Still Here.
My journey from Fellow to Chair of Year Here, a reimagined movement against inequality.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re familiar with the Year Here Fellowship. You might recall a community of young(-ish) Fellows trying their hand at social entrepreneurship. You may remember that in 2022, the Fellowship closed its doors. Perhaps you were sad; maybe you were indifferent. Well, a couple of years on and Year Here is back, laying the foundations for a bold new chapter of impact with myself, a Fellow, as chair of the board.
My story with Year Here started back on the 2015–2016 Fellowship. I was studying biochemistry, focused on infectious diseases. I felt drawn to a career in the third sector, after helping to raise over £100,000 for an international development charity whose model centered on effecting change through local communities. Despite this, I had my reservations about the speed to impact of charities, and whether I — as a Canadian based in the UK — was best placed to work in global development for all the reasons I respected the charity for.
Then, a friend sent me a link to Year Here’s website. The idea of driving grassroots change in London resonated perfectly. I was accepted and moved to Poplar in East London as part of a property guardianship scheme that Year Here partnered with to make the programme accessible.
At the time of the Fellowship’s inception in 2012, inequality in Britain had been rising for 30 years with the gap between rich and poor approaching Victorian levels.
The problems arising from economic inequality are profound and complex, spilling into inequities in wider aspects of life, such as poor school grades and health. In terms of social mobility, people’s life chances are systematically diminished by inequality, with parental wealth still being the leading indicator of success. People get trapped in a cycle that leaches into the rest of their lives with no clear way out. The situation is compounded by one social crisis after another, from housing, climate, an ageing population to now, the cost of living.
No book captures the horrifying extent and intricate effects of inequality and poverty in Britain better than Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain by Nick Davies, a book we read on Year Here, with Nick himself speaking at our graduation.
Every Fellow had a unique journey, tackling inequality from different angles at each stage of the programme.
As a Fellow, I took on the angle of health inequality. I quickly learnt of the social determinants of health, which describe how the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age impact health outcomes. In countries at all levels of income, health and illness follow a social gradient: poorer people can expect to live fewer years in good health. The difference in life expectancy between residents of Hackney and the West End is said to be the same as the difference between citizens of England and Guatemala. The disparity in London is driven by wider inequalities, such as early child development, education, employment and working conditions, the environment and lifestyle factors (which also follow a social gradient).
Just as smoking is the main cause of lung cancer, poverty is the main cause of smoking. Smoking rates are four times higher in the most disadvantaged than the wealthiest group in the UK. With housing, fuel and transport driving costs, household budgets for healthy food get squeezed. The Food Foundation found that the poorest 50% of households would need to spend nearly 30% of their disposable income on food to adhere to the national healthy eating guidelines. This rises to 75% for the bottom 10%. The national average was 8% in 2017. If you fix poverty, you fix smoking and obesity. Health is a tangible way in which injustices are manifested, and yet another compounding factor in the inequality flywheel.
Three women in my cohort neatly demonstrate Year Here’s theory of change.
On her frontline placement with Origin Housing, Sneh Jani-Patel noticed that many older residents needed support but weren’t asking for it. For her frontline innovation project, she launched Repair and Care, which embedded a simple welfare check into the protocol of Origin’s repairs contractors. This small fix unlocked a simple means to spot vulnerabilities that would otherwise go unnoticed.
While based at a North London temporary accommodation service for young homeless people, Meg Doherty learnt of the near-impossible task faced by residents: saving money for a rental deposit without having their benefits cut to an unlivable level. While facilitating cooking sessions in the hostel, she saw a means by which residents could earn a rental deposit through cooking and serving delicious food. Fat Macy’s is now a thriving catering company with a restaurant, Sohaila, in the heart of Shoreditch — with profits flowing into a housing deposit scheme for trainees.
Finally, Mursal Hedayat (my BFF thanks to Year Here) tapped her own lived experience to pursue social entrepreneurship. Mursal and her family fled Afghanistan when she was four years old, arriving in the UK as refugees. Despite her mother being a civil engineer and her father a maths professor, their qualifications were not recognised and neither secured skilled work in the UK. To combat these challenges faced by refugees and marginalised talent, Mursal founded Chatterbox, a global language-learning service delivered by refugee language coaches.
These are just three of the sixteen Fellows from the 2015–16 cohort. In terms of impact, the theory of change speaks for itself.
Over the decade of the Fellowship, Year Here recruited 276 Fellows who volunteered over 200,000 hours of frontline service, responded to 74 impact consulting briefs, and launched over 50 social businesses. 47 of the ventures are still driving impact today, having weathered COVID and contractions in public funding. Fellows have received extraordinary recognition: 6 have been named in the Forbes 30 under 30, 20 have appeared in the NatWest Women in Social Enterprise list and 3 have been honoured by The Queen — including my ride or die Mursal, who became an MBE in 2021. Perhaps, the most important metric of all is that 93% of Fellows continue to work in a social impact role following the programme.
Seven years after I moved to East London to start Year Here, I heard the heartbreaking news of the Fellowship’s closure.
The tough climate for socially focused organisations is not uniquely felt by Year Here. In just the past few months the Campaign to End Loneliness, The Cares Family, The House of St Barnabas, Opening Doors, Stand Alone and the British Youth Council all shuttered, mostly citing growing financial pressures. In the cost of living crisis, demand for charities services’ has gone up but these organisations have been deprived of the funding needed to satisfy demand. This list is not nearly exhaustive. We’re seeing support systems crumble when they’re needed most.
Despite the depressing headline story of decline and loss, the potential in our community is palpable. Since the closure of the Year Here Fellowship we’ve continued to see our ventures take impressive strides forward — raising money to grow their innovations. Sandra Nwokeoha, a Fellow of the final programme, won £500,000 to address maternal health inequalities with her venture Ellescope, in partnership with First for Health Group, her frontline placement on the programme. Fellows Zareen Ali and Felix de Grey have raised £650,000 to promote mental wellbeing for neurodivergent people for their venture, Cogs AI.
But the scale of inequality in the UK is enormous. If we’re serious about confronting the burning injustices of our time, as we are, the financial, practical, and moral support our leaders still need is considerable. Most of all they will need to keep finding the collective courage to act boldly and the grit to keep going. To resist the ravages of neoliberalism, we must be in it for the long haul.
The resurgence of Year Here.
Our founder Jack was living in New York when Fellowship ended. But he, and a group of Fellows, felt like there was something too good to squander within our little family. I couldn’t have agreed more. So despite the Fellowship closing its doors, the legal entities (Year Here Limited and the Year Here Foundation) did not.
A new board of Year Here Limited was established in July 2023, with me moving into the role of Chair following Jack’s interim period. Before stepping in the role, I asked Jack If I was really the right person to take the position. I’m not among the 93% of Fellows working directly in a social impact role. Still, the values Year Here instilled have greatly influenced my career in innovation, from leveraging the social determinants of health to design accessible and human-centred offerings in a disruptive healthcare innovation team, to consulting for UK for UNHCR and Bite Back 2030, a pioneering social enterprise tackling childhood obesity, during my time at Bain & Company. I may have taken a different path to the Fellowship’s intent, but I’ve always felt the most invigorated when I’ve had the opportunity to drive a meaningful social impact. I couldn’t be happier to return to Year Here; back to the grassroots work that set the meaning of my career in motion, and helping foster the network while driving the strategy for this new phase of impact.
This is a second starting moment for Year Here. There is so much more to come.
We are building a reimagined movement of innovators, entrepreneurs and changemakers committed to tackling poverty and inequality. Both boards for Year Here Limited and the Year Here Foundation are in place, re-galvanising the community and setting the work in motion. At our core we’re a community of around 300 Fellows, faculty and friends. But we have ambitions to recruit 1000s into a movement that leads the struggle against growing inequality in Britain.
