Nick Stanhope: We are what we do

Nick Stanhope, 28, is the producer of a book that promises to teach your granny to text and change the world. With a mixed background in education (as a history teacher) and young people (as a youth worker in South London) on the one hand and publishing and books (three years ago he wrote Blood sweat and charity, a book about raising money for charity through charity challenges) on the other, the London social enterprise We Are What We Do was the perfect place for Stanhope to put his experiences into practice. He joined We Are What We Do, whose core mission is to change the world through small actions, a year and a half ago to work with young people and children in schools and turn their ideas into Teach your Granny to Text.

So, does the world need changing?

Of course! We are faced with all sorts of social and environmental problems, problems in our communities and broader international issues. What We Are What We Do does is look at how the small, everyday things that we do can have an impact on these problems. When people think of change they think about big government decisions, corporate moves and international diplomacy but in fact we feel that just as important, if not more so, are the millions of actions that we all carry out can make a substantial difference to social and environmental damage.

Such as?

Well, our challenge is obviously to prove that small actions make big change and this is a lot easier to do with environmental problems. We can say that if everyone in the UK stopped charging their mobile phones overnight then we would save £43 million and substantially reduce the amount of C02 being emitted into the atmosphere. Our anti plastic bag campaign last year revealed that the average family uses about 134 plastic bags a year and that if they all switched to a reusable shopping bag then this would save in terms of waste, resources used to make the bags and so on. When it comes to the social issues it is harder to quantify and demonstrate impact. The second action in the book is “walk your dad” – the statistic that we use is that a dog in the UK walks on average 676 miles a year and the average adult only 197. You may think this is an odd take, but obviously exercise is linked to health and so can then be linked to deaths from heart disease and other medical conditions.

What about smiling, can it help to change the world as well?

Well, that is our first action in the book but our aim is not to identify social ills and then provide solutions. What we are saying is that the way people behave at home, in their workplace and outdoors and the way they treat each other can have a tremendous effect on how people feel about each other how people deal with social and personal issues. We make links between confidence at the personal level to the social cohesion of the community.

Are books the way you campaign?

We are about finding creative ways of bringing simple actions to life. Our three books have been the main way so far. Change the world for a fiver has been a huge success, selling more than a million copies world wide and Teach your Granny to text is looking like it will do as well if not better. Lat year we also launched an anti plastic bag campaign with fashion designer Anya Hindmarch; we produced a reusable shopper that said “I’m not a plastic bag” on it and it became a real eco fashion icon, so that was another platform we used to get our message across. Over the next year we are working on a much more comprehensive digital strategy and a TV platform to find new and interesting ways to bring simple actions to life. But at the heart of all of these is the desire to keep things in the cultural mainstream – we are not trying to ram social messages down anyone’s throat, we keep the setting quirky and fun.

What’s the trick to making such a simple idea – we are what we do – into a functioning social enterprise?

Perhaps it lies in the mixture between two very worlds. On one side there is David Robinson, one of the two founders, who set up the charity Community Links 25 years ago and through it has helped tens of thousands of some of the most deprived people in East London and who saw in his communities the fact that there were fewer and fewer social support groups. In the 50s, 60% of people in the Western world were part of some kind of social group, whether this was a religious or sporting group or union. Now that figure is down to 6% in most communities. So what this means of course is that people are not dealing with social issues in the same way any more, and David’s aim has been to break social action down to a really accessible level and to demonstrate the potential of mass participation.

On the other side there is Eugenie Harvey who comes from the world of PR communications who was inspired by David and his work and felt that the best way to get this message to a massive audience was to make it very culturally mainstream, fun, unique and stylish. I think that because of this we have been able to play into the fact that we are a consumer culture and so the best way of reaching people is often through products.

Is We Are What We Do’s social enterprise business model sustainable?

Our products – the books and the bags – are out there at the front of the bookstore and the fact that they are accessibly priced helps to make them successful. Also we are a small team of six and use our resources sparingly, like all non profits, but selling 1 million books doesn’t make it any less tough. Social enterprise is a hard model to marry.

Do you feel part of the social enterprise movement in the UK?

Yes but I think that it is still a budding movement and people are still coming to grips with what social enterprises are. They are becoming more and more common and having a couple of really high profile ones – like innocent smoothies – has really helped. I also think that social enterprise is more attractive to business people who have built a sustainable financial model for their businesses to invest in projects that also attempt to be sustainable financially but that have the added value of social output.

Find out more:

www.wearewhatwedo.org