Teach First

Teach First. Now there’s an organisation that really is making a difference.

It was founded in 2002, and it takes graduates from top universities and turns them into teachers and/or leaders. Here’s the deal. Top graduates are trained so they teach for two years in the toughest and most educationally disadvantaged secondary schools in London, the North West and the Midlands.

After two years they either stay on as teachers, or join one of the sponsoring companies as an employee. The hundred or so supporting companies – Cadbury Schweppes, HSBC, McKinsey’s, Microsoft etc – invest in the charity for two reasons. Reason one is social conscience – help the community by helping to put quality teachers in the schools where they are needed.

Reason two is that the Teach First graduates who after the two years decide not to make a permanent career in teaching go to work for them. And they are a very special graduate intake, because after two years of teaching tough kids in tough secondary schools their communication skills, and their planning, organisational and creative skill, are way beyond anyone who hasn’t been through the experience.

Indeed, Teach First turns them into both elite teachers and elite human beings. Teaching, business, industry and society all benefit.

Teach first recently got a fantasically positive Ofsted Report. There have been 1000 plus participants in the scheme since it started, and this year two of the graduates joining the scheme were beneficiaries themselves of it. Yes they attended two of those educationally deprived inner city schools.

Today, a difference

An extract from the site:

Get started by doing something today. Find a simple way to make a difference to someone in the next twenty-four hours. Devote between five minutes and half-an-hour to it. Your budget: anywhere from nothing to an hour's wages.

It could be as obvious as carrying someone's groceries. It could be buying a book for a friend. It could be phoning someone who's unhappy or troubled.

Choose something simple but worthwhile, and go do it. Then see how it makes you feel: our bet is that you'll feel more fulfilled immediately.

Nobel Peace Prize winner: Mohammad Yusuf

Mohammad Yusuf is the man who started the micro loans revolution. An economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh, he was devastated by the poverty around him, worsened by crop failure and famine that was going on at the time. He determined to find some way of applying the economic principles he was teaching to the dire state of the personal economies of people just beyond the campus gates.

He spoke to some of the villagers to see if he could do something – anything – to help. Talking to an old woman selling bamboo stools, he discovered she was making a profit of about 2 US cents a stool. This was after paying 20 cents for the bamboo.

What made her profit margin so desperately small was that she, along with countless others, was so poor she couldn’t fund the 20 cents capital for the bamboo. She had to borrow it from a moneylender, at an extortionate rate – sometimes as high as 10% a week. In reality she was a bonded slave to the moneylender, with no chance of breaking out of the vicious circle of slave labour and debt.

Yusuf sent a student to the village to find out how many other people were in the same situation, and how much there total debt was. The student reported that there were 42 people in a similar situation, and their total debt was $27.

Yusuf, realising such people were outside the conventional banking system, and thus unable to get bank loans, took the money from his own pocket. He told the student to lend the appropriate sums to the villagers on the firm understanding that it was a loan, not a gift, and that they should pay it back when they could afford to do so.

The villagers were enraptured, and took – and repaid – the seed corn money that helped them to survive through their own hard work. Yusuf realised this could be the mechanic that fanned the spark of personal enterprise and initiative that could pull them out of poverty.

The scheme spread, despite the resistance of conventional banks, who thought lending to such people was absurdly risky. In fact, their trustworthiness was outstanding. As the operation grew over time, two remarkable facts emerged.

The first was that 94% of loans were to women. The second was that 98% of loans were repaid – a much higher figure than for conventional banks.

The scheme grew (with little help from the financial community) into what is now the Grameen Bank. It has cumulatively lent over $5 billion dollars since 1983, and set countless people who were hardworking and honest, but penniless, free from financial servitude.

Well done the Nobel Peace Prize committee for recognising this fantastic act of Difference Driving.