The Young Foundation practises what it preaches. Enthusiastic about social enterprise, it's entrepreneurial, the begetter of myriad schemes and spin-offs. On a tiny budget, £4.3m this year, it is the epicentre of social enterprise, the great hope for both the political left and right.
As much a "do-tank" as a thinktank, the charity is led by an intellectual and organisational buccaneer in the person of Geoff Mulgan. He wears, metaphorically speaking, no bandana nor pirate's earring; his style is cool and correct, almost professorial.
Yet the former Downing Street insider has a star to guide him who was unconventional, institutionally bohemian, a born mould-breaker: the main who gave his name to the charity, Michael Young.
Young, of whom a full biography would be welcome, was a propagandist, sociologist and Labour party activist who died in 2002. His empirical social research with Peter Willmott in the East End in the 1950s remains a benchmark in understanding the dynamics of cities and communities. He established the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green which, under Mulgan, has transmuted into the Young Foundation and, on present trends, is fast establishing itself as a global not just a British brand on the boundary where ideas meet practice.
Firework
Young was a firework and is credited with pushing for the formation of what became the National Consumer Council, the Open University and the Economic and Social Research Council, among other organisations. (There were near misses and failures, too.) Young's famous book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, captured the postwar fear that in becoming the sole currency of social success, examinations and credentials would exclude and oppress.
For the generation moving on and up in the 1960s and 1970s, the attainment of students in schools and colleges did seem to be outweighing the pull of their social backgrounds; now we know, however, that parental income and education count hugely. We don't live in a meritocracy after all. Able children from poor backgrounds are handicapped.
You don't have your base in Tower Hamlets without being intensely aware of social class and power, yet the Young Foundation is also inflected by an optimistic sense of possibility and emancipation.
Mulgan, by background, is a man of the political left. His CV touches the unions, the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, Gordon Brown (in an earlier incarnation as Labour's bright hope) and, since 1997, the very closest connection with New Labour, as a policy adviser in No 10 and subsequently as a civil servant founding the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.
Glorious descent
Mulgan's descent from heaven (to use the Japanese term) was always likely to be glorious when he left Downing Street three years ago. He could doubtless have chosen corporate wealth or academia - his scholarly outputs include Good and Bad Government and, later this year, a footnoted study of strategy.
Instead, he came east to pull together the threads of Young's institute, relaunch it and brand it as the place for thinking and action under the headings of innovation and enterprise, prefixed by the key word "social".
It is a rare beast, Mulgan says proudly. He simultaneously, and not without irony, recollects the foundation of the Institute of Community Studies 50 years ago "during a period of Tory hegemony, when Labour had run out of steam", and casts forward in time.
He and colleagues travel the globe running seminars in North America, South Korea and, on the subject of innovation and enterprise, at a school for senior cadres of the Communist party of China in Beijing.
The foundation's activities embrace what Mulgan calls classic research. In collaboration with a dozen other philanthropic foundations it is in the midst of a project to capture changing patterns of social need. Then there is local stuff. Young is an instigator and promoter of the neighbourhood agenda being pursued by Hazel Blears at the communities department.
It thought up such schemes as fix my street; it is helping refashion public policy to take better account of wellbeing; and is seeking to insert innovation in the school curriculum.
In addition, the foundation is heavily involved on its doorstep, with what is called the London collaborative. It recently organised a 24-hour retreat for London borough chief executives and will branch into more detailed thinking, and doing. "It's not classic thinktank stuff," Mulgan says, "we're bypassing the publications stage, to network ideas, to help the public sector make better use of 'intelligence'."
A consequence, he notes, is that the Young Foundation is less visible than it perhaps deserves to be.
New enterprises
The foundation is itself creating new enterprises in education and health. It is negotiating the creation of five or six schools for 16-19 year olds; it has venture capital backing to set up a new online marketplace for teaching and learning; it has social care and workplace health schemes and has been helping with Lord Darzi's review of the NHS.
And so on: leadership development schemes for the white working class and for ethnic minorities, action learning sets for British muslims.
Internationally, in association with the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, Nesta, Young is building "innovation" as a field of study and exploration, with partners in Australia, Spain, Portugal and beyond; the foundation is involved with the commission of the EU but seeking to push innovation up and away from the traditional association with scientific research and technological development.
The trip to Bethnal Green has become a must for ministers and moguls, Cisco and electric company, Philips among them, for finance as well as social capital has to be in the mix. Mulgan's Whitehall connections are multiple; Young is involved with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills as white paper proposals, such as innovation in public services, roll out.
And Mulgan, savvy, is broadening the foundation's offer, bringing Tories in - "most of our local authority work is with Tory-controlled councils", he points out, "so we are relatively protected against political swings".
Mulgan's list of activities is vertiginous as he moves seamlessly between dense practice and high theory - few have thought as intensely as he has about knowledge for police and how government, researchers and intermediaries might be more fruitfully configured. "How do societies think," he asks.
Or take the problem of taking innovative practice from its local context and bringing it to scale, applying experience in other or wider contexts; there's an intense practicality to Mulgan's thinking which may stem from those years of having to distil and present suggestions to busy and often distracted government ministers.
It's hard to discern the management model for what is now a fair-sized operation: is Mulgan, unconsciously or by design, replicating the chaotic style of Michael Young? He says there is a strong team in place that mixes wisdom, age and creativity. While he eschews a "try anything" approach, that last quality - being original and interesting is what he wants the Young hallmark to be. "In government," he says, "I ceased to be surprised by the thinktanks; they had stopped carving out new space."
Straddling bodies
But the best thinking is also doing. He talks of "straddling bodies", simultaneously inside structures of power and outside. Wholly out and you can't access power and money; wholly in and you lose creativity. Governments need bodies such as the foundation, able to think and do in useful ways but offering governments "plausible denial".
And that, presumably, will be the foundation's calling card if, as the chatterers now assume, Labour's era is over and a version of liberal conservatism and/or intra-UK nationalism colours politics. Mulgan already has lines out to the right. David Cameron and colleagues say they are keen on community self-help and social enterprise and the visitors' book in Bethnal Green shows they know where to turn both for ideas and examples.
