A gentle reminder from us this summer: rest is productive.

Modern work culture tells us to keep going, keep hustling and keep smashing it. But changemaking isn’t a sprint.. it’s a marathon of collective effort. Research shows that people who properly disconnect (🤳🚫) from work during time off experience significantly greater improvements in wellbeing than those who stay half-plugged in.

So please don’t feel guilty about taking some time off this summer. In many ways, choosing rest over relentless productivity is its own small act of resistance against the culture we’re trying to change. 👀

And in case you missed it, last month we published an interview with Jess Thompson, founder of Migrateful - a social enterprise that runs cookery classes led by refugees and migrants. Her perspective on community, migration and social change is well worth a read. ⬇️

For those of you who are still on the hunt for opportunities, fear not! We’ve got plenty for you in this summer round-up.

🖍️ Heads-up: a lot of these opps have application deadlines in the next few days 🏃🏾‍♀️‍➡️

>>>>>>>>

Jobs

• Director of Programmes and Impact, Real Farming Trust (RFT) | UK, Remote | £43,200-£44,800 (0.8 FTE) | 28th July | Link

• Grant Search Product Owner, Turn2us | London, Hybrid | £44,196 | 30th July | Link

• Business Development Manager, Pathway | London, Hybrid | £56,779 | 31st July | Link

• Head of Persuasion, HOPE not Hate | Remote | £55,000 | 6th August | Link

• Senior Government and Research Fundraising Manager, Soil Association | Bristol, Hybrid | £43,000-£45,000 | 9th August | Link

• Regional Development Manager, Libraries Connected | Remote | £44,286 (0.8 FTE) | 10th August | Link

• Audience Insight & Research Manager, Shelter | Remote | £44,323 | 11th August | Link

• Head of Information, Research & Culturally Sensitive Collections | London, Hybrid | £65,600-£82,000 | 18th August | Link

• Citizen Resilience Manager, European Citizens Action Service | Brussels | €4000/month | 20th August | Link

• Digital Marketing Manager, Sheila McKechnie Foundation | London, Hybrid | £28,000-£29,600 (0.8 FTE) | 26th August | Link

• Campaigns Lead, Economy Change Unit | London, Hybrid | £49,804 | 17th September | Link

• Engagement Manager - AI Risk, Good Impressions | Remote (Global Timezones) | $80,000–$160,000 USD | Rolling | Link

Join The Social Leadership Project as Executive Director

The Social Leadership Project is looking for a talented and ambitious Executive Director to help take the organisation to its next stage of growth. The role is fully remote (with UK travel), offers a salary of £120,000, and applications close on 14 August | Link

Freelance + Consulting Gigs

• Programme Coordinator, Made in Hackney | 4-month contract | 3 days/week | £184/day | London (Hybrid) | Start ASAP | Link

• SEND Strategic Consultant, £600/day | Link

• Campaign Strategist, The Climate Coalition, 18-20 days | 3rd August | Link

• Consultant Project Advisers, The Architectural Heritage Fund - invitation to tender | £550/day, up to March 2030 | 10th August | Link

Funding + Awards

• Trading for Good, School for Social Entrepreneurs - Stockport, Milton Keynes and Bury. Learning programme with match funding up to £4000 | 29th June | Link

• Venture Studio from Crisis, for social ventures helping to prevent or end homelessness | Rolling | Link

• Daring Capital, providing capital and support for early stage founders | Rolling | Link

• Youth-Led Creativity Programme, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, supporting arts and culture organisations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland | Opened 20th July | Link

• Small Eco Awards from National Lottery, grants between £300-£20,000 for communities across Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland | Link

Learning + Leadership Opportunities

Routes Mentoring Programme: Pairing women leaders with refugees and asylum-seeking women

Running from October to February, you’ll receive training and provide 10 hours of practical mentorship. Applications close 5th August. Find out more

• Finance Trustee, Irise International, a Sheffield-based charity working to advance menstrual justice, around 3-4 hours month | Link

• One-to-one Leadership Coaching for Scottish social entrepreneurs and charity workers, with Just Enterprise | Rolling | Link

• Locating Ourselves Workshop, for Black community leaders in South London | 22nd August | Link

• Impact Storytelling workshops, from School of Social Entrepreneurs, from £89 | Various Dates | Link

Actions + Other Ways to Get Involved

• Wake the Valley, 30th July, a gathering exploring to how food, farming and culture can regenerate the land | Bristol | 30th July | Link

• Interdisciplinary Impact Picnic, from Impact73 | 1st August | Regents Park | Link

• Split Banana is looking for 18-24 year olds to join their Youth Advisory group on Relationship and Sex Education. Paid £15/hour. Deadline 30th August | Link

• An AI coach for social leaders, developed by The Social Leadership foundations, helping social impact leaders find opportunities to grow their skills | Link

Host an purpose-driven talent with On Purpose

Get matched with an exceptional mid-career Associate to support your organisation’s strategic priorities. You’ll also gain access to a trusted network of more than 3,300 purpose-driven leaders and organisation. Find out more

Want more?

Check out the latest Events Round-up with 4GOOD ⭐️

Summer is in full swing. If you feel like venturing away from your fan (🥵), there are plenty of events you can get stuck into. We've selected a handful that we think are particularly worth your time.

It’s also festival season, so here are a few that are a little off the beaten track.. and happen to support some great causes too.

🎪 Spotlight on Alternative Festivals 🎪

Also Festival
📅 10-12 July | 📍 Park Farm, Warwickshire
Food, music and ideas in the countryside, alongside activities that promote nature and wellbeing.
→ Book Tickets

Green Gathering
📅 30 July-2 Aug | 📍 Piercefield Park, Chepstow
The award-winning off-grid grassroots festival. Four days of low-impact living, music, creativity, natural abundance and community spirit.
→ Book Tickets

Into the Wild
📅 28-31 Aug | 📍 Chiddinglye Estate, West Sussex
A gathering for all ages, celebrating wild crafts, world music and nature. Profits support wildlife and nature projects in the UK.
→ Book Tickets

Read more

Today, that idea is a multi-award winning social enterprise running almost 1000 cookery classes a year, and welcoming more than 70,000 participants.

Migrateful has shown that something as simple as sharing a meal can shift attitudes and build connection across difference.

Recently named one of the Big Issue’s Top 100 Changemakers, Jess has spent years working at the intersection of food, migration, and integration - navigating both the human realities and the structural challenges of the UK system. She has developed a unique perspective on what actually changes how people see each other.

I sat down with Jess to reflect on her journey of building a social enterprise in an increasingly polarised Britain. We discussed the secret sauce to Migrateful’s success, and what she feels is needed to build a more connected society.

Interview with Jess Thompson

Edited for brevity and clarity.

Nearly ten years after starting Migrateful, how does the current climate around migration in the UK feel to you?

The disheartening thing is that objectively, the climate has got worse.

Seeing the protests last summer was incredibly upsetting for our community. Reform gaining popularity, even under a Labour government, and increasingly restrictive asylum policies… it can feel like we’re actually further away from the world we’re trying to create.

A lot of our chefs talk about feeling unsafe. When they come to a Migrateful class, it feels like this microcosm of how they wish the world could be. Somewhere they feel welcomed, celebrated and safe. But outside of that, many experience hostility. Quite a few of our chefs live in asylum hotels, so they’ve had protesters outside where they live.

When you build an organisation to solve a problem, and the problem gets worse, that’s difficult. But at the same time, I feel our work is more needed than ever.

And we know we’re having an impact. Around 70,000 participants have attended our classes, and our post-class surveys show 45% reporting increased knowledge about migrants’ situations and 25% reporting warmer attitudes towards migrants afterward. For behavioural psychology interventions, that’s actually a very significant result.

That is an amazing impact! How do you think Migrateful has enabled that shift in attitudes?

Early on, I met an academic who specialised in contact theory. This is the idea that people can hold prejudice towards a group, until they actually meet and connect with someone from that group. There are certain conditions where contact theory works especially well, for example, when there’s a shared goal and the power dynamic is equalised.

Consequently, our cookery classes work really well because the refugee chef is the expert. Everyone works together to cook a meal, then everyone eats together.

We also try to target the “anxious middle” as our audience. They’re not strongly pro-migration, but they’re not anti either. They’re the group most likely to shift through contact theory. We do this through corporate bookings, for example, where it’s the office manager booking the event, so people aren’t necessarily choosing to come themselves.

The fact that we’ve shown a measurable shift in attitudes is really exciting. If the impact was only for the refugees, it would still be worthwhile. But seeing there was also this wider hearts-and-minds impact makes it feel much bigger.

Absolutely, that wider piece is so important. Has the impact on your refugee chefs also been different to what you expected?

The primary reason for setting up Migrateful was supporting refugee women into employment, and it has continued to be successful in that. But the more I saw it play out in practice, the more I realised it’s also helping them to heal.

Our chefs may have had their asylum claim rejected for years, and felt unable to use their skills.

When the power dynamic flips in our classes, where they’re the leader, it transforms their confidence, self-esteem and sense of belonging. They feel celebrated. They feel like people in the UK actually want them here.

For example, one of our chefs, Majada, started teaching for Migrateful right after arriving from Syria. She had fled the government and arrived in the UK without her family. She started teaching classes before she even had the right to work, and we were able to support her through solidarity grants. It gave her confidence and community during a really lonely time. People loved her food so much that she eventually started her own Syrian catering company called The Syrian Sunflower. It’s now really successful! She does lots of events and even employs other Syrian refugee women.

What do you think have been the main drivers of your success?

Honestly, I think a lot of it comes from the Year Here philosophy of really understanding the people you’re trying to help, to understand what their problem is.

During my Year Here Fellowship, I worked at the Bromley by Bow Centre, where I was running a skill-exchange programme with migrant and refugee communities in East London. The migrants and refugees really wanted to work, but they faced huge barriers - language barriers, legal barriers, and unrecognised qualifications. Many had left behind successful careers. I started teaching English classes, and participants had to share a skill back with the group. I had 15 migrant and refugee women in my class, and every single one said they’d love to teach cooking.

From that understanding, I was able to start Migrateful. It showed that there is a genuine interest and demand from the chefs themselves.

There’s also a whole school of thought around the benefits of asset-based approaches - focusing on what people already have, rather than just what they lack. So Migrateful has created an opportunity where people can use their own skills to shape their journey towards independence. That’s incredibly empowering.

On the customer side, there was probably some luck in the timing! Post-Brexit, people really connected with the story and the brand. Migrateful is a positive story about migration that people want to be a part of.

It’s definitely a great idea, but ideas don’t always make it to successful enterprises. It’s a testament to you as well, it can’t have been easy?

I started working on Migrateful when I was 24! I had no CEO experience, no management experience, no finance experience.

Within five years we had a million-pound turnover and a relatively large team.

I had to learn everything by doing, which meant making a lot of mistakes. It was incredibly stressful at times, but also an amazing way to learn. Now, nine years in, things feel much more settled.

Have there been any specific challenges that you’ve learnt from?

Probably the biggest challenge is the tension of trying to run a business and a charity at the same time. Even my staff sometimes struggle with that balance. They’ll say, “We shouldn’t be doing things just to make money,” and I have to explain that we do need to generate income in order to exist!

This tension shows in the kinds of people you hire too. You need people with commercial skills - marketing, operations, systems - but they often come from more corporate backgrounds, while you’re also trying to run a charity working with vulnerable adults.

It’s the classic social enterprise dilemma. The goals of financial sustainability and social impact don’t always perfectly align. Overall though, being a charity has meant we haven’t had to obsess purely over profitability. We’ve been able to focus on impact.

What about growth, how have you managed that?

We’ve done pretty well at growing - our current turnover is around £ 1.3 million.

But honestly, it’s not easy.

Because it’s an in-person event business, every time we grow we need more staff, more venues and more infrastructure. This means overheads go up as you scale, which is different to tech companies, for example. We have to rely a lot on grant funding.

What does the future look like for Migrateful?

We opened a cookery school in Bristol in November, which is a big step for us outside London. Bristol is my hometown, so it’s exciting personally as well.

We’re also starting to work more with young people.

Now that 16-year-olds will be able to vote, it feels like an important age group for us to target.

We’ve only run a few school classes so far, but before one class some students filled out questionnaires saying things like “I hate refugees”. After the class, they wrote things like, “That was amazing”, and talked about how much they loved meeting the chef and trying the food.

One teacher actually cried because she was so amazed by the transformation!

That’s awesome! So what do you think, how do we actually change things?

I think initiatives that genuinely bring people together from different backgrounds to “integrate” are really important. They’re not always easy to run, and they’re not always cost-effective, but they matter.

For refugees and migrants, there is a tendency to put pressure on them to “integrate”, rather than seeing it as a two-way process. Sometimes the concept itself can feel othering.

And the government doesn’t help this. The government will place asylum seekers into housing blocks, but not fund any initiatives that help them connect with their local community.

Community doesn’t just happen naturally anymore, we need to invest in it. We’re living in a time where people are increasingly online, increasingly isolated, and there are fewer shared community spaces, particularly since austerity. In the past, maybe people met through church or other shared institutions. Now we need different ways to bring people together.

Refugees and migrants are often presented by politicians and the media as a problem. But when people meet and connect with them as fellow humans, they stop seeing them as a threat. Migrateful is evidence of that. So any initiative that helps people connect across differences is doing something valuable to change things.

📆 Join Migrateful This Refugee Week, 15-22 June

If you’re in or around Bristol, join Migrateful for their event:

Migrateful Refugee Week: How Do We Build Connection in a Polarised World?

Wednesday 17 June

5 PM - 7:30 PM

Tickets from £13.45

What does connection look like in a polarised world?

This Refugee Week, and for the Bristol Refugee Festival we’re bringing Bristol together for an evening of thought-provoking conversation, live music and delicious food from Somalia, Sudan and Kurdistan.

Hear from Bristol’s newly elected Lord Mayor, Yassin Mohamud, Bristol’s High Sheriff Kalpna Woolf, Migrateful chef Kele and CEO Jess Thompson as we explore what it really means to build belonging, understanding and unity across differences.

Expect:

⭐ Open conversations

🎤 Live performance from rapper and poet @MoYah

🥟 Food made by Migrateful chefs

👯 A space to connect with community

Click the link here to book your ticket. We can’t wait to connect with you!

June is one of the busiest months in the gatherings for good calendar. Pride Month, World Environment Day, Refugee Week and London Climate Action Week… there so many opportunities to connect, learn and take action!

We've done some of the sifting for you and selected a handful of events across June and early July that we think are particularly worth your time. If there was ever a month to get out, show solidarity and build community, it's this one.

⭐️ Spotlight on Refugee Week ⭐️

Migrateful Refugee Week: How Do We Build Connection in a Polarised World?
📅 17 June | 📍 Windmill Hill City Farm, Bristol
Conversation, food and music, for local community members, organisations and supporters.
→ Book Tickets

Supper in Solidarity
📅 18 June | 📍 Jean Stokes Community Centre, London
Share stories and raise funds over a meal prepared by Chef Doug Rolle from Sohaila.
→ Book Tickets

Bath Refugee Festival 2026: Celebrating Sanctuary
📅 20 June | 📍 Fairfield House, Bath
A family-friendly day of activities, celebrating culture, creativity, and connection.
→ Book Tickets

Read more

May is packed with opportunities to connect, learn, and take action, from climate gatherings to career-shaping conversations. Here are the events we think are most worth your time…

⭐️ Spotlight events ⭐️

Deep Time Walk — Ashton Court
📅 9 May | 📍 Bristol
A guided walk exploring Earth’s history and our place within it.
→ Book Tickets

Slow Fashion Festival
📅 16-17 May | 📍 Coal Drops Yard, London
One of the most joyful entries in London’s sustainable fashion scene.
→ Book Tickets

Who controls the future?
📅 18 May | 📍 RSA, London, and online
A free discussion on what happens when the future arrives pre-decide.
→ Book Tickets

Read more

🌳 The planet is losing 10 million hectares of forest every year - an area larger than Iceland.

🐟 Around one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction.

🌡️ The past three years have been the hottest ever recorded. With a possible El Niño in 2026, that trend may well continue.

But… it’s not all doom and gloom. People are building, organising, experimenting, and pushing forward solutions for a better planet. In the spirit of Earth Day, we’re spotlighting a sprinkling of these below alongside our usual opportunities line-up.

👀 Look out: a lot of these opps have application deadlines in the next few days 🏃🏾‍♀️‍➡️

Jobs

• Lead Content Designer, Soil Association | Bristol, Hybrid | £47,800-£51,000 FTE (28 hours) | 28th April | Link

• Project Manager: Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, ClientEarth | London | £56,991 | 29th April | Link

• Interim CEO, Ubele Initiative C.I.C, 12-month contract | London, Hybrid | £100,000-£110,000 | 1st May | Link

• Chief Operating Officer, Global Legal Action Network | Remote, UK | £62,000-£72,000 | 4th May | Link

Read more

Our goal is simple: to help you connect, feel inspired, and find practical ways to create positive change.

Social Enterprise and Investing

• 2026 Skoll World Forum, highlighting impactful innovations. Can be joined virtually for free (in-person is invite only) | 21st-24th April | Online (BST) | Register here

• Impact Investing Forum 2026, a leading impact investing and ESG conference | 26th-27th April | Kensington, London | Book tickets

• Good for Growth: B Corp Fest 2026, a day good businesses to learn and network | 23rd June | Edgworth | Book tickets

Read more

A year ago, I didn’t want to be a mother. Or at least.. I never saw myself having a child. It wasn’t that I didn’t like children - I love them. I just couldn’t see how my career would fit alongside it. But, as can happen in your mid-thirties, I met someone lovely and we decided to give it a go. And here I am, five months pregnant, and feeling all the feels about what it means for my future.

In 2026 mainstream media, we’re constantly shown stories of women who “have it all”; successful careers, polished livestream, and motherhood seamlessly woven in. Jacinda Arden famously led a country while raising a young child. These stories are celebrated, and make you think, maybe it is possible?

But now I’m on that journey, I’m starting to believe that - for most people - it just simply isn’t.

My partner, the father, is entitled to just two week’s paternity leave. For self-employed fathers and non-birthing partners, the entitlement drops to nothing. By contrast, my maternity pay is covered by the UK government for 39 weeks. Most nurseries won’t accept babies until they are at least six months old.

So the decision makes itself. I have to be the primary carer.

The UK’s paternity offer is among the weakest in wealthy nations. Spain offers more than three months, and Iceland offers around six. In addition, during the two weeks, UK fathers receive either £187.18 per week or 90% of their earnings (whichever is lower). That’s significantly below the national living wage. For self-employed fathers and non-birthing partners, the entitlement drops to nothing.

It’s no surprise then that one in five dads in the UK take no parental leave at all.

Yes, having a baby is a choice. But I can’t help feeling disappointed that in a wealthy country that claims to value gender equality, we are still so far from getting this right.

My friend Bee Pearson, co-founder of the media agency Piqniq, recently wrote an article about this issue:

“When couples look at rent or mortgage payments, both incomes matter, and both careers count. But when a baby arrives, we suddenly revert to a far older assumption: that caregiving will naturally sit with the mother. This isn’t just a workplace issue; it’s a social one.”

She points out that in heterosexual couples women often make career decisions based on maternity policies, while men rarely have to think about paternity leave in the same way.

The consequences are long-term. When mothers are expected to be the primary parent, their careers and financial stability take a hit. They lose earnings, pension contributions, and opportunities. Meanwhile, fathers miss out on early bonding time.

Even when mothers return to work, they often remain the default parent and carry the mental load of childcare alongside their jobs. This has real impacts on maternal mental health, including higher risks of postpartum depression.

It also affects relationships. Recent research commissioned by The Dad Shift and Movember found that 39% of separated parents said unequal caring responsibilities contributed to their break-up.

This affects everyone. Not just parents.

When caregiving is unequal, so are career outcomes. Men are more likely to reach senior leadership roles and higher salaries. Women are less visible in positions of power. And the idea that men are “natural” leaders becomes quietly reinforced.

It’s also no wonder that entrepreneurs are more likely to be men in the UK. The average age of starting a business is 32, exactly when parental leave and childcare costs come into play. As Bee puts it:

“Women repeatedly cite family care as a barrier to starting or scaling a business… the gap persists not because of a lack of ambition or capability, but because systems still assume they will absorb the majority of care.”

We are operating within an outdated system. One that assumes mothers will absorb the majority of caregiving, and gives families little real choice to do otherwise.

So what would a better system look like?

Campaigners argue it should start with a simple principle: each parent should have their own individual entitlement to time off and pay.

Women’s Budget Group highlight that both parents matter. The mothers need time to recover from childbirth and establish breastfeeding. Fathers and partners need meaningful time caring alone to build confidence and long-term involvement.

At its core, this is about giving parents the choice.

For some families, a more traditional split works, and that’s fine. But for those who want to share care more equally, the current system makes it incredibly difficult.

Other countries show that change is possible. In Finland, Sanna Marin reformed parental leave in 2020, replacing separate maternity and paternity policies with a shared system. Each parent receives around 6.6 months of leave, with flexibility to transfer some days between them. The policy aims to reduce inequality in both caregiving and the workplace, and early signs suggest more fathers are taking leave.

Government policy isn’t the only lever. Organisations can make their parental policies more equitable, and some are already leading the way. Parenting Out Loud identified over 165 UK employers offering equal parental leave, including companies like John Lewis, Netflix and British Heart Foundation.

As Bee says:

“Men must be encouraged to take paternity leave, without stigma or career penalty. Leaders must model it. Teams must normalise it.”

As I approach this new chapter, I feel both excited and unsettled. I can’t wait to be a mum, but I don’t want to lose the career I’ve built. Time away can mean losing clients altogether.

The truth is, the next few years feel uncertain.

And I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a partner with a stable income. Many don’t.

But if anything, this moment has made one thing very clear to me: if we are serious about gender equality, we cannot ignore parental leave. Until we fix it, we won’t have an equal society.

First, a quick intro: 4GOOD is an award-winning social enterprise on a mission to inspire people to do more good through the power of events. Born out of Year Here in 2022, we’ve been helping event organisers embed sustainable and socially conscious practices, while growing a community of people who believe in gathering for good. For more about us, visit our website or follow us on Instagram @weare4good

4GOOD is partnering with How to Change Things to bring you a monthly curated round-up of events and happenings across London, Bristol, the UK and beyond - all with a positive impact spin.

We’ll share events hosted by social enterprises, designed for socially conscious citizens and curious changemakers. Our goal is simple: to help you connect, feel inspired, and find practical ways to create positive change.

Read more

Before we start sharing their monthly events round-ups, we want to properly introduce you to our new partners - 4GOOD.

4GOOD is a London-based, award-winning social enterprise building a movement where doing good becomes the norm. It was founded in 2022 by Fran Harris, off the back of Year Here. At the time, she’d been working in planetary health research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Fran said:

”I was deep in the science of climate and sustainability, but what I loved most about my job was the public engagement work. Events, workshops, school talks. I loved bringing people into a room to spark interest, inspiration and ulitmately positive change.”

So she asked the questions:

• How might we use the power of events for good?

• What if events weren’t extractive, wasteful or performative — but regenerative, inclusive and genuinely impactful?

And 4GOOD was launched.

In just over three years, 4GOOD has:

• Worked with dozens of organisers to make their events more sustainable and socially conscious

• Promoted over 600 impact-focused gatherings

• Built a growing audience of thousands who believe in gathering for good

The focus of 4GOOD is bottom-up change. It’s based on the believe that when people connect, collaborate and create together, small actions ripple outward. We’re proud to be partnering with 4GOOD as part of How to Change Things. Because social change doesn’t just happen in theory. It happens in rooms, around tables, on stages.

More soon.

Alas, the year has indeed kicked off with the same chaotic energy as its junior 2010s partner.

Now we also have to contend with an information ecosystem that is getting hella noisy (hello, AI companions). Consequently, it’s become even more important for us to prioritise what we give our attention to. Garbage in, garbage out.

So, alongside our usual opportunities, jobs, and events in the social enterprise world, we’re sharing a few nuggets of wisdom created by people, to help you stay human and stay woke in 2016 2026.

First up, here are some Substacks we’re into:

🌍 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson - Forward-looking musings on climate, culture, and possibility from a scientist and policy nerd.

🤑 Grace Blakeley - Insightful, evidence-backed writing on capitalism and imperialist power—and how to resist it.

🇬🇧 Black British Radicals - An exploration of Black British political identity: how it is shaped, how it is lived, and how it continues to evolve.

💡Jordan Stephens - Honest ramblings on love, identity, culture and the absurdity of existence from one half of Rizzle Kicks.

These curated opportunities reflect where our audience is: mostly London, a bit of Bristol and the rest of the UK - plus a soupçon of goodies from all over the world.

Look out: a lot of these opps have application deadlines in the next few days 🏃🏾‍♀️‍➡️

Jobs

• Social Enterprise Programme Manager at Cook for Change | London | £40,000-£45,000 pro rata (0.6 FTE) | 30th January | Link

• Head of Policy, Programmes and Media at Advice UK | London, Hybrid | £70,000-£75,000 | 30th January | Link

• Operations and Fundraising Manager at Migrant Democracy Project | London | £37,000 pro rata (0.6 FTE) | 30th January | Link

• CEO at Transport Action Network | Remote, UK | £50,000 | 1st February | Link

Read more

Also—in case you missed them—check out some of our recent posts:

These round ups are for paid subscribers and the Year Here community. We select opportunities based on where the Year Here community is: mostly London, Bristol and the rest of the UK—but with a sprinkling of Europe too.

‼️ A lot of these opps have application deadlines in the next few days ‼️

Read more

I remember the decisions coming in thick and fast – on how to secure Year Here’s organisational survival, how to protect the vulnerable people we worked with, how to equip the team to work in a totally new way, how to respond to public demands for racial justice. That upsurge in responsibility was layered on top of a set of (more commonplace) personal burdens that came with just trying to survive a pandemic.

It would have been tone deaf of me to bemoan all that—because our community was struggling too. Most were cooped up in small flats. Some were desperately worried about vulnerable folks in their lives; some were vulnerable themselves. Many were anxious about what might happen next—for themselves, their families, the country, the world. They despaired about the gaping social and racial inequity that had been laid bare by the virus.

My role was to make sure our community’s practical and emotional needs were met so that we could do good work together. At the time, that felt like an impossible task. If leaders eat last in normal times then, in 2020, it was leaders eat never.

Then the Black Lives Matter protests began. People took to the streets because Black people were being killed by the police, not just in America but in the UK too. Because people of colour were more likely to die of Covid. Because, despite ostensible progress, Black and Brown Brits were still more likely to live in poverty. Because racism infected every part of society, including charities.

With all that context, no one needed to hear my complaints. I had to just suck it up. As a white leader of a social enterprise during a racial reckoning that laid bare the oppression faced by Black people around the world, the least I could do was listen, own my blind spots and blunders, and try to identify a path forward.

There were more decisions to make: how we communicated about the murder of George Floyd, what support we offered our Black colleagues, how we changed our policies and practice. We were rightly challenged to respond with substance not performance, and to consult Black members of our community while not burdening them.

Around the world, progressive leaders faced a deluge of difficult decisions, frustrated employees and a fired up citizenry. The leadership challenge was most acute in the USA, where the Black Lives Matter movement had its roots.

Many white charity leaders on the other side of the Atlantic did not suck it up. They gave up.

I moved to New York in 2021. I soon learnt that what I had experienced the year before, at the helm of Year Here, was far from unique among white leaders of charities in America. The challenge to power proved too much to bear for many of them. They took their cue and left their positions—or even left the workforce altogether.

In the U.S. nonprofit sector, this mass abdication proved consequential. More people of colour than ever, it seemed, stepped into vacant leadership roles and newly-created DEI positions.

Along with this changing of the guard, other Black and Brown people were taking the activist energy of 2020 and turning it into social startups that challenged the status quo. Wealthy institutions and individuals who were eager to assuage their white guilt poured money into existing Black-led nonprofits.

While personally traumatic for so many, perhaps we can look back on 2020 as an inflection point in the nonprofit sector. Maybe white charity leaders’ struggle spurred some creative destruction: long overdue change at the top.

For a new piece in Nonprofit Quarterly, I spoke with three New York City leaders of colour who came up through the crises of 2020 about the legacy of that year, and where we find ourselves today.

READ THE ARTICLE

It may be time to sit back and unwind but some don’t have that luxury. For those for whom the grind does not stop, it’s time for another opportunities round up: the summer edition 🌻

Since our last round-up, we’ve published interviews with J-Babs and Wendy Kopp. We’ve got some great posts in the pipeline and some très exciting potential podcast guests.

…

Read more

Until 4 July 2024, no Black person had ever been elected as a Liberal Democrat MP. That changed when Josh Babarinde became the Member of Parliament for his hometown of Eastbourne, ousting the Tories by the largest margin in a generation.

A decade before, Josh joined the third cohort of Year Here. He worked with young people affected by gang crime and went on to found Cracked It, a smartphone repair service staffed by ex-offenders and other at-risk youth. In 2020, he was awarded an OBE for services to criminal justice, social enterprise and the economy.

Within his first year in Parliament, he made waves with a campaign to fully recognise domestic abuse in the law. On 22 May 2025, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that the government would heed Josh’s calls.

I just had no shame in trying to get this done. I was so sure this was the right thing and took every opportunity. Sometimes I felt a bit too pushy doing it. Sometimes I felt like a broken record. Sometimes I felt like I wasn't going to get anywhere.

But it was clear to the powers that be that I was not going to give up. I said to them: I'm not dropping this. I'm sorry, but I'm not dropping this.

This battle was personal for Josh. In an interview with The Times, he revealed he was a survivor of abuse himself. Inspired by the words of former SNP MP Michelle Thomson, “I’m not a victim. I’m a survivor”, Josh began the long journey toward sharing his experience publicly, and using it as fuel for a campaign for justice.

In this conversation with Year Here’s founder Jack Graham, Josh tells the story of his campaign on behalf of domestic abuse victims and survivors. He also talks about how he became a Lib Dem, how his Year Here experience prepared him for political office and some of the quirks of life in Parliament.

Read the excerpt below or listen to the whole conversation:

How to Change Things

I'm Not a Victim, I'm a Survivor

Listen now

a year ago · Jack and Josh Babarinde

The conversation is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You recently scored your first big win in Parliament. For those who weren't plugged in, what were you trying to achieve? And what have you achieved?

The story with this is that last September, the prisons reached breaking point. There were fewer than 100 places left in the men's prison estate because, quite frankly, the last government mismanaged our criminal justice system and crashed our courts—massive backlogs there, overflowing prisons, poor conditions, super high reoffending rates, etc. The government therefore created an early release scheme where it allowed many ex-offenders to be released 40% into their sentence.

The government said: we're going to put a number of exclusions in place so that certain offenders won't qualify for early release and they gave assurances that domestic abusers would be excluded from this scheme. There can be a debate about whether that's right, whether there should be such exclusions, but what there can't be a debate about is around honouring a pledge.

What we found is that many domestic abusers were being released early under this scheme. It turned out that the government actually didn't have the means to comprehensively exclude them from early release. The government was only able to exclude people on the basis of the offence that they had committed, and not based on the context of it—because it's not formally recorded. Many domestic abusers are convicted of things like assault, battery, actual bodily harm, ABH, and…

…which are the same as what someone might get for a pub brawl…

…a pub brawl between strangers! And so there was just no way of making this distinction. It felt to me that this was wrong, a promise was being breached, and so I wanted to do something about it. And I said to the government: there's a gap here, you need to fix it. What are you going to do?

After speaking with various researchers I hatched an idea to create a specific offence of domestic abuse in the law. The way it would work is in the same way that you have racially- and religiously-aggravated assault, ABH, GBH, we could have a domestic abuse-aggravated equivalent. Then someone convicted of those crimes could be excluded from an early release scheme if the government so chose.

There were more and more benefits that I unearthed that such a categorisation would achieve. Data was a key one we unearthed through putting in a written parliamentary question to the Ministry of Justice asking “how many domestic abusers are there in prison and what is their re-offending rate?” The government replied saying, quote almost word for word, ‘it is not possible to robustly calculate the number of domestic abusers in prison or their re-offending rate.’

I went to, in the first instance, Women's Aid and Refuge and said, folks, this is bonkers, isn't it? There's all this stuff that survivors feel they need to do in response to their domestic abuser being released. To tell them that the abusers are not going to be released early (so they've got time to prepare) and then they find out that they have already been released, or that they're set to be released early, is just hugely disorientating, hugely traumatising and unacceptable.

I knew I was onto something. I put forward this bill. I pitched the bill on Good Morning Britain. The response was extraordinary: a petition with 50,000 signatures on change.org, lots of survivors getting in touch after that initial launch. I challenged the Justice Secretary on it within hours of the launch in the chamber. We built a coalition of survivors, survivors charities, academics, lawyers and politicians around this idea—and just kept pushing on it every opportunity.

And you were getting support across the board, across the house?

Support from across the house: From Labour MPs, Conservative MPs, of course my Lib Dem colleagues, DUP MPs, Green MPs. It was a cross-party thing, and I think that was so important. This was not tribal; this wasn't about a blame game. I met with every minister going. I met with Jess Phillips in the Home Office about this. I met with the Victims Minister, I met with the Justice Secretary, I met with the Solicitor General, I met with the Attorney General. I raised it with the Policing Minister, I raised it with the Home Secretary. Everyone who needed to know about it did.

Last week I gave it another massive push and said “guys, what is going on? There's no one else I can meet. There are no more arguments I can put forward. You've told me what your concerns are, and I have come back and addressed them, line by line. What more do you need from me?” And then I got a response from the Minister for Victims, who I work really well with, who gave a bit of a teaser that she had some news that I might welcome. I had a meeting with her and the Sentencing Minister the following day, where she shared with me that the government would be pursuing a specific categorisation of domestic abuse offence in the law—for the first time ever. It was announced in the House of Commons the following day.

The change hasn't happened yet. Currently, it's being written into a new law. The government has asked for me to be involved in that, and I want to make sure it's implemented in the right way. But if the only thing that I achieved in my political career was this, I'd be very proud.

You acknowledge you're a survivor of domestic abuse yourself and you've spoken to The Times about that experience. How did you get to the point where you felt OK to talk about a really dark, traumatic time?

Well, it was something that I'd made a commitment to myself that I wasn't going to talk about. It happened many years ago and it was hard and traumatic. It was also something I just didn't want to define me. I also felt a bit of embarrassment and shame. I didn't want that to persist so I didn't intend to speak about it.

But some things really moved me towards the end of 2016 when I saw some folks in the public eye talk so candidly and inspirationally about their experiences of abuse. One was a series of footballers who spoke about how they were dealing with their experiences of abuse at the hands of their former coach, Barry Burnell. They were on the Victoria Derbyshire Show and it was just so moving to see them speak. That got me thinking a lot, and resonated with me.

Around that time, you and I had dinner with our friend Rich who was a Year Here Fellow as well. We got to a point where we were just talking about families, I think, and we'd very much transitioned into heart-to-heart mode. When it was my turn to go, I found myself sharing a set of experiences that were the same set of experiences that I had said to myself I was not going to bring with me into the future. That's how this really came to the fore again for me. And it was clear I hadn't left it in the past. These things, I'm afraid, don't leave you.

While writing her thesis at Princeton, Kopp developed an idea to recruit hundreds of students to become classroom teachers in some of the United States’ poorest communities. Her blueprint included a rigorous selection process and an eight-week residential training program, after which college graduates would begin a two-year teaching placement.

In her first year after graduating, Kopp raised $2.5 million to make the idea a reality. Her record of fundraising meetings reads like a who’s who of corporate America. Nearly 500 college students became the first ‘corps members’ of Teach for America (TFA) in 1990. The organisation grew to a peak of over 5,000 incoming participants per year in the 2010s—placed in schools all across the US.

To date, over 60,000 people have become teachers through the scheme. TFA inspired Teach First in the UK, and many other schemes around the world.

In 2007, Kopp co-founded Teach for All, a global network of organisations with a similar mission and model to TFA. She stood down from TFA in 2013 but remains the CEO of Teach For All.

In its formation, TFA came in for fierce criticism: privileged do gooders would be clueless as teachers in low income schools; they would abandon their kids after their two year commitment, doing more harm than good. Accusations of elitism dogged the organisation for years. Kopp herself was also a target. Steven Colbert was not the first to point out, in a TV interview in 2007, that she had never actually done the very thing she was asking others to do: teach. Kopp’s earnestness and the scheme’s meteoric success were magnets for opprobrium.

TFA has been characterised as a neoliberal project that undermines unions, deprofessionalises the sector, and upholds an unjust status quo at the behest of its powerful funders. The question of whether TFA is, on balance, a force for good warranted a separate piece:

In my interview with Kopp, I was interested in whether she had shifted on some of these thorny questions or remained steadfast.

An interview with Wendy Kopp

Edited for brevity and clarity.

Reading your book, what struck me as extraordinary was the sheer level of ambition you had at 21. Where did that come from?

I always thought ‘I just got into this situation’ and felt like there was no option. I had such a sense of responsibility to all the different constituents.

I observe it every day: social entrepreneurs who have the weight of the world on their shoulders. It was just the transformative effect of entrepreneurship itself.

By now, we’ve probably all psychoanalysed our early years and how those shaped our current ways of being. Growing up, I gained a real sense that I could overcome anything. I came to realise that, with enough work and focus, I can do anything.

I realised at a very early age that education was my key to having the freedom to do anything I wanted and live anywhere I wanted—and that's exactly what I did. I just worked really, really hard.

A lot of it was naïveté too. If I had had a little more seasoning, I would have realised how big that was—but I was just like ‘let's do it’.

I really think we need people before they're too jaded by experience to pursue their big ideas. We need them when they're young and full of idealism, before they’ve been shaped by the status quo.

You are one of the archetypal social entrepreneurs. How do you make the case for entrepreneurship as a tool for social change?

I actually don't make this case.

What I started seeing a few years ago—less now—was so many people running out saying, ‘I'm gonna start something!’ and trying to figure out what to start. That just shouldn't be the starting point. It certainly wasn't my starting point.

People need to figure out what issue they want to tackle, gain proximity to it, really understand the challenge and the range of solutions, and then figure out where they can best leverage their energy. That might be joining something that already exists. When you see a big hole in the system, then it makes sense to start something new.

That said, we've seen the role that social entrepreneurs can play in fostering innovation and putting pressure on big entrenched systems. You need people who aren't operating under the constraints of the public system to help pioneer the new way, to show what's possible.

You weren’t a teacher before you started this, nor did you share the lived experience of the kids that Teach For America supports. When you think about that now, is that something you feel was missing?

The thing I did have was that I was a college student in the generation I was trying to inspire.

In those early years, everywhere I went, everyone from the educators to the people in the school districts to the school principals would say ‘college students will never do this’. That was the one thing I had any reason to have conviction about. No one was going to get me to believe that we couldn't recruit a bunch of college students. I knew we could. That wasn't even a question. I had the proximate experience of that.

I was super clear that I didn't know what I was doing on any other front, which led me to ask for lots of help and be open to learning.

If I had taught, I don't think I would have gotten back to starting this. What you realise when you teach for two years is that you can't leave it.

That said, there’s a lot I missed by not teaching myself. This is very clear to me whenever I'm with people who have taught. The level of conviction I had that we could recruit people? That's the level of conviction teachers have about the fact that actually, truly, all kids do have potential.

In your book you talk about finding the right business model. Along the way, there must have been dynamics with some funders that were antithetical to what you were trying to achieve—or where there were some unintended consequences.

We learned a lot about this but, sadly, real conviction about it didn’t come to me vividly until my last official week at Teach For America when I was visiting rural communities where we had been placing teachers for a long time. What I saw then, and have put at the center of the work at Teach For All, is that the foundation is coming to understand what those communities want for their kids, and being sure we're working towards that instead of something else.

If we were putting at the heart of our work in any given place, an effort to co-create among a diverse set of stakeholders—with students and families at the centre, and teachers and community leaders and even philanthropists and business people: what do we want to have be true for our community? When we've been at our best as a community, what was at work? What are the challenges facing kids, and the pathways for opportunity? Given all this, what do we want to be true for our young people? Then we should be working towards that.

I think if I knew what I now know, I could have started this in a different way.

That said, I don't feel we compromised our values. Through the years we invested in the learning of those philanthropists. We hosted gatherings enabling them to get into proximity with communities and to learn together in challenging, supportive environments, with facilitators like Beverly Tatum and Dr. Michael Lomax1. We saw a lot of evolution in the mindsets and approach of the philanthropists themselves.

How do you think about the role of activism in the education field?

I really evolved my thinking about this over time through the Teach For America journey.

We thought [at the outset of Teach for America]: we can change all the policies, advocate for all the policies we want, but there is so little strength in the system to implement any of that. So, let's focus on developing teachers, school leaders, school systems. We saw what happened when we had people with aligned purpose and vision and values, not only in the system but also in positions of political leadership. We saw how much faster we could move.

Then we realised that it's not sustainable without the advocates. If we don't have advocates outside the system educating the public, even educating teachers, about the issues then political leaders with bold visions won’t stay in office.

In Memphis, Tennessee, a group of parents formed themselves into an advocacy group called Memphis Lift. They started doing community walks, just educating parents about the state of the education system: did you know that this is the graduation rate in this high school, what your rights are as parents, etc. All of a sudden, the media had two people to interview. They were interviewing the union2 and they were interviewing the head of Memphis Lift, this incredible, scrappy parents’ advocacy organisation. The dynamics in the education reform movement changed overnight. Finally, the people who were in there fighting for kids and fighting to make the system accountable had a shot.

I’m sure you know the books by Anand Giridharadas and Edgar Villanueva. What’s your take on those arguments? Where do we go wrong as a field in our relationship to money?

Collective leadership3 means that we need diverse people—especially people with lived experience of inequity and their allies—working in relationship with each other, and working together on the solution. This means we need the philanthropists engaging alongside everyone else.

I can think back to the circumstances in communities such as Oakland, California, for example, or Newark, New Jersey4. In these situations there are philanthropists and they don’t have to be funding education. But they have made big commitments to it.

We need people working together and listening to each other—philanthropists and the others—and that's what doesn't happen. We're really not going to get there without the philanthropists.

I think Anand [Giridharadas]5 helped generate a set of debates that needed to happen. But we won't get where we’re trying to go without deep collaboration with the people with the money and the privilege.

Across three decades, what have been some of the lessons and evolutions in your own thinking when it comes to racial justice?

From the start we were thinking a lot about how to recruit a diverse corps, how to train and support all of our teachers and staff members so they were conscious of their biases, the inequities we were addressing, and how to build our collective skills to work across lines of difference. That said, we’ve learned a great deal about how to do this—and have made tremendous progress in building a diverse organization that centers equity.

I think many don’t have a fully accurate picture of TFA, fuelled by the initial media coverage thirty-something years ago.

To this day, people think that Teach For America began by recruiting at 13 schools. And yet we recruited from a diverse group of 100 of them even in year one—including state schools, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. And from the start our cohorts were much more diverse than those 100 universities.

All this said, we have certainly become all the more clear that people with lived experience of inequities must lead the change if we’re going to create a truly just world and sustain progress. At the same time, I do also think we need people with privilege. To effect systemic change we need a diverse coalition of people.

33 years ago I wasn’t aware of how much unlearning we all need to do. So many of us have been taught inaccurate versions of history. Many of us have so much work to do on ourselves and our own biases. That's a never ending journey, right? We very much underestimated how much personal effort this work requires.

When you founded Teach For All were you thinking about how to do things differently? What was on your mind?

I believe so much more in people now than I did before. I've just seen people transform themselves. There's something about the combination of local ownership, peer effects, opportunities to step up from your context, and putting everything that we would have put into management and control into helping everyone learn from each other that is just really powerful. Controlling things is just not the answer—to anything, actually.

In year two of Teach For America some person, who I probably found very annoying at the time, sat in one of our regular Monday night staff meetings and asked the question: “Why do we think all kids have potential but all adults don’t?” They were making a point about the way we were operating internally. I never forgot that question, but I also didn’t know what to do about that inconsistency.

With everything that we as social entrepreneurs know now about the world as it is—and what we've done right and done wrong—what do you think the next wave of organisation-building needs to look like?

We need to shift from a solutions-led paradigm towards a ‘people first’ approach that invests in the leadership of people—diverse, proximate, locally-rooted in communities—so that they can develop and adapt solutions. We need networks, enabling them to learn from each other across communities, across countries, so they can pursue change that is globally-informed.

We also need to reinvent the way we work within organisations, so that we’re developing everyone’s agency—because if we're not doing that within our organisations, how are we going to do that for communities?

One of the things I'm completely obsessed with is about the young people on college campuses today. We have lots of evidence that they are more committed to diversity, equity, sustainability, justice than the generations that have come before. But you really can't see evidence that they're doing anything different with their time and energy—their career choices. In fact, they're thinking: ‘OK, let me make enough money, let me get a job that pays enough, let me advocate with those employers for lots of time off, then I'll show up at the protests, and I'll go weigh in on TikTok’.

But we’ve got big problems facing our society. I don't know if we were as aware of the challenges we had as a society 20, 30 or 40 years ago, but today, we are deeply aware of them—which gives us a responsibility to take them on. Doing so will take a lot of full time energy so we need to start being more critical about where this rising generation is going to put their energy.

Further Reading

Wendy Kopp - One Day All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way Kopp’s memoir chronicles the first ten years of TFA’s development. Kopp is frank about major fundraising hurdles, her own blind spots, and facing down her detractors.

Wendy Kopp - 35 Years In: What’s Been Learned and Accomplished at Teach For America Remarks delivered at Teach For America’s 35th anniversary Benefit Dinner in June 2025 in New York.

A couple of years later, a consultant started working with our team: a Black American woman whose acuity and style I found magnetic. I learnt that she’d been on one of the first cohorts of Teach For America (TFA), the model that had inspired Teach First in the UK. I eagerly asked her for coffee to get feedback on an idea I was working on, to build something similar in the field of social entrepreneurship. “I may have done TFA but that doesn’t mean I don’t have serious critiques of TFA,” she told me before launching into a comprehensive take down of the scheme and leaving me chastened. Since then I’ve only known TFA as both a colossal presence in the US education system and the topic of ferocious debate—about public education, racial equity, labor rights, social mobility and elitism.

Ahead of the publication of my interview with Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, I wanted to dig in to the arguments / hear out the haters.

Since its founding in 1989, TFA has sought to reduce educational inequity—disparities in academic achievement between students of different races and socio-economic backgrounds. The organisation’s original vision statement was: “one day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education”. So far, so uncontroversial.

Where the obloquy comes in is when it comes to TFA’s method: recruiting, training, and placing graduates under-resourced schools to teach for two years.

So, first, here is the entry-level case against TFA:

• Elite graduates are not the right people to teach children from low-income backgrounds. They share little in terms of identity or lived experience with their students.

• TFA provides inadequate preparation to its participants before they enter the classroom. Just a few weeks’ training over the summer is much less than other new teachers receive.

• TFA teachers leave the kids high and dry when they inevitably leave teaching for a high-paid corporate job. The TFA commitment is for two years. After this, many participants leave teaching—at higher rates than teachers who came up through other routes.

These 101 criticisms are rebuffed vigorously by Kopp, who often says that they are a wilful misunderstanding of the model. She addressed some of them at Stanford University in 2011:

Presumably these takes, if true, would have a negative impact on the educational attainment of students of TFA teachers. But the data suggest that Kopp is right. The model—inclusive of its selectivity and relatively limited professional preparation—works. A 2024 meta-analysis by the American Institutes for Research reviewed data from 23 studies of the efficacy of TFA over the scheme’s first 24 years. The study found that TFA teachers had a significant positive impact in Maths and Science (although the impact was not significant in English).

What about churn? Surely teachers leaving the profession at high rates can’t be good for kids. A 2022 Brown University study evaluated New York City data and found that the lower retention rates of TFA teachers was offset by an uplift in student performance among those taught by TFA teachers.

But social change is more multifaceted than just a slight uplift in grades at the end of a school year. TFA speaks in the language of systemic change and we should appraise its impact and influence accordingly. It is in this systemic domain where things get more complicated and where the fiercest debates about the scheme are ablaze.

For two centuries, the U.S. public education system has yielded stark educational inequity. One of the main drivers has been segregation which, while declared unconstitutional in 1954, persists to this day1. Another cornerstone of this injustice is the nature of public school funding. The primary method for funding schools in the U.S. is via local property taxes, meaning that schools in poorer areas with lower property values get less funding.

How to solve the achievement gap has become a contested question. In the 1980s and 1990s, school choice policies2 led to the development of charter schools, which are publicly-funded but independently-run, and the topic of much debate3. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind4 pushed standardised testing and punished schools for poor performance. It was into this fraught debate that TFA came on the scene.

Critics argue that the TFA model has insidious effects on labour rights, educational equity and racial justice in America.

So let’s hear three of those those arguments.

1. TFA is Anti-Union and Pro-Privatisation

As TFA grew, it was seen as increasingly allied to the charter school movement. Charter schools have been blamed for contributing to the structural weakening of teacher unions’ power and the deprofessionalisation of teaching. One of the largest charter school networks, KIPP, was founded by TFA alum. For 16 years KIPP was led by Richard Barth, a founding staff member at TFA and Kopp’s husband.

New Orleans is perhaps the starkest example of the shift from public schools to charters. Before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, less than 1% of the city’s kids attended a charter school. In the years that followed that disaster, the city fired over 7,000 school workers and became the district with the highest proportion of students in charter schools in the nation, with TFA playing a significant role in staffing up these new schools.

A 2019 Propublica investigation found that the organisation’s largest private funder, the Walton Family Foundation5, was granting higher amounts for teachers placed in charter schools than in traditional public schools. Around the same time, an increasingly disproportionate number of TFA teachers were being placed in charter schools: 40% of them in 2018 according to the article. For context, less than 7% of students across the nation attended charter schools at that time.

TFA has been denounced as complicit in the mass lay off of unionised teachers, who are then replaced by TFA teachers. The pattern has been reported across the country in the school systems of New Orleans, Chicago and Oakland among others. In 2019, 300 alumni signed a letter to TFA’s leadership asking it to stop “pressuring” participant teachers to break a strike by suggesting they may lose financial benefits if they do.

2: TFA Maintains the Status Quo

The dynamic between TFA and its powerful funders illustrates the core contradiction of philanthropy as described by Edgar Villanueva in Decolonizing Wealth: giving to the needy with one hand, while keeping the poor poor with their other. The argument goes that extreme wealth—concentrated in the bank accounts of a few, mostly white, families—is uninterested in structural change that might harm its own interests. This contention is reasonably applied to many nonprofits but TFA, in particular, has been a darling of US philanthropy for decades. The organisation generated over $2.5 billion revenue in the 2010s alone.

A special education teacher in Chicago authored a searing open letter to new TFA recruits, pointing to TFA’s partnerships with the very financial institutions that contributed to the 2008 financial crash and drove families into deeper poverty.

TFA aims to address educational inequity but it can only pursue a specific strategy to achieve that goal if it is funded to do so. What if the most effective strategy to eradicate educational inequity negatively affected the bottom line of the financial institutions who fund the work, or their customers? What if TFA started advocating for a wealth tax to better fund public education? Would those banks—or the Walton Family Foundation—still support?

The holders of the purse strings tacitly dictate what TFA does and, perhaps more consequentially, what the organisation does not do to further the cause. The result: an inequitable status quo remains unchallenged.

3: TFA Does Not Challenge Racism

A common characterisation of TFA is that its teachers are privileged outsiders and mostly white, while the students are disadvantaged and mostly Black or Brown.

In the school year before Hurricane Katrina, 93% of students enrolled in New Orleans public schools were Black and most of their teachers were Black too. In the six years that followed, EducationWeek reported that the proportion of public school teachers who were Black dropped from 73% to 49% while the proportion who were white increased from 24% to 46%. The same article reported that TFA had 375 first and second year teachers in the city by 2013 and that just 16% of its 2012 cohort were Black.

Undeniably, public education in the U.S. has racist roots—in the denial of education to enslaved Black people, segregation and the ensuing resistance to integration, and unequal school funding. Many argue that this racism persists, all be it in a different form, today. Looking through this lens, activists and advocates say that TFA has an obligation to dismantle these racist systems.

One modern manifestation of educational racism has been described as a ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ in which Black and Brown children are funnelled, through a confluence of disciplinary practices and racial bias6, out of the education system and into the criminal justice system. By placing teachers in the ‘no excuses’ schools most associated with the school-to-prison pipeline, TFA has been accused of not doing enough to disrupt this pipeline.

So, Is Teach For America The Villain?

Where does all this leave us? These bigger, more complex questions about privatisation and labor rights, structural inequity and anti-Blackness are hard to weigh.

TFA has maintained that it is neutral on teacher unionisation. In response to the complaints surrounding the 2019 strike action in Oakland, a spokesperson said that the organisation “cannot hinder or prohibit” their teachers’ participation in the strike. TFA says that it supports a broad range of educational models, not just charter schools, and that it sets policies independently rather than being beholden to its funders. Since the organisation’s birth, Kopp has tried to disabuse critics of the notion that TFA is an example of white saviourism or even anti-Blackness. In her 2001 memoir, she said “I felt we needed to make a particular effort to recruit individuals who shared the socioeconomic and racial backgrounds of their students.”

The answers to these thorny questions are likely more nuanced than some detractors would have us believe. One small example: TFA’s staff were initially all paid a flat $25,000 salary, regardless of their seniority—pretty far from the ultra-capitalist model that the organisation is charged with emulating.

But some of the criticisms do ring true. I did some LinkedIn stalking before meeting Kopp and discovered that the members of the founding team and board she names in her book are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The mismatch between the racial and socio-economic backgrounds of the scheme’s founders and those of the student population that it serves does leave a bad taste in the mouth.

The answers to these questions are also not fixed in perpetuity. A social purpose institution can (and should) change—rather than cupping its corporate hands over its ears as objections are thrown its way. TFA’s intake has diversified considerably over the years and is now majority people of colour. Teach For All, the organisation that Kopp now runs, embraces a ‘collective leadership’ philosophy which incorporates a more diverse set of actors into the conversation about education reform.

But all that still leaves lots of questions unanswered. I put many of them to Kopp herself. Look out for my interview with her in the next few days.

Further Reading

Wendy Kopp - One Day All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way: Kopp’s memoir chronicles the first ten years of TFA’s development. Kopp is frank about major fundraising hurdles, her own blind spots, and facing down her detractors.

Teach For America is shrinking—Is this cause for celebration? (Brookings, 2023): a comprehensive review of the evidence of TFA’s efficacy in the light of a declining enrolment in TFA—and increasing enrolment in for-profit certification programs with dubious results.

Over the coming months, explainers, interviews and opinion will be landing in your inboxes. We hope they galvanise you.

As members of the Year Here community, we’ve given you all ‘Founding Member’ status 💙 This means you’ll get acc…

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There’s something else we don’t talk about from that year. 2020 was the year we seemed to all agree that Black Lives Matter, and that our institutions weren’t acting like they did.

Although the movement was born in the US and focussed on police brutality, galvanised by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the broader argument about systemic inequity resonated here. We saw how the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on Black and Asian families—and what that revealed about our society. We also had the British colonial legacy to reckon with.

There was an astounding proliferation of books on anti-racism, corporate DEI statements, social media call outs, lists of Black businesses to support.

And then there wasn’t.

Anti-racist righteousness seemed to evaporate. Covid eventually ebbed away too. The news cycle moved on.

But those stark racial inequities that so many professed to care about are still there. Black Caribbean students and Gypsy-Roma students are between 50 and 350% more likely to be permanently excluded from school than their white counterparts. Bangladeshi, Arab and Black African families are more than 10 times more likely to live in overcrowded housing than white British families. Black women are around three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women. The explosion of far right racist riots in summer 2024 served as a reminder of how much further we have to go.

The nature of systemic inequity means that racism infects every corner of society. The corner that Year Here focusses on is entrepreneurship, specifically social entrepreneurship. Here, the picture isn’t rosy: 84% of Black British business owners see racism as a barrier to entrepreneurship. 0.24% of venture capital funding goes to Black founders—and VC is even less accessible to Black women.

In social enterprise, Black and ethnic minoritised founder-led ventures are less likely to receive social investment than white-led organisations. Just 13% of social enterprises are led by people of colour, meaning white people are over-represented in social enterprise leadership.

While thousands of organisations support individual entrepreneurs of colour, we wanted to highlight those that have got a specific and explicit focus on tackling the barriers faced by Black and Asian founders, and other entrepreneurs of colour.

Here’s our list. It’s almost certainly incomplete—so let everyone know who we’ve missed in the comments.

Venture Capital

Black Seed: A Venture Capital firm addressing the historical underfunding and over-mentoring of Black British founders.

F100 Growth Fund: A partnership between the Black Equity Organisation and Sky, this fund backs Black entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses.

Impact X Capital Partners: A London-based venture firm focused on investing in underrepresented entrepreneurs across Europe, particularly people of colour and women.

Social Enterprise Funding

Black Funding Network : A giving circle that offers small, Black-led grassroots organisations serving Black communities the funding they need to grow.

Flexible Finance Fund: This fund, managed by Social Investment Business, offers a combination of loans and grants to charities and social enterprises led by Black and Ethnically-Minoritised Entrepreneurs

Baobab Foundation: Born from the UK Black struggle movement that was catalysed in 2020, Baobab is a pro-Black foundation resourcing racial justice and redressing anti-Blackness in the funding world.

The Pathway Fund: An impact investment wholesaler (i.e. an investor in other investors) focussed on catalysing opportunities for Black and Ethnically-Minoritised communities across the UK

Training and Community

Foundervine. Foundervine enables the growth of entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds through accelerator programmes and events.

The Ubele Initiative: An African diaspora-led social enterprise, Ubele supports Black and minoritised communities in the UK through leadership programs, capacity building, and advocacy.

The Bae: The Bae is a community for high-growth British Asian entrepreneurs, investors and operators.

Do it Now Now: An open-innovation organisation committed to the empowerment of Black people, Do it Now Now offers various programmes for Black entrepreneurs.

OneTech: Founded by Emma Obanye, OneTech offers training and network opportunities connecting tech startups led by diverse founders with VC and industry experts.

Diversity Business Incubator: Based in Plymouth, DBI is a Business Hub for Minority Ethnicity entrepreneurs across Devon.

The Avocado Foundation: Aiming to eradicate economic inequalities experienced by under-represented youth, nonprofits and entrepreneurs, the Avocado Foundation offers entrepreneurship training and venture support.

Research, Advocacy and Campaigns

#CharitySoWhite: Starting with people of colour sharing their experiences of racism in the charity sector, #CharitySoWhite has evolved into a campaign to end institutional racism in the charity sector.

Black Business Association: Run by the London Chamber of Commerce, the Black Business Association lobbies for and supports Black British business.

Diversity VC: This international nonprofit, headquartered in London, drives diversity, equity and inclusion in venture capital with insight, tools and resources.

Extend Ventures: This group of business, finance and research specialists work to democratise and diversify access to venture capital.