Tales from Tom’s Trust
For five years now, Livity has been fortunate enough to receive support of various kinds from the amazing Tom’s Trust.
Set up in memory of a young man called Tom ap Rhys Pryce who was murdered by gang affiliated teen muggers on his way home to his fiancee Adele from his job as a successful lawyer, the Trust is run by his parents John and Estella, his former employers at Linklaters; Andrew, Alan and Michael, and his friend Callum, Livity’s Creative Director, in their spare time.
The Trust is dedicated to tackling the route causes of violent street crime by enabling organisations that are already doing great things to help young people, to do even more.
In Livity and Live Magazine’s case, that means enabling us to provide pastoral care, positive experiences and one-on-one mentoring to young people with the greatest needs and with the most challenging personal circumstances, that we and other providers would otherwise have struggled to cater for.
To learn more about this and the dozens of other fantastic youth organisations Tom’s Trust supports, go to www.tomstrust.com or have a read of the most recent newsletter….
Livity celebrates one radical night on the tiles
Last night was a momentous milestone for Livity as we were recognised for our achievements at the Marketing Agency Association Best Awards. We scooped up three awards for NSPCC’s ChildLine Final Verse including Best Consumer Campaign, Best Social Media Campaign as well as Best of the Best Campaign given for overall campaign of the evening at the discretion of the judges.
Kate Brundle, Associate Director at Livity sums up the evening: “Final Verse is a project we are incredibly proud of. To create a campaign that reaches your audience with an important message and also receives industry recognition is a fantastic feeling. Winning Best Social Media Campaign and Best Consumer Campaign is an amazing achievement. We are so pleased we stood out to the judges and thank them for awarding us Best of the Best against so many other high quality campaigns.”
“Final Verse deserved this award because it was an absolutely inspired piece of work. It was built on a genuine understanding of their core male teen target group who are very difficult to reach and to get talking about ChildLine issues. Urban music, MCing and performing is at the heart of their culture and they create an authentic highly shareable idea which made it so successful in social media” said the judges.
Our rapturous celebrations were echoed at an event hosted by NESTA, for our nomination as one of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’, awarding Livity with the distinction as one of the few organisations who are ‘changing Britain for the better, applying fresh approaches in practical and scalable ways, through social, technological, scientific and artistic methods’.
As The Observer pointed out in their article, “Thomas Edison famously said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” and if last night’s celebratory-antics are anything to go by we would say Livity are on the right side of genius!
Sam and Michelle win at the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Awards!
Livity Co-founders Michelle Clothier and Sam Conniff won the London and South Social Entrepreneur category at the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur awards. Michelle collected the award and said a few words to the room full of entrepreneurs, on arriving at the podium she opened an envelope with the words ‘you never know’ written on the front and took out for a few pre-prepared words, here’s what she said…
“When Sam and I found out what amazing people we were shortlisted against in the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur awards we felt proud to be finalists amongst such amazing leaders and organisations (Sir Tim Smit of The Eden Project, Sue Riddlestone of Bio Regional and Emma Stewart and Karen Mattison of Women Like Us)
And we truly felt that we had got as far as we could in the brilliant Ernst and Young Entrepreneur awards.
“So, why on earth prepare a speech?” you’re all wondering.
Good question. 2 reasons:
- Sam my brilliant business partner is currently taking a break in Mexico, asking the woman he loves, to marry him (she said yes). Now anyone who knows Sam and I will know that I’m ‘the quiet one’ … and he… is…not the quiet one and he would feel far more comfortable up here with the mic. I, however, am someone who needs to prepare.
- Secondly, you just never know… as has been played out to me this evening.
In 2008 Sam and I were finalists in this same category and we lost out, quite rightly, to Ian MacArthur and John Bird of Big Issue. Rather than be disappointed to lose, we felt inspired to go away and ‘be better’ and so we pledged to continue building the business of Livity, proving the concept of Livity and delivering more business and social benefits to our clients and young people in equal amounts… until we were good enough to try again for the awards – and win. Think it, say it, do it. And here we are.
Thank you to the judges for recognising our improvements, growth and our ever-increasing ambition. Thanks and well done to our fellow finalists – we represent one of the most important and exciting developments in business and the community and must continue to support and inspire one another.
Thanks to everyone at Livity – we have a brilliant team – each and every single one of them. Thanks to our families and friends for supporting and believing in us and the business. Thanks of course to our clients and the biggest thank you must go to all the young people who have come through our door, been involved in our campaigns, the magazine, our workshops and apprenticeships – they are why we get up and go to Livity every morning.
Thank you, I’m really really thrilled.”
Sam and Michelle now go through to the UK finals in October…
Women and the Big Society
Livity co-founder Michelle Clothier was recently invited to speak at the RSA’s ‘Women and the Big Society 2011: Blast from the past or new vision?’event.
Here she shares her experiences and her words….
I was invited to speak at the Women and the Big Society 2011: Blast from the past or new vision? Both in my role as a Nexter and as a Fellow of the RSA . Mostly though, I was there to share my experience as a female business owner and leader.
This RSA Fellowship Women Speakers’ Network event, in association with the Big Society Network, set out to discuss the role that women will or already play (and have been playing for many years) in The Big Society… a movement promising to build a better and happier UK through civic enterprise.
Steve Moore of the Big Society intro’d and hosted us and humanitarian and FRSA Louise Burfitt- Dons led the discussion.
Here’s what I shared in my 3 minute slot…
“My business Livity has just celebrated our 10th Birthday.
For a decade, we have been proving the concept that you can run a profitable business model that has social objectives and purpose at its very core.
We are proving to some of the biggest brands in the world that you can align business objectives with social objectives – that benefit, in our particular model, young people, and achieve a win/win.
We are now 37 people strong at Livity, with a majority make up of 27 brilliant women – It’s important to say that the 10 men we employ are equally brilliant! – but only 27% of our workforce compared to the 73% women.
We insist on recruiting the very best people to work with us – I’m not interested in whether they are male or female – although I do think that culturally it’s important to achieve a healthy and diverse balance – and that is a business benefit that many businesses simply have not grasped any further than box ticking.
I do feel that women gravitate towards our business, because it combines creativity and innovation with social purpose and benefit. And I witness first-hand the pride and purpose our teams seem to have working in their various roles at Livity (in a recent employee satisfaction survey we scored 95% for “proud to work at Livity” ) and I do think that, it is because, as human beings we increasingly crave purpose other than that of simply earning and making money to exist. So, yes, maybe women are slightly further ahead on the evolution scale on this one.
That said, increasing numbers of men are attracted to our business model, mostly reflected at the moment by our clients, from the likes of Google, Coca Cola and Sony PlayStation.
I’m in agreement that women are perhaps more naturally inclined towards Big Society, – whether it be in a voluntary and community based role, or like my employees through their careers, and I absolutely champion that, but where I become really excited and where I believe the vision and ambition has to be set, is for business to take a greater role and responsibility through it’s models, methods, finance, reach and relevance in order to truly tackle some of the bigger problems that society is now and will in the future experience. And I truly believe more and more canny business leaders will see the value that such an approach will bring to their core business and brand – starting with the sense of purpose and pride they can give their employees with such an approach.
Finally, I’m keen to know if the panel and the audience believe that business and brands have a role to play in the notion of ‘Big Society’?
And if they do participate meaningfully, whether over time, this might help and address the lack the diversity and inequalities that many sectors are still challenged by – by attracting and benefiting from the masses of untapped and undervalued female talent?”
A healthy discussion ensued, business cards, tweets, new contacts shared and common interests were found.
It was a thought-provoking evening and a really good partnership between RSA and The Big Society Network. Here’s to more discussion and more importantly here’s to more ‘getting on with it’.
Social business, the Yunus way
by Leila Khalifa, Senior Account Manager at Livity
‘I don’t know that I went because of a charitable impulse. I just thought that I should be useful to somebody.’
This was Muhammad Yunus’ response yesterday, when asked how it was that in 1976 he found himself venturing into a small Bangladeshi village called Jobra, close to the university campus where he taught economics. It’s a typical Yunus response: practical, humble, honest. It’s also remarkable, since out of this trip some 35 years ago, the concept of microcredit was born. It arrived quietly, and took some years to become an officially recognised financial innovation; but today microcredit is a worldwide phenomenon which has changed irrevocably the landscape of development economics and poverty alleviation.
Professor Yunus was at NESTA yesterday morning, speaking about how his model of social business was born in the ‘70s, in the form of what eventually became the now famous Grameen Bank – a social development institution which was awarded, along with its founder, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
It was a moving conversation with a man who has dedicated nearly forty years of his life to ending poverty in his home country. Since the early 1980s, Grameen Bank has handed out microloans to 7 million borrowers, and 80 percent of poor Bangladeshi families have been reached with microcredit. Out of Grameen Bank a number of other, distinct companies were born into the Grameen family – from Grameen Fisheries, which improves rural livelihoods for many Bangladeshi villages by maintaining local ponds and seafood, to Grameen Kalyan, which is providing affordable health care for members of Grameen Bank in a nation where previously only the rich could access a decent medical service.
Grameen has had a rough ride recently – on May 12, Yunus resigned as Managing Director of Grameen Bank following a series of government-led attacks aimed at ousting him – but there can be no denying that the model of social business which Yunus helped to create has taken on the traditional capitalist system in a way which is today mobilising rapidly.
At Livity, we spend a great deal of time talking about what it means be a social business. We get it, because it’s in our DNA. But amidst the day-to-day madness of creating marketing campaigns or delivering groundbreaking legacy projects, it’s easy to forget that we’re part of a growing movement of businesses which recognise what Yunus often reminds us of: people aren’t one-dimensional. Human nature has many sides, which means that most of us care about more than profit alone. And when you’re not in business purely to make as much money as you can, you can do more.
You can start with the smallest of ideas, and see if it will grow with one person, two people, or a hundred. You can build. You can start over. Social entrepreneurs can try, fail, learn, move on in a way that profit maximising businesses and governments simply cannot do.
It’s a real privilege to spend time in the company of a man who affirms so fully the spirit in which social entrepreneurs and their organisations operate. And while it’s impossible not to feel somewhat bowled over at the sheer scale of what Grameen has achieved over the past few decades, Yunus never fails to remind people that it began from something tiny – a small idea in a little village in Bangladesh, born out of a desire to solve a problem.
There are a hundred soundbites from Yunus’ talk that I’d like to share. But this final thought is probably best summed up by something he said towards the end of his session, as he reflected on leadership and the advice he would give to those who seek it. ’Don’t give up,’ he said. ‘Develop a miracle seed. Multiply that seed… and you’ll have a plantation.’
A Conversation with Professor Muhammad Yunus is available to watch online
Support Muhammad Yunus via Friends of Grameen