Challenges and breakthroughs in social impact

That’s where we are at Opencast. Not that there wasn’t willingness and commitment before, but we’re starting to make a real impact with meaningful allyship at the senior and executive leadership levels to go alongside the buy-in and allyship we’ve built across the wider business. And it feels good. It feels exciting, even world changing. In the best way possible.

I’d like to say that as Opencast’s first Head of Social Impact ever, this was all part of my masterplan. But that would be lying. This space doesn’t work like that. You can’t control or simplify it. At least, not if what you’re looking for is meaningful impact. Not if your ambition is to prove that it is possible to have a financially successful digital technology consultancy business that does good things for people and planet not as a ‘charitable’ thing, but as a default. And that’s always been the ambition at Opencast.

Let me acknowledge my privilege: there are certain battles I’ve not had to fight at Opencast. Our board and executive team have always been bought in. Our DNA has always been ‘do the right thing’ so in my most radical moments, at best they’ve whooped and immediately jumped in right behind me and at worst they’ve given me a raised eyebrow and an implied questioning of my sanity. But they’ve never blocked or tried to stop me. That is huge. And it’s not that common for a business of our size, in our industry.

Having said that, we’ve had our challenges, as expected. And we will have them again. But over the past two years, I’ve learned a few things, the most important of which were crystallised in my mind last week while attending the Louder than Words festival, the largest gathering of B Corps in the world: