Today is my last day with the University of Northampton 05 October 2023.
When I arrived in May 2008, I was sheltering from a storm. The economic crash that had been building since 2006 peaked in the summer of 2008, just as I was selling two houses in Scotland and moving the whole family to England. I has been applying for a number of jobs, but when I went for interview at the University of Northampton, my biggest question for my interview panel was to be ‘why does UON want a senior lecturer in social enterprise?’. As I walked into the interview room, the question was already answered in the form of Wray Irwin, formerly head of Social Enterprise East Midlands, with whom I had already worked for over 4 years! I found myself immediately on a steep learning curve of developing degree validation paperwork, as I developed and saw undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in social entrepreneurship through to fruition. All that was needed was to tell the world that we had a handful of new degrees to sell. But the marketing of the university was generic, and most people had not heard of social entrepreneurship as a subject, let alone a potential future career. I also soon found myself in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, a place that had been no more than a fuzzy picture on the TV as single protestor faced down the tanks of the mighty state. As I stood there, I was expected to find out about the wonderful new movement of social enterprises in China. My visit showed me that China had already its own long history of social enterprises, that worked as ‘total economies’ educating the workers families, feeding them, providing health care and long term employment. My ‘danwei’ paper was not as enthusiastically received by the Uni as I had hoped, but echoed my earlier paper from working at Oxford Uni on how grit (i.e trouble and failure) makes a pearl in social innovation terms. Without anyone studying BA Social Enterprise, I made myself useful by teaching a class on social entrepreneurship to entrepreneurship students, and also a business ethics class to management students. I secured a little prize money from the millennium charity Unltd, for the best social innovation ideas, and this turned into quite a lot of money. Amongst some amazing ideas, Gill Gourlay and I helped students launch ‘Bag in Bag’ a simple retail social enterprise to give entrepreneurship students real world experiences of the end-to-end of small business creation and operation. We were told that we had to have a permit to trade on campus, but there wasn’t an application form to get that permission! The university wanted social entrepreneurs, but wasn’t acting as a social enterprise, or an incubator. The new vice chancellor arrived. He was hungry for a new identity for the University, something that it would be internationally known for. He realised that there was a lot of social enterprise activities going on and decided that we should be ‘No 1 for social enterprise’. The problem was, there wasn’t a ranking system for this, and nobody else was competing to be number 1. I pitched to him that there was only one organisation that could validate what we did, and that was to apply to become a AshokaU Changemaker Campus. This was a venture created by students I had met at Oxford, and they had launched a global federation of campus wholly committed to creating the conditions for students to become social change agents over their lives. Wray and I led the discovery process, convening a ‘core group’ that represented every activity on campus. A year later we found ourselves in San Diego being interview by AshokaU and become the first and only Changemaker Campus in England. This process led to the University of Northampton rediscovering its foundational purpose ‘to transform lives and inspire change’. This became the University strategy, and Changemaker Campus accreditation showed that we meant it. Any and all activities, programmes and initiatives on campus were filtered through the lense of ‘do this make the world a better place for ourselves, improving their ability to act?’. During this time, I also met Chris Durkin and Sue Kennedy in the School of Health, whom I worked with the redevelop a Social Welfare degree into a BA in Social & Community Development. We introduced social entrepreneurship and innovation modules from first to third year, as well as community development and community organising modules. We also doubled the ‘good degrees’ received by these students, at the same time as doubling the student numbers. I created a ‘Changemaker Handbook’ with students, to be taught by third year students in a second year class. This co-written handbook had some assessment criteria in the back, which I had developed from ‘21st century skills’ rubrics from American Universities. This was picked up by Rachel Maxwell and turned into the Changemaker Learning Outcomes resource. Wray has moved from being a Social Entrepreneur in Residence to head of the Employability service, as well as a range of other student directed services. At this time, students were becoming the primary customer, as funding shifted from block grants to student loans for fees. This put increasing pressure on programmes to show that they created high levels of employability. The students who were getting good results in the BA Social & Community Development generally didn’t want high powered graduate jobs, they wanted to better inform their existing community and health work. They wanted to, and did, start new charities and social enterprises or go back and volunteer in improving charities in their own communities. But, because of ‘poor employment outcomes’, the degree was removed from offer. I was instead poached by Vicki Dean, who had been given the task of getting the Foundation studies offer to work properly. I came in to run one module for all the students, in which I buried research and investigation skills, but oriented towards a social innovation skillset, demonstrating that all degrees involved could contribute to improved capability for students in solving the worlds problems. Working across 150 students in 70+ degree programmes required a certain amount of consolidation, so over three years, all the students, whether artists or engineers, applied their research skills to their own experience, that of student food poverty. This job morphed into revalidating the whole of the Foundation programme into a single year, embedding the social innovation skill set across the whole curriculum. This led to me stepping up as programme leader and line management of the team, having dodged that bullet for 13 years. I finish at UON as a deputy subject lead and Associate Professor with a PhD in social innovation. I came into the higher education sector with a yearning to figure out to get corporations to better care for the environment and communities they operate in. I have developed part of the answer, and have been surrounded by an inspiring group of people, from those in the Manchester Critical Group of UK academics, to the Changemaker Campus academics around the world, to close colleagues and curious students. A lot of people will remember the Changemaker brand, with good and frustrated memories, but beyond that has been a much more constant commitment to take the purpose of ‘transforming lives’ seriously.
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