Our next big Shift
A new vision and purpose for sustained social change
Shift has a habit of starting somewhere to end up somewhere else. Over the last 10+ years, we’ve been any combination of a behaviour change and campaigning agency, a social venture builder, a field and relationship builder, and a social, service and systems designer. It’s been a journey as we’ve shifted focus from one thing to the next in search of finding ways to deliver sustained social change.
This blog introduces our new Shift and shares more about how our journey has helped us to develop a new vision, purpose, and strategy for the future.
Why do we exist?
It’s an important question for any organisation to ask itself. This question has been particularly important as we’ve reevaluated how to best contribute to social change in recent times. We’ve asked ourselves questions about whether we’re needed, where we might perpetuate rather than help dismantle systems of oppression, and how we should organise, be governed, and show up for ourselves and others as an organisation. We’ve reflected on our role with ourselves, our board, our former colleagues and the partners and people we’ve worked and collaborated with. It’s been an exhausting and challenging journey, but it’s also the work we’ve needed (and continue) to do.
Whatever we do moving forward, we’ll do it with greater intention, purpose, and focus. We want to be clear to the world about who we are, what we have to offer, and more explicit about what we both choose and refuse to be. We are what we do. We are also what we don’t do.
Most importantly for all of us — we’ve been in search of inspiration. We’ve found it in the people we’ve worked with in communities up and down the UK. We’ve also found inspiration from frontline organisations, support groups, and community movements that continue to deliver against all the odds. It’s in the community centres, the WhatsApp chats, the neighbourhood forums, local parks, and all the other spaces where people organise, find their voice, and take action that we’ve reminded ourselves of why there is hope that change can, will and is happening. It reminded us once again [did we really need another reminder?] that change won’t happen in Whitehall, some swanky London office, or even on a post-it note [although we haven’t officially retired post-its just yet]. We’ll be sharing more about specific people, movements, and organisations that have inspired us through blogs and events later this year.
This inspiration has helped us to re-define our vision that we can all buy into a world that could meaningfully look and feel different for the individuals and communities that continue to be excluded from the systems that dominate today’s society.
Our vision is a world where we all have the power and influence to shape the change we want, so that everyone can live a happy and healthy life.
A vision doesn’t mean much without a purpose. If our vision is our north star, then we need a good compass to keep our ship pointing and crew steering in the same direction (do they even steer?) — you get the gist. We want to state our purpose in the sector so that we can feel proud about the role we play and ensure that we don’t take up space where we shouldn’t. To explain our new direction, we’re going to share our collective journey getting here.
Reminding ourselves of what we do and will continue to do well
Developing relationships, partnerships, and alliances. Shift has always cared about the work we do, but we’ve also cared just as much about who we do the work with. We care so much about relationships that we have a dedicated team working on it, the Relationships Project, led by Immy Robinson. We’re proud that no matter the outcome of our projects, most of our partners want to work with us again. We care deeply about each other as people, and we believe in building relationships with individuals rather than just the organisations or institutions they represent. That involves being honest and upfront about our shared goals, and where we don’t see eye to eye. Moving forward, we plan to double down on our relationship-centred practice and create ongoing trust, dialogue and meaningful coalitions. Relationships are a must if we’re going to continue exploring risky, bold, and often challenging work. Relationships come first, everything else builds from there.
“Never underestimate the importance of creating space for reflection and conversations to happen. Relationships are the work. You can’t predict what will come from a relationship, but relationships are the only ways in which we make progress and have some sort of impact.”
Immy Robinson, Co-lead of the Relationships Project
Convening diverse voices, ideas and skill sets around a social issue. We’ve never believed that anyone ‘owns’ a social issue regardless of whether you contribute to its cause or cure. We believe that voices diverse in thought, background, and lived and learned experience provides the best chance to explore how to solve that challenge differently and for good. In our experience, people coming from different perspectives allows everyone working on that issue to think about and consider the problem or potential solutions in a new or different light. That’s where the magic happens. Our focus moving forward is ensuring that these voices can still come together, and importantly, there’s an acknowledgement of how those voices are weighted in the room when decisions get made.
“The fact that we brought onboard lived experience consultants, paid an equal wage as project staff, was critical really… to have the people who have lived it saying, ‘it’s like this’, was one of the strongest points of the project.”
Lucy Kenny, Centre for Ageing Better, talking about our project co-designing a new programme supporting over 50s into work.
Backing things we believe in. Shift has long been a believer in potential rather than credentials. At times, that means we’ve probably tried or supported things that we had no business doing, but it’s also meant that we’ve tried things that no one else would. We’ve supported people and organisations in whatever way we can to keep going and turn ambitions into a reality. We’ve always believed that if you have the right conditions and the right people, change can happen anywhere and any time, and our new strategy will be focusing on how we can work to demonstrate this change is still possible, despite the forces consciously or unconsciously working to maintain the status quo.
“Shift kept BFB alive. We always try to keep things we believe in alive. We still believe that if you keep a good idea going long enough with the right people around it, it is likely to do something important. It’s a harsh reality that the well-funded things with long enough roadway, and not always the best things, are the things that go on to grow and scale.”
Duncan Brown, former Shifter
Deeply learning, designing things, and adapting as we go. Shift has always hired and conspired with deeply curious people. We’ve found that our best insights have come from listening, observing, and collaborating. But learning doesn’t happen without ongoing reflection. It’s essential that we continue to open up space for people to explore, challenge, contextualise, and validate learning. It’s also essential that we understand our positionality and how that might frame our understanding of social issues and the people experiencing them. Learning happens when we take a piece of information and decide to do something different as a result. We heard from many of our former colleagues and partners that our bias to trying things out, even when there are still many unknowns and risks, is a real strength. We’ve never expected to get things right from day one, and we don’t try to pretend things are working if they aren’t. We also don’t think every failure is a lesson, and sometimes we need some time and space for our own wellbeing before we’re ready to go again. It hurts us every time we can’t find a way to make something work. But adapting as we go, getting permission to be wrong rather than always right, and deciding how we adapt, regardless of how hard or different it might feel, is at the heart of creating real change.
Pushing boundaries and getting sh*t done. We love to make things, break things, and put them back together. Many of us in the team need to be working on something tangible, that we can touch, see and feel — both the change and the impact. We’ll continue to encourage and champion a ‘just do it’ (thanks Nike) spirit, championing the rule breakers, the people who want less talk and more action. However, we’ve also learned that we need to resist scaling something until the people we’re working with in partnership feel like it’s ready. If we had one superpower, our ability to work with others to get something off the ground and into the real world quickly would probably be it.
“We know how to build things that work”
Louise Cooper, Shift
Finding inspiration in real, meaningful, joyful experiences. We’re reminding ourselves that it’s in the moment of experiencing something different, playful, something that makes you think, feel, or act differently — something you want to go home and share with friends and family, is where change feels most exciting. At times, this sector shines a spotlight on the very real challenges facing our society — but we also need to recognise the power and strength of what communities are creating in this world despite those challenges. We’re committed to shining a spotlight and platforming the positive inspirations and people that keep us going and bring us joy. Whether it’s finding joyous moments in the boring revolution, or shaping new rebel alliances, count us in.
“The world needs more fun, it needs more happiness, it needs more hope. The communications at the moment are doomsday stuff. But there are visions out there that are hopeful and exciting and positive. We don’t always need to beat ourselves up about how bad we’ve been. These things might be true, but they aren’t very motivating. Shift tries in all it’s communications to have a warm, engaging, and hopeful lightness of touch”
David Robinson, former Chair and co-lead of the Relationships Project
What are we (un)learning?
Unlearn Verb
to make an effort to forget your usual way of doing something so that you can learn new and sometimes better way — Cambridge Dictionary
Shifting from single solutions to plural solutions. In the past, we’ve developed and delivered new ‘silver bullet’ solutions that we think will help solve the problem. The challenge with that is if those high-risk, one-shot solutions don’t work, we have to go back to the drawing board, pivot, or explore something else. The local organisations or communities we’ve been working with who experience the problem are still left with the problem, and sometimes even disillusioned if it will ever be solved. Worse, ideas that seem to work in one place, can be completely inappropriate if ‘scaled’ to another. Moving forward, we’re committing to working hyper-locally on a problem for the longer term and facilitating space for many solutions rather than one shiny product or service. We hope that this will give us a better understanding of what’s collectively needed to actually move the dial. We’ve been working in this way since before the pandemic, but we’re still learning how to bring others alongside us to buy into a collective way of working that cares more about the community and whether something is working rather than how new or innovative or exciting it might look or feel.
“As a single market solution, it is going to be so hard on your own to change something, especially without negatively impacting another part of that chain. So if we are talking about food, we would work with schools and farmers and councils and working with all the actors would have been better in Lambeth and Southwark. During our work [on the food venture], we found there were so many other food organisations doing similar things, but we had never heard of them.”
Alice Wilson, former Food Venture lead
Shifting from power holding to power sharing. We’ve always believed in leaving change behind rather than Shift building its own empire, and in order to do that, we have to work with and alongside others and support them to carry the work forward. But in some of our previous work, we didn’t explore enough about who was holding power when deciding on how we tackle shared challenges, or the implications of what power we were holding ourselves. We’ve learnt that we were not experts in shifting power to others or devolving it ourselves. As a result, we’ve been experimenting with a number of projects in the last two years focused on participatory models that give decision-making power (or as much as we can or are conscious of) to the people who stand to benefit. Before any project starts, we strive to think about where power lies, how equity can be consistently present and how we can relinquish our own privilege.
“We know that power sharing doesn’t happen in a workshop: it’s all of the micro-decisions along the way, whose knowledge is valued and the rules and regulations hardwired into organisations and systems that influences or prevents change.”
Oli Whittington, Shift
Shifting from theories of change to demonstrations of change. In recent years, Shift has built on its understanding of different issue areas and systems. We’ve explored these from their policies, funding dynamics, service landscapes, and social networks to understand how every small thing impacts and influences everything else. But at times, systems work is overwhelming, and we’ve often found we have no control over the part of the broader system that needs to change the most. In reality, we were trying to shift things that have no incentive to shift. Moving forward, we’ll be leveraging what we’ve learned from our previous experiences where we’ve been able to demonstrate change, such as our work to improve school food commissioning in Lambeth and Southwark. If you can show it’s possible, that it’s needed, and you can prove it, then you’re much more likely to make tangible differences at small scales that can have multiple ripple effects elsewhere.
“If you can pinpoint the problem you are trying to solve, then you can look at who you need to matchmake with to bring around the broader thinking, and that’s a different skill than competing with what’s already there. A neat example with the food venture was during easter meal delivery, we had to show that the price was not deliverable at £2 a meal, and we demonstrated that this couldn’t be done by delivering 10,000 meals at a higher cost point. We went in heavy and showed that you would never support the local economy with this model. And that was a real change to food organisations in Lambeth and Southwark and a real change to young people accessing better quality food. No one in the local system had the knowledge or capacity to figure it out at the time. We broke something down and demonstrated what it needed to look like.”
Alice Wilson, former Food Venture lead
Shifting from complicating things to keeping it simple. In the past, we’ve been guilty of having language that is unnecessary, complicated and exclusionary. It’s mainly been a product of wanting funders to think we’re ‘smart’, but also because some ideas are just complex by nature. We’re working on trying to unlearn that way of thinking, even if it hurts us in the short term. We still have a desire to be inclusive about the way that we talk about and share ideas, no matter how complicated or overwhelming they first seem. We actually think that what makes us smart is being able to communicate seemingly complicated things in simple ways. That’s what has allowed us in the past to move quickly from conceptual to practical, from academic to real world, from ideas to impact.
“The language we speak tells you a lot about what and who we think matters, a lot about who should be included or excluded in the work. I’d rather us come across as simple and straightforward rather than intelligent or experts. But that requires unpacking what we’ve been taught — from writing CVs to grant applications — we’ve been told to use exclusive language because of the signal that sends to others. I think its time for us send a different signal”
Duncan Fogg, Shift
Shifting from the team we are to the team we want to be. We’ve been reducing in size over the last couple of years as we take stock and set this new direction. We’ve said goodbye to some great people. As we now look forward with this new direction, we’ll be looking to bring more people on to our team, and with that, increase our diversity. We’ve removed the need for traditional qualifications and professional experiences to make hires. But to do good work, on-the-ground, with the people that experience the issues, we need a team that relates to and is reflective of the communities we work with. We’ve got work to do but look forward to welcoming more people into Shift in the coming months.
“It’s an exciting time to be part of Shift right now — reshaping our team and our purpose feels like the beginning of a new chapter, which we’re all eager to throw our energy into.”
Michael Roberts, Shift
Finding purpose
Given our strengths, capabilities and limitations, our learnings and unlearnings, we’ve landed at a new purpose to drive our work forward.
Our purpose is to demonstrate real-world social change, which people can see improving the lives of the people most negatively impacted by systemic inequality.
We’d like to thank everyone who has made Shift what it is today. We’ve had so many amazingly talented and dedicated colleagues, contributors, and partners. You always remain with us in the spirit of our work, our culture, and our charitable mission.
We hope this blog is a recognition of and a thank you to everyone who has put their time, effort, love, care and deep expertise into the work. We’re especially grateful to those who’ve challenged us throughout the journey. It’s not always what we’ve wanted to hear, but it’s nearly always what we’ve needed to.
