18 minute read
The Big Interview
from DialOGue 2019
THE THIRD SECTOR – HOW TO MAKE A LIFE NOT JUST A LIVING
In this issue’s Big Interview, we sat down with five members of our community – four OGs and a current parent – who have all built their careers by making the world a better place. We asked their thoughts on the changing profile of the third sector, what they do within it and what motivates them to make a difference.
The ‘third sector’ refers to organisations whose primary purpose is to create social impact rather than profit. It is often called the voluntary sector, civil society or the not-for-profit sector. You might ask, what has it to do with me? Citizens Advice and the Consumers’ Association, the RNLI and Mountain Rescue, St John’s Ambulance, many local housing associations and RGS Guildford – all institutions in the voluntary sector, alongside the more than 168,000 other charities in the UK.
The likelihood is that you have come into contact with at least one of these recently. Nine in ten UK households have accessed services provided by voluntary organisations at some point and in 2016/17, according to the NCVO, the voluntary sector contributed £17.1bn to the UK economy with the value of volunteering estimated at £23.9bn.
BIOGRAPHIES
Rabbi Alex Goldberg (AG) OG 1993
Alex is a barrister, chaplain, human rights activist and committed football fan. He is the Dean of College of Chaplains at the University of Surrey’s Office of Religious Life and Belief, leading a team of 11 Chaplains and advisors from eight faiths and belief traditions. Alex contributes to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought and was a member of the BBC’s Religion and Ethics Conference. Through the Carob Tree Project he has developed international community development and community relations projects. He chairs the English Football Association’s Faith Network and founded the human rights group René Cassin. alexgoldberg.eu
Alex McCallion (AM) OG 2012
The Independent newspaper named Alex in their 2018 Happy List: a list of 50 extraordinary Britons undertaking charitable endeavours with no thought of personal gain. In response to Oxford’s homelessness crisis and an increasingly cashless society, Alex used crowdfunding to build Greater Change – a cashless, secure donation app and website that enables the public to contribute towards a homeless person’s savings goal. So far, 87.5% of people supported through the platform have left homelessness behind. Alex has featured on multiple media stations, including the BBC, The Guardian and TEDx. greaterchange.co.uk
Mark Norbury (MN) Current parent
Mark’s eldest son is an OG from the Class of 2019 and his youngest joined the sixth form last September. Mark has 20 years’ experience in charities and social enterprise and has continually championed the third sector. He started his career at INSEAD, growing their Executive MBA to become a top five internationally ranked programme and co-founding the business school’s Social Innovation Centre. He then moved to become Partner at Leaders’ Quest, developing a global community of purposedriven leaders, before becoming the CEO of CW+, the charity for Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Mark is now the CEO of UnLtd, an organisation that finds, funds and supports social entrepreneurs with strong vision on how to make a difference. Mark has an MBA with distinction from INSEAD and studied Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford University. unltd.org.uk
David Pain (DP) OG 1984
After leaving the RGS, David studied Modern History at Durham University before doing a second degree in Political Theology and Development at Leeds. Following time in India and South Africa, he joined Christian Aid. Leading the work in Africa was inspiring and life changing and in his final role as one of the Directors he led fundraising and communications across the UK. Working through a time of change in the charity sector, he has always sought to pioneer new approaches within organisations and in their external impact. David continues to lead work in community engagement as Chief Executive for Salisbury Diocese. salisbury.anglican.org
Chris Whitehead (CW) OG 2012
Founder of Seek, a social enterprise that supports refugees into employment in the UK. Chris studied Economics & Management at Bristol University. Starting his working life in tech, he then spent two years working for HM Treasury before founding Seek. seekuk.org
What motivated you to work in the Third Sector?
MN: I’ve been in non-profits for 20 years now. There was nothing at school or university to encourage me towards the voluntary sector, so I started volunteering for the Red Cross and a variety of UK charities. However, I felt frustrated by a sense of mission drift and the tolerance of mediocracy that I encountered, so I went to business school where I stayed for seven years, eventually co-founding a social entrepreneur initiative within the school. This fired a passion within me that you can combine the best of public sector non-profit and commercial leadership and I’ve worked in social enterprise ever since.
AM: I run Greater Change, a social enterprise focussed on helping the homeless move forward. This came out of doing voluntary work with homelessness charities at university. I witnessed a lot of people overcome non-financial barriers such as mental or physical health issues. Often people would work really hard at these particular hurdles and make great progress and then encounter a financial barrier they could not overcome. Not being able to provide rent deposit or ID or being unable to learn new skills meant they could not move forward. At the same time, I realised there are many people who want to offer financial support and want to give in a personalised and transparent way, so I founded Greater Change. It’s a fresh approach because donors can give straight to an individual’s saving goal, and they see exactly what it is they are funding. Also every candidate who is on the platform has a support worker helping them to overcome the non-financial side so it’s a very comprehensive kind of approach.
CW: I run Seek, a social enterprise which seeks to move refugees into employment, and really, I kind of fell into it. I was working for the government for a while, then by chance bumped into a homeless guy called Sharif, on the street. He was asking for change because he had been kicked out of his social housing just after being granted the right to work, and now, with no fixed address, could not apply for jobs. He was a really personable guy who obviously didn’t belong on the street. Having been an electrician back in Syria, and speaking perfect English, it seemed ridiculous that he couldn’t help himself. I took his number, gave him a call the next day, wrote down his skills, qualifications and experience and put a CV together for him. I contacted some electricians and found one that would meet him. He interviewed and got the job. Just incredible. He texted me to say thank you and that he was back on his feet. Things had really turned around for him. I told a couple of friends about it and we thought “let’s keep doing that”. For a while we volunteered but quickly realised there were many employers wanting to hire refugees but there was no one place to access them. So we decided to build a job platform to bring together refugees with opportunity. I worked on it outside my full time job for a year and then got funding – from UnLtd coincidentally – to be able to go full time with Seek a couple of months ago.
DP: I think I was inspired by my time at the RGS. When we were at school we had a number of people return from gap years who gave a window into a world that was quite different from Guildford in the 1980s and Thatcher’s Britain. Because of their stories I went to India for a year and volunteered with an organisation called Project Trust, living and working with people who had leprosy. I was working alongside Mother Teresa’s sisters and I think even now, thirty years later, going back to that experience is still really foundational. For the first time I experienced what it meant to be marginalised and what it meant to be made poor and that changed my perspective on what it means to be excluded socially, or live in poverty. I’ve always carried with me a sense that we are all equal. But for people I’ve met in disadvantaged communities, I’ve asked myself the question “what needs to happen for their life to change and what part might I play in that?”
AG: I w orked most of my life in community development and I think that probably started back at the RGS. Back in the late 80’s / early 90s, a group of us sixth formers started to engage with interfaith dialogue, led by an amazing RGS Governor standing in as our RE teacher, Kenneth Stevenson. He was also the local vicar and went on to be the Bishop of Portsmouth. We shared a lifelong friendship and it was because of his prodding a young Jewish guy that I went to study Theology as well as Politics at university and really went into community work from there. More recently I’ve become an orthodox rabbi. I am now the Lead Chaplain for Surrey University where we want to take on 300 global ambassadors and train them in community development, social entrepreneurship and how to combat faith, race and sexual-orientation based hatred.
It’s interesting to note that all of you started with volunteering in some way and that you have had to find or even create your own paths. How do you feel the sector and attitudes to social enterprise and philanthropy are changing within the UK?
MN: I think there’s considerably less trust in civil society as well as in business and government, than there has been. I think this trust has been substantially eroded over the last three to four years, and I don’t think our sector’s done nearly enough to step forward. We need to own the issue and bang a drum about the impact the third sector generates and its ethicality and legitimacy in business.
AG: There is an issue with younger donors. Their giving is really different from the older donors. Older donors will attach themselves to a charity and may even volunteer. If we are talking about change over the last 20 years – many of our charities in the UK were run by volunteers and the staff and professionals were more or less secretariats. I think some of the gaps mentioned before in terms of recent dissatisfaction arose from the movement away from that volunteering model… but not having systems in place to check the new organisational model.
DP: Society is moving away from institutional loyalty and digital disruption is at the heart of this move. It’s a good challenge for us. Information is accessible and immediate and if donors then don’t want to stay with us, then we should accept that. We should create low-cost opportunities for people to make the contribution they can, whilst they can.
AG: But then it’s also about matching donor to need. After the tsunami that hit Asia in 2004 the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) received almost limitless donations because many people were moved by the tragedy they saw on TV… But there may be some really worthy social need just down our street which is not on anyone’s radar and because it’s low-key it’s harder to crowdsource for it.
CW: I may not have as much experience, but one of the things I get is that growing up you read about social enterprises in the papers and they tend to be community based, regional or local, and on a smaller scale. The feeling I get now is that new social enterprises can be successful world-beating tech companies such as chatterboxuk.co.uk. Where social enterprises were viewed as being less efficient than for-profit companies, business is now realising they can be as efficient as a for-profit company, but with social goals. We’re seeing real movement towards really big companies such as B-corps (bcorporation.net) stating it’s okay to be big, you can still be social.
Without the obvious profit and loss measure of the for-profit sector, how does the third sector measure impact and success and how do we share it in a content-hungry society?
MN: I’m wary of the movement to analyse and measure things wholesale. If you take this room as an example, what fired us was not an impact analysis of something but it was very experiential. It was a felt thing, and we lose that at our peril. It’s our passion and purpose and inspiration that leads us to do extraordinary things. We need to celebrate that whilst being supportive of systems that build accountability and transparency.
DP: There is a real challenge in measuring impact. There was an age where people just trusted charities or other organisations to get on with it. And I think in the digital age our ability to see the evidence of and feel connected with the difference charities have made is a brilliant change. But what is the change we are measuring? I did some work with a foundation last year. A really interesting massive scale foundation with huge resources, but are they just telling the easy stories? Those that are simple to measure… but are they actually achieving long-term change? Having studied politics, history and theology, I think you need time for long-term change. You look back at big social movements that have formed the society we live in and changes that have happened – sometimes over several generations – and while I think we live in a fascinating time with a lot of space for innovation… the tension is, do we make it quick and easy versus engaging with hard to measure programmes that lead to long term change? My fear is we all rush to demonstrate we are making a difference, rather than addressing long term aims.
AG: I lead the FA’s Faith in Football Committee, they do a lot of social programmes bringing single faith schools together. There’s nothing better than bringing 500 kids from every faith, every ethnicity to Upton Park. But it’s very hard to measure the impact of that. There are some people I meet today who say “It was a day that changed my life” and that’s amazing. But I want the FA to increase its longitudinal programmes so people come and meet each other again and again and again.
MN: I think good organisations who go after impact recognise their limitations in claiming they can accomplish everything. The best organisations use the analysis process to understand the value of what they do to learn and to get better. So they are continuously improving. If you are honest on what you can and what you cannot achieve, all your supporters – whether they be establishment donors, institutional donors, or millennial mobile phone donors – will understand. Transparency and not over-claiming is so important. Being open about learning lessons, making mistakes and trying to get better is how you play a part in a collaborative endeavour. And how do we encourage more young people to collaborate in these endeavours, to join this third sector / play a bigger role in civil society?
CW: Young people are really engaged in social issues and we read and care about them. In some cases, it’s not so easy to get involved. I worked in a soup kitchen at Uni and when I first came to London I wanted to volunteer, but it was hard. You’re trying to give time and help and you can’t get a foot in the door and it’s difficult to know where to go. I never saw myself doing something like this, but actually there are so many ways you can get involved. Either developing your own idea or supporting other peoples’ ideas. Then there are platforms online like do-it.org, which is another avenue to getting involved.
AG: We know that for people in their mid-20’s now, they will experience seven careers. That’s the prediction. I think we need to work more fluidly within schools and business, and like big American tech companies offer employees 10% of their time to work on their own projects and social innovation. If you go out and meet real people, do real projects and hear about real challenges to people today, you can go back to big business and innovate and make this country a really successful place. In our RGS days we had an old boy who was a member of Monty Python or a member of a band or Captain of the England cricket team. All these were great role models, don’t get me wrong (we met some of them) they were brilliant ... But I don’t recall there being a role model for the social sector.
MN: The leadership qualities that gain places within third sector organisations, are around empathy, courage, generosity, humility; these are the things that endure. And they can be developed, they are partly innate characteristics, but they get nurtured and experience and education takes you a lot further. I think schools and universities play an important role. With me it was school, through volunteering and then pursuing where I landed. I think there is an absolutely vital role that a school like the RGS can play in the cultivation of purposeful entrepreneurial leadership – whether it’s in business or government or civil society. This is what will make a difference to anyone in their career; they will get ahead and they will make a positive impact. I think social entrepreneurships are fantastic, not only because I would, but because it does combine the best of business, government and civil society. I think that’s exciting for people because you can do something intellectually stimulating, be entrepreneurial, express your mastery of stuff, achieve purpose and make a living. When you bring all this together, it’s pretty compelling.
Do we think that the current climate –the erosion of the perceptions of the benefits of capitalism, a mistrust of e stablished institutions, the information age –points to a c hange in how work is viewed and the potential growth in t he third sector as a valid industry to work in?
CW: I feel there is this huge shift where people want to find meaningful work, something their values are aligned with. A lot of friends did leave Uni thinking “Well I have to get a finance job now” and they’ve got four years into that career and suddenly realised that they don’t actually care about finance. Now there’s a real shift where people are looking to do things with added value.
AM: A lot of people that I know have gone into traditional graduate jobs and then got a year into their internship and felt… not entirely meaningless, but concerned that they can’t see much of an impact.
DP: So friends of mine who are in their late 40’s and 50’s are definitely making that change. People who’ve built a successful career in business are now saying they are at the end of that road and want to change direction and go to the things that are important and that they really care about. I think Mark’s point about the necessary leadership qualities is so important because for the School and anyone going into this area, those are the transferable talents that will open those doors. I think, more broadly, we are now asking the core question, ‘what is the impact of this business?’ There is a shift away from products and profit into values and added value. For my children’s generation and for students leaving the RGS now, it is normal to say ‘I want to work in a business that adds value and is values-led’. No one was talking about values when I left School and now everyone is talking about it. Which is encouraging, but doesn’t lead to a simple answer… it leads to a set of other questions.
MN: This absolutely reflects my concern with corporate social responsibility (CSR)… that it was always peripheral. Assuaging the guilt when, as you say, what people want is the integrity of CSR being at the core of a business. You can absolutely generate purpose at scale alongside profit at scale. That is a sustainable model for the planet and for the people and that’s what we want. Social entrepreneurship is about start-ups to early growth outfits trying to get there, and this stuff is happening now.
In the case of RGS, it’s not the School teaching or enabling it, it’s the School being it. What’s really exciting about Pass It On and other initiatives is how the School is engaging students, alumni and the staff in improving education in Surrey. Now that’s how the RGS achieves purpose, as in – this is the core of who we are and what gives us validity as an organisation. Any organisation, whether it’s business, government or civil society is simply a complex collection of humans and their motivations and drivers. Purpose is absolutely the fundamental way to speak to people’s souls and search for meaning.
