We've been as excited as anyone about the exciting new influx of exciting people at the Young Foundation. Which is to say that we saw a few of the many tweets, somewhat repetitive, a trifle forced, that were actively propagated by YF staff and duly ignored them. But then the weather got colder again, the sun hid its bright face behind a load of dirty grey, and we thought we might as well check out a bio or two and see what these people have to offer.
We'll be honest. We didn't go at this task with the bright enthusiasm of a new recruit in an American cop show. We took to the web with the weary cynicism of that young rookie's mentor. You must imagine us hitching our belts around our waist, running a hand in a careworn manner over our handsome, lean, experienced cop's face, and adding a shot of rye from a hip flask to our coffee mug before we got down to the task. But, like that wise detective, we have a strong sense of duty here at My Impact Is Bigger. We may need a bit of a stimulant to get us going, but once we're on the job, we're on the job, scouring online material with both the old timer's keen eye and the rookie's energy. We hoped to find some interesting leads, maybe something a little weird, a little unexpected, like Woody Harrelson's wig in True Detective. We hoped to unearth a bit of complexity, a plot twist, or at the very least a Scandinavian jumper, but not, we hoped, simply the usual suspects. So, you ask us, what did we find? Readers, scroll on...
Filippo Addarii
In Filippo we found a man with the breadth of ambition we like to see here at My Impact Is Bigger, for here is an innovator whose self-appointed task is nothing less than the reformation of Europe. Someone tried that once before we think, it rings a faint historical bell, but we haven't bothered to identify the peal. We're fairly sure at least that this previous reformation didn't start at the Young Foundation and that it didn't have quite the blockbuster populism of Filippo's mission. Filippo's superpower is networks. We imagine him in a clinging onesie covered with a latticework of wearable media technology. So that as you gaze upon this innovator's purple, lycra-clad man-body, glowing tweets chase one another up his calves, his thighs, snake about his waist and wrap themselves lovingly around his chest. We imagine him in a glorious Facebook hat, status updates flashing merrily and informatively across his forehead. We see a fabulous LinkedIn cape adorning his powerful shoulders and shooting industry insights down towards his disruptive buttocks. Thus clad, and with all the thinking, action and change of the Young Foundation behind him, we can only wait for that wonderful future of global peace, prosperity and justice that he will bring to us. We're beginning to feel we deserve it.
Ashley Elizabeth Ball
Oh Ashley Elizabeth Ball! The stare in your bio photo is both quizzical and baleful. As if you have both a dry sense of humour and the kick of an angry mule. This is, we imagine, the result of your Anglo-American heritage. Something about your head of glossy curls, your big shiny earrings and your leopardskin jacket speaks to us of both the line dance and the bingo hall. You seem a woman of strength, of character, a woman who could redefine relationships with a roomful of Texan CEOs or a garage full of Danny Dyer with equal vigour. We imagine you behind the wheel of some vast and unwieldy American car, a Buick perhaps, travelling across these forty American states in which you have campaigned about stuff, one hand on the wheel, the other raising a playful middle finger at any passing redneck. We imagine you pausing briefly to direct New Mexico - perhaps with a loudspeaker and a cattle prod - before taking to the wheel again and ending up, with a wonderful, rightful inevitability, in Lambeth. And lastly we imagine you addressing the assembled staff of the Young Foundation from half way up its staircase, hands on your hips, heels towering, necklaces chinking, a kind of fierce Barbara Windsor of innovation. And then breaking into Beyonce's "Single Ladies" because it's an anthem for our time, and you know it.
Indy Johar
Of course Indy Johar is a usual suspect. It's hard to dabble even a tentative toe into the murky pool of social innovation without feeling the sudden nip of his jaws upon it. Indy is a fish so big in this comparatively small pond that it sometimes feels as though the rest of us are squeezed up between his vast, curving, scale-covered sides and the hard edge of the pond itself. We are struggling sticklebacks to his giant grouper fish, a surfeit of lampreys to his rare sturgeon. There is something rarified too in his way of expressing himself. Where the rest of us, the small fry of innovation and enterprise, merely use words, Indy expresses himself in the abstruse phraseology of the oracle at Delphi. When the rest of us merely speak, Indy pronounces. He rises from the watery depths of innovation with a great surge, before breaking the surface of social enterprise communication with a wondrous, deep and reverberating music like that of a whale. This music echoes in the form of retweets across the enterprise and innovation sea. We like to listen to the sound but we can never hope to interpret it fully, and most of us long ago gave up trying.
Rowena Young
Young, like Johar, is no new face as anyone familiar with the white hot furnace of Nesta will know. Her latest venture is called Urbivore, and it's all about growing vegetables in cities and totally skilling all hell out of unemployed young people at the same time. Oh and health. And personal change. And isolation. And sustainability. And capacity building. And renewed conviction. And old people. And Stoke-on-Trent. And probably the obesity epidemic. In fact to judge by the effervescent and self-congratulatory tone of their site, this venture is pretty much a one stop solution to all urban problems. Which is great news both for us and the Young Foundation who must be hoping Rowena can turn it into a fruitful happy garden full of cheerful, personally changed and healthy urban innovators. Those of us who are not on the path of personal change or renewed conviction and who consider healthy living to be a choice rather than a duty might wish to quibble, but we won't, for that would seem churlish. Instead we will celebrate the bounce inherent in Young, in her ventures, her language, her curls and her buoyant sense of her own impact. For if there is a thing we truly admire here at My Impact Is Bigger, that thing is one person's ability to divine in their own modest self a truly impactful greatness, a greatness of which other lesser mortals merely dream, and to tell everyone about it.
And so we bid a fond farewell for now to the Young Foundation and its innovation facelift. Though we feel we shall look again, and look hard, at its disruptive impact, for we have not yet exhausted the many new arrivals, and we do like to exhaust a thing before we let it go. We are like a dog with a particularly tasty chew in that respect: thorough. Or like a service designer with obesity research: immersive. Yet still we turn our faces from the glorious potential for disruption that this influx represents, to look to a man who leaves as Johar, Young, Ball and Addarii arrive, a man who has disrupted already, but who is moving on to disrupt elsewhere. This is a man whose terse approach to the online biography knows no rival, a man whose winsome smile and willowy physique have no doubt haunted many a lovelorn intern's dreams, a man who has one or two things to say about community empowerment, and who can, very occasionally, be persuaded to say them, a man whose preference for a dose of evidence and realism over a hyperbolic display of impact marks him out as truly disruptive, for he believes changes are generally small, and take effort and this is not what innovators like to hear, and yet he tells them, occasionally. In short, not an innovator, or a social entrepreneur, but a man, a real one. We give you Mandeep Hothi.
