Telescope, Year Here, and the impact of social enterprise

We’re still processing the news that the social enterprise that birthed Telescope, Year Here, is closing its doors after ten years of hugely transformative work. It’s a sobering moment.

Over the years, Year Here has produced over 50 social enterprises, all with one common thread - frontline insight. The venture portfolio has taken on challenges across the spectrum of social injustice, from homelessness, healthcare inequity, and refugee underemployment to bias in recruitment, lack of diversity in media, and poor social procurement. As the team explained in their closing blog, “we advocated for and built a model of venture-building that was not about entrepreneurs making assumptions about how people live but about getting alongside people, about listening and learning before doing anything else.”

The closure of Year Here throws into stark relief the primary challenge that all entrepreneurs face - that “doing a startup” is hard. It’s particularly hard when you are impact-driven, and therefore have multiple demands on your resources that other businesses might not. Among these are, for example, higher standards for employee pay, or much longer planning and design time for your products because true co-design takes time.

But that’s also the joy of a social enterprise. Year Here, as founder Jack Graham eloquently put it, started as “an idea on a post-it note [and became] a living, breathing movement powered by purpose and love”. We feel the same about Telescope. We may have lost count of the thousands of Post-Its (physical and virtual) that have gone into building our mission, but the sense of purpose that comes from running a business that is truly designed with the people at the sharp end of social challenges is, in our opinion, unparalleled.

The potential of social enterprise

Social enterprise operates at a fascinating nexus of commercial and impact interest areas. It falls within the remit of supply/demand, relying on revenue to make the work possible - but at the same time, it seeks to solve a social justice problem whose resolution would render the social enterprise redundant.

The potential of this model is, therefore, quite amazing. Harnessing the power of the market while serving a social good means operating in the grey areas between the two sectors, with the potential to change how the entire system operates. Year Here’s inspiration, for us, was the unyielding belief that people on the frontline of social challenges have the expertise and insights that we need to solve those challenges. We’ve taken that forward into our own work, and can see the potential of that frontline insight not only on the specific content of probation policies, for example, but also on the entire way that policy is made. Creating a feedback loop between the way that social enterprise operates and the outcomes it can create provide a case study for systems change across all sectors.

Looking forward - a future for social enterprise

At the Telescope level, the focus on frontline insights remains paramount. We continue to advocate for the voices of frontline professionals in policymaking. We will soon be launching a mutual mentoring programme that will connect members of the civil service Policy Profession and the Operational Delivery Profession, to build a greater understanding of the realities of service delivery among those who have decision-making power. In this way, we hope that our social enterprise can support the longer-term design and delivery of public policy.

For our broader social enterprise community, the closure of Year Here will have ripple effects, likely much greater than we anticipate. But active efforts from the team and alumni are already generating exciting ideas for how we will continue to share resources, ideas, and support with fellow social entrepreneurs and social justice warriors - not to mention have some fun while we’re at it!

The question of whether social enterprise can change the way society operates remains, for now, unanswered. There are so many examples of socents doing things differently, producing better outcomes through their non-traditional methods, that we are hopeful. We’ll share as much as we can about our journey, and hope that over time we can build a great database of proof points that show real systems change. In the meantime, if you want to support our mission, or any other social enterprise doing awesome things differently, check out our website, and the list of Year Here ventures who work across the entire gamut of social justice.