Zahra Hedges, CEO, Winning Scotland

Sarah Stone: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Let's Talk Social Value, a podcast where we explore what creating value for society means and the practical ways you can go about creating it. My name's Sarah, and my guests work in different areas of social value across public-private and third-sector organisations. From the public sector, procurement to ESG and sustainability, social enterprise and impact measurement.

I'll be asking them about their work and what they've learned, and they'll be sharing their tips and experience to help us all make our organisations better. Today's guest is my very great friend and former colleague, Zahra Hedges. Zhara is the Chief Executive of the charity Winning Scotland. She's a former board member and Vice Chair of Social Enterprise Scotland.

And she worked for many years as a business advisor for social enterprises and third sector organisations before she moved to work for the Scottish [00:01:00] government. We talked about a whole range of things that I hope you'll find interesting, from how important resilience and growth mindsets are in the workplace to what a VCSC is and why you should buy from them.

But before we get to all that, I started by asking Zahra about what she does in her spare time.

Zahra Hedges: Outside of work. I volunteer on the board of an organisation called SACRO, which is a community justice organisation here in Scotland and also for another charity called Changing the Chemistry. And we seek to create more diversity on boards.

I'm also a mentor with MCR Pathways, which matches you with a young person. And Pilot Light, which matches you with another charity or third sector organisation. I live in Glasgow, and I'm a single parent to a wonderful five-year-old little girl. 

Sarah Stone: Who is fabulous. How do you fit it all in? 

Zahra Hedges: So I say I'm a single parent.

I actually co-parent with my ex-husband. So I have three nights a week where I don't have my daughter and I really try to use that time. When my marriage first ended and I found I had all [00:02:00] this time, I just watched Netflix essentially from when I got in, from work, which was before five o'clock until bedtime.

And after about a week of that, I thought I can't do this because to not see my daughter for that amount of time. I could sit and waste it or I could do something with it. So actually, what I did is I took a part-time job at a pizza delivery place. And I did that for a few months and it was really good because it got me out of the house and it got me mingling with different people.

And at that point, I started to think, okay, how can I use this time in a way that feels like it's going to serve me? So I joined a running club and I started to look at the volunteering that I could do. So there is some good time management, but I think the other thing is that I'm quite purposeful in what I do.

So it never feels like it's too much because it's just things that I'm interested in anyway. And I would probably be doing it. And at least in this way, it's a bit of a more structured way. And I get to talk to other brilliant people who have a similar purpose or a similar aim. So. It's a combination. And then, of course, actually the jobs that I've had have always [00:03:00] allowed me to do some of this during work time.

So my mentoring, for example, with the young person, obviously that has to be during school. So I am able to take and have always been able to take a couple of hours out of work to do that because my employers have always seen the benefit to me in volunteering. I do also have time to sit about and read books and, you know, go to the swimming pool and sometimes slob about my pyjamas as well. It's not all work and worthy causes. 

Sarah Stone: In terms of, you know, you talked about your employers understanding the benefits of volunteering; what do you think they are? Cause I think that's something that a lot of people don't really think about. You know, they don't really realise. Actually, it's not just about giving their staff time off.

There are real benefits for the organisation too. Can you maybe talk a little bit about those? 

Zahra Hedges: Yes. And in my staff team, I have at the moment, they all volunteer actually to a greater or lesser extent. And there are so many benefits. I can't even think of a negative. It makes them feel more able to bring, we talk about this a lot, bring your whole self to work.

The way that we do it is we don't [00:04:00] have a list of nominated charities. Causes that people have to volunteer for. They can literally come and say, this is the organisation that's close to my heart, and that's where I want to volunteer. So it means that they can do that and they can talk to us about why they've picked that charity if they want to.

So it allows them to be more of themselves. It gives them confidence. One of my team has recently joined a board, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what that does for his strategic vision and his leadership and his own personal development. And I'm sure we'll re the benefits. It also gives a different perspective, and it might be that the organisations you staff volunteer for are nothing to do with what you do as a business, but actually they're out there with people.

And if you're a business that has customers, that is all about speaking to different people from different walks of life. So I can't see why you wouldn't want to put your staff into other organisations if it's for an hour, a week or two hours a week, or for whatever it might be. If it's half a day a. It just seems to me that it's a really nice [00:05:00] way of allowing your staff to develop their skills.

And it might be that it's a different skill set. So they might be working with you as a software analyst, and they are volunteering on the board of an organisation, and they have to get involved in some HR discussions, or they have to get involved in some fundraising discussions, which they wouldn't get to do in their day.

When they come back to you, it's a different set of questions that they're asking, and it's a different way of looking at it. I feel like we ought to do a podcast episode on volunteering. I think there's something in there because not many organisations do it really, really well. And the risk then is that it doesn't really work for the employees.

Doesn't really work for the employers. And it certainly doesn't work for the third sector organisations who are doing it. So maybe you could showcase some organisations that are doing it really well to inspire people; SAP, the big software company, they have a really good program where they match skills-based volunteering.

Because when I worked in the third sector, there was not much more frustrating than someone phoning up and saying, oh, I want a team building day for 50 [00:06:00] people. Can we come and do some volunteering? First of all, team building days and volunteering shouldn't be confused. They are different things in too many companies.

Try to stick it all in the same thing. And if you want team building, they go in and do a team building day. If you want to volunteer, then you need to find out what the organisation wants. And it might be that they want a patch of grass, a patch of garden dug out and resurfaced, or they want a building painted.

But actually, those opportunities are very, very rare. And I have heard tales in the third sector of charities who have a room that basically just gets painted by corporate volunteers every year because that seems to be what they want. Yeah. And. What SAP do is they match the skills of their employees to what our third sector organisation wants.

So if you imagine, if you were working in a charity team, you had the chance to have five days of time from an SAP consultant, looking at your systems or looking at your data, it would not be in the realm of possibility for you. And then the SAP employees are making a difference to an organisation.

There was an example before the social [00:07:00] enterprise world forum in Edinburgh, where I think it was one of the homeless world cup type charities got. Those employees at SAP were so motivated and so excited because they were able to see the very tangible difference that their particular intervention made.

You know, sometimes when you're working at a big organization, part of a big team, it's easy to feel lost or that you don't know exactly the difference you made. Whereas if you are going into a charity, you're like, well, If I hadn't been there, that difference wouldn't have been made. So SAP is definitely one that I would say and any, do you know what SMEs are very good at this?

Because SMEs, the people who run these organisations tend to live in the communities where they are. So they're hearing through the grapevine, do you know what that local football team can't afford to go on that tournament, drip things. And the SME will be able to say, well, we can do that, or we can hook you up with it.

So there are lots of different ways of doing it. And I don't think there's an excuse to say, oh, we are too small, or we are too big. It's just about finding the model that works for you. 

Sarah Stone: So SAP gonna get them in next, but the reason we are here today is to talk to you about what you do. . So can [00:08:00] you tell us a bit about Winning Scotland?

Zahra Hedges: Winning Scotland was founded 15 years ago. And what we work to do is to create a winning culture in Scotland by building confidence and resilience in young people. And people always ask me, well, what do you mean by winning culture? And I kind of describe it as being the opposite of a losing culture, the opposite of a head down, just get on with it.

Don't really have high expectations. It's a cliché that young people are the leaders of tomorrow, but it's a cliché because it's true. And what we want is for our young people to be ready for that challenge. So that means that they can recognise their strengths and weaknesses. They can see learning and unlearning and relearning as a lifelong process, and they have both the self-confidence in what they can do but the humility and understanding that they only have one perspective.

We want them to be able to work with others creatively and challenge assumptions. We really want them to know their worth and the value that they bring. And to understand that together, [00:09:00] we can create a happy Scotland that smiles where all of our citizens can live to their full potential. And I do appreciate that sounds ambitious, and it sounds airy-fairy, but what it translates to in real terms is giving them the tools.

To understand themselves to understand their mindsets and how they respond to challenges. So is this a threat, or is it an opportunity? And that's ultimately what we seek to do. We work in education, we work in sport, we work in communities, and it's about lifting the heads of these young people so that we all benefit from that confidence and that resilience.

Sarah Stone: And how do you do that? Cuz that sounds like a huge challenge. So do you teach the children? 

Zahra Hedges: We are a catalyst for change. Our chairman describes us as an action-focused think tank. We have a very small organisation. We have a mixture of corporate support, private individuals who fund us and, you know, going to [00:10:00] the usual grants and trusts and foundations.

And what that allows us to do is to look at what is happening in the rest of the world. To look at what's working in Chicago, in Iceland and wherever it might be, and to see how we can apply that in Scotland. And then what we do is we look to find a partner. Everything we do is in partnership, and we are not experts in everything.

Our expertise is around mindset and that resilience piece. So, for example, we are working currently with an organisation called early year Scotland. Still continue to work in schools. We work with teachers, primary teachers, and secondary teachers. They're already doing a brilliant job in really hard circumstances to teach kids Math, English, Biology, whatever it might be.

And what we do is we take them through a program that says, okay, while you're teaching that, can you teach them something about the value of mistakes? Can you teach them something about the value of collaboration and really helping teachers to articulate some of what they do anyway, and also give them some new skills.

So with early years, we know that in order to make [00:11:00] it a difference to poverty-related attainment gaps. You really need to be getting into the world of children before they're five years old. So before they start school, this was something we knew we wanted to do. And we know we have a lot of data and evidence.

So we approached Early Years Scotland and said, is this something we can work on together? So what we're now doing is working up a program that will adapt. That curriculum that we have for primary and secondary school and make it fits what early years practitioners need. Similarly, in sports, we had a big program of work.

Actually, we more or less we've handed over our part now, but that was a program looking at sports coaches and parents. And the influence they can have when children are in their football team or whatever, it might be the ice hockey team. And we worked with SFA, Scottish Rugby and Sports Scotland to develop a programme.

We piloted it; we evaluated it; we finessed it. And then we gifted it to those organisations. And SFA in particular, has taken that knowledge and taken that evidence. And they have now incorporated that [00:12:00] in all the learning. They do. And that's what we would hope with all of our partnerships that we are involved at the stage, the innovation, the testing, and then we hand it over to someone who deals with that.

And we can focus on the next thing at the moment it's CPD for teachers before it was around sports coaches. And we're also working in community settings, working with parents. Working with local authorities to make sure that the right people are involved because a risk that can happen in the third sector is that you parachute an organisation in, and it can also be quite a big national organisation that comes in because they've been identified by the government or by a local authority.

Oh, well, they can come in and solve this problem for us. And it doesn't work. And people say, why did that not work? It's because you didn't include the local people, so that's why everything we do. We try to work locally with partners who know the communities because something that works in Gallasheils might not work in the city centre of Edinburgh, even within Glasgow.

For example, something that works in the district of Poso park might not work in Pollockshields. So you need to have lots of partners and be [00:13:00] willing to say, actually, we don't know what we're doing here. We need to rethink; we need to relearn. So it is very practical, even though it sounds like it's quite aspirational, but it's grounded in science and its grounded in data.

Sarah Stone: That's such a good point about making sure that you're connected to the communities where you're trying to have the impact because so many programs just don't work because that's that basic communication and engagement piece is missing. 

Zahra Hedges: And sometimes it works both ways. Sometimes you get local organisations that don't want to, and I see this as someone who loves the third sector and really feels my life has changed since joining the third sector, but there can be a protectiveness.

And that's partly because of the funding landscape because funding is so tight, and people feel that they're fighting for money. So when a national organisation comes in, people immediately see that as a threat and immediately say, well, that's rubbish. You won't understand how the community, you won't understand how we work, or you just go away.

And I faced that when I was helping to roll out a national program. And actually, when it works best is when local partners realise actually these national organisations have [00:14:00] some value to add. And the national organisations realise that they will be more effective if they work locally. And that sometimes works very well in our sector.

And sometimes it's harder because we're fighting for scraps, which doesn't bring out the best in anybody. 

Sarah Stone: Do you only operate in Scotland?

Zahra Hedges: Interesting. We do. Our Founder is a proud Scot. He played rugby for Scotland. And although we know that the work that we do would be replicable elsewhere and it's something as a social enterprise, as a business, we are always thinking, well, you know, where's our sustainability and I, I would be telling you a lie.

If I said, it hadn't crossed my mind. If local authorities in England or a school in England or Wales or Ireland wanted to use our materials, we would be open to that conversation. But it's not something we're actively pursuing because our mission is about the culture in Scotland, but it's not inconceivable that there might be a version of Winning Scotland that would be in other places if it was a benefit.

And if it helped us to enhance what we're doing here. 

Sarah Stone: The other [00:15:00] thing that you had talked about was. When you partner with a local organisation, it becomes about the money, doesn't it, you know, all the funding. Who Is gonna pay for this? And one of the things that I know that corporates struggle with, and, and I think the third sector does too.

And I'd love your advice that you might have on this. The first thing that charities tend to think of when they think of corporates is, oh, they can give us some money, you know? Yeah. And there's a big challenge in that for corporates because although it looks like they've got lots of cash and they don't help themselves because they pay shareholders and their director's huge amounts of money, actually the budgets of individual departments, you know, they're fixed, and they're quite restricted, and it can be quite hard for them to access. You know, it's not as easy as it once was to just give money to a charity. And so what would you say to a corporate who was looking to approach a charity and see if they could help out form some kind of partnership, and equally, what would you say to a charity who was looking to approach a business or had been approached by one who [00:16:00] was kind of tempted to see pound signs?

Zahra Hedges: I think it's really difficult because ultimately, at the end of the day as charity money is the most useful thing because you can do what you like with that. If you think about you, a business, if somebody came to you and said, we want to help you, we can give you 25,000 pounds or. We can give you something in kind; if it's something in kind, you have to think of a way to make that work.

Whereas if I said you can have 25 K you've probably got 10 things already that you think you could spend that on. And charities are ultimately businesses in that same boat that said, given the realities of this situation that you've described, I think. What if there's no time pressure on it. And that's one of the problems that we have when people are doing it for a tender because if you go to a charity or a local organisation because you want to write them into your bid, it's very difficult for the charity in a couple of weeks to come up with something meaningful.

Whereas if you can have relationships. That means that the charity is able to come to you and say, okay, actually, now I know you approached us [00:17:00] 18 months ago, but now we're at the stage where we are about to refurbish our building, or we are about to put in new IT software. Or we are about to go through this merger, and we'd appreciate some legal advice.

At that point, it can be a really meaningful relationship because you've got a lawyer sitting there, or you've got guys who can come and rip out the floor and then it can work really well. But that doesn't work for the company because they're thinking, well, I need did this 18 months ago, so I wanted to write it a tender.

So I think that's where I would like to move beyond social value for the sake of tenders. Because it means that you're trying to squeeze something into a box that doesn't really serve anybody. And then you find, as you and I both know, that either the social value isn't delivered or people are just going out and doing school visits because that's quite an easy thing to tick off.

So businesses, I would urge them to think about the social value that they can create. Anyway, as part of their business, look at what you're doing, look at how you might benefit. Start having conversations. It can be very difficult for [00:18:00] people to have conversations with 50 charities. I totally get that. So go to an intermediary in Scotland; we have third-sector interfaces.

We have social enterprise networks in England. You have social enterprise UK, and I'm sure you have the equivalent and start conversations. And then, when you come to write a tender for a particular project, you're not scrabbling around trying to make something. You're actually able to look at the whole swath of what you do and say, okay, well, this is about employability.

So we'll talk about this employability strand that we have, or this is about environmental stuff. So we can actually talk about this relationship that we've got here, and that will take time, but that's the only way it's gonna work for everybody. And for charities, I would see, think about what you need.

Think creatively. So it might be an organisation that comes to you that does building work. For example, maybe it's a construction company, do you think? Well, we don't need any construction. We don't even have premises, but actually, the construction company is likely to have an HR person. They might have a bid writer; they might have a website person.

And then I [00:19:00] would be saying to them, could your HR person review our policies for us? That's probably quite useful. So thinking a little bit creatively, I would say there's nothing replacing, sitting in a room together and actually talking about it. And what you probably find is a charity. If you can find a business that cares about what you do, they will go over and above and they will support you for years because they can see the difference that they make.

Sarah Stone: Yeah. Just reminding me of the wishlists that we created, basically put together a list of things that third sector organisations and community groups in their areas needed. People who were bidding for contract suppliers could then look at the list and pick things off the list that they could deliver. So it was kind of a way of matching need with supply. 

Zahra Hedges: The wish list that we did. They're not perfect, but they're a really good start for companies who are thinking, oh, I don't know what to do. And for charities who are sitting there thinking we can't afford to do everything we want to do. And I think the wish list are a great place for people to even see the possibility of what's out there.

Some of the wishes that charities were giving. I wouldn't have come up with it in a million years.

Sarah Stone: When you were talking about Winning Scotland [00:20:00], and you were talking about what you were doing. I was thinking a lot of the skills that you were describing teaching people to teach young people are skills that are really, really important to employers.

You know, it's interesting when you look at our education system was designed for the last century. There's a growing recognition that it doesn't necessarily serve the needs of the population in the 21st century where information. Readily available at the touch of a button, you know, so what's the point in revising and learning every single element in the periodic table when you can Google it.

Whereas in the past, when you couldn't find that information, having it in your head was really important, but now it's much more important to have soft skills and be able to communicate. And I was wondering whether you ever do anything with adults is all your work with children with young people. And do you ever do anything with Companies?

Zahra Hedges: Yes. And it is what we do. I had a really interesting conversation with Skills Development, Scotland, last week. And we were talking about work readiness and actually, the Times Education Commission published a [00:21:00] report that young people are not ready for work. And it's what I hear again and again, and again, whether they've done an apprenticeship or whether they've done university or whether they've come straight outta school, we're not giving young people the skills they need to thrive in a modern workplace.

So we are looking at that. We're looking. What is that gap? And is there a role that we can play? There are some people already in that space. So for us, it's about deciding what is the specific value that we can add, but there are things around collaboration, and you know, for me as well, you look at something like the banking scandals that have happened repeatedly, it seems, and we need young people in those environments. 

To be able to say, you know, that doesn't feel right to me. We need people to be able to go into environments where they are the newbie, where they're the person that doesn't know as much and to have the confidence in their own opinions and also to be able to take feedback and to take criticism. So there's an awful lot in there, and it's not something we have done, but it's something that we are looking to [00:22:00] do.

The meta-skills we call them, and we have done work with corporates. Our whole approach is that we work with adults who support young people. We don't actually deliver very much directly to young people themselves, because if we can train a teacher, she's got 30 kids in our class this year, and next year she's gonna have 30 kids.

And next year, she's gonna have 30 kids. So that's how we manage to create. Impact for such a small number of people that we have. So we do work in the workplace. We've worked with HSBC, for example, and interestingly HSBC, having their strategy and growth mindset, they have that as one of its values. I think.

So we've done work with HSBC, which is great for us as a charity because we get that support. And from their point of view, they've got employees who understand the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, and they understand how they nurture a growth mindset in themselves. You know, a lot of people who work in companies we've talked about this before is not drones or robots that go and work in these big companies that we all criticiGe, their parents, their caterers they're people who would pick litter up off the [00:23:00] street.

They're people who you might say hello to on the bus in the morning. So if we can empower them to understand some of this, not only will they be able to help the young people in their lives, but they will also find that they themselves are more able to withstand challenges and goodness. We've all needed to do that.

So for us as a charity, there is a challenge around what is your mission? What is your core purpose? Because you're registered, you're regulated on that basis, but there's definitely an argument to be made that we can. And we do work with corporates on the basis that it enhances our ability to deliver our core mission to young people.

The thing that sometimes people often forget is in a big company, you might have apprenticeships and you might have graduate recruitment. In the graduate recruitment scheme, people might think, well, they don't need any help because they've all got firsts from Russell Group universities. And, you know, they can do what we're asking them to.

No problem. Those kids are the ones who might never have had to struggle academically. I'm not saying they didn't work hard. They would've had to [00:24:00] work hard, but they might never really have had those moments where they're like, I can't do. They say that when you face challenges, that's when you discover who you really are.

So some of these kids who are on the apprentice programs won't have had to do that until they come into the workforce, and then someone who's senior to them criticises something that they've done, and they don't know how to come back from that. So we would argue that the work that we do around mindset is as important.

We work with an academic at Glasgow University who supports gifted children. And one of the things that we work with her on is the importance of mindset for high-achieving young people. Because if you define yourself, whether it's because you're really good at football, or you're really good at math or whatever it is if that's how you define yourself because your parents praise you for it all the time, you know, they, your best in your class at whatever that skill.

If something happens to challenge your perception of yourself, maybe you have a bad match, or you come across a subject that you can't do. Evidence shows that some of those young people just [00:25:00] stop because they would rather not be seen as bad at that. It's either they're gonna stop on their own terms.

Rather, what we would encourage them to do is to get through that blip. We call that the learning pit; we would say, get in the learning pit, embrace it because you're gonna come out better and stronger. So there's an awful lot that we can all learn regardless of how clever we are or how academic we are.

And we can all learn from each other in that regard. And so far as a growth mindset, a fixed mindset. It's a spectrum. Nobody is a growth mindset person. Nobody is a fixed mindset person. You'll have areas in your life where you're. Inclined to see challenges, a good thing where you're more inclined to embrace mistakes and to just think, well, you know what, that wasn't very easy, but I'm gonna get better.

And you will also have areas in your life where you absolutely can't see it like that. And that's what we are encouraging reflection so that we can all get better. 

Sarah Stone: I just wanted to ask you as well; you do lots of other things in your kind of outside life and away from Winning Scotland. You were Vice Chair of Social Enterprise [00:26:00] Scotland.

And you know, you've been a business advisor to social enterprises, and I think social enterprises and VCSC so voluntary organisations; they're organisations that, if you are not familiar with the sector, people often struggle. So I was wondering if you could just tell people what is a VCSE and why should somebody buy from them?

Zahra Hedges: VCSC is actually a term that is used by the UK government. And it's used, I think, more in England, the terminology that is more kind of universal across the UK. We talk about the third sector. We talk about charities. We talk about social enterprise. One of the complications is that there are not necessarily hard and fast definitions.

There are definitions of charities. So you need to become registered with a charity regulator. And what you do is you can raise money, whether that's shaking a bucket, or whether it's writing an application and you raise money from people or organisations, and you use that to deliver your charitable purpose, and your charitable purpose has to be predefined.

That's when I was talking earlier about corporate work that we have to make sure it fits our charitable purpose. Someone might come [00:27:00] along and say to us, can you do this programme for homeless people? Now that is a really good cause, but it's not our purpose. So charities do that. And then you've got businesses, the corporate partners that you work with, and in between somewhere, you've got social enterprises, and social enterprises are businesses that make money.

They might sell goods; they make sell service. What they choose to do is to reinvest the majority of that income into a good cause. There's a huge overlap between charity and social enterprise. Something like 75% of social enterprises in Scotland are also registered charities. But ultimately whether you're a charity, whether you're a social enterprise, you have decided that there's a social purpose, whether it's environmental, whether it's about people, whether it's about animals, that is your core reason for being.

If you decided one day that you didn't want to serve that purpose anymore, you would cease to exist the benefits of these organisations. Well, for me, all businesses should be social enterprises. [00:28:00] To be honest, I think that businesses need to take more responsibility for what they are extracting from communities.

And can they be generative rather than extract? So if you are an organisation, and you mentioned earlier, you know, paying shareholders and paying directors, and I appreciate that's the system that we live in, but I would also urge people to look at what are the benefits that you personally have had from a third sector organisation.

It might be that someone in your family had cancer and you had a Marie Curie nurse, or they had to go into a hospice, might be that someone has Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or dementia. The vast majority of that support is given from third-sector, organisations. It might be that your local high street has got charity shops that you pop into for some vintage goods.

Look at the children that are in your communities that are supported because their parents are alcoholics or are struggling in some other way. We all benefit from third-sector organisations. So we all have a responsibility, I think, to support them. And if you're a business, you're in a really privileged [00:29:00] position to be able to do.

An easy way is to look at putting social enterprises into your supply chain. If you're buying coffee for your offices when we're allowed to go in again, can you buy that coffee or tea from a social enterprise supplier of toilet roll? You can buy that from a social enterprise supplier, because what you're doing then is you're ensuring that the money that you're spending as a business is staying in the communities.

And then we all benefit in terms of charities that aren't social enterprises. You know, we talked earlier, there are ways that you can look at supporting them. That might be because you make them your charity of the year. It might be because you can look at what they need in terms of support. But if we don't, it's the same with public services and the public sector.

If we don't pay our taxes, then we're not gonna have repaired roads. We're not gonna have street lights, and we're not gonna have bins collected. If we don't support charities and social enterprises in some way, they are gonna cease to exist. And then what?

Sarah Stone: Yeah. Then where will we be? So powerful, and you're so right because we forget how sort of symbiotic the [00:30:00] relationship between the private, the public and the third sector is, you know, and we all rely on each other, and as workers, we all move between each other, you know, you can work for a charity and then get a job working for the public sector and then, you know, maybe go and work for a company.

And you're still the same human being. 

Zahra Hedges: Very few people, I think, who are, you know, selfish entirely want everything their own way and want to keep all their money and sit on it like a dragon, whatever it is, we all do care about whether it's the communities that we live in. And I think we need to, as companies, we need to get better at recognising that and allowing people.

To do that. We talked earlier about volunteering through the workplace, but we need to recognise and allow people to be 360 people and look at what we can do to support that. And it is amazing. Actually, when you talk to people, I spoke to someone yesterday inside a really big, you know, one of the world's largest companies.

And he said I wrote it down. Cause it was amazing. He said, I think social value is the best thing the government ever did, but I'm really disappointed because I think they [00:31:00] could do more and they could ask more of us and they should make more of it. I think sometimes the government are afraid of upsetting business.

And actually, I don't think some businesses would be that upset. And I think the businesses that would be upset by being asked to pay more or to do more. Well, those are the businesses that we shouldn't be supporting. There was evidence coming out that after the 2008 crash, there were businesses, private equity investors, and people who won big assets who were saying, yeah, we benefited from that, and we shouldn't have, we were rich.

We are already richer. And actually, if the government asked us to pay more, we would, but they didn't. We know that shareholder capitalism businesses have to pay out to their shareholders. We know that that has to take primacy. So it really is up to the government and businesses to have a really honest conversation and to see well where we are is not really working for any of us.

So what can we do differently? And this post-pandemic people we're talking about build back better. That hashtag was all over my social media. For about a year and a half, it's kind of disappeared a bit. Now I do have a fear that we're gonna go back to business [00:32:00] as usual when actually this is a wonderful opportunity to look at what we want to take forward.

Sarah Stone: We're not gonna go back to business as usual if you and I have got anything to do with it. 

Zahra Hedges: There's something else I was reading yesterday about the three horizons and people can look it up. They can just Google three horizons and may know more about it than I do, but you've got immediate if things carry on as they are.

And the problem with that is if things carry on as they are, whether it's an economic situation or whatever it is, things are not gonna carry on as they are. They're gonna get worse. And then you've got the third horizon, which is, well, what would our ideal situation be if we thought about the high dream for each of us as individuals and for us as communities.

That is the third horizon. And it's kinda so far away that we can see it, but it's sort of shimmering. And the second horizon is the most important bit because that's the bit that could go either way. It's when you're looking at technological innovation, or you're looking at new ways of thinking or new ideas.

Are those ideas gonna get harnessed by the first horizon and just amplify what we have already, or are they going to lead us into the third horizon? And, and that's where I think businesses really, [00:33:00] it excites me because what our business is about if it's not about innovation if it's not about doing something differently.

So if businesses can be part of this discussion, I think we'll all be richer for it. You could use social value to intentionally stimulate. Technologies that we need to create a market for, you know, so for example, if somebody's created a, and this is something I'm desperately looking to find, so if anybody knows where I can get one, I want to be able to buy PPE.

So personal protective equipment and not. COVID gloves. I mean like high vis jackets and vests, you know, for construction sites made from recycled plastic. So plastic bottles and I can't find a provider of that. So if anyone knows one, please let me know. But you know, say, for example, somebody in the UK had developed a product but needed a market for it.

And you are a procurer. You could say, we want to buy PPE this year, and we want it all to be made from recycled plastic that would stimulate the market. 

Sarah Stone: In Scotland, we have two wonderful opportunities. One is called Interface, and it connects universities with businesses. So what you would do is you would go to interface [00:34:00], and you would say, this is what I want to do.

I want to make high vest jackets out of plastic. And they would put a tender or a, you know, request for information out to all the universities in their network. And they would give you 5,000 pounds for it. So essentially, you might have three universities who would say, yeah, we think we can, we can have a go at that.

And you would pick one, and you don't get any money, but you don't have to pay anything either. Interface pays the university 5,000 pounds to sort of developing the idea. And then I think there's a second stage that if it looks like it's gonna go ahead. I think there's another 20,000 pounds. It really makes that accessible.

Partly because I wouldn't even know as a business that you could go and approach a university to work with you on something so that in itself, getting all that academic knowledge, it's really, really interesting. And the fact that you can get them to work with you on something that you know, that there's a market for because you wouldn't be asking for it.

If it wasn't going to sell, I don't know if that exists in England, but it's called Interface in Scotland. And we have something called Sytech, which is run by the Scottish government. And governments are not known for being entirely innovative, but this is a whole new way of doing procurement. And what sever tech does is the speak to [00:35:00] business.

It's mostly the public sector actually, but they also work with charities, and they'll say, what's the problem you're trying to solve. What's the challenge that you have often in procurement people rush to, this is the thing I have to buy. This is the solution that I need. And actually, it's about taking a step back and saying, what's the problem you're trying to solve.

They take that. They really batter out what's the challenge. And then they invite people to through Public Contract Scotland. So it goes out all through the official channels. But the difference is you could be a one-man band. Who has an idea who sees that thing and thinks I could do something with that?

And all they have to do is to fill in two pages with their ideas. Everyone's got the same chance. They all fill in the two pages, and then there's support a bit like with the Interface thing at each stage; there's support there's payment for the companies to develop that idea. And it means it's much more than the supplier and the buyer are working in partnership to design a solution.

Zahra Hedges: Civic tech, the name kind of implies it's all technology, but it means by the end of it as a business, there's less risk because you [00:36:00] are designing a product for someone who definitely wants to buy it. And as a public sector provider or as a charity, you are getting a bespoke solution rather than I always give the example of pens.

People saying, I want to buy a million pens when actually. It might be that what they need is a tablet or something completely different, but we immediately jump to, I need to buy X or Y. So in Scotland, we are moving down that path and I hope others take inspiration from it. 

Sarah Stone: I bet you there's loads of people listening to this supplier who are thinking, why have we not got this?

Zahra Hedges: If the public sector can do it, there's no reason why the private sector can do it and come up with something truly innovative. Part of it, I think, is about IP and people being afraid. Like I said, the third sector can sometimes be afraid to collaborate. Private sector is like that with bells on; if you can figure that out, you're gonna create something so much stronger that actually meets your needs.

So, yeah, that's a challenge. And if you're listeners who are in a big company that buys a lot of stuff, why don't you think about doing it a little bit differently? 

Sarah Stone: I also wanted to say, I've got a [00:37:00] friend, a colleague who works in social value space, and he's invented a new kind of fire extinguisher. And it replaces, you know, this one fire extinguisher it's much smaller than normal fire extinguishers, and one fire extinguisher can put out.

Three or four different types of fires. So you know how normally you need like one fire extinguisher for an oil fire and one for water. Yeah. You know, he's got one fire extinguisher that replaces, I think it's about three or four others, which not only is that you know, the environmental footprint much better, but also, you know, how fire extinguishers need to be safety checked every year or something.

You don't need five different safety checks. So that's not five different people in vans driving around checking fire extinguishers. So the environmental benefits of this thing are amazing. And obviously, it's a lot more cost-efficient. I kind of was just like, wow, this is incredible. And I, you know, said, why are you not like a multimillionaire

And he said because nobody wants to buy it. The system is set up to have, you know, a different fire extinguisher for every kind of fire. And that's what people are buying large organisations. That's what they're procuring. And he [00:38:00] just can't seem to get this new product into the market. 

Zahra Hedges: And that's so frustrating because people don't know they need it until they see it.

And we talked about this before that the challenge, when the people who are doing the procurement departments are so stretched and so tight, it's actually very difficult for them to know enough about what it is they're actually trying to buy. I'm sure it happens in corporates as well, where there's too much of a distance between the people who are going to use the product.

If you went and asked a facilities manager, would you like this fire extinguisher? I'm sure they'd bite your arm off. If you asked the procurement person, they'd say no, because we need to be able to tick these boxes.

Sarah Stone: And you know, you've hit a really good point because I don't think people realise quite how stretched procurement departments are actually in the public and the private sector weirdly because people think, oh, it's a private sector.

They must have lots of resources and lots of staffing, but they don't because. People don't realise how important they are. You know, they think of them as always back office functions. They cut them, you know, but actually, they are so important procurement departments. Anyway, thank you very much before we finish up one last [00:39:00] question.

This podcast is about learning from other people and sharing knowledge and. We don't all have the solutions. And so in that kind of spirit, I think it's always really good to get tips from people about things that they've used, things that have helped them with their job. What's the most useful resource that you use at work that you can share with people?

Zahra Hedges: There's one that I came across quite recently, and it was actually a colleague who recommended it to me. It's called Scribd and it's a bit like a library. You pay a monthly fee, and you have access to lots of audiobooks, podcasts, and eBooks articles. And what I like about it is that. It allows you to dip in and out of things.

One of the things that I'm good at, I think, is having quite a broad perspective, and it's because I love to read, and it's because I'm really interested in people, and script gives me a really affordable way to do that because, you know, if I'm buying a book, I'm like, okay, do I really want to buy this? Is this something that I'm gonna read cover to cover?

Whereas, because I've got this subscription that costs about 10 pounds a month. I can just dip in and out of stuff. And if I'm listening to something or [00:40:00] reading something, and I think actually this isn't quite what I thought it was. I can just put it back and get the next thing. And also they have non-work things.

So I just listen to a really good autobiography from a comedian called Cal pen who was in those movies, Harold and Kumar. Like stoner movies, but then he went to work for Barack Obama in the White House. So there's loads of interesting stuff there. And it's called Scribd, and it's S C R I B D. If you are in the UK, then you best get a gift subscription, and you can access all this content for free.

Sarah Stone: As often as you like amazing, another top tip. Thank you very much. And thank you so much for coming and being on today.

Zahra Hedges: Thank you for having me, and good luck with the rest of the series. I'm looking forward to feeding them.

Sarah Stone: Thanks for listening to let's talk social value with me. Sarah Stone. My guest today was Zahra hedges, and the show was produced and edited by Chris keen.