FOUR SETTINGS, ONE OBSTACLE
Impact
A special education school, a constituency office, Zoom lessons and a Khmer village. The Unspoken Policy spearheads change through tangible impacts.
Project Flare
BIWEEKLY, SINCE 2025
Meet-the-People Sessions
WEEKLY, SINCE 2024
Project Reperio
WEEKLY, SINCE 2025
Overseas service
NOVEMBER 2024
Building sustainable models
Meet-the-People Sessions
The session runs whether I turn up or not. That is what makes it an institution, but it is also the problem: it runs on volunteers, none of whom are paid to be there. Roughly half the cases need Mandarin and there is no guarantee the next volunteer will speak it or return regularly. A service that depends on who happens to show up is a fragile one. The answer is probably not more volunteers, but someone for whom showing up is the job.
Project Flare
There is never a shortage of volunteers. A new cohort arrives every year. The problem is that everyone leaves within two years, so the supply is constant and the experience is not. Whether the next team inherits a programme or starts one depends on how much of the curriculum, the training and the school relationship exists in writing rather than in people. Our first school partner withdrew before launch, and Project Flare restarted at Grace Orchard because the curriculum and the training were written down rather than held in one person's memory.
Project Reperio
Students finish without an exam or certificate, and formal work options are heavily constrained. We teach a second track of practical skills. That is realistic, because it matches the work they can currently access, but it is also an accommodation, because it treats that limit as a ceiling. I keep asking what completion is worth when no institution recognises it, and whether the answer should change what we teach.
Overseas service
Clean water and reliable lighting are not problems a school fundraiser can solve. They are governance problems that go back decades. We raised three times what we were asked to, and it bought what it was meant to buy: four pathways and six solar street lights that were working when we left. What it did not change is why the village needed us to raise it. Some problems a project can relieve. Others are produced by something a project cannot reach, and I did not know which I was in until I got home.
Communication is a skill which I can master with time. The harder challenge is how to pass this skill to others. How it is funded and staffed, what institutional support it has and what survives being handed on are all questions which are worth exploring through research.
These four problems are not only funding problems. They are problems of obligation: once the founders leave, nobody is contractually bound to continue the work, and none of it produces an outcome for which an institution can be held accountable. I learned that in the placements, and one thing more: money follows whoever can be held to a result. That is why social enterprise interests me, not because earned revenue beats donation, but because a paying counterparty creates an obligation a donor does not.
Whether that obligation can exist where the work itself is unprotected by law is a legal question before it is a commercial one. That is where I would begin.