Money in Good Hands: What It Really Takes to Build a Business Doing Good

I think the first thing you asked there, like, where do you start? You know, you start in your own backyard.

I think me returning back to Scotland, back to the town I grew up in, there are plenty of things that you see.

You maybe see or you can ignore or you see and you choose to walk on.

Like, you walk on and... there's a lot of things that exist in your own backyard that you have the ability to change um and you have ability to make an impact on like for me coming back here um I think what helped me the most was the rise and young people that are struggling in the education system um the rise of people that are completely disconnected um and I because of the experiences that I had at Schumacher College because of my own experience in the education system where I struggled like I failed most of my exams in high school so because of that story of myself because I can see that that's increased massively but you know the system of education hasn't really evolved or changed that much there's some brilliant teachers don't get me wrong educators in there but the system itself is not allowing them to fully flourish or all young people certain young people do flourish in the the system but there's a lot of people that aren't and I think that's increased I definitely think that's increased um and the rise of ADHD autism like all these it's all interconnected and that's what I was seeing when I came back home and for me I was like well what can I do so I met I got an introduction to the head of a local um community trust who owns a piece of land and where they want to do good work and they're at the heart of the biggest problems for the community in a pretty low socio-economical area.

I got into a community, the social enterprise community.

I sit on the board for Social Enterprise Scotland and I started to learn more about incredible social enterprises here.

So I was like, okay, well, I've got that community.

And that's where I got other introductions.

And I just spoke to people that I met in that area and asked them, like, what do you want? What would you like to see? Like, how do we do this? And we created a project.

We spoke to the local council and they gave us money to run this project.

And, you know, it's like I didn't have anybody to do it, but I had a local community trust that was in need in the land.

And then we had a council that, you know, a lot of people sort of give bad rap to governments and councils.

I get it because it's a system.

Again, it's another system that exists that maybe isn't functioning the way It needs to.

But there are great people within these systems that are connected to the heart, that do want to do good things.

They are maybe restricted by the system, but there's still ways.

There's still ways to get access to money.

And I think it's about asking, asking questions, asking more.

So for me, that's a project 20 minutes from where I live.

where we ran a pilot project.

We had lots of people come.

They learned about soil.

They learned about how to basically do the basics of looking after soil.

We watched documentaries.

We learned about restoration.