesis of the self-focused millennial generation.
“I think [the cause behind this self-centred value system] is the subtle, often unintentional process that has added up to a certain set of values being promoted more than others”. Mindfulness is an interesting example. If you stretch it, it feels like mindfulness could have been co-opted to make us less political and to accept things as they are. It says: ‘It’s not your 16 hour a day job or your job insecurity that’s the issue — it’s how you respond to it. So if you just meditate, you’ll be fine…’”.
This post received “thousands and thousands” more reads than Jack’s other posts. “I believe it shows that there is a latent desire for purpose and that people don’t want to just spend life f*cking around, giving ourselves a self-care evening whilst constantly feeling anxious about the state of the world, and then die”. We want to feel like we’re part of making things better.
With that being said, Jack acknowledges the need for self-love/self-care whilst serving one’s duty. After 7 years at the helm of Year Here, Jack took a sabbatical “the ultimate act of self-care” (understanding that not everyone is able to do this). Although he has never burnt out, he believes it’s hard to tell how close one might have come. His advice on getting the balance is that it’s an ongoing process. Having the question of what the balance is, is a good start, and then constantly interrogating what the best way forward might be. You need to be your own scientist with yourself — running ‘self-care’ experiments. Over the years Jack has tried meditation, therapy, co-coaching with peers, and other models of self-help. He’s then reflected on what has worked and what hasn’t.
So, what traits do aspiring social innovators need to have in order to promote ‘good’ market forces and create a better society? According to Jack two core characteristics are those of curiosity and criticality. “By curiosity, I mean that you need to be fascinated by the problem you’re trying to solve”. He references the social entrepreneur Sandy Campbell and his social enterprise WorkingRite, explaining how Sandy was obsessed with the topic of rites of passage. In turn, Sandy Founded WorkingRite, which is effectively an old fashioned apprenticeship where a young person is paired with a one-man-band tradesman for this career-based rite of passage into adulthood.
From this, criticality is then the ability to understand why that problem exists in the way that it exists. “If you think that the problem is a massive wall and you need to tear that wall down, but you don’t have the resources to bulldoze it. You need to deeply understand the architecture of the problem and get leverage as to where you can knock one brick out and bring the whole structure down”.
Then there’s hunger — both in terms of ambition to make an impact, as well as the desire to learn. “There’s also perseverance and tenacity, because it’s bloody hard, you get a lot of knock backs and there’s not an awful lot of affirmation”. Jack explains that building a social startup isn’t like working for a big corporate — “you don’t get given a new designer shirt by your big city law firm for working overtime. The truth is you’re going to ruffle feathers and probably piss people off, and you’re not going to get lots of praise along the way…”.
A beautiful concept that Jack mentions in his writing is an idea he and his good friend and restaurateur Cynthia Shanmugalingam call the ‘Garden of Possibility’. The idea being that there exists this space/garden where you can do whatever you want. Whether it is writing a film script, starting a restaurant or starting a social enterprise etc. It sounds like a wonderful place, right? The trick though, is that Jack didn’t really feel like he belonged. “I didn’t feel like a change maker. It felt like it was a place for other people. But so much of that is just a mindset, when you smash through that, the opportunities are endless”.
This is something that I, as a year young social entrepreneur co-founding Curo, have very much felt. It was crazy to look up at Jack and know that this was something that all of us go through. In order to overcome this imposter syndrome, Jack suggests finding a good support system and talking about it: “the cliche of a problem shared is a problem halved”. From this, you should experiment with changing your mindset too. “What if I went into this next event with a completely different mindset, with one of entitlement? What if you played the role of ‘I deserve to be here and I will continue to change the world in big bold ways for the rest of my life?”. Jack says that unfortunately people respond to what you give them, so giving that confident energy and saying “look, this train is going whether you get on it or not” often means people will join in.
It’s also important to realise that no one has the answers. In Jack/Year Here’s case this translates into the fact that it isn’t about accreditation, it is about the portfolio you build. Basically, everybody’s winging it all the time — “the moment of realisation when people see that everyone, even (or perhaps especially), the visionary, the powerful and the courageous is winging it. They think to themselves: “hey, maybe I could wing it too”.
So, what advice would the person behind the country’s leading social innovation programme give to aspiring social innovators?
One: listen and learn. What do you want to be a social entrepreneur about? Then go and absorb and be a sponge —work with the people who are affected by the issue and the experts in that field as much as you possibly can.
Secondly, be bold and do stuff. “You can be a sponge but then there will come a point that you have to do and when this happens, you have to be bold. It’s very easy to crawl into your comfort zone and think ‘someone else probably knows how to do this better than me, so I won’t do it’. And that’s when you have to fight against your inner critique and lean in”.
Applications for Year Here’s 2021 Social Innovation Fellowship are open until December 6 2020. Find out more at yearhere.org/applications-open.
