For Gemma Collins, that sentence came from a secondary school teacher in Blackpool. “Think about university.” That was it. Simple, ordinary, and completely life changing. Because until that point, university wasn’t really part of the landscape Gemma could see.
This week’s article is a reflection on my interview with Gemma, portfolio lead at The Hg Foundation, for The Giving Habit, a new podcast miniseries exploring the grit, hope and creativity of social impact. Our conversation, perhaps more than any other episode, proves that anyone, anywhere can spark change.
Identity
Like many young people, Gemma’s sense of what was possible was shaped by what existed immediately around her. Retail, hospitality, local work. Perfectly respectable careers. Yet education, we know, can widen horizons, or at least create opportunity, more doors to walk through, should we choose to do so.
Gemma grew up in Blackpool, one of the UK’s most economically disadvantaged communities. Single-parent household. Eldest of four children. Free school meals. A hardworking mother doing her best to hold everything together.
It was a teacher who introduced Gemma to the Sutton Trust, the UK’s leading charity improving social mobility through education. That led to a summer programme in the United States, which led to Harvard, which eventually led to a career helping other young people discover possibilities they cannot yet see for themselves.
When Gemma tells this story, there’s no trace of self-congratulation, only gratitude. And perhaps that’s because she understands something fundamental about social mobility: Talent is universal, opportunity is not.
The dangerous myth of meritocracy
We live in a culture obsessed with the idea that hard work alone determines outcomes. Work hard, want it enough. Show resilience and success will follow.
Except it’s not entirely true. Hard work matters enormously, but exposure matters too. Networks matter. Confidence matters. Being able to imagine yourself in a particular career matters. If you grow up without seeing those pathways, the gap between your potential and your opportunities can become enormous.
That’s the space The Hg Foundation is trying to address, and a perfect fit for Gemma, who now works as a Portfolio Lead at The Hg Foundation, an independent charitable organisation funded by private equity firm Hg.
Full disclosure: Hg owns a significant shareholding in a company where I used to work, an enterprise software company called IFS. Also, The Hg Foundation once provided a grant to the IFS Foundation, a charity I chair that secures access to a decent education for kids living in remote, rural communities in Sri Lanka. I share this not because it affected my interview in any way, but transparency matters.
The Hg Foundation mission is deceptively simple: Remove barriers to education and employment in technology. Beneath that sentence sits a much bigger challenge. Technology shapes every aspect of modern life. Think healthcare, banking, education, government, media, transport. Artificial intelligence is only accelerating that trend, and yet the people building these systems still represent a relatively narrow slice of society.
Women remain significantly underrepresented in tech. Ethnic minorities are underrepresented. Young people from lower-income communities remain dramatically underrepresented.
A dangerous feedback loop
If technology is built by a narrow demographic, it inevitably reflects a narrow set of experiences. And if access to those careers remains unequal, the economic benefits of the future become concentrated in the hands of people who already had advantages to begin with. That’s not just a social problem, it’s an economic one.
One of the most interesting parts of our conversation centred around aspiration. Or more specifically, how aspiration gets formed. The HG Foundation works with young people as early as age eleven. At first glance, that might seem incredibly early to begin talking about careers in technology. Gemma explained why those early interventions matter.
At that age, children begin forming beliefs about what kind of person they are. Good at maths, bad at science. Creative, technical, or academic. Those identities shape future choices. Do I continue STEM subjects? Do I apply for that programme? Do I believe I belong in that room?
One of the Foundation’s partnerships is helping create what may become the UK’s largest technology work experience programme. Thousands of students. Hundreds of employers. Early exposure to careers many young people would otherwise never encounter.
These programmes are not simply teaching technical skills. They’re normalising possibility, because once a young person spends time inside a tech company, speaks to engineers, sees somebody who looks like them working in the industry, something subtle but powerful happens. The career stops feeling abstract. It becomes imaginable.
Measuring for impact
The most interesting thing about The Hg Foundation is that they are fully prepared to measure what actually works. Most organisations talk endlessly about impact. Far fewer are willing to rigorously test whether they’re actually achieving it.
This is where The Hg Foundation becomes particularly interesting. Gemma spoke extensively about the Foundation’s commitment to long-term evaluation. Real evaluation beyond vanity metrics. Randomised control trials, longitudinal tracking, and independent external assessment.
They want to know whether interventions genuinely change outcomes, and while that sounds obvious, it isn’t. Serious evaluation is expensive and time consuming, occasionally uncomfortable. It forces organisations to confront the possibility that some well-intentioned programmes may not work nearly as well as hoped.
From our conversation, The Hg Foundation appears deeply committed to learning rather than performative certainty, and that’s refreshing.
Rinse and repeat
Gemma repeatedly returned to the idea of iteration. Test -> Learn -> Improve -> Repeat.
It’s a mindset borrowed partly from the technology sector itself. The irony is that many social impact organisations still struggle with this. We often fall in love with intentions, when outcomes matter more.
If a programme improves confidence but not employment outcomes, that’s important to know. If mentoring works better than classroom interventions, that matters. If repeated exposure to employers creates significantly stronger results than a single work experience placement, that changes how resources should be allocated. Evidence matters, especially when resources are limited.
Corporate philanthropy is changing
One of the things I found particularly compelling about The Hg Foundation model is that it sits in an interesting middle ground. It is independent. The Foundation has its own trustees, its own governance and its own strategic direction.
Yet it also remains closely aligned to the expertise and networks of Hg itself. That alignment creates interesting opportunities. Employees from Hg contribute through skills-based volunteering. This moves well beyond tokenistic volunteering. It is grounded in the provision of real expertise. Advising nonprofits, supporting curriculum development, providing mock interviews, helping shape programmes. And perhaps most importantly, helping young people access professional networks that many privileged communities take for granted.
This is where modern philanthropy appears to be evolving. The old model was transactional, where money moved from donor to recipient. End of relationship. The emerging model is far more collaborative, and here I observed striking similarities with the interview I held with Rachel Engel from Macquarie Group Foundation.
These are examples of foundations acting as conveners, connectors, capacity builders, and learning partners. Gemma described bringing dozens of nonprofit partners together annually to share lessons, failures and best practices. I loved that. Some of the most valuable things in the social impact sector aren’t grants, they’re conversations. The ability for organisations tackling similar problems to learn from one another is essential. The social sector can sometimes become unnecessarily competitive. Funding scarcity creates that pressure. But the best organisations increasingly recognise that collaboration scales impact faster than isolation.
This collaborative spirit is something I observe in the volunteering work I do with The Majurity Trust in Singapore. Our home base is the Foundry, a co-working hub for social impact organisations. Renting a space at the Foundry is much cheaper, freeing up funding for project work on the ground. Regular workshops take place, sharing knowledge and practical ideas. The place is buzzing every day with collaborative interaction, and the door is always open to useful outsiders, like me, who want to contribute time and energy.
The elephant in the room
Running beneath our entire conversation was another enormous topic. The role of artificial intelligence in the social impact sector. While AI may create extraordinary opportunities, it is also reshaping entry-level employment pathways at extraordinary speed.
Gemma spoke candidly about growing concerns that many traditional entry-level technology roles are beginning to disappear. Some due to automation, some due to changing hiring patterns, some due to globalisation and offshoring.
That creates a worrying possibility. If younger workers cannot access foundational entry-level roles, how do they eventually develop into future managers and leaders? The challenge is no longer simply getting more diverse talent into technology. It’s ensuring the ladder itself still exists.
This is where organisations like the Hg Foundation may become increasingly important, because adaptability is now becoming a core workforce skill. The ability to continuously reskill, relearn, pivot, and remain curious. The future of work may belong less to those with static expertise and more to those capable of ongoing reinvention.
The hidden risk
Toward the end of our conversation, we drifted into a topic that rarely gets enough attention in social impact circles. Burnout. Purpose-driven work creates a strange paradox.
The work is meaningful, which makes it incredibly energising. But there is always more to do. Another young person to support, another programme to improve, another inequality to address. In many social impact organisations there are often three overlapping risk environments at play. A workforce that generally skews younger is susceptible to the stress commonly associated with long hours and heavy workload, while fast-growth and purpose-led organisations can be understood as conditions that can amplify burnout risk.
Gemma reflected honestly on working in the nonprofit sector during COVID. Like many people in social impact, the boundaries between work and life began dissolving. This period also crystallised an important idea in Gemma’s mind. The work matters deeply, but we are still human. We cannot pour endlessly from an empty cup. We need to take care of ourselves first before we can take care of others.
I suspect many people working in social impact need to hear that more often. This sector attracts people who care intensely. That is its greatest strength, and occasionally its greatest vulnerability.
The real story
As our conversation wrapped up, I found myself thinking less about technology and more about teachers. About Mrs Wade from Hodgson Academy in Blackpool. The teacher who noticed something in a sixteen-year-old girl and opened a door.
Beneath all the strategy, evaluation frameworks, impact metrics and programme design, the real story here is profoundly human. Someone believed in somebody, and chose to act. That belief created confidence, and confidence created opportunity. Opportunity created transformation, and now Gemma spends her life trying to recreate that process for thousands of other young people.
That’s the thing about social mobility. It rarely arrives through one giant intervention. Usually it begins with small moments. A teacher. A mentor. A work experience placement. A conversation. A chance. These are opportunities available to all of us, an opportunity to act and contribute. And sometimes, if the timing is right, those small moments alter the course of an entire life.
Based on an interview with Gemma Collins, Portfolio Lead at The Hg Foundation. You can view or listen to the full interview here.
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This post was previously published on Stephen Keys’ blog.
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