Meet the Patrons interview with Roger Warnock, CEO of Young Social Innovators

YSI was founded in 2001 by homelessness campaigners Sister Stanislaus Kennedy and Rachel Collier who recognised a need to involve young people in the design of the responses to issues affecting them. Since then, YSI has worked with more than 180,000 young people and continues to engage up to 15,000 more every year.

Roger has an undergraduate degree in Geography from the University of Glasgow and an MBA with a focus on Strategic Marketing from Ulster University. He has also earned an array of fellowships and professional development certificates, including a diploma in management consulting, a qualification on the development of business models for a sustainable world from London School of Economics, and another on leading strategic projects from Said Business School at the University of Oxford. 

Roger began professional life as a project manager with various companies before his disillusionment with corporate world led him to set up his own company, RAW Outdoors, in 1999. After 11 years as an entrepreneur, he joined Castlereagh Borough Council as Economic Development Manager and, later, Northern Ireland’s Department for the Economy where he focused on research around social innovation strategy. 

A passion for youth support saw Roger take on an executive director role with the Book Reserve in 2014. The social enterprise provided technology and hospitality training and employment to young ex-offenders, an award-winning project which earned Roger international acclaim. He would go on to join the Young Foundation, a think tank specialising in social innovation to tackle structural inequality, as Programme Lead for Ireland. In 2018, he took over as chief executive of The Bytes Project, digital youth work charity. He’s been the CEO of Young Social Innovators since 2023. 

What are the biggest lessons you learned in your career?

A hard and fast rule when working with young people: never interfere. Make sure everything you do is youth-led because what you’ll find is that, if young people naturally come together and have conversations, they naturally co-create and innovation flows out of that. Where it breaks down is when old people like myself become involved because that disrupts their natural curiosity. If we want to tackle issues that young people are going to inherit from us, it’s up to us to support them and facilitate those conversations. If we do that, they will come up with the solutions.

What was the best advice you ever received?

We used to have a line in one of the programmes I ran: tread lightly and listen deeply. When you work with a group of people, you don’t know what their lived experiences have been. If you want to understand the issues in a community, you have to listen. 

How would you define your work style and how has this changed over your career?

The fellowships I’ve done have really helped me to understand myself. In YSI, we break people down into four seasons. I’m spring, which means that I’m super creative. But I’m also a winter so I’m super decisive and make decisions very quickly. Over the years, that creativity has been reined back as I’ve gone up the chain of command. I don’t get to be as creative as I used to be which is something that I miss. 

What have you learned about managing teams and individuals?

I’m very much a believer in letting people get on with their work. The tendency for some is to micromanage but micromanagement creates a culture of fear within an organisation. It leads to failure. We are what we say we are: Young Social Innovators. We’re about innovation. If you’re going to innovate, you’re going to fail, so let your people do that. If you do, they will show you their innovation and creativity. I constantly say that failure is only an issue if you don’t learn from it.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Slow down. Sit back and think about it. That’s what finally sunk in during all those fellowships and my MBA. When I was in my 20s, I just cracked on. That wasn’t always the best course to take. 

If you had not chosen your current career what you love to do?

I have a degree in geography. When I graduated, I had the opportunity to go to Tanzania to do research off the coast there. The local fishermen were using sticks of dynamite to fish. The idea was that we would survey the reef, so I would have been diving all day. I sometimes regret not doing that. Conservation is probably a career I would have explored if I hadn’t gone in this direction. 

How has AI impacted your organisation/industry?

Most charities are way behind the curve when it comes to AI. That’s primarily because, between fundraising, stakeholder management and other day-to-day activities, they don’t have the time to look at it closely. There are massive benefits, from my perspective, in terms of efficiency and streamlining processes and resources. Overall, it’s a good thing. There’s obviously a dark side to it as well, but I don’t think charities are even at that stage to worry about that. 

Why is R&D important in your industry?

We are looking at R&D more as time goes on. Indeed, one project we’re currently working on is the development of a sentiment dashboard so that young people can better understand the issues that are impacting on them. For example, in our latest annual Gen Z survey, 71% of young people say they’re worried about climate change, 26% are worried about peace and justice and 23% reported being concerned about poverty and inequality. Mental health and wellbeing don’t factor, but if you look at the school programmes, a lot are focused on mental health and wellbeing. That’s part of the rationale for developing the sentiment dashboard. We want to pull all the real data together and let young people understand the issues that their peers are worried about, as opposed to whatever the news media says they should be worried about. We have funding from three government departments for that and we’re also looking at wider European partnership to develop a European dashboard as well. 

From your experience, what are the current trends in learning?

A lot of our projects are advocacy-based, but there’s definitely a trend emerging around the use of technology and how we can use it as an education tool that drives social innovation. There’s a massive opportunity to harness technology to drive those innovations. Technology is open to everyone and can be an easy way to scale innovations for young people.

What are the biggest skills challenges to your business or sector?

In Northern Ireland, a lot of thought and research is going into how to build capacity for technology skills within the non-profit sector. The shortage of technology skills in this part of the world reverberates in the absence of things like EdTech and other sectors. How can we develop those sectors if the base level of tech skills isn’t there? 

What book would you recommend on learning, technology, business or understanding people?

I read a lot of Simon Sinek. He’s an author and speaker on business leadership and has written two or three books that I’ve come back to repeatedly over the years, like Start with Why and Leaders Eat Last. They are about understanding the baseline purpose of an organisation. More than a vision and mission statement, a purpose statement deals with why you are actually doing what you’re doing and then ensuring that the whole team gets behind it. I used it in previous roles where I took over some dysfunctional organisations and had to pull them around. I found the books to be hugely effective.

What are your favourite tools and resources in work?

Trello is our default tool for everything these days. It allows us in group meetings to put all our thoughts on boards where everyone can collaborate. It means we don’t have to write out minutes and have multiple tabs and files open all the time. For a charity we get it very cheap, so it’s fantastic for us. 

Any interesting podcasts or other media do you consume that you would recommend on learning, technology or business?

I’m not an avid podcast listener – although I do listen to The Rest is Politics with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart. I’m a massive reader. I start and end my day reading for an hour and I have an extensive library of books on social innovation and co-design. I find I’m better at reading than listening to the podcast or radio. If I’m listening to a podcast, my mind just goes to something else. 

Why is membership of Learnovate important to your company? What does Learnovate do well?

Learnovate is a great resource in terms of establishing connections and giving us access to Trinity College Dublin and the latest research into learning. That’s something that aids our strategy, which is founded on creating Green Papers and bringing our evidence base forward. Learnovate is a great way to do that. We want to find out what other research is going on. We’re really keen on that R&D side so if there is something being done that interests us, we want to have the option of collaborating on that as well.