Welcome and good morning, thank you for joining us for this episode of Nesta Talks to these events are put on by Nesta and are designed to be a conversation with today's most interesting thinkers and doers focused on the big topics that define our future I’m Moria Sloan Nesta's chief of staff i work on strategy and thought leadership and with our senior equity diversity and inclusion lead i also am on the line to make sure that Nesta is advancing progress on our equity diversity and inclusion strategy I’m really pleased to welcome Bayo Adelaja to discuss diversity in entrepreneurship and innovation it's great to see you the entrepreneurship sector is notoriously depressingly undiverse and I think there's been a spotlight on addressing inequity and improving diversity with immense credit to the activists champions and leaders across the world who have been and continue to be demanding and driving this change but we're still really far from it being a diverse plane a level playing field and Bayo’s work aims to level this playing field and expand opportunities and support available to black entrepreneurs in particular and innovators she is Chief Doer at ‘do it now now’ the company she founded in 2016 to champion ethnic diversity and entrepreneurship creativity and philanthropy in response to the gaps and disadvantages and the support available to black innovators building tech companies and social enterprises across Africa and in the UK in 2018 Bayo was named one of the most influential women in social entrepreneurship in the uk by nat west bank she's been given several awards by Durham, Harvard and Oxford university's business schools for her work to create opportunities for underserved communities through through technology i think Bayo is a change maker and a role model for letting your life speak and i feel really privileged to be with her and all of you in the audience this morning um a bit of a housekeeping we're both really keen to make this as much of a conversation as as this medium allows and so please do post your questions or reflections in the chat um i will start off with a few questions of my own but then we'll we'll turn to those those in the audience to um ask and respond to your questions

so to start us off you, Bayo use the phrase the future nida needs us all can you tell us what you mean by that um well thank you for having me and uh thank you for the opportunity to talk about this because it is it is a necessary conversation i find that we don't we've kind of uh turned diversity innovation open innovation all of these things into into buzzwords and into into things that people are now kind of treating like a hashtag that is good as a trend that is now played out and we should all be sick of like i don't know the word slay but it's it's it's game-changing it's life-changing for people that are benefiting from the activity and the uh and the innovation that is seeking to be diverse intersectional and inclusive um as an organization we use the the tagline the future needs us all because in looking at the future that we're creating if you look at the way that technology particularly or the impact sector has shaped the world that we uh exist in uh over the past 20 to 30 years you'll notice that a few people um really just uh enough to fill a physical private members club in the center of London likely uh have decided what this future that we are currently existing in looks like the decisions they made whether a governmental level at venture capitalist level um local local governments um leaders of large-scale charities national organizations they've all decided who we are and what we believe in as a as a community but they aren't representative of the entire community and if we are going to build a world that is truly fit for purpose we need it to be representative we need those decision makers we need those decisions to be representative of the needs and ideals of everybody that is going to be engaging with it um so the the future needs as well is about recognizing that one group of people can't know everything can't experience everything and certainly can't reflect everything that is necessary to be reflected in this future we we seek to design so all of us need it at the table or maybe at two different levels into different levels um um engagements and different types of engagement but all of us need space at the table um and opportunities to um achieve our own change whether that's small scale um being a i don't know a neighborhood group leader or large scale to running a billion pound fund or something it's it's important for everybody to have the resources that they need to step up and do what they think is is right naturally that society will work towards or against that's a kind of creating an equilibrium

i couldn't agree more and I really appreciate the sort of painting the painting picture of the sort of future that is much more inclusive and has a lot more um diverse voices at the table and in positions of decision making you've been recognized for actually your work in breaking down the boundaries and empowering um people from minoritized backgrounds to be part of those decision making be part of building businesses that define our future so can you just dig in a little bit more and tell us what exactly do you do and how did you get into this work in the first place um sure so the

i'll talk the entry point i'll go with the entry point first um in 2016 i had been i was working at the london school of economics after having started uh um that was my first job after university um i had done a master's in sociology focus on culture and society because while i was at university my undergraduate degree i was just fascinated by how people came together and stayed together and started a tech company around that to support people to find themselves and find each other and build community together and kind of support each other to create shared goals um and what i found was as i was working in this space and seeking to really focus on social social care and social impact and ensuring that the government knew what they wanted to do when it came to supporting people to with um degenerative mental health uh issues supporting them to live in their communities a lot longer uh then be institutionalized for instance i recognized that the people that we were talking to the organizations that were we were working with the people that were leading these conversations want a diverse group of people and it meant that if there was a group of for instance black or asian um people with dementia who needed very specific support that was culturally sensitive and would be more effective for them that wasn't on the table because no one was talking to them about it no one was asking those questions and there were no organizations that was deemed to be um of the standard level or worthiness i suppose of being able to be part of those conversations so when i started ‘do it now now’ i started it with the purview um to essentially just infrastructurally support and finance

organizations that were left out of the conversation um with uh an assumption at that time that the reason that they were being left out was because they were not good enough they had not met their bar that's what i started with and then over time recognize that that was the lie that was the lie that was being perpetuated and this is no fault of LSU i'm not trying to come out LSU they're a great organization did enjoy my time there um but i recognize that we have kind of perpetuated this falsehood that there is this there is a type of organization that should be given the opportunity to make a difference and when i started looking into that and reorganized and um reframed our work in terms of our work in Africa and now i work in the UK and what we're trying to do that's when ‘do it now now’ became what it is today which is an open innovation racial justice organization that seeks to focus on the black community across the UK and Africa to create solutions that are specific to the needs of those populations with in a cross-section of what our actual ability as an organization is so our focus on entrepreneurship financial inclusion employability and leadership skills comes from my own experiences in those spaces my own expertise in those spaces and our ability to grow outside of that into a way that doesn't lead to mission creep so the we can't say we are although we say we talk we support black people we aren't all things to all black people um within the the demographic of black people we seek to find our niche in that and support that so that there is more space and we work in entrepreneurship because if you support an entrepreneur social entrepreneur for instance to start a

subsidized child care system collective for uh black single mothers or other low-income level single mothers in a local area you are not only supporting that entrepreneur to create something that's sustainable and can pay their salary and help them and their family to be more sustained financially sustainable you are also contributing to an entire ecosystem that they are building into so that's that's the work that ‘do it now now’ does and that's how we position ourselves today that's amazing and just to help sort of bring this a little bit to life for anybody in the audience who maybe perhaps hasn't come across ‘do it now now’ can you tell us about a particular program um or initiative that you are most proud of or that you think really exemplifies sort of the work that you do and what you're trying to achieve you know i genuinely hate it when people say that your business is your baby but when you when you asked me to pick my favorite i was like oh no my babies i couldn't possibly pick one between all of them oh goodness um okay so i'll i'll pick two if i if that's okay because then it shows the the spectrum so um one of them is specific to the UK we um are just focused on that for now but one of them is common core so we run a grant fund um and an infrastructure support organization in common core that supports about a thousand uh black-led charities and social enterprises to access expert um expert cohort-based training one-to-ones with um those same experts and key skills and reasons to give them access to key skills as well as information and resources that they may not have access to otherwise all of the work that we do with uh our community members is free to them um we fundraise for that work and we grant money so we have to date committed 348 000 pounds in grant funding to i want to say 46 um 46 black led charities and social enterprises across the UK that could be wrong i don't lead on that work um but then uh the flip side of that is the program that we call my moon landing which is a leadership skills focus program that supports uh black women black lgbts to combat non-binary people at the very early stages of their community leadership journey so it's targeted at people that are maybe doing something they're volunteering in a number of places across their community um they are seeking to make a change but have not necessarily taken that first step into building their own organization or they have taken that step but they kind they're kind of at a kind of plateau in terms of where does it go and essentially where it was in the beginning where you're kind of you're in there in it and you're like oh wait the things i thought before are not necessarily what they actually are so it's supporting them to access um a very very early stage inspiration stage access to resources skills and uh people that have been there and done that that can help them think through how they could potentially build their organization and what it could look like in five years brilliant i you mentioned that some of the work that you do now is also inspired by your own experience and in particular thinking about this program i'm moon landing and the what you just said about connecting um or sort of inspiration stage leaders if you will with people who have been there and done that one question that i love asking guests about is how they in terms of how they got into the work that they do is is about your mentors so did you have any mentors and and if so what did you learn from them um so i i had some uh i have mentors in this in the way that uh they don't know that they're mentoring you it's a bit sneaky um but uh i used to run taurus yeah yeah i think so um so i have some really fantastic people that have um that have helped me see things through and see things better i didn't actually have many mentors in the beginning um because i didn't necessarily know what i wanted to ask for from a mentor i was just kind of meandering my way through and hoping for the best and kind of just thinking i'm honestly thinking i knew everything already and just because i built it i built a startup i'd been working in this um research space i've been working in the sector i was kind of i was interested in going into and i had my own experiences so i just thought oh i know what i'm doing let's go for it and see how it does or doesn't do um and it was when i started really needing mentors and needing focus support and really no needing to talk to people um beyond my peers so i suppose i focused more in the early stages i focused a lot more on peer-to-peer um relationships and learning from people that were going along this journey alongside me in the same kind of in the trenches together and learning from each other and that was extremely helpful but when i started looking for um mentors that were much further along it was it was that growth stage of ‘do it now now’ when i suddenly realized i'd had no peers that i could look to and say you are doing a one-to-one of exactly what i'm looking to do and if they were doing something relevant it wasn't as tailored as i needed to be and yeah it was just really difficult to find comps for ‘do it now now’ um which was really frustrating at a point um so i ended up finding a group of really awesome people like um there's a my friend christine uh we met at a conference and she was just like yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna help you speak at this other thing that you you were great at this i'm gonna help you speak up to speak at this other thing it kind of um agree like that and now i have my my mentors are people that have been running international organizations for 15 to 30 years and are kind of at the point of retiring or have retired and are now like hey you're doing stuff let's talk it through and when covert hit that was extremely important because i had on a really really bad week i don't know if they sensed it but they all just called me and we had really long conversations about the length of their journey and they just talk to me through the beginning to where they are now all of them and it really helped because at that point do it now and i would have closed if i didn't have those conversations because i was so tired of how hard it was but yeah um that was a ramble answer but i hope it got there at the end yeah i mean i think what you said probably resonates with a lot of people who are listening around sometimes not knowing not being sure what to ask for um and so not necessarily looking looking for mentors but also the peers and the relationships that we have with our friends actually um really sustain us and enable us to to achieve the things that we set out to do and sort of persist um so big shout out to to christine um and and to the other friends who called you during that week i want to pivot the conversation back a little bit and i'd like to turn to diversity and entrepreneurship and in the UK 10 black women have been funded by venture capitalists in the past decades and only 38 black people in total have been funded by venture capitalists in the past decade and this was research that you shared with me from extended ventures um study that was published last year so i'd like to sort of think about where does this start what do you think we should be doing from from a government policy perspective at the highest levels to be able to better support and create the right environment create a better environment that enables um black innovators to thrive and get started and access funding um i think it starts uh if we're going to go from a government a governmental perspective it it's a i think it's a local government this um issue with national funding uh allocated to ensuring that there are active programs to support um young young black people specifically but um people that are off the beaten path of the traditional look and feel of an innovator or entrepreneur or whoever it might be to engage in after school programs in um in entrepreneurship building programs in um small grants and competitions to support them to activate that part of them in a way that is not necessarily encouraged by culture or due to um sexist barriers which is why i think there's a significantly lower number of black women in the tech space as opposed to black people in general though the challenges are somewhat the same um and i think it's about ensuring that there is enough awareness as to what is already happening because there are some really great councils out there who have been on this trajectory for a very long time but have not done a great job of sharing that information all those opportunities likely for fear of being inundated with um with requests because they don't they have a finite number of resources and a kind of burned out team so being able to properly resource the outreach activities of local local councils being able to properly resource um collaborative work with local organizations who can champion those young people so that we can end up in a space in 10 years where we can see a significant jump in that um that is that is the type of governmental commitment policy that i would like to see um there are lots of lots of things that are needed to jumpstart it at this point because i mean i remember uh kind of asking someone i think it was a i was speaking at um a gla event and i just kind of threw it out there what would happen if we had something like a minority version of the eis or scis um tax opportunities for investors would that be something that could possibly come um come forward in the future because there are things that could jump start investment into uh black led and other people of color-led organizations today there are i mean dorman's account money that funds a lot of the grants um grant making in this country there is reason to believe i think that part of that money could be allocated to organizations not a plug but not that far off of a sensibility why don't we get dormant account money for common core like i know we're a small organization but we could do it if you just gave us the money and the time um so if there are organizations that would welcome the opportunity but the the gulf to get into those rooms and even speak to those people in the first place is really difficult um there's an organization that used to be a comp for ‘do it now now’ um a few years ago that launched at um at the house of commons or a downing street or something like that and every day that i've i've not stepped into downing street as a as a the founder of an organization i look at it as like we are five years behind where there's that organization started and i know it isn't a sensible uh comparison in that in that context exactly but i do think there there is something to be said about the fact that we are doing a lot of work that a lot of organizations um white led with um lots really great networks and opportunities and entry points but we're doing the same work with more people i don't know if it's more impacts that's to be to be discovered i'm sure but we don't get the same opportunities by far um we don't get the same respect by far and that i think is uh is the sort of thing that i would like to see change and not just for our benefit but for the entire sector i think

that seg-ways really well into sort of a next question as i imagine there's some people in the audience who are from leaders or work in accelerators incubators venture capitalists philanthropy um or in government maybe in local government um which you said was so important so I want to ask you what should we be doing to help equalize and expand opportunity to make sure that the opportunities are there for leaders of blackbaud organisations um who whereas you said doing a lot of work at equal scale and impact

so could you repeat the question?

I’ve got a delivery I think which is so it always happens when we get a ping or a delivery I was just gonna ask so many people in your audience and listening who will listen after this um recording maybe working in our leading accelerators incubators venture capital philanthropy and what would you want um these people and us all to be doing to better equalize and expand um opportunity for black-led and minoritised um community-led organizations what are some specific things that you would want us to do um and if you need to get your doorbell I think I need to get that so can I just go on a yes yeah absolutely grab your doorbell and while um Bayo is sorting that out I just ask if anybody in the audience has questions um for Bayo please put them in the chat this is a great opportunity um to just take a moment to reflect on what you um might want to hear from her and we'll be getting to audience questions in just a few minutes

goodness um thank you for the question and the grace in that situation anyway um I think there are there are certainly lots of things that organizations um that make up the ecosystem can do to ensure that they are being inclusive and intersectional in their thinking and their support of um of innovations that are coming from places that they don't usually see um innovations come from uh it's about recognizing that the things that you value as an organization the team that you have hired to do this work may not know everything about what is coming out and what the problems are at a local level one of the challenges that black-led organizations of across different sectors face uh when they're trying to do this work and trying to get access to opportunities and resources that are held in these spaces is that their ideas and the market or the impact that they're trying to bring is not valued because it's not understood um one of the easy

references for that comes from the tech space actually where people um lots of black women are building tech startups that have to do with hair hair care have um accessories relative to um that space consume the consumer beauty space now when you recognize that the personal experience leads to the innovation that you bring forward so if you know that you're spending 600 or um so on um a year on your hair or even a month in some people's cases if you know that you're spending that much money on your hair you know 10 people that are and then you can do your own research to understand what beauty supply stores are doing um despite the fact that it is not mapped traditionally you can do your own research to understand that it is a viable sector to go into but if it is not mapped traditionally the vcs won't value it because they don't trust it they don't trust you're an independent researcher they don't have the space all the time to do that research themselves the same comes when it's a an impact organization that says they want to significantly support work in x space the onus has put on the impact organization to validate in the application that um that space but if everyone has a thousand words and uh i've got to teach you about an entirely new space of work in a thousand words whereas someone else is going to go in no with a an easier time because they don't have to educate you on the space then we're not on a we're not on a level playing field immediately in those two applications so it's when you're thinking about what you can do and how you can support new innovations and use spaces but it's about talking to people that's what an open innovation is about it's about engaging people and talking to them and making sure that you understand where they're coming from and why they're building the things that they're building and making sure you have that space for them to ask you in questions and talk to you i mean for common call we had the latest um funding call we had 600 applications and did 142 phone calls with um our applicants that is rare unfortunately within the space one to have that many applications but two to do that many phone calls uh because unfortunately funders themselves are not that well um

uh the capacity within the organizations is typically not that um that broad to be able to take on that kind of work but if we start looking at that kind of work as necessary to the impact and necessary to the work that we're trying to achieve or the um to the future that we're trying to build then we'll organize our capacity differently to prioritize those things that mean that we're going deep into communities we're talking to um to disparate groups we're seeking to bring minoritized communities forward and centre them in the application design centre them in the way that we're building um our calls and said to them in the way that we're explaining these calls in the first place um wherever it may be whether that's a Nesta challenge or it's a funding call or if it's an opportunity for a contract somewhere

that's excellent advice and there's a question pre-submitted question from Emily from the audience in the royal society of chemistry who asked I run an innovation competition accelerator how can I encourage more diversity in those that are applying and I think you've given some suggestions just now but wanted to see if there's anything else that you would want to add specifically around the sort of application process um well specific to the application process um

there are there are lots of different um different methodologies that can be used you could start with a shorter application there's an expression expression of interest that allows you to test for the diversity of the group that is applying so that you know not whether you're meeting your targets in the first place um and then you can go out to specific groups if you find that you're not meeting those targets so you're not necessarily waiting to the end of the application process to figure out if you're already if you're going to meet those targets or not you could also ensure that you are talking to um to specific founders that you would be um you would be interested in encouraging an application from at that very um at that very stage of putting out the application process or even designing the call one of my favorite stories is van jones who was at Harvard Law School and uh he was he's an extremely well respected activist and um and uh news broadcaster now but at the time obviously he was just a student um same as everybody else studying Harvard Law and he said he was doing his best he was studying he was writing his essays he was submitting things and he was being polite he thought that's what you were supposed to do and that's it but uh it turned out that the professors were mentoring people and they were introducing students to um justices and to gain clerkships and they were there was this whole subculture not necessarily actually subculture but there was this whole subtext of activity that was happening that outside of his own awareness of how those things worked because that wasn't his experience of them you he didn't know how to navigate these like the fact that people invite you over to dinner and don't invite the whole class they just invite the ones that they like so he didn't know that he had to be liked by his professors he just thought he had to be good at his work um and encouraging those spaces to be equal where there's kind of little things that you do to support an application where you just kind of have these ad hoc conversations creating space for those to be neutral spaces where anyone can opt-in for something and really decoding that to see where you are getting the warm applications from so that you can create more opportunities to have those warm applications come through i think great great advice and you know i think data has a massive role to play in this and if you're if you're really tracking your data where does who is applying what are their characteristics how did they get founded what kind of resources have they been able to draw on um both social resources as well as financial resources in the past can i think also help really highly versus the gaps are and where you might be falling down and in um your efforts to sort of um drive equity in in a application process for example i'm going to turn to some audience questions um there was one here about from faisal who asked can you have inclusion without diversity and wanted to sort of turn the conversation to reflect on inclusion as well and perhaps you can respond to that question in particular i think it's it's entirely possible to have inclusion without diversity but it would you would have to have very specific definitions of both so if you're looking at diversity or thinking about it if in specific contexts of this question if you're seeking to separate the two when you're looking at diversity you're looking at it entirely as the numeric values associated with specific representations of demographics within a certain space so it's the targets that you're setting and the ability to achieve those targets that diversity um when you're looking at inclusion and i i always encourage our clients um our diversity inclusion clients that we work with to look at it from a perspective of being inclusive because inclusion is at the base a set of principles or policies or practices that you invest in across your organization so you can have in a policy and accessibility support policy for instance where you provide um uh you as a matter of course you provide a sign language interpreter or captions to all of your video content um for everybody no matter whether you know or you don't know that you have someone that would need them in the audience that is inclusion but being inclusive is is consistently seeking to understand the audience so understanding the diverse audience that is um experiencing your activity and then creating opportunities and resources and tools for them to help them engage better with what you're providing so you can have inclusion without diversity um and you should have inclusion even if you don't have a diverse organization or a diverse base because there is always diversity within whatever space you're working no group is a monolith no white group is a monolith no black group is a monolith you have to figure out what the when you're looking at inclusion you have to figure out what the needs are within the specific space and what you can provide if i can just ask a follow-up to that from your experience what were some of the most diverse and inclusive professional spaces that you've been a part of and what were some of the characteristics of those spaces that really enabled you to feel belonging and sort of contribute your your best ideas and feel really part of it engaged um honestly i don't think nothing comes to mind in terms of being part of an inclusive space um or being particularly in a particularly diverse space i've lived um i like to say i was moved to england when i was 10 rather than i moved because i didn't make that decision my parents did so i was moved to this country and i moved from being in a majority space where i had no concept of race um because everybody was black and i had no understanding of what black meant beyond actually no i didn't have any understanding of it at all and it was only when i moved to the UK that i realized that i was black and i realized that i was black in a vastly white community um so i we lived in london for about three months and then moved to kent and then from that point on i was the only white i was a i was only white person certainly not i was thinking black person in the room most days and i just got used to racism like it was like thinking about i sometimes tell people about my experiences at school and they they get traumatized by listening um and i just it was normal to me it was normal for racist jokes to be told by teachers it was normal for racist tricks to be told by students and nothing happened it was really normal to get accustomed to the street it was normal to like i grew up with those things it didn't really phase me truly until i grew up and thought about it and realized how messed up that was and then i went to um i went to Durham which is a similar space very very white community very very white um collegiate community as well i was the only black person in my actually never two there was a mixed race girl i don't think she had identified as black though but um that was the only black person that identified as back within my college as well so i've lived most of my life in those spaces so i can't say that i've ever been truly in a diverse space that much um and but then obviously living in london now it's easier to breathe i'll say um when you just kind of see people that look like you and you don't feel particularly like you stand out you're like being watched it's just easier to navigate and um the

the good things of the good things that um about being in a space that seeks to engage you is that you do feel engaged but the negative aspects of it is that unfortunately historically in my experience um in not in my experience as a consultant or a with our clients but in my experience as a person that's been on the receiving end of inclusion um uh initiatives it's usually the person rather than the organization that's passionate about it so if that person leaves or something changes or budgets gets stripped then that breaks down a little bit so I haven't had a personally I haven't had a positive experience of most of these things which is I think why I work in this space because I’m so adamant that I don't want other people to experience the things that I have

thank you so much for sharing some of your own reflections on on um yeah your experience and i think it really shows just how far we have to go um to create and foster diverse and inclusive spaces and ensure that that isn't just because there's one person who cares and who's who's carving out budget for something um to that effect but to really make it systematic and and built into the infrastructure of our organizations and institutions um so again just thank you for for sharing your own reflections um just now the there's a couple of questions in the from the audience in the comments um and again encourage others who are listening to please put your questions here we do have some time um but there was a question about is Bayo open to working with organizations outside of the UK from Nesta and you do work outside of the UK so i wondered if you wanted to share a little bit about some of your international work and um who you partner with or what you do internationally absolutely so we specifically focus on tech in Africa in terms of our international work so we work with tech startups at the earliest stages of um that work so post-product post revenue is where we is where we sit but um pre um large-scale investments so it's a very specific piece of work that we do and that's because our mandate uh our strategy in Africa is to catalyze um employment large-scale employment across the continent so we work with tech startups um in individual tech startups to help them stabilize their work and to connect them with um corporations resources and and funding opportunities internationally so in america and in the UK despite it being um funding wise despite it being the smallest um cohort that we work with so it's about 10 of the number of organizations that we work with across the year this year we've worked with about 4 000 people um and i think we we're working with about 20 African tech startups who do that math i don't know what it is but percentage twice but um they have gone on the last cohort that we ran uh in 2020 what have gone on to raise four million dollars in the past year um and they are hiring like gangbusters and some of them have moved to the UK to be able to continue that fundraising journey some of them have moved to the us and are the founders i mean um one founder representing those companies and setting up headquarters elsewhere so they can continue that international expansion um while also being able to expand in the in their own home country as well as across countries now with the Africa um fair trade uh free trade agreement um that's that's thankfully uh been put in place so that's that's the way that we work we work in partnership with corporations and organizations in the UK uh predominantly actually um to provide mentors um finances and resources to um to African tech startups and we do work with organizations in the us but we've tried to move back into working predominantly with the UK organizations over the past six months well and while you're talking about partnerships and the other organizations that you work for there's a question from black business fundamentals what is Bayo doing to work with other black organizations in the same space so one of my key uh goals is it as the leader of ‘do it now now’ is to ensure that we are not working in a silo we do a lot of work with other black focused organizations because we are privileged enough like it's a it's a rare space um where as there i don't know how many organizations black led organizations that have a seven-figure budget i was trying to think i was trying to count how many that serious that was um we're we're rare and um i don't like that we're rare i i despise it actually um and i'd like i basically my goal is to make sure that we aren't rare in the next three or four years that we can see a significant amount of other black focused organizations um raise their raise their budgets raise their team capacity um deep dive further into the work that they're doing and be able to really solve the problem um because we're finding in our research and our work with black lead organizations actually we're just doing another round of focus groups we're talking to i think 45 different black ceos over the next couple of weeks uh to talk about how what their engagement is in civil society and what we can do to help them um but what we're finding is that without the access to tools and resources people with a real passion for to bring solutions forward are not able to do so and they end up in prevention rather than cure so they end up at the lightest touch level of what they actually want to do because there isn't the level of funding there isn't a lot of support that they need um like i say we work with about a thousand black led organizations so we definitely that's the center of our work and we're investing a lot more in that we're currently i was joking about some fundraising applications that i was writing before this call started and um we're currently doing quite a lot of work um to design um

opportunities that and we're trying to find the right funders to bring those forward because we don't um one of the things other things are adamant about is not trying to fit what we do into the funding landscape but design what we want and then find funders that make sense for it so hopefully I’ve gotten some interested uh com people so hopefully we'll have some good conversations and we'll be able to work with a lot more uh black-led organizations over the next few years

brilliant i just want to ask you you've made a commitment to open innovation and this is something that is a big part of what you do at ‘do it now now’ can you say a little bit about sort of the role what is open innovation to you and what role does it play in supporting other organizations and sort of making sure that other black blood organizations have the opportunity and access to the infrastructure that that you've had and diversify in the space absolutely so um the first thing uh it it's different levels for us so the first one is i make myself as available as possible it's actually um it's really easy to get in touch with me a little bit too easy sometimes but it's really easy to get in touch with me to have the conversation about what you need what we can do to help you how we can talk um how we can support you or what resources we can share the team is also very easy to contact if you need support for something um we share our learning on absolutely everything we've been a bit slow to do that recently and slow for us is like three months late as opposed to one month which is what our usual target is when we finish something we share the learnings immediately what went well what went badly and what you can do to improve on our um on our experiences um we are consistently running focus groups and talking to different community members to ensure that we are understanding them as much as possible and that they can understand us as much as possible and we're also really adamant about um collaborating with our with our community members so we have an online community that we work through we all that we work more closely with there's about 500 members in that um that we understand and we seek to support more um throughout the year and then we have our programs where we consistently identify new organizations that we want to support or collaborate with um and we just share opportunities consistently so open innovation for us is about making our learning our experiences our challenges um our opportunities as available as possible while also supporting other organizations to do the same and bring you on board our clients and our partners to be able to tap into that work actually um we recently did a piece of work we're just finishing up with Nesta where we were given a piece of a pot of money and our entire model was about how we essentially bring 30 well total 75 but really um a core number of um 30 organizations along that same journey as to what that should look like how it should be provided what it means to the community what impacts it should have and how we should um kind of evolve in this space so having those conversations and building out that community engagement team that's our biggest team so it's really important to us great and a related question from naomi what are some of the most common areas of support that black flood organizations need and are they and how are they different from non-black led organizations um so black light organizations typically have the same needs as lived experience led organizations so if you look at the typical

person who starts a charity or a social enterprise or a tech company um or some kind of innovation community based on art

it's one of two types of people they either have lived experience of an issue or have compassion for the issue or see it as an opportunity to do something they work in a space that they enjoy and solve a problem and get paid while doing it so the people that are coming at it from a perspective of i don't really i don't have a personal experience of this but this is a good problem to solve those people are typically middle upper class people who have the ability to earn less money because they have parents who can support them they have good savings they have made maybe have some inheritance from their grandparents they have stuff that means that they are able to engage in a space um without a lot of burden financially and then there are people that are on the flip side of that who have lived experience of an issue who are devastated by a challenge that they have experienced or they have seen their family members go through and they are not coming at it with an understanding of the sector they're not coming at it trying to run an impact organization or a big company or anything like that what they're doing is trying to solve a problem for the people around them and then they fall into funding conversations they fall into impact measurement they fall into trying to get contracts and building revenue so they come at it from a how did i get here and with a kind of mental existential crisis of how am i leading a con leading this conversation now how am i now the person that is making change and trying to make all this why all of these people suddenly relying on me it's a very different experience of the sector um and the sector itself is built for the people who know how to run organizations who come at it wanting to run an organization and start from that perspective one of the reasons that do it now now um failed truly for the first two three years of its inception two and a half years of its inception was because i had no idea we were registered incorrectly i had no idea no one told me um that is something i would have known if i was the former if i was the person that came into this sector knowing and i thought i knew i really did i thought i knew everything and i was fine um but if i if i'd come into the sector with the background with the networks with the things that most people have if i'd been one of those people that could launch it down a street i'd have a very different experience of this sector so the areas of support are everyone needs to understand income generation everyone needs to understand branding and marketing and comms and all of those things it's the way you present it the way you market it the way you build that out that information um the direction that you take with it the expectations you have of the people taking part in those programs all of those things are different the content is usually pretty much the same

and I think that also circles back to the first point you made when we when we first started speaking about you know who are the decision-makers and how are they setting um the sort of infrastructure that we live in that our institutions um are shaped by um and if those decision-makers and that decision-making group isn't diverse in the first place um then we will continue to sort of perpetuate some of these barriers um I’m gonna take one last question from the chat and we won't get through all of them so apologies um for that and then we'll wrap up in the next couple of minutes this is a question from Nina I meet employers who have the best intentions but are quite blind to how non-inclusive they are where would you start in such a situation

oh that's difficult because if they don't know um you have to be able to admit you have a problem because they have to be able to allocate funding to it to be able to fix that problem so if they're employers that don't know that they have a problem they're pretty much a lost cause honestly until and i don't think it's up to a person of color or a diversity inclusion consultant or whoever to convince you that you have a problem within in terms of how inclusive you are or how diverse you are because honestly that we've tried for i want to say decades to convince employers to be diverse in their hiring practices to be inclusive in their onboarding retention and if you just are refusing to see it you're you are the problem at that point and that's that's when you kind of get these conversations about like if only the board would change if only the ceo would leave if only the smt would would change at that point i honestly my starting point would be to just start just understand whether or not they are actually blind to it or if they just don't know where to start and are paralyzed by the by the kind of awareness of it and they're just too scared to make the wrong decision which is a lot which which is a real thing i i get sometimes get disappointed by organizations that i used to really love when they don't do something or aren't doing something and it's i found that it's usually because they're too scared to make the wrong move that they end up doing nothing because they're talking about it they just end up talking about it over and over again within the within their team and therefore make no external movement or no policy maybe not practice movement so figure out if that's the issue if that's the issue then yeah that's that's solvable you just find the right it convince them to pay someone to take that on and make the recommendations and implement um but if if they don't know then no one is and particularly if it's a private company no one is going to be able to force them to shift their hand um unfortunately uh

if people are willfully ignorant then i have a i have a theory that i work towards um that i explain our work in with in terms of diversity inclusion in terms of retention specifically which is silence violence and escape um if you are not inclusive in your organization you will face three experiences particularly with your people of color you will find that they become silent so they become disengaged and they're just there to collect the paycheck and they will have uh they will live for the weekends and for and for the end of the day and they will do the bare minimum and if you're okay with having people do the bare minimum in your organization go for it um violence is essentially people being a bit aggro being really just not um kind of obtuse and willfully obstructing the the space and that's likely the one of the things that will happen before they escape which is they leave they just leave you in the lunch and go to another organization um and leaving leaving the lurch doesn't mean they quit and then don't give notice and all that which could happen happens all the day all the time for many organizations um generally across non-people of color as well obviously but um escape is about them going to another organization and you having wasted that money to recruit them interview them that capacity all of that stuff and having to do that again so you're basically setting yourself backwards in terms of hiring and onboarding again so if if they're um i i really could just have no time for organizations or leaders that don't care about diversity i think i'm not here to convince you to to care about something that is so obvious um and if you don't care then i don't care about you

but we have to um close but i just want to say an immense thank you i think for me this conversation has been um i guess both future focus helping us think about and imagine sort of what what would things be like if decision-making circles were broader and more diverse and more inclusive but also incredibly um pragmatic at the same time as well with really tangible advice for funders and others working in the space about expressions of interest and just getting on the phone and talking talking it through with applicants and examining the process processes that enable people to succeed or or that are incredibly opaque in what they're really asking for and and making changes to that so really immense thank you to joining us um such a pleasure to speak with you for those of you listening in there's a link to a short survey in the chat um and in the events description so please do let us know what you think your your real-time feedback is incredibly invaluable um and just to close this out the the next Nesta Talks to event is with Joan Fitzgerald on the green revolution um how to make cities greener and fairer and that is on October 7th so we would really love to see you there um thank you again to all of the wonderful questions in the chat and Bayo in particular to you for making time um to be with us today it was such a pleasure thank you for having me.