Due to the significant changes in the world since we founded, we kicked off 2022 with a critical piece of work to review our purpose and impact to provide the vision and direction for us to have maximum impact.

We have now completed the discovery phase of our Purpose Review, consisting of extensive data analysis, 35 interviews, a series of workshops and sessions with our team, board, Fellows, Faculty and partners. We’ll be sharing learnings with you over the coming weeks, but in the immediate, we wanted to share some headlines with you.

Our key strengths:

• Our Fellows have gone on to have impact in more ways than we’ve captured and shared. In addition to setting up successful social ventures, there are many routes to delivering impact that our Fellows have, and do pursue, including politics, activism, social innovation and leadership.
• Creating the conditions for a transformational journey has been a critical factor in delivering our impact. Again and again, our alum told us that whilst Year Here was one of the hardest things they’d done, it was hugely ‘rewarding’, ‘formative’ and ‘transformational’.
• The network we’ve built is hugely valuable. Everyone we spoke to raved about the connections and relationships made through our ecosystem, from helping our ventures find clients to assisting Fellows in securing jobs.

 

To ensure we continue having impact, three key areas of focus emerged:

• We will focus on developing people and their journeys to create social impact, rather than solely focusing on venture creation. The issues and challenges we face as a society today are so complex and intertwined that systems change is needed. By facilitating multiple routes to social impact, we have the opportunity to seed entrepreneurial changemakers across the system.
• To be truly equitable and inclusive, we must address the financial barrier to entry onto the programme. Not earning for almost a year is unsustainable for most people, brought into even sharper focus with the current cost of living crisis.
• We need to transform our business model to deliver on our ambitions and ensure we can sustain and scale our impact. Our model requires significant business development and funder relationship resource and doesn’t fully harness the value we and Fellows contribute. In addition, delivering stretching and therefore transformational experiences requires significant resource.

 

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be working closely as a team and with our board to set clear plans and priorities aligned with our Purpose Review findings. To do this work, we are taking the decisive step to pause the Autumn 2022 cohort that was set to begin in September, giving the business a defined amount of time and resources to focus on our next steps.

We will continue to keep you up to date on our progress, but in the meantime, drop us a line at hello@yearhere.org if you have any questions.