Celebrating our progress in 2021
Collaborative Future was both born out anger at a system of work that was designed to prioritise profit over people, and a hope that if people come together, connect deeply and recognise their own and other people’s worth we can build a world in which everyone is empowered to thrive. This work has felt more important than ever in a year full to the brim with fear and loss. So we wanted to take a moment to celebrate with everyone that has supported us and reflect on what we’ve learnt.
Community is everything
Some of our community of small businesses, freelancers and young people coming together to celebrate the end of the year.
When we decided to launch the second iteration of our collaborative and flexible work placement programme in the middle of lockdown with the aim of generating paid work experience for 10 young people it was our community of fellow small businesses and freelancers that came together to support this work. Their investment made it possible for us to go even further and generate paid work for 13 young people as well as our collective of 10 incredible coaches and trainers.
Through our 2020 programme we have brought a community of 35 small businesses, freelancers and young people together to work and learn. Our unique model of matching people based on skills, passions, project needs, working patterns and personalities we’ve generated 31 different pairings between young people and small businesses so far. In addition to gaining a huge amount of value from working together, many of our businesses and young people have also contributed to the growth and development of the programme too - from providing training or mentoring sessions, improving our Notion platform, or sharing ideas in our slack group, regular check-ins and retrospectives.
From that community we’ve also hired our third team member, Prisca, as a community advocate to support Sonia and I to replicate the successes of this year. The hiring process in itself led to so many brilliant ideas from our interns around how to expand and improve on our work. We’ve got some exciting work ahead of us - starting with re-running our programme for young people and small businesses in January, we’ll then be looking to partner up with other organisations and groups to implement our collaborative and flexible employment model for a whole range of communities, industries and locations.
Get in touch to be part of our work placement programme or partner with us to run your own version.
Everyone is uniquely talented, you’re just not looking
One of the main purposes of our work placement programme is to create space for people to both demonstrate and discover their value through doing real paid work. We still have a few weeks to go with our 2020 cohort but already over 50% of our interns have been offered long-term employment since participating in our programme and 25% have gained the confidence to start their own business or freelance career. Everyone has had space to discover what it is they need to do next and make valuable connections to help them on their journey.
Rania, one of our interns and the latest member of our board, would never have had her talents discovered by William Joseph Design without our programme, and three months into her employment they have already promoted her! William Joseph Design originally partnered with us because they believed we could reach people they couldn’t and this has generally been the response we’ve had from most businesses.
Zoya Ahmed, one of the talented interns on our programme, designed this amazing collaborative future postcard to send to our partners and supporters.
The approaches we take to hiring people is quite unique in comparison to traditional recruitment processes that are the fast track way to end up hiring cardboard cutouts. In the same way there’s a dominant culture in work that excludes so many of us, there’s a dominant approach to recruiting that only empowers a small minority of people to shine.
With a strong focus on diversity and inclusion you might imagine we’d adopt a hiring process that anonymises CVs. Instead we scrapped CVs entirely and ask people to bring the most important parts of themselves to the process, which for some people isn’t necessarily their years of work experience but instead their unique perspective on the world. We believe employers need to make space to really see a person and weave the unique aspects of people’s talents and potential into the way they assess for potential.
We’ve created radical improvements to both our hiring practices, and the practices of hundreds of other companies through direct partnerships and sharing openly with others. Get in touch to develop inclusive hiring practices with us in 2021.
Growing together helps us achieve our potential
This year, alongside our work placement programme, we’ve facilitated and coached a huge array of teams to improve their ways of working and company culture. From empowering people to put inclusion at the centre of their work, introducing coaching approaches to managers, developing teams’ facilitation skills, embedding practices of giving and receiving feedback and generally supporting organisations and communities to build thriving relationships in these unprecedented times, we’ve helped teams and individuals to learn and grow, and in the process we’ve learnt and grown from working with them too.
Creating space for people to learn and grow together is one of the most important things to invest in as a business. There is a unique energy that working with others creates and it is hugely powerful. It is often the space between people that produces the most exciting and interesting discoveries about what we, individually and collectively, have the capacity to achieve. We are incredibly privileged and grateful to have provided such a diverse range of organisations with consultancy, facilitation and coaching this year including: CAST, Climate Strategies, Developer Society, Lankelly Foundation, Near Neighbours, Penfold, Tech for Good live, Unmade and Zoomforth - plus hundreds more via our public-facing workshops.
Taking risks is the only way to change the system
When we launched our 6-month internship programme earlier this year I shared how people believing in my potential is what enabled me to find fulfilling, paid work when I left school. Organisations often view hiring young and relatively inexperienced people as a huge risk, and at that moment that feeling of risk around hiring anyone is heightened for so many businesses.
Our programme is designed to make accessing young talent feel less risky, and opens up opportunities for people who are often overlooked and undervalued. Collaborative Future brings together a collective of businesses to contribute membership fees which we then use to hire a pool of interns to work across those businesses. We aren’t grant or government funded nor are we highly profitable - about 50% of our costs are actually covered by our consultancy and training income rather than our membership fees - and most people would wince at the risk we are shouldering.
Through our consulting work we also support businesses with building more diverse and inclusive teams. Sadly we still meet so many leaders who say they can’t afford to invest money and time into equity & inclusion until they’ve secured their next round of funding, or until they’ve reached their financial targets. They say it’s ‘too risky’ right now to change their practices or to spend money. All too often the organisations that say this will never change - they will always find another excuse to stick to their comfort zones.
Personally we don’t see what we do, or what we support other organisations to do, as risk-taking. We see it as changing the system. We see it as our responsibility to build a more equitable world by investing our time and money into the people that face barriers to professional opportunities and financial security in our current society. And more importantly we know from experience that the people and processes we invest in are not a ‘risk’ at all. As we said earlier everyone is uniquely talented, and we’ve seen first-hand the immense value that comes from creating a world of work in which everyone is truly empowered to thrive. The real risk is never discovering the endless possibilities when you work together to create meaningful change
Drop us a line if you’d like to work together in 2021.
Thank you for all your support!
Tess, Founder of Collaborative Future