Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity)
This article is part of a series profiling innovative organisations from various industries. Find all of the articles here: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Things We Learned During COVID-19.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders with free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during this crisis.
Young Enterprise give young people the life skills, knowledge and confidence they need to succeed in the changing world of work. Since 1962, Young Enterprise has worked with both the business and education sectors to engage over four million young people in the UK. This entrepreneurial charity was based on the successful Junior Achievement programme in America which fosters work readiness, entrepreneurship, financial literacy skills, and “learning by doing.”
It launched in 1963 with 113 teenagers and by 1973 twenty-two Young Enterprise Area Boards of volunteers started up across the UK. They created Young Enterprise Centres in disused warehouses and factories, a church building, and a pub. Thanks to major corporate partners the Young Enterprise Company Competition began to build momentum in the 1980’s awarding six regional winners and a national award. By the 1990’s student numbers hit 24,000 and introduced an Entrepreneurship Masterclass for 13–17 year olds, as well as a Graduate Programme for university students. Into the 2000’s more than 2,000 businesses were supporters and today across the UK the charity works with more than 300,000 youth to develop their employability and financial education skills.
Sharon Davies is the CEO of Young Enterprise and she believes the charity’s most critical challenge today is to overcome the inequity being created by COVID-19. She has been with the charity for ten years, previously as COO and Director. She is passionate about the future of the younger generation, having worked as a youth worker for over 15 years in the North West, and is deeply committed to changing lives through addressing inequality of access to opportunity.
She views COVID-19 as deeply impactful socially and economically for young people; They are the first to lose their jobs, and their education and career prospects are set back disproportionately by the closure of vital services. These issues are further compounded for those who lack the finances, technology, and personal connections to make getting through these uncertain times possible.
3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity)
This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways. Moreover, the charity had to plot a new course knowing that they’ve lost much of their funding as a result of closures.
#1 Turn overcoming uncertainty into a shared journey
The charity anticipated that schools would shut and that they would need to protect and stabilize the organisation and its programs. While the future was uncertain, what was certain was that the team quickly needed to be set up to work from home, and that the main goal is to support the at-home learning of their community.
By mid-April leadership had created an 18-month vision and model so the team could understand the journey they were about to set out on. They had to feel like they were heading into uncertainty together, with a shared vision, and non-stop updates. Teams cannot simply rely on adrenaline to weather the storm — you need to create a culture which believes there’s a destination they are all moving towards.
#2 You can’t act until you’ve reached out to your community to understand the impact and their new needs
In Young Enterprise’s 58 year history they have never faced anything like this crisis before. More importantly, the community they support would all be impacted in very different and unequally distributed ways.
Assuming that they would need curriculum and support offered via digital channels is too general and unspecific — what types of help did people most need right now? Before the charity could determine the best way to help under “the new normal” they had to first listen to the very human stories and needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents. This enabled the organisation to create three toolkits and deliver them across the entire country. They found ways to get these toolkits into market faster by using their existing network, resources, and content in a way that best suited the challenges faced by all.
#3 Critical thinking is vital to surviving times of crisis
While the organisation had to use critical thinking to quickly adapt to this time of crisis, youth will now need those skills more than any other. As evidenced in the 2008 economic recession, youth are the first to become unemployed and they disproportionately lose access to career preparation resources, which combined leave a long term scarring effect on peoples futures. Today’s youth will need critical thinking skills to navigate a quickly changing world and solve the lasting impacts it will create on educational institutions, social programs, and a healthcare system already being weighed down under an aging population.
For Youth Enterprise this crisis defines why their mandate is so important. And while it may transform how the organisation may need to operate it will only embolden their desire to become more resilient so that they can prepare youth from all backgrounds for the future.
Register for the June 17 webinar How Organisations Become Adaptive & Resilient in a Time of Crisis to learn directly from some of the leaders profiled.
More lessons from this series:
- 3 Lessons from Zahra Ebrahim (Civic Engagement): Their solution required no technical background and it helps communities precisely because of its simplicity. They wanted to create a resource that made it extremely easy to connect people needing help to resources offering help.
- 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity): This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways.
- 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education): CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community.
- 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education): The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person lab-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity/ Technology): As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology): Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Tyson Villeneuve (Events/Hospitality): Events as an industry effectively flatlined and we were the first to get hit: Large sports events, festivals, gatherings. The entire industry was shut down two weeks before restaurants.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dianne Dredge, Ph.D (Tourism / Community Engagement): Her lens from the perspective of regions and tourism ecosystems that had to completely rebuild provide lessons on how industries can become adaptive and resilient.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during the COVID-19 crisis.
