Tackling homelessness with coffee: interview with Cemal Ezel, founder of Change Please

Quantifying homelessness is not straightforward. It is a growing social issue however, as it is estimated that the number of people sleeping rough has more than doubled in the UK since 2010, now reaching 4000 people every night. We are launching a thematic month on this subject, to promote the work of great social enterprises with innovative approaches to support homeless communities. We will also raise some questions about impact measurement, as organisations working with homeless communities face specific challenges.

Change Please, backed by the founder of the Big Issue magazine, started with an observation: Londoners love coffee. And coffee could make a difference. After having trained homeless as baristas, the organisation provides them with a temporary accomodation and a job: selling ethically-sourced coffee in the streets.

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Can you say a few words on Change Please? How do you differentiate from other organisations dealing with the same issue of homelessness?

I was moved to set up Change Please after seeing the power that social enterprise could have in effecting social change. I visited a ‘Silent Tea-House’ while on a holiday in Vietnam and I was so impressed by the commercial and social good that the enterprise was doing. It changed my opinion on how business could be a force for good. On the same trip, I completed the ‘rocking-chair test,’ where I was invited to consider my life at 90 and reflect on what I had achieved. I could see that I would not be happy living a life solely in the commercial world.

Change Please is unique because our model immediately lifts people out of homelessness through a sustainable employment model with the living wage, support with accommodation, mental wellbeing, opening bank accounts and accommodation. We do not seek to replicate the work of other organisations and we are very proud of our partnerships with organisations tacking homelessness.

What are you proud to have achieved with Change Please? What’s your next big objective?

There are so many areas of success that Change Please has had and so many achievements that it is difficult to know where to begin! It was five years ago that I first had the idea of Change Please and homelessness after meeting some people experiencing homelessness and seeing how much they had to offer.

The most difficult first step was turning the idea into reality and knowing where to look for support. Fortunately, there was so much around and I discovered a whole new world of people wanting to help and make a difference.

We have had many successes with individuals that we have supported on their journey out of homelessness and this has been extremely fulfilling to see. I have also been impressed with how many people from different backgrounds that we have managed to bring together from different backgrounds to help us reduce homelessness.

Our next big objective is to expand throughout the UK and abroad and launch our training academies. We recently received Charitable status and this will help us achieve our mission of ending homelessness once and for all.

What challenges do you face when measuring the impact you have on the homeless community?

We have been incredibly grateful to have received support from industry leaders, Can-Invest, TSIP and Northampton University for measuring our impact. This meant that we were able to design some very powerful and useful tools for monitoring our impact and putting it into the context of other organisations in the sector.

Originally, we were finding that impact was an ‘extra’ piece of our work and we found we were not making it a regular part of our operational work. We have now over-come this, and it is now embedded into our operations.

As well as this, communicating with our Beneficiaries about the need for impact monitoring, without making it too invasive was more difficult at the beginning of our journey. We now find it easier but we have to make clear its importance to each new Beneficiary that we take on.

Any news that you would like to share with us?

We are now in the third year of our operations and will be launching three exciting new projects; our retail based expansion in Manchester where we will be opening eight new sites; our retail expansion in London where we will be launching eight new sites on TFL and locations and finally the launch of our Training Academy.The Training Academy is a huge step in our development and will allow us to train and recruit even more people experiencing homelessness as Baristas.

We are always on the lookout for people to join us in supporting our mission and help end homelessness once and for all.

IFG Social Impact Evaluation of the School for Social Entrepreneurs Supports Major Grant Award

We at Investing for Good were delighted that the Big Lottery Fund has renewed its funding for social entrepreneurs, supported by School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), with a £2.55m grant.

SSE is a charity with a network of 11 schools, impacting communities across the UK, Canada and India. The charity offer programmes, workshops and short courses, aiming to support individuals on a learning journey, and creating social change together.

The renewal of funding extends Big Lottery Fund’s commitment to the Lloyds Bank Social Entrepreneurs Programme, in partnership with School for Social Entrepreneurs, launched in 2012. The first five years of the programme has supported 1,300 social entrepreneurs. These social entrepreneurs are predicted to reach as many as 1.1 million beneficiaries over five years, according to a social impact review of the programme conducted by CAN Invest and Investing for Good in 2016.

Following a competitive tender, Investing for Good and CAN Invest- a charity committed to helping other charities thrive- were chosen by SSE because both organisations have extensive experience working with intermediary organisations and with the complexities around capturing, measuring impact and attributing impact.

Investing for Good acted as the lead on the project, representing the team and acting as the main point of contact. However, both parties were equal partners during the delivery of the project and worked as one unified team. The partnership made the best use of our respective expertise and experience to date.

We adopted a hypothesis testing approach whereby we developed and tested a number of assumptions in the Theory of Change and the extent to which the activities that the SSE were doing delivered the outcomes that were initially hypothesised.

Mapping backwards from organisational goals, we tested hypotheses around strategic assumptions, placing emphasis on understanding not only whether SSE activities produced the desired effects, but also how and why, throughout the course of different SSE programmes.

This provided the framework for research for SSE to contribute thought-leadership and become a higher profile, leading voice in the intermediary and educational sectors on excellence in supporting social entrepreneurship.

IFG and CAN Invest used a variety of methods including qualitative research with in-person & telephone interviews, focus groups, surveys, social media approaches, narrative story-telling, and more traditional quantitative, statistical based approaches and study designs.

The review captured the whole spectrum of SSE’s impact: its achievements, success factors, learning elements, progress towards strategic goals, and included an analysis of the various programmes and their performance, and the impact of entrepreneurs to date.

The final report was deliberately designed to catch the eye of a wide audience and encourage readers to find out more.

A social audit can be hugely beneficial to an organisation. Social audits evaluate your current impact processes against best practice, identify any gaps and recommendations for improvements, and give you the opportunity to strengthen relationships with grant makers, social investors and commissioners.

More information on our social audit services can be found at https://www.investingforgood.co.uk/social-audit/

Impact Platforms - Silver bullets or a poisoned chalice?

IFG’s newest recruits recently travelled to Oxford to sample Marmalade, an open-access fringe event to the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

We dropped into several sessions during day two of the festival, but it was the workshop entitled - “Silver bullets in slingshots: Beyond killer platforms for social good” that intrigued us the most as we cast our eyes over the bumper five-day schedule of workshops, panels and networking events.

Everyone in the room added a social impact tech platform on a post it and it soon became clear there are lots... and lots...

Even before we arrived, the call to arms was set – to truly overcome the planet’s greatest challenges and properly harness the collective groundswell of energy for change, wouldn’t it be better if all those in the impact investment space thought beyond our own, sometimes niche, networks and platforms and considered how greater inter-connectivity could be built into our current work streams? Therefore, to truly create an ecosystem that was greater than the sum of its parts and capable of moving innovations and capital at scale.

The two-hour session was led by Astrid Scholz (CEO, Sphaera) and Audrey Selian (Director, Artha Initiative). We started by crowd-sourcing names of the many, many platforms that exist in the space. The photo below is proof of the fragmentation within the sector and collectively represents an outlay of over £60m on development costs alone, while only one platform has achieved financial sustainability to date. 

After a lively debate about the virtues and pitfalls of the aforementioned platforms, our hosts shared an update on a recent project where they had sought to break free of their own organisational silos.

Astrid & Audrey explained how they had come to realise that their respective organisations had essentially been operating at opposite sides of the same coin. For Sphaera, the focus is at the “ideation” stage – identifying, sharing and scaling solutions, while Artha provide the information management platform for entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries to collaborate. Traditionally, both offerings would function separately with end users needing twice the amount of account logins, time and patience to participate.

The key to the Sphaera- Artha collaboration was opening back-end systems through APIs (application programming interfaces) to share information seamlessly – so the end user can use each of their preferred specialist tools without having to repopulate data over and over. Think using your Google account to speed around the web with a single-sign on.

Of course, a change in mindset away from platforms purely competing with one another is first required; impact communities exist and impact technology exists to connect those communities, but in the market at present no provider is big enough for the data layer to become sufficiently scaled to truly drive outputs. To make this happen either the number of technology platforms will have to consolidate, or the various actors must find a way to share data more successfully and accept that being part of a larger, richer eco-system where each other’s objectives, incentives and financial realities are acknowledged. This is where real progress will be made. The theory extends that that this will also encourage and enable platform creators to offer one service well rather than several services poorly.

Clearly there are real challenges over data sharing and other trust issues that will need to be worked through sensitively, but the aspiration is to make this sector more collaborative and efficient by providing participants the tools to act in this way.

Our hosts promised to update us over the summer on the progress of their project and we look forward to seeing the outputs of case studies that showcase how organisations have fared in the real world and the opportunities that greater access and API’s can offer to us all.