The Telescope Story: Meet Our Founders
In May 2024, it will be five years since the first seeds of Telescope were planted. The core of it was simple: bring together policy and practice, so that they could inform one another and build a better world.
Since then, we’ve run 15 programmes with over 300 participants across 30 organisations, exploring areas as broad as family-centred probation in Cardiff, car clubs in central London, Housing First approaches in Lewisham, and different approaches to migration policy and practice on the South Coast.
As we explore a couple of new avenues over the next few months, looking at different options for the future direction of Telescope, it seemed like a good time to take a look back at the story of Telescope through an interview with two of the founders, Hebe Foster and Sarah Holliday.
What inspired you to work in policymaking and social change, and ultimately set up Telescope?
Sarah: Before this, I worked in scientific research developing low-cost solar cells to benefit society, but I felt distant from the people it was actually benefitting. So, I left in order to do something where I could see the real-world impact. And I found the Year Here programme in social innovation, where you spent six months working on the frontline and that was where I was inspired to set up Telescope.
I worked at a community centre called the Bromley by Bow Centre, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which has relatively high levels of deprivation. Every day we were seeing people with problems that were a result of government policies, whether that was trying to transfer to Universal Credit, the digital inclusion barriers that they faced, struggling with employment, poverty, needing to access foodbanks. It really felt like the frontline of the decisions that were being made in Westminster. There were so many brilliant people working at that centre who had such expertise and breadth of experience, and an understanding of the system that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. They’d been seeing these problems and understood the impact these policies were having in a way none of the decision makers in government did.
We met Ruth, who was one of the other co-founders, on the Year Here programme and she had a background in policymaking. She’d worked in Parliament, in human rights policies and left that role partly because she felt out of touch with the real world. It was really interesting speaking to her and seeing that real commitment to social change that people working in policy can have, that desire to make society better but not knowing how to do it, because they didn’t have any opportunity to meet real people and find out how they were living. It seemed like a no brainer to make these two worlds meet.
In the beginning, we didn’t know how we were going to do that, but we had all different experiences and we had learned through Year Here about the benefits of service design and design thinking more broadly, so Telescope was born as a learning and development programme about social change for policymakers.
Hebe: My brain has always been drawn to system level challenges. When we were at Year Here, it was like, find your issue strand or your target group and build something around that. There was always a part of my brain that was like: what about the bigger picture, can we shift the needle in a different way?
That was why policymaking feels so important, because it shapes so much of what we do on a day-to-day basis. And the other thing was that, I remember being completely blown away by Sarah and Ruth. It felt like such a privilege and an opportunity to work with these incredible people that I wanted to be like.
And I would have said that even if you weren’t here, Sarah!
Sarah: And that was part of it for me too, absolutely!
How has running Telescope allowed you to develop your own professional practice?
Hebe: In so many ways! A lot of this is really about mine and Sarah’s relationship, because we work really well together, our brains work in complementary ways. Sarah’s always been challenging me to look at the bigger picture and think about whether this is the best way to do things. I’ve learnt so much about ways of bringing people together, that double diamond.
On the flip side, it’s taught me to recognise some of the ways I work and to be more cognisant of how that fits within a professional organisation. And running a business, that’s not something everyone does. The self-motivation and keeping things running when there’s only two or three of us, it’s a good skill to have.
Sarah: It’s been a huge learning curve running a business. Coming from a science background, I want to collect all the evidence, read every paper, don’t do anything until you’re sure it’s the right thing to do and there’s evidence behind it. Whereas, with building a venture like this you have to let go, try and fail. Test something and learn from it. And you always do learn from it, you can always ask what insights you’ve gained that allow you to move forward and I’ve applied that in all my other work.
Can you share some productivity hacks that have helped you while running a social enterprise alongside a regular job?
Sarah: Hebe is going to be better at answering this one as she’s the productivity queen! But we work well together, because I am an over thinker and Hebe is not. She prevents me from diving too deep into any one thing and I think my main productivity is balancing a job with a venture and two young kids. It’s that thing of holding lightly and knowing when something is good enough to go and not reworking it six times. And being selective about prioritising what’s most important in the moment. There’s lots of blogs still half written that go on the to do list, but we’ve made it work.
Hebe: A few things.
Microsoft To Do is an excellent tool, I love it.
Always start with the biggest task first. If you start your day with five minutes on the biggest task, sometimes that carries you through and gives you the motivation you need to get it done.
This wasn’t easy, but shared calendars are the only way to run things: so, shared between us but also our different jobs, so everything is in one place, it’s made an enormous difference.
Sarah: And Slack!
Hebe: Yes, Slack. It’s such a good hybrid between chatty WhatsApp and formal email, and you can share documents, it’s a really useful tool.
For both of us, we’ve probably learned not to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Telescope work with people and organisations across various sectors, from housing to transport, to health and justice. How do you apply the principles and theory of change across such a diverse range of clients?
Sarah: It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in, it’s fundamentally about building empathy between humans and figuring out ways to work collaboratively to overcome those pain points.
Then it’s about asking what is your core purpose, what are your values, what’s preventing you from overcoming challenges? Your pain points will definitely be different from city to city, sector to sector, organisation to organisation, but the approach you take of identifying them, mapping the user journey, figuring out ways to test and develop solutions, developing a strong theory of change is all universal.
Hebe: I don’t think in any of the other sectors we’ve worked in you couldn’t draw a user journey map that shows different interaction and falling off points. There are not many sectors with people involved where you can’t apply it. It’s a mass of data essentially, a mass of stories. It’s about distilling that in the most human way possible. And that humanity is important because we are all people trying to build a better system and improve people’s lives.
What are the biggest challenges your clients experience when engaging communities in research, co-design or policymaking and how do you help them address these issues?
Sarah: Unfortunately, in all the public sector and even the charity sector, it’s often institutional buy in. There’s a strong drive within systems to maintain the status quo, we see that everywhere. It’s very difficult, in particular for a public sector organisation, to change direction, there are so many layers of resistance to change. Going from something being a nice idea with a motivated individual to making it happen is hard, there are a lot of steps involved.
We have our ladder of participation, or the spectrum of engagement, from residents and communities up to policymakers, decision makers and politicians. Society is not set up to make those two worlds meet. It’s difficult to make sure you’re hearing everyone’s voices. Sometimes it’s hard when you have an unequal society, there’s a lot of mistrust and we’ve seen that a lot through our Telescope programmes. People who have a lot of social challenges feel marginalised, so they don’t want to be engaged, or they wanted it to start a long time ago so it’s too little, too late. So, it’s hard both to get the institutional buy in and the trust of communities.
Hebe: There are a few things: one is general over consultation, fatigue of being asked questions. I also think there’s an element of expectation management. You can run an amazing co-design project but if you then turn round to the boss and say this is what people want and they say no, you’ve raised people’s hopes that you can deliver something but it’s out of your control.
And another one is inevitably engaging with people who don’t want to be there, or have lost trust, or are just quieter. People who are so busy they can’t engage because they don’t have the time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. And that is a struggle for us too, we’ve looked at how we can compensate frontline workers to make it meaningful for them to input their time and expertise. We try to keep our programmes and interventions personally useful: build your own connections, build your own skills, build your own understanding, so it has an innate value. It can be professional development. We have unshakeable faith in the idea that this interaction will lead to a ripple effect that changes the way people do their jobs, and that in itself will slowly but surely change society.
How has the policymaking landscape changed since Telescope began?
Sarah: The country’s been through a huge amount of change with Covid. We started four-and-a-half years ago and we’ve lived through the pandemic, but I think it’s shown everyone where there’s a will, there’s a way. Local and central government responded with such speed and force to that huge, national challenge. It certainly inspired us to know that change can happen if there is a shared purpose and vision.
And there has been a slow shift towards more participatory structures. I think central government, or the civil service, is aware of the need to engage better with communities and the frontline, but because of all the challenges we discussed it’s been slow to make that happen.
Hebe: I don’t think there have been huge changes that weren’t already in motion when we started, it’s just an acceleration of those. The key one being turnover in government and that’s at all levels. The turnover in ministers has been unreal. And that impacts our work because people don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s a tendency towards short termism. It makes it all the more important that our programmes have a longer-term value so you can see an impact.
What are the biggest changes you would like to see within the public or policymaking sectors?
Sarah: Obviously I would like a more equitable society. A continuation of that shift to a more participatory decision-making model, for communities to feel heard and empowered. They need to know they can make change happen and the government is on their side to make society better.
Hebe: This is huge but, ministers should have some experience of the sector they work in. There should be a process so people can’t move with no transition, no handover, there needs to be consistency. Devolution of power from central to local government, there needs to be a massive shift in that power dynamic. Local government needs to be trusted to do what they do well.
Also on a Telescope specific level, there should be frontline panels or sector specific hackathons, where people in Whitehall can sit with people who’ve worked in adult social care for twenty-five years and have that real deep expertise and hear what they have to say, rather than reading academic papers on it. And there needs to be a shift in what we see as data, which feeds into how policies are made. There’s a huge emphasis on quantitative measurements but there needs to be a sense of broader social value and qualitative measurement in decision making.
What advice would you offer to anyone thinking of setting up a social enterprise?
Sarah: You’ve got to have a lot of energy and drive and hustle. We believe in our mission and that no one is currently doing this. If you’re going to set up a social enterprise you have to believe in the core of what you’re doing, stay true to that north star, otherwise you’re going to put in a lot of unpaid hours, sacrificing other things you could be doing with your time. And if you don’t really believe in it, it’s not going to sustain itself.
And make sure you’re best friends with your co-founders and team members, your skills complement each other and you enjoy spending time together. That’s the other thing that kept us going.
Hebe: Definitely don’t do it by yourself! Always have at least one co-founder and/or a really reliable team member. Make sure you’re trying to solve a problem that you really care about, not building a solution that you really like and trying to find a problem it fits with.
We’ve been able to hustle along for as long as we have because we sustain ourselves on income rather than grant money. The time that goes into funding applications can be such a sink, and you have to know what you’re doing. My advice would be either focus on those financial streams that make your business sustainable, or hire someone to do your fundraising.
You have to choose whether you’re going to be a single-issue social enterprise or a systems social enterprise and the latter is harder, because there’s not funding for that, which is why we had to go down the income, revenue generating route much more than others.
What has been your proudest achievement with Telescope?
Sarah: We’ve delivered lots of great strategies and programmes, and been part of some ambitious, ground breaking projects in service design, which I’m really proud of. But I think it’s the small moments where you see that flashlight of understanding from someone who suddenly understands what it’s like on the ground, or why this person in government is facing similar challenges, but on the other end of the spectrum. That a-ha moment where they understand why it’s not working. That’s why we set this up, that one brief interaction that’s going to stay in their head as they go forward in their career or their life. I’m really proud we made that happen.
Hebe: I agree with Sarah, it’s the little moments in people’s lives. I also think the fact that we’re still here after almost five years, alongside other jobs, alongside two children joining the family, and one director, Ruth, moving to the other side of the world and then stepping back from the business to focus on other priorities. Through the cost-of-living crisis and an increasingly turbulent political environment, I’m proud we’ve stuck to our values through all that and done our best to produce work that we think will help people change how they work. We’ve always said people on the frontline are the experts, they’re at the heart and we bring them to the front of everything we do and that hasn’t changed since the beginning, which makes me very proud.
