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Responsible Tech Leadership for charities & social enterprises — meet the trainers

Eva Appelbaum, Kiran Kaur, Marcus Smith and Tom Tobia are more than up for the task of helping charity leaders feel more confident with difficult digital choices.

Throughout March, with support from the £1m DCMS Digital Leadership Fund, Doteveryone has committed to training up to 75 charity and social enterprise leaders to help them make Responsible Technology standard practice within their organisations.

We put the call out last month to CEOs, leadership teams and trustees to apply to attend one of the five seminars we’ll be running across the country, in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester.

In just a few weeks we’ve sold out and are buoyed to see so many leaders in this sector keen to embed responsibility into the way they work.

The training builds on what we’ve learned from running a similar programme with ACAS and the Greater London Authority, led by our digital leader’s consultant, Alex Mecklenburg. Alex has previously written about the core principles that underpin the programme.

This time, however, the funding is enabling us to train four trainers, working in a similar field, in our methodology to deliver the programme on our behalf.

And we’re very pleased to introduce you to Eva, Kiran, Marcus and Tom — four incredibly inspiring and impressive people, coming from a variety of backgrounds and with wide-ranging experiences. They will help to maximise the potential reach and impact of the programme to support charity leaders to:

1. Explore and understand the impact of digital services (procured or/and created)
2. Understand how their mission, vision and values are able to guide them to take tech decisions or make trade-offs
3. Connect strategy, policy, and delivery to create principles and practices to do this

Strengthening the social sector to use technology well and to sustainably serve their beneficiaries in a rapidly changing world isn’t a small job.

It’s going to be a challenge but they’re more than up for it. 💪

Meet the trainers

Eva Applebaum (@evaapp)

Eva is co-founder of the transformation consultancy Arc and has been working with digital technology since the 1990s.

Eva was Amnesty International’s first global digital director and later led digital transformation for BBC marketing. She has worked with organisations such as British Airways, Department for Education, Action Aid, AXA and GSK.

“Technology has moved quicker than our ability to make sense of it, to frame it, to apply values to it. The digital industry itself is not incentivised to look for evidence or research scenarios that may threaten their business interests. Responsible leadership is imperative so that we consider the unintended consequences of our technology use and investments. We can harness the creativity and potential of digital innovation, while ensuring that an overriding ‘duty of care’ for people and society is woven into our decision making.” — Eva

Kiran Kaur (@KiranNotKeiran)

Kiran is co-founder and CEO of GirlDreamer and consultant in Accessibility and Inclusion.

After deciding not to pursue a medical career, she took a gap year where volunteering as a mentor turned into her co-creating one of the first female empowerment enrichment programmes in Birmingham secondary schools for the countries most marginalised girls of colour.

Using Google and YouTube to teach herself business and finance, she became the Operations Director of GirlDreamer before furthering her responsibilities as the CEO.

Kiran has been featured on BBC Asian Network, ITV News and the BBC and co-produced a multi award-winning documentary film about a project she co-created that set up the UK’s First Women of Colour Longboarding Crew to use sport as a tool for social change.

Kiran’s efforts to connect and empower more women digitally has earned GirlDreamer’s blog an award as one of the “Top 10 UK Millennial Blogs”, whilst her new found coding skills is leading her to set up digital skills programmes for women of colour run by women of colour.

“I hope, through taking part as a trainer, to share what I learn to empower local communities and organisations to feel more confident about making informed decisions within the digital world. I also want to help them to be able to think more broadly, when they’re creating new technology or digital platforms, about how they can affect everyone.

But by the same token, I’m quite nervous about delving into something that’s new for me and working within a completely different environment than what I’m used to. But I do love a good challenge, so I’m choosing to focus more on that!” — Kiran on the Responsible Technology Leadership programme

Marcus Smith (@mnrsmith)

Marcus has over 15 years of experience as a project and creative freelancer, working in Bristol, London and New York. He is currently an Immersion Fellow on the South West Creative Technology Network led by the University of the West of England and Watershed in Bristol.

Marcus also conducts young problem gambling awareness workshops for Addiction Recovery Agency, drawing special attention to smartphone apps, loot crates and eSports. Here’s a recent news article he wrote on young problem gambling for The Bristol Cable.

You’ll also find Marcus on his new weekly radio show ‘Think Globally Act Locally’ — joining the world music dots with local news and views on Bristol Community FM.

Tom Tobia (@tomtobia)

A creative entrepreneur, Tom has led the early-stage development of many projects and organisations that explore new models of learning, working, community collaboration and emerging technologies.

In 2013 Tom co-founded Makerversity; a social enterprise now Europe’s most exciting community of creative startups with campuses at Somerset House, London and Amsterdam. Makerversity has been recognised by The Observer and NESTA as one of the Top 50 organisations in the UK ‘radically changing Britain for the better’, and by Network of Innovations, Culture and Creativity in Europe as the continent’s most socially innovative creative business. Tom now works with other social enterprises, charities and impact focused startups to help them shape strategy and build happy, motivated teams.

Tom lectures at Sheffield Institute of Arts (Sheffield Hallam University) and is a Trustee of Yorkshire Artspace. His work has been exhibited at the Design Museum, Barbican and the V&A, he has written for industry-leading publications.

“I’ve seen the challenges of attempting to lead an organisation responsibly first hand as the cofounder of a social enterprise and know how hard it is. I wish I’d been involved in a programme like this seven years ago!

I’m inspired by Rachel and the Doteveryone crew, and their very refreshing habit of saying really smart things very simply — even I understand what they’re talking about. I’m excited to learn more about how they utilise this deceptively difficult skill in a live setting.

But I’d say I’m nervous about understanding how to support workshop participants in effectively bringing what they learn back to their charities and teams. So often momentum built up in an inspiring day can be lost once the dust settles. I’m looking forward to tackling that issue head-on.” — Tom on the Responsible Technology Leadership programme

About Doteveryone

Doteveryone is an independent think tank that explores how technology is changing society, shows what responsible technology can look like, and builds communities to improve the way technology shapes our world.

We want industry to build technology that considers its impact on society, we want the public to have a greater voice in shaping technologies and we want policymakers to make informed and responsible decisions about the ways we use technology.

If you’re running similar programmes or would like to find out more, we’d love to chat. Get in touch at [email protected].

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Responsible Tech Leadership for charities & social enterprises — meet the trainers was originally published in Doteveryone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.