By Kawika Solidum
Driving social impact through policy change brings to mind detailed recommendations based on stats, analysis and a distilled understanding of existing and previous interventions. The way I drive social impact, though, is quite simply by driving.
I work for the CSJ Foundation, which champions grassroots frontline charities and links them into the Centre for Social Justice’s (CSJ) national policy work. My role is to identify charities and social enterprises that exist to better their community. We currently have an alliance of over 450 such organisations. They are deeply embedded within their localities and have a sixth sense for what the people they serve need now and in the future. Often, these organisations are hard to reach – easy for their community to access but harder for many in Westminster to find. And that’s exactly why I’m regularly driving up and down the M6 or M62 – scouting out for the best social-sector organisations in the North West.
The CSJ Foundation operates throughout the UK to nurture and grow its network of poverty-fighting charities, what we call the CSJ Alliance. These organisations work with us to ensure we drive genuine social impact through our policy recommendations – helping us devise and refine what we believe is needed in a particular policy reform.
Boathouse Youth was established in 2009 as an open-access youth club in one of the most deprived wards in all of England. Today it is the largest youth organisation in Blackpool and an example of how a local organisation has far-reaching influence by engaging with the Centre for Social Justice and the CSJ Foundation in its On the Money report published in June 2021. We have just completed the next phase of that work, contained in the CSJ’s report “Practice Makes Perfect” focussed on financial education, supported by Lowell.
Boathouse Youth does not specialise in financial education; there are many charities that do this. In this instance, I was searching for an organisation that focused on providing support and guidance to young people in the broadest possible sense.
We wanted to know how to make money management principles relevant to young people rather than simply a school classroom course. We needed to understand how to immerse the concepts of budgeting and credit into activities and discussions young people were already part of attending.
The original plan was to ask the young people attending weekly sessions at Boathouse Youth what they thought, but I was given even better advice: get to know them first.
Hence, I found myself driving yet further. This time to the Lake District with the group of young people who would form our focus groups. The Boathouse Youth staff encouraged me to get to know the young people – walk alongside them as we followed the path of a Cumbrian stream, nervously queue up as we took plunges into the deep pools of icy water and laugh at the fact that we were all out of our comfort zone.
And because of this, it was much easier to then sit down with them, to listen to how they grappled with budgeting and money. Learning that many have never used or seen a debit card and that their parents avoided buying things online was important to our research. As was how tedious maths or money management lessons at school could feel with concepts like APR and mortgages, when many of the young people felt that was irrelevant to their lives. It was noteworthy that the CSJ’s thinking on the necessity of experiencing financial education was influenced by these dialogues, which were the result of hours of observation and small-group discussions.
My job is to pinpoint frontline charities delivering real impact. We want to know what disparate, often geographically and economically isolated individuals, families and communities have to share about their life experiences. These lessons add to our hard-nosed analysis to form our recommendations for policy change.
Boathouse Youth and the community of young people it serves may be far from the heart of Westminster policymakers, but together with the CSJ and the CSJ Foundation, its learning, solutions, and impact are shaping policy to improve lives across the UK. That’s what drives me.
Kawika Solidum is Head of Region (North West) for the CSJ Foundation and connects with policymakers and philanthropists to ensure that charities with hard-hitting social impact inform policy and get the support they need. This blog covers how Blackpool-based Boathouse Youth was identified as a key partner for “On the Money: A roadmap for lifelong financial learning” and is profiled in “Practice Makes Perfect: Insights from experiential financial education in Blackpool.”
