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.