Developing the social entrepreneurs of the future with Jack Graham, CEO and Founder of Year Here.
By: Matt Pullen
Tags: Social Entrepreneurship, Social Justice, Inequality, Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation

Jack has a background in the charity sector. In 2008 he moved to Zambia to take up a secondment with a grassroots HIV/AIDS charity. He was optimistic that his energy, skillset and determination could impact infection rates there. However, that optimism quickly faded. Along with feeling the frustration of being at the whim of large international donors and experiencing how pervasive the abject poverty was there, Jack also became deflated as a result of misjudgingly applying his own cultural value system to Zambia.

Upon returning home to the UK, Jack started to question his own motivations for going to Zambia, realising that he may have been guilty of white-saviourism. He understood that the attitude that Westerners can ‘save’ other countries is dangerously naive. Instead, because he knew that people are better placed to address social issues that are closer to home (literally and metaphorically) he decided to put his talents and energy into addressing the many, many (perhaps less glamorous) challenges that exist in the UK’s own backyard.

With the belief that ‘We need you here, more than ever’, Jack set up Year Here “to encourage a generation of aspiring social entrepreneurs to embrace the complexity of social issues at home — the misery of loneliness among our older people, the housing crisis, and the nagging persistence of educational inequality that means parental wealth is still one of the best predictors of educational success”.

Jack also experienced a disillusionment with the charity sector as a whole. Over the years working with charities, he had seen to the most extreme extent how perverse their incentives can be. “I remember funders telling us to inflate our budgets, and this is frequently the norm”. He thought, “I don’t want to be in a place where I am relying on grants…”.

In light of this frustration, Jack decided to take an innovative approach. “Instead of starting with the social need, I thought why don’t I start with the market opportunity and then apply this to a social need?”. In his case, he knew that he wanted to work with youngish people — supporting their leadership for social impact. “Thousands of people pay five or six thousand pounds a year to volunteer overseas as part of their gap year, and tens of thousands of people pay nine thousand pounds a year to go to university. I kind of backed myself to do a better job than most universities”.

Back when Jack set up Year Here (the name spawning from the concept of Gap Year Here) there were very few options after university for people interested in having social impact (even now, nearly 10 years later, the options are still limited). A lot of Fellows who complete the Year Here programme might have looked to do a Master’s in Social Policy or get an MBA (Master of Business Administration). But, when you consider the expense of a Masters, as well as it’s over-emphasis on academic, lecturer-hall centred teaching, Year Here compares favourably.

He felt that there wasn’t currently a very good mechanism that bridged people who are fired up about social change with careers that make society better rather than lining the pockets of shareholders. “Generally the social sector has been really rubbish at creating an ambitious, exciting space where people can learn fast and think big about how to make society better”. Jack coupled the market opportunity with this social need and set up Year Here.