Impact and innovation

By Impact Hub Bradford for Ethos magazine: issue 13| October 2020

Bradford has long been a lab for social innovation, from the formation of the Independent Labour Party and Titus Salt’s workers’ village, to William Forster’s work on the first national education legislation; the first schools to offer free meals to children and the first UNESCO City of Film. With waves of Irish, German, South Asian and Eastern European immigration, the city has continued to be a place where a diversity of minds experiment with progressive ideas, to tackle social issues.

At Impact Hub Bradford, we see ourselves as one of many custodians of this legacy of social impact. By bringing Impact Hub to the city, we hope to be a platform for creating prosperity and a catalyst for bringing together innovators to tackle the city’s challenges.

We’re all natives of the city and third-generation immigrants with deep roots here — and careers that have taken us around the world; from Silicon Valley to the heart of UK government and the burgeoning social enterprise sector.

Our hopes for Impact Hub and our city aren’t just grounded in a distant legacy or our personal histories. They’re bound with the realities of a struggling city with pockets of low economic activity, education attainment and social deprivation, lower than regional and national averages.

The Bradford district is the fifth largest metropolitan district in England, with a population of around 534,000. Remarkably, 50% of the population is below the age of 25 and 90% is urban; 153 languages are spoken across the district, which is a unique nexus for diaspora drawn from around the world.

Our city’s youth, diversity and culture are potent ingredients for a risk-taking, experimental and creative culture of innovation. The city’s youth makes it innately entrepreneurial and its diversity offers a vibrant backdrop of social frictions and creative collisions that are vital for innovation.

We’re not the only ones who believe this. PwC’s Good Growth for Cities Index of 2019, found Bradford to be the most improvedcity in the UK, driven by a combination of new jobs, improving skills and a finely calibrated work life balance. This year, the Sunday Times also named Bradford district in the 20 best places for business in the UK and Barclays continues to advise the city as one of the best places to start a venture. As the city builds up to bid for the 2025 City of Culture, people sense innovation and creativity around them and see where they can influence prosperity and their own futures.

Our role within this new culture is collaborative, convening people and the private, public and third sectors around themes, to address our challenges:

Social innovation — tackling inequalities through boosting social innovation and the social economy, cementing our ambition to make Bradford the UK’s capital for social enterprise.

Arts and culture — with the run up to the 2025 City of Culture bid, the arrival of Channel 4 in Leeds and our numerous Arts Council-backed national portfolio organisations, creating pathways for young people and diverse cultures — and a new generation of cultural startups — will become a vital creative engine.

Diaspora — Bradford has has a unique role as a focal point of diaspora, drawn from across the planet: with 20% of the city from South Asian roots, a sizeable black, Arab and Eastern European population, we support the deepening of cultural and economic collaborations with the wider world.

Finally, our focus is fundamentally the people of our home city — for too long its young, its women and its minorities have been the underserved voices of Bradford. We believe the city’s path to prosperity means taking our work to these groups and assisting them in building a fairer city.

We’ve been exploring these themes and supporting these communities with innovative events — Red Bull’s Amaphiko academy, the TEDx conference, a resilient communities programme, working with the British Council and drawing new investment to the city’s voluntary sector.

This is just the start…

Kamran Rashid, Mandip Sahota and Imran Ali are the co-founders of Impact Hub Bradford.