As I am leaving NHYC on September 11th, this is likely to be one of the last pieces that I write on homelessness, and although a version of this piece was orginally written for Inside Housing, I felt compelled to update in light of the homelessness push coming out of Number 10.

In other news I have started a seperate, new Substack called Worth Noting Newsletter, to give a round up of news from the world of AI as it effects charities and civil society.

That means I will write And in the End and Worth Noting on alternate weeks and each will now come out fortnightly. Please go check it out, subscribe and share with those who might be interested.

Worth Noting Newsletter

A fortnightly digest on AI and its effects - both good and bad - on civil society

By And in the end

Far from the Madding Connection

The Poor Laws were created under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to deal with poverty in England. Under the act, local parishes were made responsible for looking after poor people and financed this aid through a local tax on landowners.

But while much changed with Poor Laws in 350 years, one core rule applied throughout: if a person needed help, they could only get it in their home area. The overseer would refuse to help anyone who wasn’t from the parish and start a process known as ‘removal’ to send them from whence they came.

In Far From The Madding Crowd, Fanny Robin dies as a result of the journey to her local workhouse in Casterbridge. It is a story that is oft repeated throughout the novels of the Victorian era because it so closely followed real life. Documents from the time described cases where pregnant girls and women, children, older people and those who were ill were forcibly sent back to their ‘home parish’, sometimes dying on an arduous journey back across the country.

But this post is not a tale of an all too common Victorian scandal. Rather, it is a tale of one that might be on its way. For, in a year just after the homelessness sector has celebrated the abolition of the Vagrancy Act 1824, there is a very real risk that we might be sleepwalking into bringing back the infamous Poor Laws that were created at the same time, or at least some of the worst parts of it.

The 20th century post-war era finally ushered in the demise of the Poor Laws, with the Beveridge Report of 1942 condemning that they should not be allowed to continue under any guise because “social security must be achieved by co-operation between the state and the individual.” This cemented a notion that people deserved help where they were, not where they came from.

But today, we see the return of the Poor Law philosophy with the growing emphasis on local connection. While “we don’t import need” might sound like a line from a workhouse master of a bygone era, it actually came from a housing official in a London borough. It is a sentiment that advice workers at the New Horizon Youth Centre are seeing again and again in councils when trying to get support for new young homeless people that come to our day centre every day.

Although there is no provision for local authorities to determine individual claims for supported housing based on local connection, this is exactly what is happening in practice. As the housing crisis deepens and London’s temporary accommodation bills continue to escalate, so too will the walls of the borough boundaries, and there are very real implications of this for the Prime Minister’s ambition to get Everyone in For Christmas.

Will that new approach uphold what Beveridge held dear, or further embed a system where supported housing provision will only be available for those who are from the borough the housing is in?

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To an outsider looking in, ‘local housing for local people’ might sound like a sensible solution, but it creates two significant and related issues. First, it is a policy designed to harm the most vulnerable. The reasons that led to people’s homelessness can also be the reasons they need to leave their home area.

Second, it assumes, incorrectly, that services and support are distributed evenly across the country when they are not. Major cities have always and will always be a draw for people. It is one reason why such a significant proportion of London's rough sleeping population was born outside the UK, and why people have always travelled to the capital from elsewhere in the country looking for work, opportunity or simply somewhere to start again. Indeed, it wasn’t long ago the mayor was championing that “London is Open” to embrace this spirit of movement. Will our new national, ‘A Bed Every Night’, decide instead that it will be closed?

Andy Burnham has, quite rightly drawn inspiration from the Everyone In scheme in the pandemic when this country came closest to achieving the ambition he outlined as his first instruction. But Everyone In worked precisely because it meant everyone and because in meant wherever you were, not wherever you were from.

So whilst the PM is right to drawn inspiration from our recent past, he should also take the lessons of a history not so easily remembered. We do not live in Victorian times anymore, but we should not underestimate the damage creeping back into modern-day ‘local connection’ and ‘removal’ policy might cause to our ambitions to end homelessness.

The National Assistance Act 1948 helped us get rid of the removal process and the stipulation that help could only come from the place you once called home.

This Christmas, we will find out if, once again, our past catches up with us and everyone really does mean everyone.

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I recently invited 12 charity leaders to come together and discuss the advent of artificial intelligence in society and how we should be responding.

I did so both as a concerned citizen and as the chief executive of a charity, worried about how the rollout of AI might affect the issues my organisation is here to address.

Don’t get me wrong. I am, I think, an AI optimist. It has unfathomable potential to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems on an unprecedented scale.

Imagine a future where diseases have cures, work is completed by machines and there is unlimited clean energy to power it all.

Even today, charities are seeing huge productivity benefits, and it is not hard to see why everyone wants to harness the ‘army of interns’ so readily available to us all.

But AI also has the potential to do a lot of damage, and this isn’t getting enough airtime in our sector.

The environmental impacts, the enshittification, cybercrime and mass unemployment are all real concerns, before you even worry about a computer itself taking over the world.

This isn’t the first time we have seen huge disruption following the explosion of a new technology.

After the Industrial Revolution, the 50-year period in which incomes stagnated while the capitalists got rich, came to be known as Engels’ Pause, leading to large-scale changes in employment, the environment and society itself.

I wonder if we are now on the cusp of something similar. Though, with the chief executive of Google DeepMind predicting the impact to be 10 times faster and 10 times deeper, it is less likely to be a pause and more of an avalanche.

As charities, we need to face that risk head-on.

At the roundtable, it became clear that I am not the only one with these concerns.

While the excitement about AI continues, the conversation in civil society is slowly shifting from the applications to implications. Because yes, LLMs and agents might make us more efficient, but are they also – sometimes imperceptibly – leaving damage in their wake?

It is a well-trodden fact that the third sector can be much slower to get behind digital trends than our private-sector counterparts.

Much of this can be put down to the capacity issues perpetuated by our paper-thin funding model. But talking to other leaders, I realise the avoidance is not simply a ‘cannot’ issue, but a ‘will not’ one.

The moral concerns about the birth of these tools are well founded, but will our abstinence alone stop them?

The advent of AI is upon us and, although there is surely now no way to put the genie back in the bottle, we must start talking about how we get a share of the wishes.

The conversation last week revealed some clear steps that could help us get there and, thankfully, some of this work is already underway.

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Firstly, we need to surface a new narrative about AI within the sector, taking into account the impacts and not simply efficiency gains.

Critically, this means shifting our mindsets from seeing AI as a digital tactic to understanding it as a governance issue. Work must begin at pace with boards to help them consider the strategic implications of what is upon us.

Secondly, we need to collectively identify harms early and catalogue them so they can feed into funding, policy and public debate. We should build upon the work the UN and OECD have already started and bring our vast, community-rooted expertise to surfacing the impacts on the ground in the UK.

Thirdly, surrounded by a government obsessed with growth and an unbridled race towards whatever AI nirvana they imagine, we should force a seat at the table.

We need to ensure consideration is given to how we might all benefit from the gains if we all have to suffer the consequences. AI sovereignty will become one of the hottest conversations of the next six months, but it does not just apply to data and access – it also matters who is reaping the rewards.

Finally, and with this in mind, charities need to start asking serious questions about ownership.

Who controls the models we use, and where is our data stored? What does it mean for our sector if we become reliant on a handful of American technology companies whose interests may not always align with ours?

It might seem overly bold for a technophobic sector like ours, but there could be alternatives: shared infrastructure designed with and for civil society, allowing us to harness the good-making potential of AI without simply importing all the bad-breaking potential alongside it.

The 12 of us who met did not leave with all the answers, but we did leave convinced that this is a conversation the charity sector can no longer afford to avoid.

Because whether we choose to freeze, fight or fashion what comes next, the future is upon us – and it is arriving faster than ever.

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Regardless of whether you work for a charity or not, it probably isn’t a huge leap of understanding to infer why the so-called ‘third’ sector has some funding problems. Indeed you may well have seen one of the many stories about the large scale redundancy programmes underway this last year or one of the seemingly ever-present closure stories too. Public giving is down, corporates have less to donate and Trusts are overrun. There is no safe haven unless you happen to be in a peculiar niche that actually knows someone on the Times Rich List (I know your Trustees will have asked).

But when I took the call I didn’t talk about any of that. The first thing I mentioned was public sector commissioning for I think it is this - beyond any other source or issue - that is making us bleed out.

To understand why we perhaps first have to go back into history and think about the origins of charity, especially in the Victorian era when we had little state aid and the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor. Of course, that all changed post the Second World War when the formation of welfare state suddenly put much of what had been in our wheelhouse firmly back on the government’s to-do list.

So things stayed until the 80s and 90s when the commissioning of charities to deliver government contracts took hold and accelerated. This saw some voluntary organisations grow huge and expand across the country, indistinguishable from aspects of the departments outsourcing to them or the councils contracting them. For Thatcher, the ideology to expand free markets very much included us, and after her, Blair envisaged a different relationship between us, in a so-called ‘third’ way but one in which also saw huge parts of the state’s being passed on to us for a price.

In 2024 charities reported £10.96bn of government contract income from the nearly 8,000 charities delivering them - a number that has been growing steadily for 45 years and which is ill understood by the general populace. That our sector’s economic model is still viewed as a purely voluntary, philanthropic one is perhaps best illustrated by the incendiary articles in the likes of the Telegraph, where journalists and commentators shout blue murder when an exec is paid over £100,000 for running a £150 million organisation employing 6,000 people.

But if the public are annoyed by that so-called waste then they would go absolutely ballistic if they knew how much of their cake sales, marathon runs and generous fundraising were going to subsidise these swelling but inadequate commissions.

Last year NPC estimated that charities subsidised public-service contracts by around £2.4bn annually, equivalent to 20p in every pound but there is something particularly perverse here. In parts of the private sector, government outsourcing has proved sufficiently profitable to attract private equity. Meanwhile charities are apparently taking money raised from donors and putting it into the very same public-service market.

So what is going on and why are we letting government - both local and national - get away with it? The answer is malcoordination and helpfully there is at least one way we can fix it.

To answer this it is helpful to consider yourself at the helm of a local care charity helping, say, members of the public with learning disabilities with your £4 million turnover. The council puts out a tender for £1 million for work you’re already delivering even though you and the other charities considering the specification know it’ll cost £1.2 million to deliver. The same is happening on your other contracts elsewhere in the local authority and to all the other providers for the work they’re delivering too.

So what do you do?

It would be easy to say that the right thing to do is walk. The private sector wouldn’t allow itself to be lowballed or deliver without profit. But doing so forces you to lay off a quarter of your staff and destroy the culture and reserves you’ve worked so hard to build. Critically it also means the risk of your beneficiaries going without help - a deep conflict for a mission driven organisation.

But stopping you more than anything is the knowledge that if you walk, another charity may not. Someone will take the hit, reasoning that something is better than nothing. And perfectly rational decisions by individual charities drag everyone into a Moloch-trapped race to the bottom that none of them actually wants.

Across the land this scenario is playing out on a local, regional and national stage, every week of the year. It is one of the great collective action problems of our sector and at a time when so many leaders espouse the need to collaborate, it's perhaps the greatest example of how often we do anything but.

For those growing up in the 80s familiar with the iconic Ian Rush Milk advert, you might have heard me talk about the lesson behind it as a shared marketing campaign from disparate - and desperate - dairy farmers.

But the work of the then Milk Marketing Board wasn’t simply to create adverts like ‘Drinka Pinta Milka’, it was to get the farmers organised. Much like the Unions of the 1800s realised that the collective action of thousands of workers is an unstoppable negotiating tool, the Board realised that central coordination of the sale of milk to buyers meant they had an extraordinary bargaining position since they controlled the whole market.

So instead of dairy farmers each negotiating with buyers, trying to get the best price alone whilst being divided and conquered, all the farmers sold their milk to the Marketing Board and they made use of their pooled bargaining power to negotiate prices and terms and get the best deal.

So why isn’t there a Charity Contracting Board?

Well to those worrying that I am suggesting some kind of cartel, I am not but surely there is a lesson us charities could learn from? Because a fragmented market gives the buyer all the power but an organised one puts it firmly back into the hands of the sellers.

Imagine a central body - via NCVO or independantly - that could collect confidential contract data and pricing from participating charities; calculate the genuine cost of delivering common specifications; expose where commissioning falls below cost; establish consistent terms around inflation; and represent providers collectively to major commissioning bodies. It wouldn’t tell charities whether they should bid but if they wanted to it would tell both them and the commissioner that their £1 million contract was really meant to be for £1.2 million.

We are not one market of course, but wouldn’t the chance to collectivise data encourage us to aggregate as though we were? We have a statutory duty to work in the best interests of our beneficiaries and own organisations, but couldn’t we begin to view that with a longer term answer? And we know that in a time of scarcity this behaviour becomes more entrenched but what if we could stand back and see how much of our hard won resources are subsidising the state?

When I spoke to the journalist last week he was interested in why the funding landscape had got so bad but he also wanted to know what we could do about it.

Well, I guess I am saying that we should do this. Because if we want to stop crying over spilt milk then it’s about time that we got organised and if we don’t well, you can forgot your cake sale.

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But at some point the writing habit took hold and I went from an occasional poster of jobs and collector of connections to a much more regular user, before reaching a crescendo in 2024 when I was posting nearly daily in my successful attempt to get to 3.65 million content views in a year - equivalent to 10,000 a day.

I did so because early on, despite the glow still emanating from Twitter, I had clocked that a professional network that linked you and your connections to literally thousands of would-be donors and helpers could only be a good thing for helping a smaller London-based homelessness charity stand out and draw in new audiences.

At the dizzying heights of regular posting I managed to land viral posts with thousands of likes, attracting new corporate sponsors and attention, but there were also lots of hours put into drafting, writing, commenting and scanning the little app on my phone. Over the years that is why people like Caroline and Adam have asked me what I got from it but I have never really written about why I think it is important for a CEO to do so and some of the lessons learnt, sometimes the hard way.

So before I wrap up my eight years of leading New Horizon and telling the story on the humble-bragging professional networking site, here are the eight lessons I took from it for those considering doing more:

1. What you get out is what you put in

This is probably the most important place to start. Like with anything in life and work, practice makes perfect and there are no shortcuts to success. If you want to build a big following or want posts to gain traction, then you will have to put in the work.

That means showing up online regularly, posting, commenting and joining in conversations. Like any habit, you have to work out a pattern that works for you and try to stick to it, be that every day or once a week. That may sound like a lot of graft, but consider it an important part of your storytelling and brand building. As you get into it and develop the network, you will enjoy it more - and see the results.

2. Consistency is key but so is congruency

So while consistency is vital for getting traction, congruency is the key to making that exposure useful. There can’t be a ‘LinkedIn Phil’ and a ‘Workplace Phil’ because people see through it, and the real-world connections that come from the online world will never go anywhere.

So if you are thoughtful in real life, be thoughtful online. If you are direct in the office, be direct online. Or if, like me, you use a bit of humour as you go about the day, do so online. As time goes by, your LinkedIn network becomes your offline one and vice versa, so be yourself. You don’t win any prizes for pretending in this game.

3. With your network, quality is better than quantity

For some chief execs, organisation turnover and staff headcounts are the Top Trumps test but, for others, nothing evokes more jealousy than a follower count. And whilst celebs can barely keep up with the likes of a social-savvy Sophie Pender, for most mortals a few thousand feels like a win.

Personally, I am a huge advocate for connecting with anyone you meet and work with, because the LinkedIn black book is permanent and automatically updating. But when it comes to usefulness, size doesn’t always matter. For your content to be passed on, you want people to engage with it, and a network of 3,000 cheerleading pals are far more likely to comment and share than 13,000 SaaS salespeople who only sent a connection request to sell you an AI LinkedIn post generator.

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4. The love you take is equal to the love you make

If you have ever spent an afternoon carefully crafting a post about your thoughts on a new government policy only to press send to tumbleweed, ask yourself what you would have done reading your post? Because, like all partnerships in life, social media is a two-way street and if you want people to respond to your content then you should expect to return the favour.

That does not, in my opinion, mean you have to like whoever likes you. This isn’t the primary school playground where birthday invites are dished out reciprocally. But it does mean that an active and giving participant will see the benefits come back to them through their participation. And it’s worth noting that you can get far more views of your opinion through a comment on a popular post than on a post you create yourself expressing the same view. Remember, you are here to communicate a message, not win a popularity contest.

5. Scrutiny is to be expected, spite isn’t

Of course, as you share more of these thoughts and drift away from carefully orchestrated company blogs that have been sense-checked, analysed for key messages and otherwise sanitised, you are more likely to enter into debates with people. As a rule, I think this is not an unhelpful part of LinkedIn, as it helps you test your ideas, sharpen your arguments and perhaps win the hearts and minds of some of those following along.

But over the years I have definitely had my share of trolls who are there simply to antagonise. No matter how much you wish to, we all have to accept there will be some people we cannot convince. And when their actions move from a dissenting comment to deliberately destructive obtuseness then, well, let’s just say I wish I had learned where the block button was sooner.

6. Communicate online as you would off it

If you are going to commit to a more regular use of LinkedIn then consider the types of content that you are putting out and the variety behind this. I think of this both in terms of the mode of communication you are in (broadcast, questioning, debating etc) but also the content you put out (ask yourself would even your colleagues want to hear the same topic over and over).

When I spoke to Adam I called this the pub or cafe test. Imagine being out with pals for a drink and what goes on. Of course, you all want to eagerly tell each other your updates, but you also want to listen to theirs, discuss the news and debate ideas. Your time on LinkedIn should be similar if you want people to feel engaged.

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7. Perfect is the enemy of good but so is speed

Some of my most popular posts over the years have been written quickly, in the moment in response to something in the news that is also trending online. Algorithmically this is an obvious strategy as you will see that zeitgeist topics fill your feed. So as a rule I would say that it is a good approach to get comfortable shooting from the hip and being a first responder when big news items in your wheelhouse fill your feed.

But at the same time, the LinkedIn machine can sometimes reward the person who waits for the initial flames to die down and comes in with a more considered or opposing opinion. That does not mean you should look to be antagonistic as a strategy - we have all seen far too many ‘this is going to be unpopular but…’ baiting posts - but it does mean that being first is not always the same as being interesting. So don’t spend so long perfecting a post that the moment passes, but don’t be afraid to let everyone else rush in while you work out what you actually want to say.

8. If you are flying solo make sure your team have the landing gear

When I started at New Horizon my then Chair, Nick, used to tell the story of a public servant, who I shall not name here, who lost their job because they made a bad decision that their team were too afraid to challenge. If you are a leader it is obvious you need the people around you to tell you the hard stuff, and the same is true online.

If you want to treat LinkedIn like an extension of your charity website then by all means post the occasional blog that has been drafted by someone in comms and checked by five people before going out two weeks later. But if you want to communicate authentically, do so in the moment, fly free and take the risk. Just make sure that when you say something not quite right, the team are there to rein you in or feed back in a timely way.

When I checked earlier I realised I had written 1,058 posts on LinkedIn over the years and had those reach millions of people. By itself that is a metric I am proud of, but what is harder to quantify is the relationships that me and New Horizon have gained on the back of it. So while Gaille once mistook me for the dishwasher, now most of the people I meet know exactly who I am and, most importantly, what I stand for.

When I leave New Horizon next month, one of the things I’ll be doing as a one-off is a small training session for CEOs who want to do more online but aren’t sure how. If you think you - or a senior leader where you work - would be interested then drop me a line or pop a comment below. I would love to elaborate on what I have started here.

In the meantime, see you online - or hopefully in real life

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When I gathered that the latest invoice was for ‘evaluation consultant’ that we had never commissioned, the penny began to drop that we didn’t have an aggressive colleague, we were in the midst of a phishing attack.

I was reminded of those horrible events earlier this week as I sat down with our Fundraising Team to unpick the nightmare scenario that has unfolded after the Beacon CRM cyber attack. Like thousands of other charities, our database was among those reportedly downloaded by a malicious third party, potentially exposing millions of donor records across the sector.

Worryingly, this does not appear to be an isolated incident. It follows an equally serious attack on the sector giant, CAF Bank, and although it was seemingly headed off when they saw the attempted fraudulent activity on a number of accounts, the vulnerability that the hack exposed led to a two week outage for customers and some 14,000 charities without access to their money. Proper nightmare stuff.

The fascinating thing about these three situations is how people - both colleagues and the public - interpret them. There seems to be a universal misunderstanding that somehow charities, because they are doing good or helping the vulnerable, wouldn’t be targeted by hackers. That criminals would somehow develop a moral compass in the midst of a crime.

Of course, the opposite is true as these last few weeks have shown. Charities - and, as recent events suggest, the organisations that serve them - are seen as easy targets because they hold valuable data whilst lacking the resources to adequately protect them. In itself, it is a reminder of why unrestricted and overheads funding is so important but for me it raises a much more important question about security.

As a sector we have been embracing the advent of AI as a chance to develop our productivity but there is almost no conversation about how the advancement of this technology is also making the attacks we have borne witness too more sophisticated - and seemingly more successful. So whether you are an AI evangelist or an AI abolitionist, we must all be able to agree that that the rapid advancement of this technology will only see the proliferation of cyber crime increase and we need to act accordingly.

That means that we can no longer treat our digital footprints as an IT issue that is the domain of our under-resourced operations teams, and instead need to make it a governance issue proactively, not simply when it all goes wrong as it has again this week. But more than that, these issues require us to increasingly think about sovereignty now too.

Over the last few days New Horizon, like thousands of charities affected in these disasters, has been changing passwords, reviewing protocols and notifying our donors. But when the dust begins to settle on our keyboards we will have to ask ourselves some much harder questions too about who controls the platforms that hold our data, what they are doing with it and perhaps most importantly, what happens when they fail? If security determines whether our data is protected then sovereignty dictates who ultimately controls it. Who trains AI models on it? Who decides where it's stored? Who owns the platforms our organisations now depend on and what are their intentions?

Clearly there are trade offs to be made here. Models like Beacon offer a tailored, charity-first interface but do we need to question if they have the security of the like of a Dynamics owned by Microsoft. Tools like Claude are light years ahead of any of the tech coming out of civil society, but to what end if the data we are putting in is being used for ends not of our choosing?

For years we've happily outsourced more and more of our digital lives. Our donor databases, our email, our finance systems, and increasingly the AI tools we are coming to rely on all sit on platforms we neither own nor control. There are obvious reasons for that but with convenience comes dependency and the issues of the last few weeks show all too painfully what happens when the tools we have employed fail and when they do, it is us - and the people in our communities - that pay the consequence.

In an age of AI these questions will only become more urgent and as we wrestle to maintain safety whilst also questioning sovereignty, more challenging too. So if charity leaders were wondering what the next big issue to cross their desk would be, I think we can say it is here. Because the next system alert is probably just around the corner and when my phone rings this next time, I hope it really is just a pushy colleague.

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It is, on the face of it, an almost too good to be true statement. After years of promises buried deep in manifestos and appeasing rhetoric without action, you could almost hear the gasps and nervous excitement as housing and homelessness colleagues across the country asked each other, “did he just say what I think he did?” Not the cost of living. Not growing the economy. Not AI. Not uniting us beyond division. Not even putting an end to Temporary Accommodation. Bu at an end to rough sleeping and all that must come before and after it to make it possible.

But while the sector has, rightly, rounded in on this as welcome news I wanted to raise a few questions that are in my mind - and possibly others as the freewheeling speech settled in the mind:

1. Did the civil service know about this plan in advance?

A couple of months back a well-informed insider told me that the civil service was basically on shut down waiting for Andy to start. When it became clear that the current premiership is soon to be over, there is a malaise that sets in as the machinery brace for a change of personnel and with it, change of policy. Starmer talked about this himself before he took office as the constant upheaval of recent years - Tory now Labour leadership - is probably the single biggest barrier to progress.

So whilst even the most amateur of soothsayers could have foreseen a tighter focus on homelessness given the former Mayors’ Mancunian focus, I wonder how many inside MHCLG or Number 10 were privy to what was to come in the opening speech and the level of ambition that was to come.

For not too long ago those same civil servants were desperately trying to conjure up a plan with limited resource to half rough sleepers and unite a siloed government despite Ministers resigning left, right and centre.

It’s a well discussed fact that the incoming PM has a tight inner circle but to deliver his vision he will have to bring a whole array of actors inside the machine - not least those in the Ministry of Housing - with him. Knowing whether that process started before he walked up that famous street or after he left it will say a lot about the momentum he has behind him from the get-go.

2. What does it mean for the Plan to End Homelessness?

When Labour announced their manifesto in the spring of 2024 there was a line buried amongst the talk of missions about a national plan to end homelessness. It took that plan 18 months to come to life, launching at long last in December 2025 to a muted but warm reception that praised the technical details if not the ambition.

But with this Plan, which included a then seemingly ambitious plan to halve rough sleeping by the end of the Parliament, barely six months old we have to start to question if we are now building on that or starting from scratch. Indeed, do the pilots promised as part of it still have backing and do the recent £30million of grants that have been told they are “minded” to be funded still got the grants on the way that that have been planning for?

Amongst this the most interesting piece of detail is the re-appointment of Angela Rayner back to the Secretary of State brief, having seemingly won the hearts and minds of the sector with her straight talking and own personal brand of ambition for justice. But will she be content to tinker with Steve Reed’s project and see enough of herself in it or will she, emboldened by Burnham, want to start again?

Will a delay to proceedings yet again, even to try and do more long term be acceptable? We are about to find out.

3. Were any charities consulted on the ambition and how quickly will they brought in?

One of the most fascinating things about the announcement I thought was how much it caught everyone off guard. Of course, Mick and the Passage were seemingly in on the act, but when even the likes of Matt Downie are putting together quick pieces to camera to capture the moment, you know that it has probably come as a surprise no matter how welcome.

Burnham will know from his time in Greater Manchester that the state cannot - or could not - deliver on his ambition alone and so for his success he will have to engage and enlist the large homelessness sector. The last time we had such a plan, Blair gave rise to a ‘Third Way’, positing that charities were and had to be a meaningful extension of governments delivery. With that came the explosion in commissioning and the growth a very large non-profits but with the extra money and ambition came greater direction from the state. As someone there at the time told me, if you wanted the money, you did as you were told.

Will the same happen now in a post Covenant era and will the new Covenant itself survive the new premiership? It is notable I think that there is not a single homelessness charity represented on the Civil Society Council.

4. Will he face into the divisive issue of immigration?

To solve the problem, Burnham may have to do something that I heard he does not like and face into an issue that is likely to make him disliked. Because, with around half of those now sleeping rough in London coming from overseas, rough sleeping is also an immigration question.

How will the PM wish to deal with the growing numbers of homeless refugees that he has previously moaned about when trying to solve the issue in Manchester. How we he be instructing he hard talking Home Office lead now that he is in the driving seat and not the receiving end?

Is Mahmood’s reappointment as Home Secretary a sign of his tactics here or simply a desire to show the right some tough rhetoric? Because with a growing number of newly granted refugees ended up in the streets of the Capital and other major cities, he will also need to develop a housing pathway out of Asylum Hotels - despite the rage from the right - if he has any chance of making progress.

5. At what cost will he pursue this?

Pinning your Premiership to the visible signs of people living on the streets is a bold move and to achieve his goals it’ll take an enormous coordinated effort at a time when many other issues also require such focus.

Will this continue to be his genuine priority once he reads his welcome dossiers and his eyes open to geopolitics, the thrust of the economy, threats to democracy, AI and god know what else most of us will never be in the loop on?

If it does at what cost will he pursue it when he has also already stated his intention to stay inside the fiscal envelope set by the pair before him? When he says that this is his first instruction are we to take it that it is his most important and most pressing? Or is it simply the tone setter for a man that wishes to get back to the old Labour ways he is so keen to remind us of?

Regardless, a lightning bolt of energy has just been discharged into the homelessness sector and in the next few weeks we will have to see if we - and the government themselves - can all harness it.

With nearly 13,000 rough sleepers in London alone last year, there are plenty of reasons to ensure that we do.

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None of this is new, of course. In the 2010s the Dead Internet Theory already began to guess that much of the web was already dominated by bots and automated content created to influence public opinion or manipulate the algorithm.

To see this in action, a perfect example (shared with me by the team at Firetail) is that of a lowly York City FC game. This is a team that competes in the fifth level of the English football league system, and who only have a very mediocre 72,000 followers on X.

Like many teams though, their fans love an update and so despite getting just a handful of likes and shares, their social media person will diligently tweet excerpts from their games. That was until their striker Charlie Kirk - not to be confused with that Charlie Kirk - decided to ‘shoot’, and then either they suddenly grew their fanbase or an army of bots read a few key words and decided to get involved.

Scroll online and it’s easy to see why the theory has taken broader hold. Indeed this week I read that as much as 41% of long form content on LinkedIn has been written by AI and as many as one in ten Substacks are completely AI generated. I know we all think we are seeing more of it but the study by Pangram Labs is the first to show the scale of it and they argue that it is hitting long form content especially hard on the basis it’s harder to write longer pieces (tell me about it) so the temptation to cheat goes up.

The debate about AI content is, like everything in modern-day Britain, divisive. Supporters argue for efficiency gains in busy lives, accessibility support for neurodivergent colleagues and a creative sidekick when drawing a blank. Critics worry about the dumbing of our intellect and the obvious ‘em-dashing, now here’s the thing’ slop in the midst.

So far so bad but the thing that struck me was less the results of the study and more the methodology itself - the so-called AI detectors that we have been hearing more about. So I thought I would run some of my own content through these checkers and see what it said.

First I sent it a piece I’ve written for the Third Sector (on AI no less) and despite it very much being all my words (I used an LLM for grammar /error check) it gave me a 71% chance of it being AI generated 😱.

Thinking the spell check might have cost me I instead popped in a mid-length LinkedIn post on refugees and homelessness that I’d written in a matter of moments on my phone, direct into the app going nowhere near any AI tools whatsoever. This time I get a 70% AI rating. Ok then.

Now I know AI models are well known for their confidence in assertions that are wholly unfounded but I also wonder if something else is going on here.

Firstly, it is important to remember that LLMs do not create, they recombine. To the untrained eye this copy can sound convincingly human because the bots have tried to copy a human, and as a result humans are willing to shortcut the writing effort and outsource more of it back to the bots.

In 1904 the Dutch confectioner, Droste, released a new tin with a picture of a woman holding a cup and tin of cocoa. This infinite recursion - which is now known as the Droste Effect - is a trick that has been used widely in packaging since and by the likes of M.C. Escher in his mathematical art.

I was thinking about the Droste Effect again after the AI detectors gaslit me, and I began to wonder what happens when the writing AI is trained on increasingly becomes writing that AI has already produced. And if humans increasingly rely on AI to write for them - or inspire us - how quickly recursion will begin?

Three years ago almost every post we read online was written by another human but according to Pangram Labs, today that figure is closer to 60%. If that trend continues it won’t be long before the machines are simply copying themselves in a vast hall of mirrors, reverberating echoes of original writing from a time long ago.

For a while we have been wondering if AI will replace human writers but perhaps we should be asking if it is us humans who will slowly replace ourselves. For as B.F Skinner said “the real question is not whether machines think but whether men do”.

Something for us to ponder. Preferrably in our own words.

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The great American post-modern author, Paul Auster once met his baseball hero as kid and automatically asked for an autograph, only to find neither they nor the nearby crowd had a pen. He attributes the lifelong disappointment of missing that moment as the reason he henceforth always carried one and, since he always had a pen and notebook on his person, why he became a writer.

Auster took a huge pride in his artform and would famously often spend a day’s toil simply perfecting a few lines of prose the old-fashioned way on his Olympia typewriter. For him, writing was an act of turning the details into stories. It was a chance to show that although humanity thinks their experience is unique, it is actually shared. For him, the documentation was a way of seeing - and in this regard he was certainly not alone.

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In 2006, around the peak of Auster’s writing powers, a very different story was beginning to be told and in a very different way. Then, the activist, Tarana Burke was beginning a grass roots movement for survivors of sexual violence in marginalised communities in the US. As women came together to heal, they had no idea that their community’s coining phrase - two words to build empathy - would give rise to a global movement of change nearly 20 years later.

When the actress, Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter in a sign of solidarity with the victims of the emerging Harvey Weinstein scandal, neither she nor Burke would have any idea of what was about to begin. 12 million impressions later and #MeToo went global, connecting victims of abuse across the enabling thousands of stories to come forward together as one abhorrent reality.

These stories have been on my mind as we all try and wrap our heads around the advent of AI. Of course, we hear about the good things it can do all the time. Stock prices are reliant on the application but less the implication. You hear of data centre pollution over here and a job loss over there, but all the millions of small experiences haven’t yet converged into a public story.

Nobody knows what the future of AI holds but one thing I am sure of is that we’re living through a huge societal transformation – and the meaning of that will only emerge if people document what’s actually happening.

When I first thought of a way to catalogue these issues, my first instinct was that we needed a database to record the reality we face; a Wikipedia of AI harms as it were. A place for communities to come together and document the development in real time.

It is a potentially nice idea (I can pitch it more fully if you like) but ask yourself how many people do you know who has ever edited a wiki page? I think I met one once. But social media on the other hand? I think even my Dad has used a hashtag before. And it is why, quite aside from its own potent brilliance, the #MeToo movement is the perfect inspiration for bringing people together, building a community and showing the world the pattern that is emerging. In 2006 Make Poverty History had white wristbands. In 2026 we have hashtags to wrap our messages in.

So, the next time we see a missing person case disrupted because of AI fake images share it and let everyone know #AIdidThis. And when you hear about a business being phished because of AI voice cloning remember #AIdidThis. And when your kids ask you were all the jobs have gone, tell them #AIdidThis.

If AI is as transformative as many believe, then we will all need to pay attention - to the good and the bad - and keep the notebook open and share our observations. For as Auster wrote, “The truth of the story lies in the details” but it is a story that will rely on us all to tell it.

The internet has given us the notebook, we just need to remember the pen.

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On my return minutes later, the throng was a growing crowd and trying to edge my way through it back to work turned out to be a mistake. By the time I realised that it was Andy Burnham arriving into town to be anointed in Westminster, I found myself stuck between a man with a camera (“mate can you move your head, I am filming for the BBC”) and a journalist reporting live, simply to get a passing shot of him passing briefly in a black cab.

Of course, the Prime Minister’s resignation a day earlier had changed everything for their party and the country. And based on the baying rabble disrupting my walk back to work, it seems to have changed for the King of the North.

Over the years I have met Keir Starmer a handful of times and he has visited New Horizon on three different occasions during my time there, something not that strange given that he is also our local MP and a committed supporter of young people in the borough.

When people ask me what he is like I gladly tell them, unreservedly that he is a good man and although I will not have agreed with everything he has done in office or before it, I believe he is amongst a rare breed of public servants that has genuinely given his career to helping others. But something else defined his visits that has always stayed with me and it is a test that will now define Burnham too and those that come after him.

When just a lowly MP, he came with just one aide. We met, he showed an interest in the work and then left. There were no photos or set pieces.

When running for leadership of the Labour Party in the winter of 2019, the visit was perhaps necessarily of a different shape. There was an aide again, two I believe, but this time a camera too. Yes, he showed interest, but he also relayed that interest to someone filming for social media. A set piece for the set of his leadership bid that was underway. It felt too like we were on a set.

In 2023, six months before he would become the most important man in the country, his visit felt almost surreal. Close protection police arrived hours before to assess the building and enquire who the young people were waiting to get in out front. “They are experiencing homelessness and not all will be known to us” I say, “entry through the side door. Over” they say via the walkie-talkie.

This time Keir arrives but so do three aides, a photographer and a cameraman. The 15 minutes he is with us are choreographed and - perhaps as it must be - as performative as it is political. You are conscious that everything is being filmed, that you are being watched and you sense that the future PM feels that too. The easy chat of before feels more ersatz. You cannot be this close to so much power and expect normal life to continue. You realise that you either master the media or it will master you.

Much will be made of what went wrong at Number 10 these last two years and how a historic majority became a historic unravelling. To say that Labour's communications have been lacking is a well-trodden point, but less attention has been paid to the Prime Minister's role in that. The missions felt muddled and no-one was clear what their leader really stood for. Watching him resign on Monday, you could almost sense the palpable regret from his party as, through tears, you could finally - and much too late - see this really did matter to him.

As we look back on six PMs in the last decade, it’s not hard to see how people draw the conclusion that the UK is ungovernable and make other arguments about the seemingly broken political system we are living with. But instead I wanted to reflect on another less spoken about point; the courts of public opinion.

That a man with a larger majority than Tony Blair in 1997 could be ousted in just under two years is perhaps surprising but what is shocking is not the timing but the technicality of how he fell on his sword. Brexit did for Cameron. Brexit did for May too. Boris did for himself. The Bond Markets did for Truss. Sunak was done for time.

But Starmer? Starmer was done by something much worse. He became a meme.

“Two Tier Keir”.

The millionaire son of tool maker.

The target of a trillionaire’s tirade.

Even Trump somehow managed to steal his thunder and announce his resignation before him. The court of social media never took to him and his sentence was passed down after a two year trial.

I was reminded of that as Andy Burnham pulled out of Euston on Tuesday being filmed from the sky as if in a police chase, motorbikes and paps following. This is a man used to media attention - and seemingly adept at it - but the rules have changed for him too now and while the media take an interest in a Mancunian Mayor, the Prime Minister will have a much tougher crowd to please - the public - and they, quite frankly, are pissed.

Rishi Sunak once said that a Prime Minister is never more powerful than on their first day. In the age of social media, that decline begins even sooner. The moment you start making decisions, you start making enemies.

Andy Burnham may yet prove more adept at navigating that world than the man before him. But watching the helicopters circle above Euston this week, I was reminded how quickly politics now turns people into characters. The challenge isn’t just governing the country now but making sure the story is about the progress and not the politician.

The lesson of modern politics is one his opponents learnt long ago: in politics today you either make the memes or you become them. Andy Burnham now faces the same test that ultimately consumed his predecessor. The question is whether he can keep the focus on what he does rather than who the internet decides he is.

Because if he isn’t careful, Burnham down the house has a very repeatable ring to it and he might just find that he does.

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The Luddite legend

Born in the early 1800’s in response to the growing industrialisation of the textile industry in the north of England, the Luddites protests lasted through five long machine breaking years. Like the concerns of AI critics today, the Luddites worried about growing job losses to industry, growing wage inequality and a lessening of quality as human creativity and craftsmanship was passed on to machines.

History tells us that the Luddites used largely disruptive tactics like vandalism, night raids and the smashing of machines - what we might call direct action today - to raise the alarm on what they saw as the industrialisation of their much-loved craft in a time of revolution.

Morris and the machines

50 years later, when the industrial revolution was now an industrial fact, a very different man took a very different approach to what he saw as the emergence of a world that had veered too steeply toward machines at the expense of humanity. Then, the railways and factories were firmly established across the landscape and the period known as Engel’s Pause was largely over - and a new era with better-enshrined workers’ rights was getting underway - so William Morris was less worried about how to stop the machines and rather wondered how humanity could thrive alongside them.

His was a vision for the future where human creativity could flourish aided by technology rather than one in which technology removed the need for that ingenuity in the first place. Morris will be remembered because he tried - philosophically and practically - to design a new society built on artisan principles and craft (see the Red House) but like the Luddites his work had a political flavour too, joining the Socialist League and giving public lectures and distributing pamphlets.

In many ways, the two could not have been more different. One wanted to destroy a world, the other create one. One wanted to move away from something, the other towards. One used anger and the other love.

But in other ways they were just the same. They both wanted the masses to benefit from the technological revolution that was upon them, not just the few. They both worried about the disruption to communities. And critically they knew that the technology was not neutral - yes it had the potential for enormous good, but also for enormous bad given malintent.

The resistAInce?

The other week I wrote that I was surprised how little resistance there has been to our modern-day industrial revolution and I wonder if the soon-to-be Luddites might have felt the same 225 years ago before their supposed founder, Ned Ludd, first trashed a spinning loom. Since then though - and conscious I am probably trapped in a Baader–Meinhof effect loop - there does seem to have been more protests on the other side of the Atlantic, and even the emergence of some here. Ludditian tactics have included ensuring absolutely no-one is silly enough to plant bamboo near data centres, but have so far largely made use of peaceful protest and political pressure, albeit with absolutely no success in slowing down the acceleration of the AI Express.

So why isn’t more being done there or on this side of the pond?

When it comes to threat detection, us humans are exceptionally well built and our fight, flight, fawn, freeze response are so embedded in our evolutionary make up that not even a fancy computer could outperform us. But these response choices are familiar to organisations and systems too. It is why governments are fawning over tech leaders and why, perhaps, so many civil society organisations are choosing to ignore the impeding threat of AI roll out or are simply too frozen by other priorities to have accepted it.

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To fight or to fashion?

In the 1800s the Luddites broke machines while Morris built the alternative and today we can draw inspiration from them both. Because yes, the advent of AI might lead to a utopian world of radical abundance, but it could just as easily ensure we have the opposite and rather than hope that our new Trillionaire Class will shun their Ayn Rand inspired ways, we should get organised and quick.

Objectively this is no small task. The AI avalanche is accelerating so fast, and on so many mountains, that we are probably past the point of slowing it even if there was a consented global effort to do so. But we should not let analysis paralysis stop us from trying either and there are five key areas I think charities should begin to focus on now:

Capture the counter-narrative

So much of the AI narrative and news is about the race and the wonderment of what this new technology can do now. But for every breakthrough online there is a breakage off it and we need to do more to continue to point out the harms that are being created alongside the hype.

The AI founders are all too aware of the damage this new technology can impose but who is systematically cataloguing it in real time? For I have seen plenty of graphs about processing speeds and productivity but a lot less about job losses and the spread of misinformation online.

We need a way of documenting emergent and evolving impacts and critically, need to start to use this evidence base to articulate a adjacent narrative to the ones being peddled by those who stand to gain. Because for every missing person that is found by AI, there is another family being scammed because of it.

In the six conditions of systems change model (Kania, Kramer, and Senge 2018) the pyramid of practices is built upon the construction of new mental models and helping people reframe issues through implicit storytelling. If we are to make any progress with this agenda then we would need to do the same and quickly build a critical mass of the population that see this as a public risk issue.

Build the allegiances

To do this at scale and across the breadth of society, we will need to start to form ambitious allegiances that are aligned behind a more balanced application of AI. It may feel intimidating to stand against some of the largest companies to ever occupy planet earth, but time and again strength can be found in numbers as the tobacco industry found in 1999 through the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

But charities shouldn’t just recruit from their own backyard. As Make Poverty History showed in 2005, the most powerful coalitions are sometimes the most important and if an alliance of the willing can be formed from unions, academics, faith groups and celebs then there really would be a chance to speak on behalf of the whole of society.

Who could be our modern day Mandela and outspoken Oxfam?

Advocate for those most at risk

One of the biggest challenges with AI is that it is both so huge as a domain and so fast moving. So, the temptation is to think about appealing it in general terms rather than specific ones.

But as with every policy development in history, some are much more likely to benefit from it and other much more likely to lose. We know both benefits and risks to individuals, societies and the planet will sit on a continuum, but charities should be very mindful about who is likely to lose out and first.

I have attempted to give some broad thinking to this previously via a BCG inspired Impact / Intract matrix but you won’t have had to open many papers to see that, say, young people are an obvious contender in this category. So yes, we probably do need to worry about all white-collar workers losing their jobs at some point, but let’s first focus on those that already have and start to make some noise.

Demand a seat at the table

Most of us have become attuned to spotting AI slop, especially in video format but the scenes from the G7 yesterday were the first time I have really hoped something was AI generated and it wasn’t.

To see the most powerful politicians in the world, sat round the table with the most powerful tech leaders shows just how far and forcefully this technology has disrupted the normal world order and it does little to reassure.

But as politicians and business leaders meet to talk economies, growth and geopolitics, you wonder who is there representing humanity? I don’t think for one second that the CEO of Oxfam would get a look in, but it is all too striking that the conversations about implications will never include the people who will likely be on the frontline of picking up the pieces if it does go wrong.

A seat on a working lunch with Macron might not be feasible but what tables does Civil Society need to get round or create so that those with power take note and act? The next meeting of the Civil Society Covenant, Chaired by Kate Lee of NCVO and attended by the Prime Minister will be in July. Will AI disruption get a look in? I hope so but I fear not.

Assemble the alternative

If the Luddites feared our lack of fight, I am sure that Morris would be moaning about our imagination. Because if he taught us anything, it was that we have to create the future, not destroy the present. AI is a fact of our lives now like it or not. Like nuclear bombs, the genie is out of the bottle and so we have to live with it in and make it’s presence work.

And the lesson from Morris was that technology wasn’t to be shunned for its own sake but used to enhance our very human endeavours. So, while we stress over the slow down we need people pondering how we can co-exist and make use of the tech in ways that genuinely benefit us all. Think an AI Commons of community-owned AI tools and open datasets for public benefit. Think societal design in a world where people have to work less. Think new economic models that mean we all have a piece of the stars and the sea.

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William Morris once said that “History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created”. Now we need to ask ourselves how we want to be remembered.

Because whether we choose to fight it or fashion it, the future is upon us - and it is coming quicker than ever.

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It turned out to be an emotional day in ways that I hadn’t expected - for me at least - as nearly a decade of feelings, built up from holding the fort through the good times and the bad all came rushing out.

I tried to explain the rationale to the team in my speech that morning and through an a personal announcement on LinkedIn but I found it was in the follow up calls and conversations when I got to explain myself a bit more fully that my own thinking became clearer to others, and to myself.

So, the following is a personal account of the things swirling in my mind, but hopefully has some useful tools and considerations for others to think about in their careers, especially those at the coal face of frontline work.

Happiness at work

Years ago, I heard this definition of happiness from the self help guru, Tony Robbins, probably while I was aimlessly scrolling YouTube in the early days. His basic premise was that happiness occurs when you have equilibrium and your blue print for happiness matches your reality. If the two don’t match you have a simple choice: lower your expectations or change your situation for something and make it better.

Although Tony was pitching it at the hallelujah chanting, “say aye” faithful I think the message is a helpful one for work and people feeling settled in their roles too. Of course, jobs take shape over time but nobody ever considers leaving when they find the aspects they wanted from a role (autonomy, learning, colleagues, pay or whatever flicks the switch) are all in place.

Towards and Away From drivers

That equilibrium will likely fall into place at different moments but working against this can be what I (and one of the famous psychologists I forget) call ‘towards and away from’ drivers. Ask a colleague why they have chosen their holiday destination and you might hear “to get away and switch off for a week” (away from) or “to explore new cuisine” (towards). I think most people are wrestling with these thoughts most of the time and they are anything but static. New colleagues and new projects make things better and worse. Pay rises and painful restructures all change the equilibrium.

Ask someone at interview why they have applied and take note of the response they give. As an employer you will be drawn to people making a towards decision as it shows the positive intention but for most people leaving work is a dose of both. For my part, partly as I lay out below, there were undoubtedly drivers pushing me on from more difficultites but I also knew my mind was seeking new challenges and the chance to work on and learn about something new.

Sigmoid curves and seasons

Over the years I have heard so many off-hand theories about how long you should stay in one place and although the charity sector isn’t famed for traditional progression routes like, say, the legal sector, only you will know when the pull towards something else feels stronger than the one to stay.

One way to think about this, particularly for those in leadership is that the roles have seasons and over time - possibly a year a season - those roles develop. So spring is the excitement of starting out, summer the warm glow of mastery and without some renewal, soon will come autumn - the decay of the progress before winter; the spiral down. Charles Handy had a framework for this using a Sigmoid Curve and argued that you need to restart the curve at the top of the summer arc (to make it Sigmoid) before the fall sets in (and makes it a bell curve).

It is why people who get promoted every two years of have significant role changes can feel engaged and stay and those who miss out sometimes leave. But there is a much wider lesson for organisational strategy and the culture that colleagues are working in too. Although strategies can be multi year, the sense of renewal needs to come long before the ending too. For me, 18 months in Covid started the spiral again, then a new strategy that prioritised campaigning, then a refugee homelessness crisis; all moments that galvanise the organisation and create a new vision to point resources towards. Eventually though - in my case at least - you run out of the energy and ideas to begin the process again and deep down you know the best way to start it again is to pass the baton.

The charity operating environment

It is a well-known fact that us Charity folks aren’t in it for the money. Surrounded by the private sector wage boasts and bonuses and public sector pensions, it can sometimes make you doubt the “it must be so rewarding” mantra. But even entering a career that is supposed to be about a higher purpose can feel challenging at the moment given the operating environment. Statutory disfunction and underinvestment has led to years of creeping demand at a time when resources fade with hope of a reversal.

During Covid and the years that followed it, the term burnout became a more familiar part of the public lexicon but I think the term moral injury describes it far better, for if you come to work with a mission to help and you find that goal is unachievable it is hard to reconcile however hard you try.

When people ask me about the centre, they’ll assume it is all going well because we have funds coming in and outwardly we have told a good galvanising story. But the reality is that in the eight years I have exerted myself, the one key metric through which to measure our success - how well we can house young people - has gone backwards. I know of course that this is not my fault and had I not been doing what I do the result could be worse still, but there is a deep contradiction in trying to believe you are doing a good job and seeing something otherwise.

This is the reality that many frontline services are facing at the moment and despite it they continue to choose to serve. Ensuring they are thanked - as I have been endlessly by my Board - and see the value of their labours, will help them keep doing so.

The very best and the very worst

In this sector I believe we often witness the very best of humanity and also the very worst. Places like New Horizon are right at the epicentre of that sometimes and it's therefore hard to explain what a place like the Centre can do to you – how a mission so challenging in its very existence can also carry so much joy. How together with the staff we pay witness daily to such despair, yet also so much hope. So despite wonderful, happy memories, there have been moments that have left their marks.

My colleagues hear stories you wouldn’t believe true in 2026 on a near daily basis and although they are experts at leaving the work on the door, no-one is immune to it all of the time. I will personally never forget the moment I arrived to work one early morning to find an extremely vulnerable young man asleep on our doorstep in sodden sleeping bag, pale and believing he was dead. Such moments I found fill you with a rage that keeps the fire in your belly burning but ultimately takes away the fuel to sustain the flames.

The CEO role

I can still remember the Saturday morning when our then Chair, Nick Hardwick called me to offer me the role and it has been the greatest privilege of my working career to lead the Centre since.

As I told the team, I arrived at the age of 37 full of ambition and with little idea of what was ahead of me. For while there are manuals to teach you how to be a Chief Executive, there were certainly no books for how to lead a homelessness charity through a housing crisis, a pandemic, a cost of living crisis or a refugee homelessness crisis. Like the team, these have been challenges that I have relished and learnt from but I have also emerged from each with slightly less battery for the next one.

That the role is becoming harder is an obvious implication of the operating environment and I for one can see why a growing number of charities are moving to co-CEO roles to divide the labour - and the burden - at the top of not for profits.

Complexity is also growing at a time of increasing challenge and the scrutiny of every move from outside and inside the organisation can add to the pressure to perform and worry about false moves as Julie Bentley so honestly described in her podcast. The fracturing of politics and division over issues only adds to this, as does the need to broadcast on social media when even the likes of me have had their moment of being hounded by trolls.

But for me the question becomes one of energy. In a constant period of perpetual upheaval, as a leader you have to keep finding a new north star to lead you from the Kubler-Ross Change Curve, and at some point, however many strategies in, you look yourself in the mirror and become honest that you do not have the big idea for the next chapter.

On the one hand this can feel momentus but on the other, as charity leaders we are only ever temporary custodians of our organisations and half the job of exec is one of timing and knowing when to call it. Having a highly trusting relationship with your Chair and the ability to talk about succession planning obviously helps in this regard as it did me.

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Three letters

Like me you might have heard the story of the CEO and the three letters.

As the tale goes, the new CEO starts and finds three letters on the desk from their predecessor with a note to say welcome and when the first thing goes wrong open one.

After some time they make a mistake and open letter one to find a note saying “blame me and if you make another open letter two”.

Times passes and mistake two comes and within the envelope they find letter two which says “restructure and if you make another open letter three”.

Years in now and with energy and ideas fading, it isnt long before the next mishap comes and they reach for the final letter not knowing what to expect.

“prepare three letters” it says.

“oh, and if you can be bothered - write a post on substack”

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Back in the early 1830s, in the height of the industrial revolution, a small group of Labourers in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle started a march in protest at wages cuts taking place at the time by the hands of the wealthy industrialists.

Their protest was unsuccessful in that the group were arrested and deported, but the outrage that followed led to a mass movement that ultimately secured workers rights at a time of unprecedented societal upheaval.

As the advancement of Artificial Intelligence becomes omnipresent in our lives I have been wondering who might be our modern-day martyrs, but also - seeing the emergence of booing young American grads - wondered why more people aren’t fighting back against the unfettered advancement of this tech?

As I have said before, I am not against AI per say for I know only too well the good it can do. But I am absolutely against the uncontrolled acceleration of its use if that race means the benefits of AI will go to the few at the expense of the many. For AI is being sold to us a societal panacea when in fact it is capitalistic parasite.

There is a growing sense of inevitability about what is about to happen that is matched only by the growing sense of speed in which it will occur but it doesn’t have to be like this. But if we want to act the time for resistance is upon us for the Tolpuddle Martyrs had their labour to bargain with but if the tech bros own the land, the capital and no longer need the labour, then we might find our bargaining chips are as useless as our jobcentres.

So how can we actually slow down the rise of the machines - and importantly, will we?

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Pounds

Probably the most important aspect to realise about the AI race is the financial drivers behind it. For whilst the origins of the digital dream may have been led by Godfathers like Geoffrey Hinton who thought it could help solve humanity’s problems the race has increasingly become a commercial one of VCs and investment driving tokens and user numbers.

So if money is driving the rapid acceleration is there a way to stop it we might ask? Not unless we think capitalism will somehow grow a conscience. For we are in the midst of a boom and the billions of investment into the leading players shows absolutely no sign of slowing down. And if we think the heads of those leading players are worried about the potentially negative implications of AGI or societies dependence on this new tech, then we should probably ask why the tech bros are all building bunkers on islands with private armies to guard them?

The online world is Dunedin right now and we are living through the gold rush. For investors and business leaders the questions are not about implication but rather about automation. And as in New Zealand in the 1860’s, all anyone will care about is the gold, not the workers that suffer extracting it.

The only way to slow the stampede is through regulation and that leads to the second set of challenges. A government with misaligned incentives.

Policy

At Davos but a few months ago, the hype was all about the reunion of Deepmind’s Hassabis and Anthropic’s Amodei as a seeming modern day incarnation of Jagger and McCartney on stage. The focus in the interview may have been on timelines but the aspect that struck me was the frankness with which they admitted that no government is trying to reign them in.

Indeed whilst there have been many debates about and forums for AI growth and a new Sovereign AI Fund receiving much attention, the first parliamentary debate on AI regulation only took place in the Lords yesterday in which Baroness Harding noted that “At the moment we are doing nothing, and that is really dangerous.”

Much of the worry it would seem is partly a geopolitical and financial one. We realise there is an AI race upon us, and we fear we should not slow down because either the economy will suffer or an enemy state will somehow be able to control us. It places us in a multi-polar trap, much akin to the Cold War, in which we know chasing the end goal is dangerous but we cannot slow down for risk that an even worse outcome presents itself.

I don’t think many MPs were serving in the height of the cold war but if they were they might remember that the nuclear race at least had one very common sense advantage over this one. For no matter how much Russia threatened it, we could probably be sure that no-one wanted to blow up the whole human race. If a misaligned AI took charge of the world though, could we be so sure?

It is what makes Anthropic’s call for a global slowdown a nobel one (though we might ask why they only thought of this now) but a near impossible one. For what mechanismsexist to ensure every private frontier lab and in every country all acts as one? Why would you slow when you assume that China or Musk will not?

Protest

So, if businesses don’t care and MPs are yet to wake up then why aren’t civil society banging their doors down?

One of the first concerns I had when ChatGPT became a thing was the environmental one and the considerable power usage from data centres. So, it make sense that the likes of Greenpeace and Global Action Plan - good on them - have been employing a range of planning and protest tactics to stop their expansion.

And it is encouraging to hear that, bit by bit, new organising groups and protests are taking place convening around a range of messages to either stop or slow down the roll-out of AI. But from my place as a leader of a homelessness organisation, these events are very much fringe and small scale. I am yet to be in a meeting where AI has been mentioned as a credible threat to alleviating climate change, poverty, hunger or homelessness despite its obvious power to pretty much nuke them all.

Perhaps Extinction Rebellion will crescendo into a comeback and whip everyone into shape or possibly the resistance needs to build from a more person-centred base over time.

But mechanism do already exist. There is a civil society AI taskforce. There is a Civil Society Council that meets directly with the PM, if we can move the conversation on from Commissioning. Every day there are countless meetings between charities and MPs if we can sufficiently get this issue into minds and onto agendas.

Personal

In The Terminator, the resistance sent Sarah Connor back to save us all, given that time travel existed in the future she came from. But unless the Sarah O Connor I went to hear speak at the Resolution Foundation about her new book, We are Not Machines, came from the future to save us, I think we will need another plan.

Although studies show that the public have concerns about AI, the public do not necessarily behave in a way that is congruent with that belief. We can think of AI use therefore as a Moloch Trap, meaning a system in which the individual knows that their participation in the behaviour is bad for the population as a whole but they do it anyway to gain a small personal advantage in the short term. Think buying from Amazon and moaning why your high street is dead.

Because if we all think that AI could end humanity or, more realistically make our societies and environment worse with unintended consequences then we could all, individually stop using it. No more LLMs. No more Chat.

Will we? No. Because we know that even if we don’t everyone else will and so we all go on training the machine to be better still at taking over from us and slowly handing over our intellect, our jobs and our power.

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For some AI is, to quote the PM “The defining opportunity of our generation" but it is also the defining risk. The situation looks bleak and it will be unless we act.

Civil Society is well placed to lead that action and exploring how will be the topic of my Substack next week. I hope you will read on then.

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In Greek mythology Cassandra was bestowed with the gift of foresight but cursed with the prophecy of never being believed, so when she predicted the Trojan War noone listened - something the p(doom)ers of the AI world today will be all too familiar with. For our problem in our modern day battle with the advent of this new all-encompassing tech is not that there are not any Cassandra’s knocking about -indeed, Apollo scattered them all across the web. It is that their message is getting muddled.

For the last year or so everything about Artificial Intelligence has been accelerating and the exponential growth curve shows no sign of becoming a sigmoid just yet. And that growth doesn’t just make the tech developments eye wateringly rapid, it makes the FOMO for not keeping up stop us asking the important question: who actually asked for this?

It is why in my little bit of the world, the Charity AI Taskforce was set up to ensure the sector didn’t get left behind in attempts to harness this digital doula and why so much of civil society discourse remains focussed on tech stacks rather than the turbulence this technology will trigger. And it is why this week the big news story from the non-profit world was that the National Lottery were putting £3million of support not into helping charities prepare for the post-AGI fallout but to make sure that charities join the charge. It is yet another example of the work that is going on to ensure we don’t get left behind in the AI race but without any thought to preparing us for the disruption that will happen not long after we’ve all got warmed up.

Change in our sights

No one can possibly know what lies ahead and the only scenario that everyone can agree on is that there is a near infinite number of scenarios for how the following years will play out - or just twelve if you believe the clever folks at MIT. But play it forward and you can make some assumptions about the general trends of what will happen and, importantly, how it will likely radically change the charity sector.

As I wrote about before (AI will make stuff, AI will break stuff), civil society has been slow to assess the societal risk of AI roll out because it is operating in a continual poly-crisis with inadequate funding, a lack of digital skills and boards typically working naively because they too don’t have the capacity or expertise to get near this in their 120 minute meeting slots once a quarter.

So that means that while execs grapple with adoption, and the funders oil their keyboards, we also need to shift at least some of our attention to how on earth communities are going to manage the seismic social transition that has begun and will only extrapolate.

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The matrix of our missions

To map this, it is helpful to think of AI in two distinct, adjacent ways. That is by harnessing this new digital powerhouse, charities have unprecedented ways to accelerate solutions to the problems they are working on. And it is this green tractability tranche that is rightly getting lots of attention - and funding. But ask one of the 14.9% of young people that are now unemployed and you will realise that AI will also cause lots of problems too - something that is yet to get much attention and that is marked by the red ‘high disruption’ field below.

I think of this grid as the Impact / Intract matrix but it is also helpful to think of each quadrant as a grouping of charities based on how their work will be accelerated or disrupted in the near future.

Opportunity

The golden goose box in which AI helps significantly without fundamentally destabilising any of the work. Think medical research charities, those with lots of logistics or admin heavy non-profits like grant makers. These currently equate for 10-15% of all charities but the nature of the fields mean they probably account for at least double that in income share.

Adaptation

The double-edged sword in which AI will cause huge disruptions but also offer brand new solutions. Played well it can improve outcomes, but organisations will need to evolve rapidly or get left behind. Education and mental health charities are obvious test cases and if you have seen any of the Multiverse news of late then you can see the adaptation that employment providers will need to go through. Probably a quarter of charities fit here with income % slightly above that.

Preservation

The mainstay of the sector through which human relationships, culture and community are much more important than operational and financial concerns. There is likely to be far less AI use in this segment and also less disruption. Think youth clubs, museums and faith groups. They probably account for half of all charities though they are most likely to be run on tight budgets or volunteers with as little as 10-15% of sector income funnelling through them.

Containment

The sign is deliberate because this is the most dangerous quadrant. In the near future it is very likely that AI cannot or will not solve the underlying issue, yet wider usage of the tools may lead to the issue growing. We may see democracy under threat, homelessness rising along with poverty and more extreme wealth inequality. Although it is approximately 10-15% of the sector, it is the area we should be worried about the most. If accelerated AI roll out goes badly, it is here where the crash will happen and it’s hardly like people are twiddling their thumbs waiting for it…

Buckle up

So, what does this all mean for the little charity sector?

Well, things are going to change and quick.

As we know, the Charity Commission for England and Wales has approximately 140,000 registered charities on it’s books and it is a number that has largely stayed static in recent years. But notably income is extremely concentrated among a small number of large organisations and through which the top 1% of high income charities account for more than half the sectors income.

And the size and shape of these organisations do not just differ by financials. Non-profits here do not operate in a normal ‘market’ because causes are often established to fill gaps and their success in doing so is driven by peculiar levers like donor interests, political salience and demand.

So how will the advent of AI change this weird and wonderful conglomeration of organisations? I predict five major shifts.

1. Wealth inequality will grow

Income is already unevenly distributed between the top and bottom halves of the matrix and although need is likely to rise in the bottom half, the resources to meet it will not. Of the Top 10 largest charities, most fall into the Opportunity and Adaption categories and none into the Containment which may say something about the sector itself.

There is a risk these trends deepen because the charities with the greatest resources now can invest the capital in the race and also because the lure of tractability will mean more donors want to invest in causes that can tangibly be solved. The Lottery’s new £3m fund is a very early example of this and it’s a trend that will subconsciously continue given the excitement funders have about new approaches.

2. Demand will too, without the necessary resource

The unfortunate downside to this is that charities working in the Containment quadrant will continue to operate in a scarcity environment where demand is growing and income is shrinking - a trend that is well underway and that could reach breaking point, especially without the state doing more to intervene.

Given funding in this area is already tight for the demand charities will have to make increasingly hard choices and it might lead to smaller providers closing and will inevitably continue to force more merger conversations.

3. Culture will explode

The mistrust of AI is already being well documented amongst young people and minoritised groups but although it will be a more all-encompassing part of our lives as the years pass, the rise in pervasiveness will also be matched by a risk in mistrust.

Human connection, digital detoxes and creativity will be thirsted for in a new wave that will see Preservation charities enter a golden era of cultural capital if they can find the means to sustain themselves. Institutions like the National Trust will be able to weather the storm and new micro-charities and ad hoc activists will find ways to nurture human connections in local areas.

4. Missions will be accomplished

On the very much plus side, we will enter an era when previously complex missions become solvable and the work of some charities becomes obsolete. Opportunity charities working on medical causes may find their work is no longer needed or that scientific breakthroughs shift their focus from research to the deployment of the solution.

The progress in logistics will mean more processes can be automated and more charities will work together through optimised networks to get their products and services to the communities that need them. Because AI will be able to offer better advice and guidance than any human, administrative charities who exist to give information will find their work can be done without them unless there is a genuine need to have a human in the loop.

5. And new ones will emerge

But it is also fascinating to think what the social pioneers of 2030 will be starting when they witness new gaps and social harms emerge.

How long will it be before we need a charity to remind you how to speak to another human or use a pen? Will we have grief counselling for people who have become addicted to their Chatbot lover? Will new Labour movements emerge just as they did in the industrial revolution?

AI will make mobilising around a cause easier and may even see net growth in sector numbers as the larger charities consolidate through merger and the smaller low-cost ones proliferate.

Cassandra was cursed to foresee the fate of the Trojans but she also foresaw her own fate and there is a lesson in that tale for us too.

For we have all watched enough films to be able to predict that AI might do some harm to the world but it is much harder to think about the very specific harm that it might do to us.

Cassandra would be able to see it and I wonder if we will be able to see it too, for the future, they say, will come soon enough.

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It has unfathomable potential to solve some of humanities biggest problems, with speed and at an unprecedented scale. Imagine a future where diseases have cures, work is completed by machines and there is unlimited clean energy to power it all.

Yet there are (still) some domains where AI has low tractability. It cannot plaster a wall or solve complex systems level issues like homelessness (unless Hassabis et al decide to dedicate the people and compute).

You can think of this as a tractability continuum between things it can solve and the things it cannot solve. This is axis one.

But AI will also break stuff.

The environmental impacts, the enshittification, the dulling of humanity’s intellect, the cyber crime, the mass unemployment are all real concerns before you worry about Putin taking over the world armed with a superintelligent PC or worse still, a PC itself taking over the world.

You can think of this as an impact continuum between things AI will interfere with and things it will not. This is axis two.

But the fascinating thing about the AI debate in general is that almost all - though in some sectors it is 100% - the chat about the acceleration of this new digital power through society is focussed on axis one. Government is obsessed with the economic benefits (and the geopolitical risk). Business is all also in a race to optimise and invest. Charities too seem more worried about their tech stacks and ensuring they don’t get left behind.

Take a quick scroll through LinkedIn (I know, I know) and note how many posts are selling AI or its virtues to your business. Note also how many express concerns (not counting everyone moaning about AI slop posts). I would guess a 99% for ratio and it’s a ratio I saw myself in a packed room at one of London’s leading VCs last week as I joined over 100 reps from civil society to consider the topic. Despite hearing about “momentum beyond control” and seeing graphs that basically foretell the end of work, the vibe in the room seemed to be, “great, how do I use Claude Code?”

So it’s left me asking again why we are not taking the risks of AI roll out more seriously and why Civil Society is asleep at the wheel?

Why aren’t charities talking about AI risk?

The reason of course could be that there is no risk. For every tech bro that foretells the end of work and advent of radical abundance, there is a contrarian view from someone whose stock price doesn’t depend on an answer. Typically, they will make an argument along the lines of excel didn’t kill accounting and so why should agentic machines?

This might be the case but Microsoft didn’t have $242billion of venture capital pouring into it in a three month period - a figure that is only growing - and likely to be at least partly why Google DeepMind’s founder think the disruption from AI will 10 times the speed and 10 times the impact of the industrial revolution.

If the roll-out of AI doesn’t cause any issues then it’s all gravy but a more balanced view might be to assume it can do a lot of good and it could also do a lot of bad. You can plot this in an Impact / Intract matrix to show where AI might help and where it is likely to seriously mess with things.

On the left you see area low disruption areas where we won’t mind or can’t envisage AI interruption. On the right we have the opposite problem. At the top we have issues that AI could help solve, at the bottom we have areas that it is nowhere near being applicable to.

To be clear, I think I’m an AI optimist overall but I don’t think we can gloss over “oh it’ll just be 10 years of disruption” argument that also appears all too frequently in posts like this. For while all the talk is about ‘Bad Actors’ and ‘Bad Agents’ I think the most likely risk is the unplanned ‘Bad Acceleration’ through society in the near future.

Over the last year I have listened extensively to Demis Hassabis and it is clear that - amazingly for the world of science - he is very focussed on AI in the top left quadrant as his Nobel Prize and Netflix Doc, AlphaGo should show. But what almost no-one is discussing is the right side of the grid. Indeed, most charities seem to be viewing AI adoption as a tractability exercise (can the tool optimise my mission) rather than an impact exercise (is the long term impact of my use also going to cause harm to my mission).

You have probably seen the meme where Indian garment workers wear cameras to train the AI to take their jobs, but what about the less obvious slow creep of the employment charity obsessing about AI tool use, not realising that it too is helping to assemble the tech that will one day render it’s mission obsolete.

So where are civil society in the debate?

It would of course be harsh to say that charity folk are asleep at the wheel for, as the head of a homelessness charity, I know full well that most people are head down at the wheel doing what they can to get through the week.

So I think that leaves us with three scenarios and me with one question:

• Scenario 1: charities have not clocked AI roll out as a sufficient risk

• Scenario 2: charities have understood the risk but determined it long term and therefore down the priority list

• Scenario 3: charities are worried but with so many other worries they have buried it because it isn’t yet (un)popular discourse

I suspect the reality for most people is that is a mix of all three and so I have to ask what we might do to change that? For I strongly believe that whilst AI can be a force for good in the long term, it’s unplanned roll-out can do untold harm in the short term and as no other sector can or will think about this challenge the third (and best) sector must.

If you have got this far and agree I would love to hear from you.

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I put up a Have I Got New For You style slide and ask the audience who they think said it.

Have a look and before you read on, and in your mind work out who you think said it.

Most people land on Jacob Rees Mogg or his former boss, Boris. Few guess that it was Hesiod from 8BC. More are surprised that similar quotes exist also from Socrates three hundred years before, and so on through the passage of time to today. T’was ever thus and perhaps it always will be if the convergence of mainstream and online media today are anything to go by.

The vilification of our younger generation is so all-present in fact that there is an actual word for it; Ephibophobia - the irrational fear of young people. It may sound funny to think of adults in a prejudiced panic about the under 25s but the consequences of it is anything but.

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My old maths teacher used to tell me that the working out was more important than the answer, and in that regard I am sure they would be interested in the forthcoming elections. Because whether the Greens can edge Reform later this week and whether Reform can oust Labour later in May, I will be more interested in who turns up to vote, rather than who gets the most Xs in the box next to their name.

Because it appears to be easy for the adults to attach negative labels to 18-24 year olds. It appears to be far harder for us to spend some time reflecting about how the society we’ve created has led to:

~> 70% of youth clubs and youth work roles being cut
~> Schools being closed and education disrupted through a multi year pandemic
~> Phones and social media taking over every aspect of waking life
~> Nearly a million young people out of work
~> A young person being involved in a knife crime incident every hour
~> A young person becoming homeless every four minutes

Despite what James Kirkup might try his Boomer friends, for the first time the age old promise that each generation will have it better than the last is broken.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Imagine every single young person comes out in force to participate in these coming elections. Imagine the next General Election sees a five million-strong unit that changes the shape of the vote, and suddenly every politician wishes they’d done more to focus on them as a bloc and not just the baby boomers. Imagine the energy a newly enfranchised band of 16 and 17 years olds - over 1 million new voters - could bring to party political campaigning.

Instead of worrying about how many locks we have on pensions, we might be getting a few more young people with the chance to lock their own front doors. And yes, there will be lots of young people who want to know how they will buy a home, but I can guarantee you right now there will be far many more wondering when on earth they will be able to afford to rent one.

It is why the work of the #GiveAnX campaign, which aims to get young people voting, is so crucial. Because until they mobilise as a voting community, the politicians will never need to work to win their votes. But it is also why so many young people feel frustrated with politics – because there is so little being offered that actually works for them (National Service, I am looking at you). “Why vote when there is nothing to vote for?” is the line I am often told.

But what if, come 2029 or whenever the next election might fall, there is something to vote for? What if young people across the land had set up their own political party that demanded the changes that matter to them? What if a young person stood in every constituency and even won some? If politics has shown us anything these last year, it has demonstrated that you don’t need to be in power to make the weather.

There are 1.4 million 16-17 year olds in the UK and they’re soon likely to be given the vote. That means that if every one of them turned up at the next election, they’d command 5% of the ballot - a meaningful dent to show that they care.

But if they also inspired every 18-24 year old to come out and demand a fairer future you’d suddenly have a 6million strong band that might demand a fairer deal on wealth, health and housing.

What if the NUS mobilised their network to ask why you now need to incur £50k of debt to find your job has been taken by an AI? What if Young Minds brokered every young voice to question why MPs don’t understand the mental health crisis that’s emerged. And what if Centrepoint and its young people starting a national conversation about the 125,000 homeless young people and the rest that don’t have a meaningful chance of getting on the ladder.

The next general election is in 2029 and the pundits would have us believe we might be in for a shock.

I’m hoping young people prove them right.

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But snow has other qualities too. Put those beautiful little flakes together and they combine into bits of drift. Pack them together tightly in your palms and they make a ball. Again, the sight of a group of kids, wrapped in scarves and gloves, hurtling snowballs at each other is a thing of beauty. But what if one of those snowballs fell down the hill they were on and starting to grow as it rolled towards their village? What if they were playing on top of a mountain where their loose throws and constant grabbing of the slush caused an avalanche?

The snowball rolling down a hill metaphor is one I have been thinking of again this last week as I read the unemployment news with the slow-dawning reality of passer by watching a car crash. Of course the highest unemployment figures in five years and a million young people out of work and education can easily be passed off as bad policy by Labour, but personally I read it and thought one thing; AI.

Of course, there is nothing wrong per se with AI. It has the potential to do enormous good, applied to some of humanities most pressing problems. But it also has the potential to do a lot of damage too. Our fight against misinformation and the death knoll of democracy can blame at least a little on the ‘Army of Interns’ that everyone now has in their pocket. I worry also about the outsourcing of our intellect and creativity, much like the school kid who always reached for the calculator rather than learn their times tables. In the short space of two years, we have gone from “let me Google it” to “Create a superhero image of me using what you know about me for LinkedIn” and although it’s all been quite fun, it hasn’t necessarily been as harmless.

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A little over a week ago, Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times that we are 12-18 months away from AI being able to automate all white-collar work. Whilst this might sound like sci-fi-fantasist-come-stock-massaging talk, the reality is that the computers have been slowly taking over our work for years and the explosion of LLMs and other developments has made the change curve hyperbolic.

Show me an industry and I will show you the job losses. Huge cuts across tech, 14% of the advertising industry gone and the UK is especially at risk because of our over reliance on the services industry - the low hanging fruit for your harmless friend, Chat to come and help. Worst of all, this is hitting young people hardest as the Graduate job market implodes (44% loss of Graduate accounting jobs in just three years) and entry level roles are being passed over. With the bottom rungs of the job ladder are more visibly taken, are we going to keep removing the steps?

This isn’t the first time that humanity has seen job chaos after the explosion of a new technology. After the Industrial Revolution, the 50-year period in which incomes stagnated while the Capitalists got rich, came to be known as Engels Pause and led to huge unrest. I wonder if we are now on the cusp of something similar, though with the impact predicted to be 100x faster and 100x deeper, it’s less like to be a pause and more of an avalanche. The ‘Altman Acceleration’ if you will.

Society is going to start needing to make some decisions about the future of work or we are about to bear witness to a mass transfer of wealth from the many to the few. For wealth comes from capital, land and labour and given most of the capital and land has already been bagsied, it doesn’t leave a lot if labour cannot be sold.

During the Covid years we had ‘furlough’, a cobbled together Universal Basic Income for the masses in the midst of the pandemic, but that scheme, much like the purer UBI model require governmental income and tax receipts which are not a given in an evolving techno-feudal fit out. Others, like Will MacAskill the reluctant founder of Effective Philanthropy, have argued that we will all need to own a portion of the seas and skies as data centre take over every inch of our terrains.

Bang in the middle of Engels Pause, a group of men who were appalled by the declining wages of labourers like them formed a protest group called the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers in a little village called Tolpuddle. Unions, though legal, were still seen as a threat by the government and subsequently the men were tried and sentenced, leading to huge national protests and a reversal of the decision and a pardon.

The so-called Tolpuddle Martyrs and their civil - and uncivil - society peers helped bring about the end the wealth inequality that exploded during the industrial revolution and civil society can do the same during the AI revolution that is underway. But to do so we will need to move the conversation on from how we use AI in our tech stacks and instead focus on the snowball rolling down the hill.

As it happens the web domain www.TheFriendlySocietyOfHumanLabourers.com is still available. I know because I asked ChatGPT.

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Or so said the Overhead Projector slides (remember them) of my Primary School circa 1986. A song that will remain imprinted in my brain forever more it would seem since the last 40 years have done little to expel that or the slightly less iconic “He’s got the whole world in his hands”. But crap assembly songs aside, it turns out that school really does prepare you for work - and life - if we had just been listening and not just singing.

Despite what some people tell you might be coming, we do not live in a time of radical abundance. In fact, the seemingly never ending pressures of growing costs against a flat lining economy make even a country like the UK - relatively wealthy despite how it can feel after picking up a restaurant bill - adopt a scarcity mindset. And when times are tough then why wouldn’t you want to prioritise your own? From the caves of neolithic man to the rush to fill trolleys in Saino’s during the pandemic, a selfish, survival led mindset is so hard wired into us that it is, quite literally in our DNA.

But although self-interest is alive and well and makes sense as a short-term tactic is it the best route to getting what you want in the long term?

The ancient Indian religions of Buddhism and Hinduism have a long-standing answer to this question embedded into their universal principles and it is a word many of us will be familiar with, regardless of our acceptance of the concept itself. For Karma’s simple message of ‘what goes around does indeed come around’ may appear as an abstraction, but if you have ever done a colleague a minor mis service in the short term, you might well know what it is like to see that come to you in unwanted ways in the long term.

James P Carse gave this notion a more tangible name in his book ‘Finite and Infinite Games’, a term that was later popularised (including to me) by Simon Sinek in his podcast. For in these, both argued that most people navigate life like it one great big competition and a game to be won. But unlike chess or a game of footy on a Sunday, the purpose of like is not to win, but to keep on playing. Because life and work are complicated, ever evolving systems where players come and go, the domain develops and the rules ebb and flow. Although you can try and win a pitch or succeed in striking a deal, you cannot ‘win’ work no more than you can ‘win’ life.

The complexity and challenges of the modern world of work make the tendency for us to optimise for short term metrics ever more compelling. Quarterly funder reports and updates to shareholders force a narrow focus on quick wins as much as election cycles encourage politicians to do what will look good ahead of an election regardless or whether it is the best arrangement for the long term.

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Anyone who has navigated a long term relationship will be all too familiar with the infinite game. Because love, above all, is something to preserve for as long as possible despite the challenges that present to us in doing so. In a moment of exhaustion, it may feel good to try and point score but for love to last you will have to give just as much as you may wish to take. It is, as Carroll Bryant calls it “a two-way street that is always under construction”.

Charities in 2026 present no end of challenges and like a Prime Minister eyeing the May Polls and some cheap tricks to edge the ratings, the temptation for us all is to put our heads down and look after our own. For with funding falling and need on the rise, who can afford to look beyond the week ahead and the walls of their own demands? But for us to successfully navigate the years ahead, the need to come together has never been stronger at an individual or organisational level. To do so will require a give and take we might not be familiar with for a rising tide will lift all ships and it really is amazing what you can achieve if you don’t care who gets the credit.

Tomorrow is Valentines Day and so it is fitting to finish, as I started, with love. For it turns out that not only did the Beatles understand a thing or two about a romantic ballad, bit they also grasped the Magic Penny for the masses.

So, I will leave you with the last words of the best album to ever grace a record player, courtesy of Abbey Road and Lennon-McCartney. An infinite lyric to sum up the infinite game we are all desperately trying to play - and hopefully not win.

And in the end

The love you take

Is equal to

The love to make

Happy making - and happy taking ❤️

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Steve Jobs didn’t invent any dinosaurs, but he did create one of those moments that, when witnessed, had the feeling of being pretty era defining. I have watched by the Apple iPhone launch a few times over the years. The clever ‘we are launching a new phone, a new music player and a new web browser’ gag followed by the gasps as he swipes to open for the first time seemingly never gets old. But you can watch the launch video back now with a tinge of sadness, knowing that everything really did change - and it wasn’t all for the better.

It is hard to pin down what came first in the dopamine addiction chicken and egg because the genesis stories of smart phones so neatly overlap with the birth of social media. I left to spend two years abroad in 2005 with Friends Reunited being a fun plaything only to return in the summer of 2007 to find the thing called Facebook was all the rage.

Even then, viewed whilst having to log in on a pretty crap internet connection, you got a sense of how addictive it could be to amass friends, share your very best pics look out for that little red notification to say someone had got in touch. Ping. And so, what started as a nice means of connecting to some of your school friends from a decade ago suddenly started to take a very different shape. The advent of the iPhone, when a charity working twenty something like me could afford one, became the fuel on the kindling, the carrier the parasite needed to really take hold. A pocket-sized computer in the palm of your hand could now have you checking texts and emails and with Twitter arriving shortly after (ironically something I first read about in a real-life newspaper) no end of draws for your attention.

Ask yourself when you first lost track of yourself in your phone? When you first sat, tired on the sofa wrapped in the comfort of a doom scroll? How often do you just to check one thing on LinkedIn and the find 10 minutes of aimless scrolling has enveloped you? These things seem harmless, but they creep up on you and before you know it, you realise the kids have been shouting that they want more snacks, while you’ve been pouring over the comments section on a post on immigration.

But the real problem is actually something different. You see, the dopamine hijack of our smart phones haven’t just been making us all have bad concentrations. The real issue is that they’ve also given us bad tempers. Like an overtired parent who can’t manage better, the algorithm has been teaching us all the wrong behaviour - and rewarding us for doing so.

It’s hard to say when the algorithm went bad, but studies of “rage baiting” seem to show the mid 2010s as the inflection point. Of course, the tech lords have always wanted us glued to the screen, but it was at this point that they - or their cadre of coders - worked out how to do it more successfully. Because the stronger our emotions, the longer we stay and the best way to evoke a strong emotion; enrage us. Divide the camp in two, throw in the trolls and remove the DNFTT signs.

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When you take this all in the round, then it’s no wonder that Labour are taking a serious look at it, forgetting for a moment that it appears, quite coincidentally to scan well with voters. But when you look at the list of numerous reasons they think it’s better for teens to hold off til their 17th birthdays, then there isn’t a single one that you’d think wouldn’t benefit an adult coming off it all together. And as with alcohol and smoking, it is the grown-ups that set the trends, not the other way round?

So if we are considering banning social media for under 16’s shouldn’t we first consider banning it for adults too? Well the answer, of course, is not that simple. For whilst many might bemoan the downfall of twitter, without it there wouldn’t have been an Arab Spring or a Greta Thunberg. And although Facebook has become a playground for racism, without it countless families and friends would never have reunited.

I’m writing this on the 1st of February when millions of people in the UK will be considering having a drink after a month of Dry January. It is important to note that here because behind the good health statistics of the ever-growing campaign, there is a lesson for those considering a binary social media position: ‘everything in moderation’ - at least most of the time.

So maybe the answer is not a social media ban but a social media rationing. If we thinking limiting a glass of vino the weekends is a good idea, then why not do the same with Twitter? If we are prepared to give up the booze for January, then why can’t we give up LinkedIn for a month? Anti-social August has quite a ring to it and with most people on holidays, wouldn’t it be the perfect time to put down the phones and connect IRL.

The Dry January campaign has thrown up so many alternatives to alcohol use, isn’t it time we consider the same for social media? I mean Christ, how hard is it to write a bloody letter? Maybe then we’d have more time without a phone in hand and set a better example for the young people in our lives.

Because ask yourself, would we really need to ban if we used it responsibility ourselves?

I know what I think anyway. I asked my followers online ;)

They got away with it, looking smug as the conference came to an end, but it was clear that whilst they wouldn’t (yet) suffer the damage of their actions then others would. It was a stab in the back for leadership and what it represents and it was, along with the rest of the pandemic handling - as well as what has come since - a slow death knoll for trust in the government.

One of the best things I listened to last year was the excellent Barbican talk from Yuval Noah Harari on Making Sense of the World in Crisis and his analysis on the apparent descent of democracy and why some of the West is welcoming tyranny. The difference, he argues, between these two polarised states is one of trust or it’s absence. For in a democracy we are led by institutions and for that pact to make sense we have to, quite evidently, trust those institutions and believe they have our interests at heart. Without that we are left with either anarchy or, as the tech-bros would have us idolise, the need for strong leadership - what you and I might call dictatorship.

But as trust in the public sector diminishes, and the private sector continues to appear self interested (to put it mildly in some cases) it led me to wonder how civil society is - and will fair. For on the one hand, the Charity Commission says that overall trust in charities is both stable and growing but on the other, you only have to delve into some right leaning commentary online to see that the sector is increasingly villainised.

T’was always thus you might argue but one of the comments from Hariri made me ask a slightly different question of ourselves. For trust, he argues, comes from a simple feedback mechanism - the ability to correct. In simple terms that means that when mistakes are made the system can acknowledge that and apologise. It is exactly the thing that was lacking in the Rose Garden in 2020 and it is was so often lacks in any political discourse (see every Commons debate). But is civil society more willing to fess up - and even see it’s own wrong doing?

Share And in the end

Of course charities admit mistakes you might add, and of course they do but for as many as you can think of you can also probably picture a Hannah Ingram Moore defending the publishing rights of her Dads book having been briefed by PRs. But when right wing agitators have argued with me on LinkedIn, the common assault has been that charity folk are not willing to get into the back and forth of issues, citing Stonewall’s “No Debate” tag as an epitome of this (something their former CEO said was a bad move).

I have written on here before about how charities are more likely to call home to what More in Common call Progressive Activists and how that might mean, as a sector, we are less willing to debate or see other’s viewpoints compared to other population segments. This activism is a fiery fuel for the culture of the sector but in an increasingly polarised world, will it continue to serve as it once may have? For as Ben Summerskill alluded to in his letter to the Guardian (linked above) the messy middle is not won by a tyrannic domination of ideals but a democratic debate of ideas and the slow winning of hearts and minds, however hard that might be.

Beck and Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics theory give another language to this as a model of human development that hypothesises we all pass through “stages of development” from (beige) ‘survival’ to (green) ‘humanistic’ - the final charity phase of the primary stages and one which follows the (orange) ‘play to win’ phase - but which all lack the ability to see the world from another’s equally ‘true’ and situationally correct phase. See Liv Boeree debating herself on AI to give you a flavour of this manifests.

Hariri has been grappling with how to make sense of the world in crisis but for us the answer is surely in easier grasp. For as the faith in the state and corporate institutions collapses, there will be a greater need for civil society, and the community infrastructure that powers it, to fill the void. To do so will take a degree of plurality, and a large dose of honesty but if you doubt for a moment it cannot be done then well, you will have to trust me. Or better still debate me.

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In my (oft described) ‘prolific’ LinkedIn phase, someone once asked me how I found so many things to talk about every day. To be honest, the problem instead was how to choose which of the many things I wanted to talk about I picked that day. This January has reminded me of that as I inched towards the keyboard, with the list of things to write about changing as quickly as the new years resolutions list.

As such it has been hard to pick two topics to reflect on amongst them, but on the assumption most charity folk don’t want to join the Greenland Front or pick a Beckham, I think the following might be the most noteworthy.

From Becks to Bartlett

So it turns out that you don’t even need an IG account to have heard about one of the Beckham offspring falling out with Mama and Papa B. There is little point adding to what Marina Hyde has already said, but at a time when America is trying to excerpt Imperialistic claims on the world, it is striking just how much prominent coverage a family of celebs has commanded on socials and the press. As Hyde alludes to, it is a cautionary tale of how even - and especially - the rich and famous can get sucked into the social media vortex but it is also a reminder of a tale closer to charity shores.

Watching the Beckham saga play out, you can’t help but wondering if instead of debating Under 16s access to social media we might actually be better off debating allowing grown ups to use it? For surely all the reasons we are claiming it will protect kids, might actually have protected a 26 year old Brooklyn and his 50 year old parents.

Of course, famous folk being able to garner millions of clicks is exactly why brands and charities have been drawn to them. For working alongside a cresting celeb can transport even the smallest of endeavours as Captain Tom showed in the pandemic as many have before and since.

So when one of the ultimate untouchables, our future King, Prince William, selected his commoner equivalent, Steven Bartlett to help front Homewards with him, it looked like a perfectly placed if slightly too bittersweet move on the Royal’s behalf. For who wouldn’t want one of the best brains behind that there t’internet on their side promoting a good cause, alongside his love of Huel and a certain Diary podcast.

But then this last week, Brand Bartlett’s slow descent took a serious nosedive and the LinkedIn chatter has moved from fandom to fury as Steven’s own spiral chasing the algorithm led him into some weird places and then finally misogynistic mistakes these last weeks. It makes for an interesting case study as the although the shine is very much coming off, none of it is technically bad enough to warrant a pulling of the plug. But I do wonder that given Homewards beseeched Bartlett in haste, will they now repent at leisure?

Celebrity PR for charities has always been a minefield - see countless lists inc Royals and their fix it pals - and yet the lure of the bright lights still draws us in, dazzled and hoping we will pick the one genuinely good one that really is a good egg with a load of followers. Perhaps more of them exist? And if not, then maybe we can all agree to share Michael Sheen?

Regardless, it is a cautionary reminder that patronages are for life, fame can come and go.

Do more charities need to close?

One of my favourite stories from last year was the announcement that GamCare will be closing it’s doors in March 2026 for all the right reasons, having achieved it’s mission of embedding better regulation on the industry. In doing so it will join a surprisingly finite and very much elite list of non-profits to have done that rare thing and actually achieved what they set out to do such that they’ve done themselves out of business.

It’s a story I have thought about again this year as charity closures have hit the headlines for some of the wrong reasons and as Kate Lee, the new CEO over at NCVO, has suggested we should consider more mergers to drive efficiencies in an age of economic scarcity.

Us folks charity-side know that we work in an odd sector, often straddling the paradoxical line between fretting about keeping our voluntary funded organisations going whilst also planning for a world in which we do not need to exist. The ‘charities should be working to make themselves redundant’ is a narrative that we peddle blindly at times and which the public have long since swallowed whole. It’s why there is so much confusion about our growing role in society and why angry Telegraph readers often litter the press pieces about our work with comments like that of Mr Brooks below. But the reality is that for a lot of charities - whether through nature or nurture - closure is not a viable choice and I wanted to briefly unpack why.

Ecosystem

The first is a very simple ecosystem one. There are 170,000 registered charities in the UK and many of them will have very little in common, bar the need to fulfil a public good and meet the regulatory requirements of the Commission. One of these differences is a clear fault line between what you might call infinite and finite charities with the former’s missions necessarily requiring their ongoing work and the latter having a clearer endpoint to success much as GamCare had. The Charity Commission has no way of recording this difference and there are no records to indicate proportionate sizes but we know that charities like your local community centre or the National Portrait Gallery will never “do themselves out of existence”. My guess is that roughly half of all non-profits are set up in this way and so their view on survival will be framed very differently to say a homelessness charity who wishes to end rough sleeping and successfully does.

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Ego

The second is an ego one. The people associated with particular organisations often have a complex and convoluted set of reasons why they are invested in it and want it to remain open. These include Board and CEO egos, perhaps believing size really does matter and rather than actively shrinking work, they do the opposite. We should remember charities are companies too and many pay and many people rely on that pay for their mortgages. Personal biases can creep in harder when you realise it affects you and the people you call colleagues.

When it comes to unnecessary charity existence then we should definitely account for the ‘ugly baby syndrome’ - the charity equivalent of a newborn parents thinking their prodigy is gorgeous while everyone wonders why the little one is wrinkled up like a fraggle. More accurately this endowment effect means we place a greater value on things simply because they are ours. It is why the same people might also unfairly assume their work and mission is indispensable even though the evidence points to there being hundreds of charities doing the same work better.

Evasive third way

But the really interesting one is the ever-changing role of the so-called ‘Third’ sector as it relates to Government. Most of the confusion about our organisations comes from an assumption we are volunteer led soup kitchens working in communities to help the homeless and little old grannies.

Yet over the last three decades the face and shape of our work has changed beyond recognition, accelerated by the Blair-Brown era and their so-called third-way where charities were contracted to deliver for the state. It is why last year the Charity Commission estimate roughly a quarter of the £101 billion income in the sector came from the State and why so many large national charities are effectively logical extensions of government departments, delivering on their behalf. They cannot cease without putting their missions at risk and their design is increasingly linked to the strategy of the state.

It is why the Civil Society Covenant released in the autumn is going to be critical for our futures and why the soon-to-be-formed Covenant Committee which will be chaired by Lee is crucial on getting the boundaries right between the two. For with the world as it is, there is a growing risk that more charities will have to close in the year ahead. Let’s just hope that more of them do for the right reasons, merger or not.