At this moment, at the end of 2024, we face a junction in the road. As we start to learn to live with, past, through and beyond COVID. The stress, anxiety, and change it has caused can leave us more heightened and impacted by the challenges we face in our modern economies. This is exemplified by the Great Resignation in action – the worrying growth in support for thinking such as the Great Replacement, the incredible rise in the cost of living, the looming recession… and now big tech becoming enmeshed with the incoming Trump administration in the USA.
We must meet this moment of change. We must rise to the occasion. Those of us leading (or trying to lead!) and working to deliver social good must develop and encourage the evolution of new approaches, while driving efficiency – and impact – in the traditional things we have done. The era of smart people leading on behalf of others is over – it needs to be a joint enterprise of insights. This does not mean a pendulum swing to being led purely by passion, or a sense of injustice – it means striking the right balance between intuition and ingested learning, it can be done.
The social sector is in a challenging place: its inefficiencies are finally being called into question, but it’s important to remember that all the good it’s done shouldn’t be written off, either. This is about justice – and it’s about fairness, and it’s about not assuming the role of oppressors. Rather, it’s about taking the tools harnessed by oppressors and using them to change those actors – their friends, their children, grandchildren, allies, and even their enemies – all the while being compassionate, as we work together, to change the world for the better.
We need to embrace the principle of allyship, to reach the next stage of our existence. If we fail to do so, we’ll languish in division. That division, driven by a lacking commitment to allyship, has manifested itself in a number of different ways. The culture wars, society’s failing to materially address climate change and improve the planet’s health, racism, sexism, ableism, the discrimination of people’s sexual preferences, the increasing cost of living, the perpetuating of low-quality work, concerning health outcomes, allowing AI to dominate through the lens of a few, allowing the use of the label ‘woke’ to persist and undermine good inclusion work. The list goes on.
As we firmly enter the mid 2020s, I’m starting to reflect on what I want to do for the rest of the decade. I didn’t have answers until recently (my next play is being announced soon!).
It then got me thinking, what do we, as humans, as citizens, or as social impact leaders, need to do for the rest of the decade, to help us flourish, as we move, it would seem, ever closer to an entirely new stage in our existential journey? Again, I’ve got no idea, but below is an exploration of five ideas that could help us get there. What I do know is that we must be hopeful, believe in our youth, our people, our places, and crucially, believe in those who want to come and join us in our place and help. I am hopeful we will soon be on track to a more fair, inclusive, prosperous, aspirational, net-zero, and – perhaps most importantly – loving world. A world in which we cross borders, cultures, and communities with ease and trust because we are humans first and various characteristics second.
- Rebasing ourselves after a period of being debased – doing the work at all levels from individuals through to global citizenry.
A good friend (they know who they are) said to me we are de-based. It struck a chord with me, I researched just to make sure he was using it as I thought he was intending to. He was. Debased means out of sync and doing things for the wrong reasons. He was partly referring to his views on why Vladimir Putin has chosen to attack Ukraine now. While NATO bordering Russia seems to be his reason – it’s also because he saw the West as debased and weak – too busy worrying about Instagram, Netflix, wealth accumulation, and cancelling each other.
We failed to take a non-capitalist response to COVID, allies were run out of Afghanistan while we ignored the plights experienced by those in so many other countries, allowing Big Tech to get too big, we have bathed in multiple hypocrisy through the Israel-Gaze conflict – costing lives and trauma on both sides. We (in the West at least) have failed to look after our poorest. And we have failed to support our own people regardless of their respective characteristics (i.e. inequality, discrimination, the refusal to value teachers, and nurses) none of this justifies the outbreak of the awful war, in Ukraine, but, fundamentally, I believe that exploring these things further could help us understand why Putin (and allies) have chosen now as a time to test, prod, and challenge our ‘so-called’ democratic way of life, and the values that have held us strong since 1945.
We need to rebase ourselves. I feel it in myself, as I return from a period of working on a number of startups. Or, in simple terms, we need to revisit our approach to running our economies – and get back to doing things for the right reasons. I was born in the U.K. and owe it so much. However, my identity is now more complex and integrated than that. I’m British, I have spent time in the USA, I’m Ghanaian, I’m black, I’m a man, I believe in inclusion, and I am a centrist. I’ve experienced all sorts of emotions and traumas and yet I’ve just powered on, sometimes not communicating and many times not resolving these complexities.
Papering the cracks with achievements, labels, social impact, posts and glory – great things have been established, many lives touched and impacted for good (I hope!), but there is also so much more learning and growing to do for myself, until I die. On my journey I’ve discovered that I’ve been driven by impact too much, when actually being driven by a love for my family and friends and saving my energy for my family, and friends is more important than trying to pursue impact for others which can sometimes be based on protecting reputation, growing ego, or some self-anointed sense of trying to prove to the world that one has overcome early life challenges.
So the goal is not to stop, or pour water on all the achievements we’ve made, or now say it’s a problem. It’s not about reaching a place of comfort, before then saying “right, this system that made me comfortable… sucks!…I’m going to go against it”.
No.
Rather we must say to ourselves, that, in fact, we are all constantly growing and evolving. What we valued yesterday might not be what we value tomorrow – we shouldn’t be trapped by the past, when our future is there to be created – I think we need to rebase ourselves.
Common service is needed – we need obligatory ‘in-service’ experiences that bind us, connect us, and ground us. We need to take more experience-led and innovative approaches to tackling our social problems. I lived in San Francisco for 5 years’ – it’s got the world’s worst homeless problem. Millions of dollars spent, focused on the symptoms – street sleeping, drug taking, mental health, housing – all important and critical work.
However, as someone who’s been homeless – the first thing is just being seen, regarded as human, and regaining your sense of self-worth in this world. Just an army of experienced coaches and mentors flooded onto the streets at key times, could be a great foundation to building people’s confidence and self-esteem to re-integrate. The foundational principle, required for people to simply belong to a society – is for those people to actually be seen. It just begs the question on so many of these big, enduring problems: do we really know what we are doing? Like, really, do we?
The solution to your problem (and why do we always need to solve a problem, why not create a new hope over there) is usually very close by. We need a global conversation (driven by well-organised national conversations) about who we are, and why we are here. We need that on a national level too – we need a great conversation to recalibrate. I hope we will do this sooner than later.
The founders of democracy (i.e. Socrates, Plato, etc.) had these conversations on a regular basis – we need those types of conversations today, as models of deliberative democracy demonstrate – we need to deliberate and be deliberative between elections. If you take Brexit, as an example – well, I have it on good authority that Jeremy Heywood advised Theresa May to host a national conversation about Brexit – and she refused, thinking she could do it. History will judge Theresa May a little more fairly, than Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, I suspect, but the arrogance of our recent political classes is there to be seen. It’s widespread.
- The importance of good quality work as a source to a good life.
I’ve spent the last five years working intensely, building a worker-owned co-op, focused on staffing, in California. When we began we were a quiet and small voice – now we are in a marketplace. Work is at the root of a lot in our communities. Good, quality, well paid, and balanced work, hits so many buttons. The work of GSTCC shows just how quality work can have an impact on people’s health outcomes. We know that high-quality work is positively influenced by people’s access to quality housing – and is connected to health and socio-economic outcomes, too. I’ve seen this first-hand, living in the UK and USA. I’ve also seen it, having spent extended periods of time in places as diverse as Ghana, India, and Mexico.
All the data shows that the criminal justice systems in the USA (especially) and UK are not only broken, but they are racialised oppressive systems that need complete reform. However, while that reform moves through (check-out the work of Darren Mack to close Rikers Prison in New York, or CROP’s work to support returning citizens in California) a key route to preventing entry to the criminal justice system, or rehabilitation out the other side is: work; skills; and value creation activity.
There are now some clear trends in relation to workforce development that we need to acknowledge. There is too much focus on skilling people up to enter a biased, oppressive and purely profit-driven market place – is this a good use of funds? Maybe some resources should go towards working with employers and businesses to transform their approaches; where necessary, using legislation to ensure that those approaches are serious. We are way past ‘the Seat Belt moment’ – an analogy for this moment – we need to stop allowing extractive employment practices and models, the same in nature, to thrive. Particularly, those that extract from low-wage workers.
At the heart of this is encouraging a multitude of ownership models – and even driving it into the market. At Turning Basin Labs, ownership is at the heart of its 21st century operating model. We need to train and prepare people to earn, learn, and own – not just earn and learn. The emerging work of Trevor Parham at Oakstop, where he is investing in the local black community, working to build skills and capacity through his family of Oakstop businesses, is an example of culturally sensitive workforce development that I would really like to see proliferate in the USA.
It’s time to support the proliferation of ownership across the work system – especially for low wage workers. Workers can play a role in the inclusive growth of companies. The co-op movement is driving this, but other areas of the economy are doing it too – shared ownership, share allocations, and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAO’s).
- Honing-in on our true motivations:zooming-in on winning hearts and minds to an inclusive vision, and away from a revenge mindset.
This is a new one for me, and I’m still forming my thoughts. I’ve been known to take people at face value, I like to see the positive in people. However, people’s motivations can vary. In the current social impact context – understanding people’s motivations is critical. The recent pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, the #MeToo movement, trans-rights, and the spotlight on racial justice has created huge advances in how we debate, act, and share power and resources.
Most motivations for this work are well founded – years’ of injustice, oppression, and blocking are now being replaced (slowly!) by access to opportunity and a realisation of potential. However, for some and understandably so – the motivations can lead to revenge – an eye for an eye or a chance to take the crown and play the role of oppressor. I’ve seen activism for a good cause turn into an all-out fight to just get back at the white patriarchy. I’m not sure this is how we win.
Some of the greatest activists of the 20th century who laid their lives down so we could get educated, get fair work, and a fair chance, called for an inclusive approach – King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Mandela, Obama,and more – they all advocated for inclusion, even when so-called oppressors imprisoned, shamed, or even killed, to stop their advocacy, to exclude. In fact, this is what frightens oppressors more than anything else – that any such change will offer true fairness for all. True fairness, indeed, for them, means that we will actually see more and more excellence rise – and mediocrity, found out.
Instead of providing the ammunition to allow the characterisation of an ugly or revenge-driven version of changing the status quo, the result is this keeps the relatively silent majority, passive and fearful of what they don’t know. This in turn maintains a comfortability with the status-quo. It’s important in this time, with the opportunity we have, we must act in the space of forgiveness and persuasion. The old saying ‘Better the Devil you know’, comes to mind – this is where we must win.
- Taking physical, mental and planetary health seriously – it’s real.
I’ve learnt personally through the pandemic that we ALL need to do the work – all of us. What this means is being intentional, in taking care of our physical and mental health. But it also means being intentional about how we treat each other and the planet – the watchwords here are love and discipline. At a macro level this manifests in multiple ways. It’s time to realise that the rest of the world will not embrace the clean revolution if advanced countries do not embrace it authentically, first.
In the 24 hour news and social media-driven world – international energy and commodities companies need to stop influencing African governments to not invest in their own infrastructure. Further, western governments can’t expect the rest of the world to turn away from fossil fuels when they are not doing it themselves. Hypocrisy really has nowhere to hide when it comes to climate change.
Although we shouldn’t underestimate the influence of the media and the digital sphere in shaping this debate. The answer is not just switching to batteries – the need for young children to keep mining in Africa to source materials for these batteries doesn’t bode well for equity or health, work, wealth and so much more. We need to get to the root of how we do things in a balanced way, and we need new international institutional furniture to help curate these issues – the current crop has gaps that need filling (i.e. The UN, the WTO, the IMF and many more are not fit for purpose and need new mandates, reform or new incarnations).
- Creating new global institutional furniture to help us make Global Capitalism more balanced.
This is my favorite one to solve our geo-political issues. We are in a pickle. We’ve got a global economic system that we thought was delivering us a globalization utopia. Instead we got a financial crisis in 2008, a period of epic growth, deeper inequality, followed by a global pandemic – and then a looming recession and the highest rate of inflation in some 40 years’. Rather than meeting the pandemic with humanity, we met it with capitalism and lockdowns. We privatised vaccine production and locked down communities to stop the spread. Coming out the other side,we have a mental and physical health crisis. We’ve also seen technology companies continue to run rampant, climate change gearing up to be our next challenge, and now war in Europe (Ukraine). What does this all mean? It means we need new global institutional furniture – the current lot is out of date.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are stopping the growth of Africa and Asia. The UN is failing to enforce the law, values, and issues it was set-up to address. Then there is zero regulation and no international body to oversee the emergence of AI/tech, nothing to balance its incredible potential, against its possible downsides. So now, unlike in the past, we seem unable to end this epoch – we seem unable to break it up and allow a new tranche of innovation through. Instead, we are stuck. Going round and round and round. To the point where we find ourselves in global culture wars and a global identity battle. We are being forced to align to one maybe two characteristics or identities and the extremes on the left and right determine which ones are legitimate or not – and if we do not align, we are shamed into silence or shamed into compliance. The court of public opinion is now on social media. Technology has done so much – it’s connected us. Groups connect and help each other with sickle cell, cancer, and so much more. This has only happened because of tech. I’m grateful and think it has a place – it just needs reforming and realignment to our needs, rather than being wholly driven by its needs.
These are my reflections. These are my thoughts.
I’m interested in yours?
Stephen Bediako OBE