Accelerated Social Change Through the Power of People with Tim Griffiths

Hi, this is Paul Zelizer and welcome to the Entrepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request, if you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps more people learn how to have a positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Tim Griffith. And our topic is accelerated social change through the power of people.

Tim is the CEO of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, an organization that supports people with innovative ideas to tackle Ireland's social problems. They provide a range of programs, including an Ideas Academy and the Changing Ireland Accelerator, as well as direct funding and access to an incredible community of funders sector leaders and alumni. Tim, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Paul. It's great to be here.

You all are doing some amazing things there in Ireland and we're really excited to let our listeners know about it.

Yeah, well, we try our best, that's for sure. And thank you for the opportunity to be able to share some of the things that we're up to.

So, Tim, give us a little bit of your personal backstory. Like, what would somebody who doesn't know who Tim Griffiths is want to know about you personally and a little bit about your professional background before we get into the work that you're doing now.

Oh, gosh. Where to start? Well, as you can probably tell by my accent, I'm Irish, so I'm born and bred in Dublin and I went to university and I studied economics in University College Dublin here. And when I left university, which was back in the early 90s, there was a recession going on Ireland and I didn't quite know what to do it myself. And I ended up going to London and working for an advertising agency, so I sort of fell into that a little bit. And the agency that I was working for at the time didn't have an operation in Dublin and they decided that they wanted to set up an operation in Dublin. So I had the opportunity, effectively, to come home, but to be part of the team that set up that agency in Dublin. And we had a pretty good time of it. And I guess our claim to fame is that we won the Diageo account, which was the Guinness account in Ireland, which, as you can imagine, was quite substantial.

So that was an exciting time for us.

Did you get free samples? Of course, I have to ask.

Well, not always, but occasionally, but it was a real privilege to work on the brand, that you were a very impressive organization and they certainly trained their staff and their agency staff very well as well. So that was a great learning curve for me and all of us who were working on that business at the time. And then I think it was in 2005, I jumped shipped to another organization to set up another ad agency, which was, again, the Irish operation of a multinational, which was OMD, which was Omnicom's media buying operation in Ireland. And I was the founding managing director there. So we set that up. And again, it was a small company. I think there were seven of us when we started. And I left there about two years ago, and we're up to 130 or 140 people, something of that nature.

But round about 2005, as we were setting up OMD, I got approached by a former client of mine who was in the process of setting up Ashoka in Ireland. And I'm sure many of your listeners might be familiar with Ashoka, but they are originally a US organization, but with a global footprint that were identifying and supporting social entrepreneurs. And I'd never heard of a social entrepreneurs back in back in 2005, and many people hadn't. So this guy's name is Paul O'Hara, and Paul was setting up Ashoka. And he knew that marketing skills would be an important skill set to have as part of the organization, largely because there were such fabulous stories to tell about the individual social entrepreneurs and the work that they were up to. So he asked me to get involved, and I formed a very small, informal sort of marketing committee for Ashoka. And really, that was the start of my journey with social entrepreneurship. And I guess over that last, whatever it is, 18 years since then, for various reasons, I was sort of slowly falling out of love with advertising and becoming more and more passionate about social entrepreneurship.

So I had the opportunity to make the switch about two years ago, and that's what I did. And here I am today.

I started my business in 2008, not in Ireland, in the US. But I have some sense of sort of the state of the union, shall we say. It was really early and in some ways we didn't even know what to call it. Right. Was it conscious capitalism or business for good, or social enterprise or social entrepreneurship?

Even?

Just finding each other wasn't that easy back go back 1520 years ago. So, yeah, you've seen big changes, and.

It'S even true today, but it was certainly more true back then is many social entrepreneurs don't even identify themselves as social entrepreneurs. So it's very hard to sort of class them into a big group if the people in that group aren't even identifying themselves in that way. So it's a very interesting journey. And when you get into the subtleties of the different definitions, it's been very interesting journey.

Yeah. So you got started with Social Entrepreneurs, Ireland, two years ago, but the organization's history is a little before that. Tell us about the organization.

Yeah, so the organization was founded back in 2004. And it was founded and certainly driven by a gentleman called Declan Rhine, who's part of the family behind Reiner, the airline Reiner. And Declan had decided that it was time that he wanted to give away a significant amount of money philanthropically, but wasn't quite sure about how to go about doing it. So he did a little bit of a global search and sort of discovered this concept of venture philanthropy and thought that this as a model had some merit. And he invested into social entrepreneurs, Ireland, and he really set us up through his foundation, which is called the One Foundation, which had been very significant givers across Ireland over the last 20 years and beyond. Indeed. And so Declan really set us up and running for the first five or six years of our organization. And then along the way, we've picked up other people who've sort of come along on the journey and supporting us over the medium and longer term.

And in the early days, we were quite a small team, two, three, four people. I'm only the third CEO in the history of the organization, but today we're a team of about 20 people, and we're split over different areas. But I guess the main focus is around what we call our Impact Team, which is the team that runs all the selection processes, that finds all these amazing social entrepreneurs out in the marketplace. And then once we've found them and established at what stage of their development and journey that they're on, we run different programs for them. So we have a program that we call the Ideas Academy, which we're delighted to say is supported by bank of America. And that's for people who are very much at the very entry level stage. So they've just come up with an idea. They're not really sure where to go next.

And we'll take in a given year, this year, our plan is to take 30 of them on in one go, and we'll give them a three month sort of accelerator program just to get them up and running and start to really stress testing. What is the social problem that they're looking to address? What is their idea? Fleshing that out in a little bit more detail and getting them towards a sort of pilot stage and getting them to that level. We also support people who are that little bit more advanced on the journey. And we've got a program that we call the Impact Program. And usually we pick five social entrepreneurs to go on that program. And these are people who have either given up their day job to focus on their idea full time or considering it, or quite close to doing so. And this Impact Program is supported by Kennedy Wilson, and we give people €20,000 in direct funding for that, as well as nine months of tailored bespoke support. And then the more advanced program that we do is one that we're just actually renovating and sort of relaunching for the first time this year, which is called the Changing Ireland Accelerator Program.

And we're very excited about this because this has come on the back of some great support from Google.org with Funding Partners Inco. Involved as well. And we had set out a target that we were going to get 40 applications for this program. We actually received 72, which is really exciting. And we're just going through the process of selecting the four successful candidates who'll come through that. And when we select those four, they're going to get a year's worth of bespoke supports from us and €60,000 in direct funding as well. So this is a very significant from an Irish perspective, given the scale of the country is a very significant investment into the sector. And we're very excited about the excitement, I guess, that it's generated in the marketplace.

There's so much in what you just shared, Tim. Oh, my gosh, we got to unpack this a little bit. And you're like, well, for Ireland is big. To have a 20 person unit that's just focused on that's big anywhere in my world. Please don't lose sight of the global significance of what you all are doing. This is really unique, as far as I'm aware. So congratulations. So let's unpack this a little bit.

So here we are, 2023. We're recording this kind of middle of April ish, and you got 20 people, and you just outlined three different programs. I'm finding this super interesting, Tim. So it's kind of like beginner or early let's call it very early stage, advanced beginner or a little bit further developed. About to go full time or you've just gone full time as a social entrepreneur and then you've got kind of an accelerator what we would call in the US. An accelerator phase. Somebody who's got sort of proof of concept. They've got product market fit.

There's things that are moving and the market is responding to what they're offering. And how do we grow and scale that? So does that feel at all like a way to language those three different programs?

No, I think you've got it spot on. That's exactly it.

Yeah. So help us understand how did you land on those three buckets? And what looking at it from a social entrepreneur perspective, what's really important? What is somebody in each of those phases of development, really, really early idea conception, not fully baked yet. It's kind of baked, but you're thinking of making this your full time gig and somebody who's got traction, and you really want to help them scale. They have different needs. What are those needs and how do you all work to address them?

Yeah, well, I think probably answers to both parts of your question is really it's experience. And it's experience that we've built up through our 19 years in existence because every social entrepreneurs is unique and they also have unique challenges. So what we've learned as we've dealt with people that there are sort of similar challenges for people who are at that very early startup phase and there are similar challenges for people who are at that most more advanced accelerating forward stage. So we try and bucket them together in best ways we can to obviously do things as efficiently as we can. But I think really what's come through to it for us and what we try to have in the core of our DNA and how we do everything is having a very human centric approach and really being very individualized in how we do things. So a lot of our program, certainly the early level programs, the 30 people who come onto that will sort of do it, a lot of it will be done together. But when you get to the more advanced programs it's very much into a one on one space and doing things on that level. So I think we've just learned over time and every year, even now, we're talking about our Impact program which we're going to launch in the second half of this year.

We've had really successful Impact program over the last two years but we're still evolving it and making a tweak here and a tweak there as we say, actually maybe this could work a little bit better. So every time we always do a very thorough review of the program which is not just us internally talking to ourselves, but also getting feedback before, during and after from the social entrepreneurs themselves and asking what was really beneficial for them and what worked for them. And that helps us a reimagine the program for the next year and for the next intake of people are coming through, but also helps us continue working with the social entrepreneurs as they come off the program as well. And say, well, actually, how can we help them move on to the next level even if they're not necessarily on one of our direct programs as well? So experience becomes a big part of it and it's not just our experience. We're very privileged in the fact that we have a wonderful network of the business community in Ireland who support us as well. And they support us. Some of them support us financially, which is obviously very important to us, but they also, in many ways, in such a valuable way, bring their time and their experience to the fore as well. Because obviously a lot of the experience that the business people have are similar to those that the social entrepreneur are going to encounter as well.

So we have top level people across legal firms, across the worlds of finance, whether it's expertise in the h or space, all elements of a modern business, we have people without that expertise who are willing to give their time and share that with social entrepreneurs. So that's very helpful in advising and mentoring the social entrepreneurs on the journey they go with. And as well, just being that flexible and bringing that sort of human first approach to how we support them.

Yeah, so much and what you just shared, Tim. And one of the things, as I'm listening, I'm thinking of some research, and I'd be curious if this kind of matches your just real world experience. There's a professor here in the States at the University of Michigan, I believe it's the University of Michigan. At least the research was done in Detroit, if anybody doesn't know Detroit, very diverse city. And the research that this person has come up with says that more traditional accelerators, when you take a social entrepreneur and you drop them into a more traditional accelerator or business growth, business development type learning experience, the failure rate actually goes up. Think about that for a minute, listeners, right? You take a social entrepreneurs, you drop them into the ecosystem that's supposedly designed to help businesses scale faster and do better, and the failure rate goes up. Wow, very interesting research. There's a lot of conversation.

This conversation has actually been going on in my networks for quite some time, and I'm curious to hear your perspective. Now, this is early research. I'll put a link in the show notes, as well as to Ashoka and to social entrepreneurs, Ireland, as many of the resources that Tim mentions or that come up in our episode, I'll certainly put those listeners. But this is very early research. But this is research that kind of helps give some language to some things that have been going on in conversation in my networks for a long time. And Tim, I'd love to get your perspective, the researchers theory about why this is that many accelerators don't understand the nuances of working in marginalized communities, let's just call it that, right? That these are communities that sometimes have struggles accessing resources and information and social capital that they need. That's why it's a social problem. The traditional system, certain people are falling through the cracks.

And when you take a more traditional accelerator approach that's really heavy on VCs and rapid growth and unicorns and that kind of thing, and you mash it up with complex social issues, with people falling through the cracks. What? You get is a really big disconnect between the people funding the work and the communities that need the help, and it all falls apart. That's this researcher and that actually is very consistent with some conversations that have been happening in my networks for a while. Does any of that make sense to you, Tim? Is that anything that you've seen and I would imagine, given your focus on social entrepreneurs, you all thought about some of this kind of stuff.

Yeah, well, funny, I hadn't heard of that specific piece of research myself, but certainly the findings don't surprise me. And I think from my perspective on it is, I think a lot of these incubators that are set up for, let's say, the business side of enterprise with the ones that don't have that social mission driving them as well. That's all very well, but you're only sort of working off one set of criteria, which usually is around sales growth and about sort of value or profit maximization when you're a social entrepreneurs. Yes, you have all those challenges because you are running an enterprise here and you do need to make the figures add up. But in parallel to that, and with equal and if not greater importance, is the mission, is your reason why you're actually there and what it is you're trying to achieve. And therefore some of the decisions you're going to make in business are going to be driven by the mission and they're not necessarily the decision that you would have made if you were purely just focusing on driving profit and that economic value. And I think as businesses, and certainly even as countries and as states, I think we're very good at measuring economic value. We can all probably, with not too much research, find out what the GDP is of our nation or our state and how that journey is going and what unemployment levels are like and things like that.

What we don't measure as well are things like wellness indices or even happiness indices or that sort of quality of life indices. And I think that's probably where these incubators are falling down. They're just focusing on that commercial economic value bit, but they're not putting any value onto the mission led bit, which social entrepreneurs do, as I said, of equal, if not more importance of everything that they're doing there. And that's partly what we do is we try to reimagine our sort of incubator type programs which are very cognizant of the duality of social enterprise and what they're needed, and knowing that even though our vision is accelerated social change through the power of people and we will try and bring that together in every way we can do. But we're also very conscious that sometimes in social enterprise, things do operate at a different pace, because you're working to two masters, both the economic one, but also the mission one as well.

Yeah, I knew you would have thought about this. Again, listeners. I'll put a link in the show notes to that research and love to hear your thoughts, ideas on that duality, as you were so eloquently putting it, Tim. And that's exactly something that I think that this is a question for you, Tim. The resources, whether it's Ashoka or you all or my coaching practice, I just talked to a coach yesterday who wants to pivot into coaching social entrepreneurs. I'm just seeing more and more resources as this space has really grown, you might even say exploded, especially over the past five years, things are really social impact. Everybody wants to talk social impact, ikea wants to talk social impact, walmart wants to talk facebook wants to talk social impact, tim wants to talk about social, paul wants to talk everybody wants to talk about social impact, right? And there's been a sort of flooding of resources and I'm glad there's more resources. But as somebody who's been in the space for a long time, I'm curious, as a social entrepreneur, so you've been thinking about delivering quality programs.

How would you help a social entrepreneur who's kind of taking a look at the landscape and saying, wow, now there's a lot. Go back 15 years ago, there wasn't much. Tim was getting started, Paul was getting started. But you look at what's here now and there are a lot of people who want to plant their flag saying, we help social entrepreneurs. What would you encourage social entrepreneurs to be thinking about or how to vet a resource that they might bring their sacred idea and their sacred enterprise to to get support? How do you vet if it's something that's a good fit or not?

Yeah, no, I think it's a really good question. And it's so true, and it's very much true here in Ireland as well. When I was starting off in this space 20 years ago, as I said, nobody had heard of social entrepreneurs or social enterprise. Today in Ireland, the government wrote a paper about three years ago about their first policy on social enterprise and they're about to release their second version of it in the next couple of months. So the state has got involved where probably the state hadn't heard of it 20 years ago. So the world is changing. And also on the corporate level, like I've said, for many years, that social entrepreneurs need the help of business to point them in the right direction and to help achieve what it is they're looking to achieve. I think in the world that we find ourselves today, where we talk about sustainable development goals, we talk about ESG requirements, corporations are realizing that they need to play a much stronger role than they have done in the past in this space, and they're looking for opportunities to do that.

And they're probably being very commercially driven and why they're doing it. And they're realizing that firstly, their customers won't buy their products unless they're seen to be a company doing the right thing. And also people won't go and work for them because staff want to work for companies that they believe have a set of values that match theirs. So all of those things come together to, as you say, lead into a much sort of busier space. What's going on here? I think for the social entrepreneur, it's very easy to get dazzled in the headlights of to see what's there. The way I sort of describe it is like having five year old kids playing a game of football and the ball kicked into one corner and all 22 players on the pitch all run after the football.

That's exactly what it's like.

But sometimes you've got to realize that actually by having people in different positions and holding their positions can actually help you as a team move better in the right direction. So I think for a social entrepreneur, it actually comes down to being really clear, and we do quite a lot of work with our social entrepreneurs in this space of what is your vision and what is your mission? And that nearly becomes your sort of guardian for making any decision that you make for the organization, including the partners that you work with. And you say, well, are they going to help us do this? So in our case, if our vision is accelerated social change through the power of people, there could be somebody there who potentially might be willing to give us some funding, but maybe their criteria are different to our criteria. So yes, that funding might be very welcome, but actually it won't help us deliver accelerated social change. And by definition, that means it'll slow down us delivering accelerated social change. So maybe that's somebody that we've got to walk away from and say, actually, no, we're very focused on our vision. We're just going to work with people who are going to help us deliver accelerated social change through the power of people. And that's very true for all the social entrepreneurs as well.

So what is your vision? What are you really trying to do? And yes, these people have some money that might be able to help you, or they have some other supports that might be able to help you, but is it really going to help you move in the direction in the most efficient way that you want to do so? And that's the way to it. Even though there are more players in the market now and there are more supports than have ever been before, there still is not enough. So social entrepreneurs do have to be wary. I'm wary telling people not to chase money because it's very important to them and there isn't enough kicking around in the system. However, I think people can make choices, but the market is by no means flooded. Even with all the new people who are interested in it at the moment, there's still a lot of opportunity for a lot more people to get involved.

So let's do this in a moment. Tim, I want to come back and hear more specifically about the network or the ecosystem that you're building, which is really incredible. Some of the ways you engage the local business community and invite them in both bring their intellectual information and their money to contribute and a bunch of other things. Before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you facing one or more important decisions in your impact business and you'd like an experienced thought partner to develop a plan about how to proceed in the complex times we're living, but you don't feel the need for an extended coaching or consulting contract that's going to cost you many thousands of dollars. You're looking for an affordable, targeted, and time efficient type of support. Through Paulzellizer.com, I offer a strategy session package. These packages are ideal for entrepreneurs who are facing one to three immediate decisions, like how to increase your positive impact, fine tune your marketing strategies to get more results for less effort, launch a new product or service successfully, or refine your pricing structure so it's both inclusive and provides you with a great quality of life.

You can find out more by clicking below. And thank you so much for listening to this podcast. So welcome back, everybody. Tim in the second part of the show, what we like to joke about is putting on our Social Entrepreneurs glasses. So if you look at Social Entrepreneurs Ireland right now, today, you have these like three different programs that you mentioned. You actually have a couple others at least listed on your website. If you were going to do a breakdown of just like, who's taking a pie chart of both the numbers of people in your different programs and also what percentage of your revenue, where your revenue is coming from, what would you see looking at your own organization through the lens of a really gritty Social Entrepreneurs?

Yeah, certainly from a funding perspective is that we get, roughly speaking, about a third of our money comes from corporates who support us. So we've had an organization, very successful Irish company called DCC, and they've been supporting us for eleven years, I believe it is now. But other people, like I've mentioned previously, like bank of America, like Kennedy Wilson, Google Permit, TSB, they all get involved and support us at various levels. And that comes with obviously a financial donation. But also they bring their staff and they get involved with us in various different ways as well. So if that's sort of 30% or a third of the money, probably about 50% of the money we get is actually from individual philanthropy, which is amazing. And we have people who give us literally €100 a month or something of that nature. And we have some other very significant high net worth individuals who give us six figure sums on an annual basis.

And then the remaining element comes from charitable foundations like the one foundation that set us up originally. And there are a few other foundations in Ireland that get involved as well. But also no, it is, and it's amazing and it really is quite humbling to see the generosity of some of the people out there who support us and the faith that they put in, not just the social Entrepreneurs that we're supporting, but to the whole team here at Social Entrepreneurs Ireland. And it really is a motivational factor for us to try our best every day when we come into work. Also. In the context from it. I guess we're not long having just gone through St. Patrick's Day, which is obviously the national holiday here in Ireland, but it's also become very much a global day with Ireland being sort of front and center of the world for one day in the middle of March.

And that's obviously driven by there's a very strong Irish diaspora who have traveled over the world over the last sort of 150 to 200 years. And I think today there's something like 70 million people in the world who claim to be of Irish extraction where the actual population of Ireland is 5 million. But that has had a very beneficial impact for us. So roughly speaking, about 20% of the money that we get comes from the United States and about 5% comes from the UK as well. So not all the money originates in Ireland. It comes literally from all over the world. And certainly it's part of what I'm trying to do is to look at other opportunities, obviously both here in Ireland but also across the world, to get people to invest more into what it is that we do. And I think when the engagement opportunities that we have for individuals and organizations, as much can really manifest itself in many different ways.

So right now we're in the sort of selection process for the different programs that we're doing. So we will get across all the programs, I guess close to probably 400 applications that will go through through the course of the year, across all of our programs. And we will have, as well as all the team going through, all the team here in the office, going through everything. We also have a lot of our supporters will be allocated maybe five applications to read and people go through them and they give them their own scores. So at the very bare minimum, each application will go through at least five sets of eyes. But certainly when they get more advanced through the process, they're probably going through about 20 sets of eyes to get through it. And that means that there is opportunities for staff and a lot of our supporting organizations to get involved in selection processes, to get to see the social entrepreneurs in action as well. We also run various events which showcase the work and the advancements that the social entrepreneurs have made on the various programs that they're doing.

And they can be really inspiring events. And then every year we do an event that we call The Gathering. It's actually a really important event. Obviously it's important for us as it's an opportunity for us to showcase the work that we do, but it's also really important for our alumni. So all the social entrepreneurs, the 550 plus that we've worked with back since 2004 to actually get together in the same room, to catch up, to share what's going on, to talk about their successes and their failures and what we see is the interaction between them and all the things that have sort of nearly sprung out of our organization is just really powerful. And seeing that going on as well. And the event that we did last November was the last time we had one of these events. And actually, if you go to our YouTube channel, there's a couple of highlights videos, so you can see them, they're quite short videos, you can see what the event was about.

But we had some of our organizations who literally had put teams of their people to try and address a specific problem that a social entrepreneurs would have. And they were giving the feedback both from the social entrepreneurs perspective of how this had helped them get over a particular barrier that they were looking to do, but also from the corporates organization to say, actually this gave us an opportunity to work on a project that we wouldn't ordinarily work with to work with some of my other colleagues in the organization who I wouldn't ordinarily work with and really empowered us and makes us better as individuals as well. So that's a lot of things that we're also very proud of is how we bring people together in that sort of way and bring the whole network of social entrepreneur network, but also the business community together as well.

The audio only podcast. You can't see me, like, celebrating with my hands in the air, like I just scored a soccer goal or something. But imagine Paul, like, bouncing in his chair, like goal. Anyway, the thing I'm celebrating. So, listeners, the second part of our title, right? Accelerated social change through the power of people. I just want to highlight a few things you said and the very first one is, listeners, five to 20 eyes on every single application to every single program. Five to 20 sets of eyes. And one of my pet peeves, I'm going to get on my soapbox just for a little bit.

One of my pet peeves in this space, Tim, is that the siloing, right? Like, I've got the curriculum and I'm not going to share with anybody or you're a competitor, blah, blah, blah, or you're in a more traditional business role and we're the social entrepreneurs, so you go away, right? But give us your money, but go away. But give us your money, but go ahead, right? The spirit of inclusion or the gathering, like 550 people who've gone through a program at Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, and the way you keep engaging them and creating experiences to come back and share and be part of a community, not like, okay, see you later. By you did the thing, right? The accelerator, the incubator, whatever. You did the training, you did the workshop laters, right? And I just want to highlight these real world examples and so many folks who are trying to help social entrepreneurs in one way or another are really struggling with some of the things that seem to be working really well. Tim and my guess is if I was to ask you why, which I'm going to do in a second, you would talk about that spirit of engagement and inclusion and how much people would be more likely to write you a check if they're also in the process of making the sausage vegan or otherwise, right. They're in the process of like, hey, who should be in this really esteemed program? That, again, is not just about information, but it's about community and ecosystem and finding who can build a website or which lawyer to use all that information and resources. But there's also that part of being in the process. I'm part of the team.

And then when you go and say, hey, we need either, can you donate as a lawyer, can you donate some legal information or do a workshop or something and or can you write us a check? My guess is you get a different response with that spirit of inclusion than somebody who might be more on the end of siloing. Am I telling stories that aren't true?

Tim no, listen, as ever, Paul, you're spot on. I think for us, it comes back to and it's very much one of our values that we believe in sort of human first relationships. And that's not just us saying we believe in being very supportive and putting our arms around the social entrepreneurs. It means just as much to the corporates that we deal with. And anybody who cross away, like if some organization or an individual is going to give us, whether it's €100 or €100,000, that's hard earned, and we've got to really respect that and we've got to try and invest that in the best way that we can. So it's about respect and nobody likes to be excluded from something for any reason, even if inclusion could be telling somebody, actually, we needed five people for this team and we had 50 applications, so we only have five. So I'm sorry you're not going to be part of it this time, but we will get you involved in something else somewhere down the line. And we do have conversations both with social entrepreneurs and corporates along those lines, but we're very clear and transparent in our communication and people know what the process is beforehand and they know why decisions are made afterwards.

So I think it's just having that sort of integrity and empathy and sort of human centric approach in everything that we do. And I think that's really important to us. And it actually, for us as an organization, it makes it a really powerful, enjoyable place of work to come into. And we might only be a team of 20 people, but they're 20 fabulous people. And it's a real privilege for me to be able to spend my nine to five in their company all the time, but also it spreads out to our whole community as well. And it's that sort of 20 years later, of that experience having been developed now, is that there's a very positive community that we have around us. And really, people, just whenever they walk in our door or to one of our events, everybody comes with the attitude of, a, I'm delighted to be here, and B, what is it that I can do to help? And we kind of all just roll up our sleeves and get in together and we work something out and we navigate what the best road is. But it's being human centric.

That's the bit that makes the difference.

I want to play too.

Come on over. You're more than welcome.

Yes, I have been to Ireland. It's on. Yes, I will definitely let you know when I'm headed there because it's on my pocket too. So, 20 years, 550 people, plus all these support folks around them, 550 people plus, who've gone through your programs. What's the state? The state of the union of social entrepreneurship in Ireland in 2023. What are you seeing now? And how is that different than what you saw ten or 20 years ago?

Yeah, well, I think on one level, it's never been vibrant and there's a positive and a negative to that. So the positive is that I think people realize that they can make a difference and that there's really good sort of life and career choices one can make to get involved with social enterprise. And it's a very rewarding space to be in. I think the negative is that there are more and more social problems that need to be addressed. And listen, there's global issues going on, whether it's war in Europe, whether it's cost of living crisis, which is global elements, the uncertainty in the financial markets at the moment. And then from an Irish perspective, I'm in my 50s now. The Ireland that I grew up in sort of 35, 40 years ago is completely different to the Ireland that we live in today. So it was a very sort of monocultural society, where today it's a very multicultural society and there's all the sort of growing pains that come with that as we get to experience other cultures and other lifestyles being here in our everyday and all of that side of things.

And there's sort of very much sort of poverty issues, we've got a lot of housing issues, and then there's the global issues of things like climate change and all of that. So there are so many issues there, which actually means it does generate demand, generate supply, certainly job security, social entrepreneurs.

Exactly.

So there is something it's a little bit messed up in one way, but no, the sector is very vibrant. Like when Social Entrepreneurs Ireland were formed back in 2004, we were the very first organization. Ashoka weren't far behind us. Ashoka actually doesn't have an operation in Ireland anymore, but there are other organizations that probably didn't exist five, six, seven years ago. And as I said earlier, the government really, for the first time over the last four or five years, have begun to take an interest in this space. The way I've always sort of thought about it is that if you look at an economy, an economy will, over a longer period of time, will probably grow at a natural sort of rate. But then you throw an entrepreneur into the mix and that sort of straight line of growth all of a sudden becomes a Zigzagging line as they sort of ying where the others yang and they do different things. But ultimately that entrepreneurial input means that the economy will grow at a greater rate than it otherwise would have done if there wasn't an entrepreneurs involved.

I think the social economy is exactly the same like governments across the world. Most of them, I think it's fair to say, do try their best, however successful they are in doing that, in trying to support their people and trying to deliver the services that they need to do, but they don't always get it right. But you throw a social entrepreneur into that mix that enters the Zigs and the Zags in there, and by having the social entrepreneurs in the same way as the financial side of the economy means it just grows at a better rate and a faster rate. And I think because the social economy is newer to the world, because it's really only sort of 2025 years old, I think there's still the opportunity for exponential growth that maybe the more mature financial economy struggles with a little bit more. So there's definitely opportunity for exponential growth in the sector. And I think all the extra interest that's in the sector at the moment is very exciting for those of us that work in the sector, because I think there will be a lot of growth opportunities coming forward.

Couldn't agree more. So, speaking of growth going forward, Tim, if you look ahead three to five years, what do you see for social entrepreneurs?

Ireland yeah, well, we've been doing a lot of talk about that ourselves at the moment, and there's a couple of things that we're trying to look at. One is bringing this sort of additional layer of flexibility to how we support the social entrepreneurs. So we think we've been really successful at finding social entrepreneurs. We think we've been really successful at giving them the programmatic supports that we've been able to give them, but it's trying to see how can we support people even better when they're not on our programs and how can we support the people who very nearly got onto our program but just got pipped at the post? So we're just looking at ways that we can still run the programs brilliantly, but bring that extra additional element of flexibility. The other thing is we do have, as I've been saying, a really good community of supporters people from the business world who have given their money and their time in to help us. But we really want to dial that up because we think there's such latent goodwill to the work that we're doing and the way that the world is at the moment. So we're looking at a way where we can really multiply the amount of people are getting involved, but do that in a very thoughtful, strategic manner, because if we just signed up loads of people on day one and they had a bad experience, they would walk away just as quickly as they walked in. So what we want to do is to build up something that is lasting.

So in three years time, I want to have a sort of a five fold increase in the amount of hours that people are giving us on a pro bono basis. But I want to do that in a way that means that I don't have to grow my own team exponentially because we obviously want to keep our own costs under control. But how we can manage multiple relationships at scale that become really meaningful, that are all focused on delivering accelerated social change to the power of people. So that's where our sort of brain power is at at the moment, and that's what we're trying to work on.

What a beautiful vision. Tim, I could hang out with you all day and I know you're a busy human and our listeners are really busy too. So we'll put all the links in the show notes. Listeners, go check out the site, go support it. Remember the part that Tim said that you don't have to live in Ireland to send them your support. So go check that out. The YouTube channel, all the links will be in the show notes, so certainly that'll be there. Tim, if there was something you would hope that we would have gotten to today and we haven't touched on it yet, or there's something you want to leave our Social Entrepreneurs listeners with a resource, an idea, some mindset, tip that you've discovered over all these years, that's really helpful.

Something you want to leave them with, what would that be?

Well, I think maybe two things if I'm permission to do so.

One is you can have three. How about that?

One is just a very practical thing and maybe it goes to one of the questions that you asked me earlier, but we have on our website what we call a spark toolkit and it really is sort of a starter pack for social entrepreneurs and some of the things that they should be thinking about going forward. So if anyone is a budding social entrepreneurs or thinks they might be a budding social entrepreneur, that's not a bad place to start. And you can download that from our website and it's totally free and people can have a look at that. So there's a sort of practical thing of what to start. And the other thing is, maybe slightly higher level is just to say is just believe in yourself and believe in your dreams. Because seeing the power of some incredibly successful social entrepreneurs, I honestly believe that anything is possible. And even though those journeys can look incredibly difficult and incredibly hard, you're not in it alone. That's why people like us are here, but also the fellow social entrepreneurs that are here.

And if you really, really believe in your dreams, you can make it happen. And we're here to help.

Thank you so much for the great work you're doing and for telling us about it on the show today.

Thanks, Paul. Really enjoyed our conversation.

So again, listeners, all the show notes, the links will all be in the show notes. If I missed something, feel free to reach out. And before you go, it happened again. A big shout out to Morgan Bailey from the Profit meets Impact podcast. He's the host. Go check it out.

Awesome.

Podcast morgan introduced. Tim said Paul. I think he'd be a great fit for the show. And you just heard Tim's. Awesome. We're so glad you're here, Tim, I tell you that to say, we love listener, suggested topics and guests. We do get more than I can have on, but we try to be really transparent. Like Tim was talking about, if you go to the entrepreneurs website on our contact page, there's three simple criteria that's like benchmarks we're looking for, how we debt, who we say yes to.

So if you go take a look at those and you feel like it's a fit, please send your ideas in. I'm not kidding when I'm say we love your ideas, want this to serve you. And if you've got a story that would really be helpful to tell, please send it on in. So for now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in the world.