Why Care? #10: Andrew Fairbairn - Creating Equity
“To ignore reality for as long as people have is a cultural illness, quite frankly – a delusion”
In this episode Nadia talks to Andrew Fairbairn, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) London, a Charity set up engage young people from low socio-economic backgrounds and create opportunities for them that would otherwise have been unlikely for them to attain due to societal inequity.
Andrew discusses the intersectionality between ethnicity and socio-economic status which can doubly disadvantage these young people, resulting in a lack of access to professional career paths and low self-worth driven by their lived experiences in these domains.
He explains how SEO London aims to combat this by working on a daily basis with a broad spectrum of front office executives and HR leaders at global multinationals to offer placements to talented young people on the programme. The programme encourages student self-belief, and provides them with the skills needed to thrive in the corporate world.
Andrew talks of the bigger picture. “It’s not about you, it’s about those who come after you”. He hopes that their work can go on to create a ripple effect of workplace opportunity for underrepresented groups and that a community of like-minded people will emerge who not only want to develop themselves but also the community at large.
Finally, Andrew leaves us with his thoughts on the intersectional impact of COVID-19 on those from ethnic minority and low socio-economic backgrounds and the importance of acknowledging this in order to create equity in our society.
Show Links:
Get in touch with Andrew at:
Email: info@seo-london.org
Transcript
Andrew Fairbairn 00:00
When you get beat down too many times, the incentive to get up the fifth, sixth, and tenth time is smaller and smaller and smaller, and you get to sort of extinguishment of hope in some communities.
Nadia Nagamootoo 00:11
Hi, my name is Nadia Nagamootoo, Business psychologist, coach, speaker, and founder of Avenir consulting, which creates organisational growth and success through inclusion and diversity. We've been discussing the benefits that diversity brings to a company's bottom line performance for decades with more and more evidence, but there are so many questions organisations still have about how to achieve it. How do you create a culture where people feel valued for their uniqueness and the qualities they bring? I believe it's crucial to the future success and sustainability of every organisation that they find the answer to this question to make sure that each employee is not only supported but also appreciated. With this podcast, I aim to get some of the key challenges to creating inclusive workplaces out in the open and start uncovering the solutions to embracing a culture that cares for everyone. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most inspiring people in different countries and across industries who are pushing the boundaries on inclusion and diversity in the workplace, from topics such as parenting in the workplace, ethnicity, age, gender, mental health, and all things inclusion. I want to create a movement to change society by sharing life experiences and creating more empathy and connection. Why care?
I believe that once we have organisations and societies that accept and value everyone for who they are, we become healthier, happier, and better in our roles both inside and outside work.
Hello, and welcome to Episode 10 of the Why care podcast. My name is Nadia Nagamootoo, and I am your host. In this episode, I have the privilege of talking to the Chief Executive of SEO London, Andrew Fairbairn, a charity he set out in London which supports talented young people from ethnic minorities and low socioeconomic backgrounds to achieve career success. For me, this work is absolutely critical in creating equity in our society. They work with large corporates by acting as a bridge to connect them to disadvantaged young people who otherwise wouldn't even think of applying for jobs in their organisations. Together, we speak about why young people from underrepresented groups need such support, the cultural barriers, and how the SEO London model works as a virtuous cycle to achieve sustainable equity for the future. We also delve into the underlying reasons for the inequality presented by COVID. I really hope you get as much out of listening to Andrew’s insights as I did. Enjoy.
Andrew is an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for dedicating a little bit of time, I know you're incredibly busy, to speak to me today, I really appreciate it.
Andrew Fairbairn 02:46
It's my pleasure.
Nadia Nagamootoo 02:47
Only recently actually I heard about your organisation, so sponsors for education opportunity, or SEO London and to be honest, I was absolutely fascinated, a mutual colleague of ours put us in touch. And I was just like, this is amazing work and I just thought I have to speak to you if you had the time, of course, and to learn more. So maybe you can tell me and everyone who's listening to a little bit more about Sponsors for Education Opportunity, London, and your path to the chief executive.
Andrew Fairbairn 03:20
Oh, sure. That's a long and winding road. It's a good story and we have a little bit of time. So I'm happy to launch into it. SEO London is a copy-paste of a predecessor model in New York that's been around for much longer. SEO, New York was actually founded back in 1963, Kennedy was still president, and the civil rights movement in the United States was in full flower. The optimism and idealism of that moment in time, got behind a programme to get young people from tough New York City High Schools up and into universities. That initiative carried on and did very well over a period of years until there was the sense in 1980 that a lot of the people who were beneficiaries of the programme were getting into university. They were getting out of university and getting jobs but they weren't necessarily getting those elite roles and really defined socio-economic opportunity and progress for themselves, their families, and the communities that were coming from. So at that moment, a new programme was born, which focused on summer internships at some of the leading investment banks on Wall Street in New York. From humble beginnings, 10 kids, I think there were four banks that started it off, the programme grew and grew and grew and it really struck a nerve, and it was actually that programme that I participated in back in 1995. When I think about it, there might have been 500 people on the programme but from 10.
Nadia Nagamootoo 04:52
So, you found out about it from the university, did they come around to your university to promote it or…?
Andrew Fairbairn 04:58
It was word of mouth in my case. I was playing a late-night card game with some friends, I can still remember very clearly who was in the room, the cards flapping across the table, and being told, yeah, you should totally check out this SEO thing, it'll change your life, it's amazing, etc. So, I played it cool, of course, like, yeah, whatever, okay, sounds good but the very next day, I went to the Career Centre, and I was like what is this SEO thing? So, it was back then, it was really pre-internet, there's mailing and I think emails had just sort of come online as a thing you could do. I recall mailing in an application to New York and having a phone call and a phone interview, which was, subsequently there was an in-person interview where it was a really tough and stressful process to get into SEO at that time. Anyway, I somehow made it through and that process got me an opportunity to be a summer intern at Lehman Brothers, which then yielded down the road of opportunities to work at UBS and then Deutsche Bank. And it was Deutsche that transferred me from New York to London, one fateful day in a sort of 1999, having arrived in London, looking around thinking, gosh, the SEO model could really work here and a lot of people could benefit from it.
The trading floor of Deutsche at the time and the sort of the corporate offices at the time, I think, frankly, a lot today still, we’re just deeply un-diverse from an ethnic perspective, at least. And so, I thought, well, why don't we just do this and just like New York in 1980, in London in 2000, we started with seven kids at five banks, humble beginnings and so that's where SEO came from. The thing that is most impressive to me about the model is that it moves beyond the classic band Aid model of community service and social intervention, to be something that's actually sustainable on its own merit, and yields an if you do it right, a constant upcycling of opportunity for young people. I've done lots of community service in my life over the years, whether it's soup kitchen-type work, cleaning up a community garden, or that kind of activity. All of which is really good and important and helpful, and so on but what happens the second you leave that community garden and you leave that classroom that you may have given a talk at, things revert back to whatever they were before quite rapidly. With SEO, the model engages young people, it creates opportunities for them, and instills in them the value of giving back. The mantra that we refer to again and again inside the organisation is, it's not about you, it's about the people who come after you.
It's the best thing about what we do because it means that we can help some kid get a job at XYZ firm but that's only the beginning of our relationship. That's like the minimum criteria satisfied, the rest is now alright, you've made it you're now doing M&A at Goldman Sachs or it could be corporate law at Allen and Overy or it could be sales and marketing at Google or whoever we might be working with but that's just the beginning. The next question is alright, so now you're in? How can we help you succeed? How can we help you rise? How can we help you make it to the top of that organisation? And moreover, who can you bring alongside with you? So who can you train in the dark arts of how to be successful at your job, so that we can pass that knowledge back to the next generation to create that sense of belief, share that information, and then turn that into skills development, and again, recycling and upcycling of opportunity across individuals, families, communities, and when you do it for long enough for the society.
Nadia Nagamootoo 08:36
I love that mantra, it's not about you, it's about the people who come after you because, for me, it signals exactly what you're talking about that, the ethos, the systemic shift in the purpose of SEO London which is we're not after a small change here. It's not just about one person, this is a ripple effect, we want a knock-on effect, so that we create tidal waves of change, essentially, in society. And so, how do you instill those values? How do you ensure that everyone coming through the programs and everything that you set up within SEO, I know you work in schools, and you work at the university level and I know you've got some alumni, so how do you ensure that you've got that tidal wave starting?
Andrew Fairbairn 09:21
We spend a lot of time trying to ensure that we communicate that value, that you've got to start somewhere. So we talk a lot about values and we talk a lot about the mission. The truth of the matter is we don't get 100% results on this. There's always some kid who's excited to get the job, get the money, get the Ferrari, and drive off into the sunset but we don't need 100% to be on board. If we have a strong group of committed folks who get it, understand it, and are ready to reinvest the values that they've received back into the next generation, a small group of committed citizens is what changes the world, we'll try and spread that as broadly as possible. We have to be realistic that not everyone is going to be bitten by the altruism bug but the reality is that we've seen the effect. A, we're still here after 20 years and B, we've seen our operations grow today to encompass thousands of students. You described a little bit of the shape of our programming, dealing with undergraduates, dealing with secondary school students, and all the alumni that have been through the programme. As a community, SEO London is dealing with over 20,000 people on a basis, then we've got our LinkedIn followers and our Facebook and Instagram and all those other platform followers, it takes us over 40, 50, 60,000 people tuning into what we do and how we do it.
So the model works and we find that any hour spent or any minute spent energising our alumni and having them give back highlights for the next generation, we're coming up like, oh, gosh, you know, if these guys who have been through the programme and are out in the world doing cool stuff, they're actually coming back to help me and they're not getting paid for this, this is amazing. I think there's a great hunger in our sort of modern society for people to be a part of something bigger than themselves. [Nadia: I think so too]. So, people will find that in a variety of functions and features of life, maybe it's a church group or a temple group or maybe it's a football club or where the army could be a lot of different things but in our little way, SEO London is really thinking about a building of the SEO family. It's a community of like-minded people focused on the development of themselves and their communities and the society at large. When we look back at the year 2000 when we started, not a single one of the firms we worked with nor any of their peers in the city had a diversity and inclusion officer or strategy or anything planned, look at it now.
Nadia Nagamootoo 12:03
When have you seen that shift?
Andrew Fairbairn 12:05
We've seen a shift from industry to industry. So the big American investment banks were among the first and then by 2007, the law firms suddenly flipped the switch and started getting engaged. In the last two or three years, you've seen the asset management community suddenly figure out the plot, we have to celebrate that, this is a natural evolution of an idea whose time has come and different organisations bring different human capital models and different histories. For instance, it's not a surprise that the asset management industry is slower than the investment banking or consulting, or law industries because they have a radically different human capital model. The banks and consulting firms and law firms can, I think, be fairly stated as having a churn and burn model of young talent, a lot of people come in and a lot of people go out after two or three years.
In an asset management and a fund management context, so many other firms and professions intake is perhaps smaller and when people arrive, they tend to stick around a lot longer too, this is a very different industry and a different way of engaging talent. So, we're humble about this and realistic about this and I think we understand that firms are on different timelines, and industries, likewise, are on different timelines. Within that, every firm and within every industry is comprised of a grouping of individuals, and the right individuals are on different timelines too. So, our work is geared towards meeting firms, individuals, and industries where they are and helping them get to the next step. We don't need a 100% solution every time, we can get a 50% solution, it's better than nothing and we know that with time if we just continue to press, encourage, challenge, motivate, and find value on both sides of the equation, it will take some time, we've got some time and we'll get there. Yeah.
Nadia Nagamootoo 13:55
I'm curious about the last 20 years. So, you know, SEO London has been going for say 20 years now and that critical need that young people from underrepresented or disadvantaged groups needed over here 20 years ago, what sort of shift have you seen, and I'm hoping it's a positive one. To what extent have things improved from 20 years ago to now, in terms of the need or maybe it's a different type of need, just curious about what you've seen.
Andrew Fairbairn 14:29
One of the biggest shifts is just the move from a very niche topic being talked about, thought about, and acted upon by a few firms, that level of engagement has now gone mainstream. So, any firm worth its salt of any size, even a lot of smaller firms is now thinking about this, talking about this, and trying to find solutions for this. That's a huge sea change in the underlying society and I think we can only call that positive.
Nadia Nagamootoo 14:56
So, are you finding it easier to get in with organisations to talk about SEO London's work and influence them to offer places to some of the people on your programs?
Andrew Fairbairn 15:07
Oh, absolutely. I don't sell actually, I mean, we take inbound interest. And just last night, I think I had two new firms, this is not a problem of firms no longer interested in the topic, firms are falling over themselves to deal with this and as I say, that's only positive, we're frankly struggling to keep up with the demand from our side of things, which is, again, wonderful and positive. What the challenges that we face as an organisation tend to be with trying to figure out where on that spectrum the firms are, some are sincere and genuine about this, and we are interested in advancing the cause of folks around them in the community and bringing a social good. Others are just as excited to do more with the diversity but they're thinking more from a business case perspective and then there are others that are just ticking boxes, there it is, working with the framework of what we have is a reality that we wake up with every day and deal with every day. So when you deal with a firm that is totally bought in on the social case and the business case, it's a very easy set of conversations but other times you'll have the other end of the spectrum, where you are destined for trouble and where you'll have a firm that all they care about is some ROI metric, they've got to hit a number.
Though, perhaps the worst expression of it that I've come across is a large professional services firm that should not be named, having someone who's clearly very junior in a recruitment organisation, call us up cold and say, I need nine black kids in the next six weeks and I'll pay two grand ahead. Essentially, I mean, I'm paraphrasing slightly but that is the message, right, that is not the way forward. From our perspective, we work with what we've got and try and get it to a positive place to think about the strategic objective here, which is, as a charity, we're interested in the society benefiting and we are interested in the young people we serve benefiting. The firm's and that tacky recruitment objective is merely a means to an end for us, it's not the end, for too many firms, for them, it stops right there and you get the notion of, I need x people and y z of a certain color and that is done, their job is done. They're not incentivized to think beyond that very narrow band metric and that's just a recipe for failure because you're going to get those kids into those seats and you've done nothing to talk about retention. You've done nothing to talk about progression, staffing, learning and development, and all the things that actually make for a successful career, no matter who you are in an organisation.
Nadia Nagamootoo 17:43
It rings alarm bells completely, doesn't it? That it's been handed down to some more junior recruitment person just to make the call and get the people in, says something about the leadership values in that organisation, about the value and the weight that they're placing on inclusion and diversity. The inclusion part particularly because actually, all they seem to be concerned about is the diversity part, let's just get the numbers in.
Andrew Fairbairn 18:08
We need to get folks in the door in the first part. So, I don't want to be disparaging, but recruitment is a fundamental aspect of our world and our work, we do recruit every single day all the time. I think it's just a function of where their remit begins and where their remit end and whether is it joined up with a broader strategy. I think in too many cases, it's not joined up and in too many cases, folks are executing their job, they're doing what they're being asked to do. It's just that what they're being asked to do is not, as I say, joined up to a bigger coherent strategy and that's where you end up with short-term gains two steps forward and two steps back. You asked also about the challenges for the students, I think for students, we're living in a bit of a golden age for diversity and inclusion, such that as I say, firms are coming to us asking, please can you help.
As agents for the students in our world, we see an unparalleled moment in time when firms are aggressively seeking out young people. So the challenges are now centered around information sharing, training, ensuring that students have the belief in themselves, that they can access these opportunities and be successful in these opportunities and then once they're in that they have the skills to be successful. So we've moved from the original challenge of, as was said to me, 20 years ago, here in England, we don't have a diversity problem, we have a class problem. People are happy to talk about that in the UK 20 years ago but now I think people understand that it's not just one, it's perhaps two problems and you've got to make waves to get any impact on either of them. And there's the intersectionality between class and race as a whole other topic, in addition to that.
Nadia Nagamootoo 19:49
Absolutely, particularly for those University aged people on your programme, what do you see then as the biggest gap in that group of disadvantaged or underrepresented people? Is it their knowledge of how to access certain jobs? Is it their access to people such as role models in those industries or sectors? Is it how they apply their skills or how to apply for jobs? Is it emotional? Is it some life skills? Or is it just a combination of everything?
Andrew Fairbairn 20:19
It is a combination of everything, you see it enough that patterns emerge, I think the first thing that students suffer from is a lack of information, they don't know what they don't know. If you've grown up, coming up the hard way, say, you know, what's referred to as a cold spot of opportunity somewhere in this country. And then all of a sudden, a job opportunity at a class global multinational firm lands on your desk, the odds that you're gonna say, ooh, that's for me, are very low because A, you don't know who this company is in the first place. You may have heard of them, they might be a multibillion-dollar operator, that's crushing the ball in the industry but you've never heard of them because they're not in your world. So that information is the first bit. The second piece is that personal belief of oh, yeah, I've heard of XYZ firm. I've heard they have some pretty good jobs, I've seen them in the newspapers or whatnot but is that something for me? There's a whole other question of self-belief, self-worth, and a sense that this is an opportunity that I could do well. There's a third layer which is a sense of, well, yeah, I've heard of them, I'm aware of the opportunity, I think I could probably do this if I applied myself, but they don't want me.
So, it's a belief but sort of an external lens on the same which says that's for middle-upper-class people, not for people like me, even though I could do it if I wanted, they don't want me. And then another layer because there are many layers is to say, alright, so I've heard of this company, I could do this, they're talking the game like they want me but I don't have the skills? And how am I going to get the skills, where am I going to get the skills I don't know any people in the space who can help me break in. And so thankfully, that's a solvable problem. SEO London exists for all of those elements. Now, what we can't control is sort of the last layer perhaps, which is that sense of personal grit, drive, motivation, and an internal demon that's driving you to get up every morning and perform at your best and win. Not everyone wakes up in the morning and competes like Usain Bolt in their life, you can't magically construct that. What we can do and what we try to do is to encourage people to understand what their potential is and to give them the tools to sort of realise first by baby steps but then by sort of leaps and bounds, to give them a sense of what's possible for them so that they understand how if they apply themselves, they can impact their lives of those around them. You can't manufacture grit but you can go halfway there in terms of giving people up the knowledge of, ‘if you persist, here's some cool stuff that can happen’.
Nadia Nagamootoo 22:57
I imagine it could be disheartening when you enter school-aged children and see almost the skepticism, the cynicism about the system that they've already had so many lived experiences of being discriminated against or being bullied because of who they are or their background and that they've already developed these defense mechanisms and the low sort of self-worth or self-belief that anything is possible. Is that an assumption that I'm making? Am I wrong in thinking that?
Andrew Fairbairn 23:27
Well, I think it's quite real. It does evidence itself in different ways, in different populations, and in different geographies. I think you'll find some particularly immigrant populations are gung ho. A lot of self-belief and expectations that, you know, I'm going to own this, I'm going to win this. and I think I see that deficit of self-belief, frankly, showing up more in non-immigrant communities or maybe second or third-generation communities or for that matter, White British European heritage kids. I think that deficit of belief is quite real in that community. Now, if you're from an ethnic minority and you have a whole bunch of other barriers but at the same time, you do see again, in the community and location, some discrepancies between more highly motivated populations and less highly motivated populations.
Nadia Nagamootoo 24:17
Fascinating. And obviously, we're talking about a hugely complex system but that's a combination of whether you're first-generation UK born, second generation, whether your parents speak English, and whether English is your first language, the demographics of the population within your school, for example, it could be a whole combination.
Andrew Fairbairn 24:36
I don't know the detailed statistics in this country. I know certainly from the US experience, that a full third of all university placements in the US are for African American Black Heritage. African heritage students are occupied by West Indians and Africans relative to the domestic African American population, which is vastly larger than the immigrant population, but it's those Jamaican, Trinidadian, Bayesian, Nigerian, and Ghanaian immigrants who come in and are by virtue of whether it's the self-belief or the engagement of their parents that believe in education is the way forward, they are investing more in education than the domestic population and doing better in terms of university placements, and ultimately, success. Nigerians in the United States do incredibly well, Jamaicans in the United States doing very well but yeah, the local population by virtue I think of having been, frankly, oppressed for so many years, don't have that belief, they have lost that faith in the system. So when you get beat down too many times, the incentive to get up the fifth, sixth, and tenth time is smaller and smaller and smaller, and you get to sort of extinguishment of hope in some communities. And again, that's a US experience but they're absolutely parallels to the UK experience.
Nadia Nagamootoo 25:56
I don't know specific statistics but I have looked this up. I'm a governor at all girls’ secondary school, so I was curious about how the demographics of university places, and what they looked like in the UK. And I believe it's similar in the sense that sort of the Black African heritage, there are fewer people entering universities, there's more Chinese, more Asian, Indian, Pakistani, and again, it is an assumption, again, that sits behind that but it could be cultural, there could be a whole thing. History plays a huge role, as you mentioned oppression for the Black African community in the UK, and how that still plays out in terms of their self-belief and their belief that they can make it and be justifiable in their place at university.
Andrew Fairbairn 26:44
Yeah, information is one thing, as I say, belief in oneself is another thing, belief that the system will accept you as a third, and on and on down the chain, where can you get the skills? Who's going to provide them to you? And once you're in now, we have a whole other realm of challenges around, you've managed to survive and get access but how do you not thrive and maintain and grow? So at the other end of this conversation.
Nadia Nagamootoo 27:08
I'm interested in something that you spoke about in your talk at Google, which is, when you were explaining the programme, you said it's for young people coming up the hard way and giving them a leg up. And I'm just curious about I suppose your words here around what you mean by coming up the hard way. What is the hard way? And why is that leg-up needed?
Andrew Fairbairn 27:31
Well, I think it reflects what we've been saying here, it's coming up the hard way. It can be a lot of things but in our world and in our work that is going to be translated as deficits in information deficits, belief deficits and opportunity deficits, and social capital.
Nadia Nagamootoo 27:47
What I'm getting at I suppose it's hard to measure, isn't it? How do you avoid the backlash of a positive action programme and initiative like SEO London? Clearly, I get it but not everyone does, that there is a deficit, that something isn’t balanced here.
Andrew Fairbairn 28:05
The conversation for the most part has moved on but as the sort of diversity and inclusion agenda, so to speak, has become mainstream, it's more exposed to more people. So I think you always have some form of people scratching their heads about why are we talking about this. Back in 2000, I remember when we started, we kept a very, very low profile because the culture was not ready for what we were doing. So we didn't talk about it and I remember getting the occasional email or call from somebody saying this is reverse discrimination, and blah, blah, blah. So what we did was like, listen, people who need to know about us are gonna know about us, people who get it are going to get it and people will be served, for many years, that's how we operated. And it was only after a number of years that we started to poke our head over that parapet and say, the world has actually changed, let's go spread the word, the mainstreaming of diversity and inclusion, it's created two countervailing factors.
One is more people get it, more people are up for it and more people are excited to impact the world around them in a positive way. And likewise, you have more people scratching their heads just because they're coming across this for the first time in their world. I think this is where things like for women, the me-too movement, for Black people in particular minorities more broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement have come to the fore. You really have to have your head in the sand or in a darker place, shall we say, to not get it? I mean, you really are not paying attention. If you still don't get it after me-too and Black Lives Matter, I don't know if we need to give up on you but you've got a much longer journey and I'm not going to waste my oxygen on someone like that. I'm not going to be worried about someone like that because that's like talking to a table, you're not going to get a response that makes any sense, so we press on with what we've got. One of the things mentioned earlier is you don't need 100% of people on board to get things to go on, if you've got a hardcore group of people who believe, you can change the world with that.
Nadia Nagamootoo 29:53
Yes because I come across these sorts of conversations on a small scale, where you're right, people are processing these new concepts, for them new concepts, for the first-time privilege sort of structural advantage and intersectionality, all of the things that we understand and how to create equity in the system, and that distinction between equality and equity. It's fascinating to see people's responses sometimes because it's an incredibly emotive subject, isn't it? It makes people feel like either something exists that they weren't aware of and maybe they've played a role in reinforcing it or hang on a second, I'm not sure I quite agree with this because isn't our system based on meritocracy, so everyone should get a place in an organisation for who they are, these qualities and the skills that they bring rather than the color of their skin. So, there's a lot of confusion and emotion around it, is what I find.
Andrew Fairbairn 30:53
Yeah, as you'd expect, for sure. That being said the facts are facts and disadvantages are rife. And we can talk about saying that we live in a meritocracy today but again, you'd have to be coming from a point of very poor information and perspective to not be able to see playing on its face that we don't live in a meritocracy. Are you kidding me? There are meritocratic elements in our world and our economy but the tables are absolutely skewed every day. And so, this argument against positive action or affirmative action, you might say in the States, that is missing so much of the reality of our lives, that I am consistently amazed that there are still people who don't get it. I'll give you an example of France today.
So take it away from the UK, France is suffering from an existential challenge at the moment where they believe sincerely, and these notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and I have to add, what's missing is reality. They're missing a key element of the puzzle, which is, we can live in a world of ideals and the French are really good at ideals but when it comes to life on the ground, just take a look at the French society and you see the banlieues outside of Paris, huge swaths of the population, just not integrated at all into the life of the community. Those grand words and grand ideas could add to that meritocracy, free markets, and all those things, these are wonderful ideas, wonderful theories, wonderful principles but they have to have meshed with reality at some point, and to ignore reality is for as long as some people have is a mental illness and frankly, it's a delusion.
Nadia Nagamootoo 32:47
So for those organisations, certainly the people who are listening now, 2020 has been an incredibly tough year, obviously, COVID being the main thing that people have been talking about this whole year, leaders have struggled in many ways just to figure out their way navigate their way through 2020 and even think about 2021. So with those restricted resources time, what would you say to them in terms of why it's still important, despite all of the other challenges to focusing on programs like SEO London?
Andrew Fairbairn 33:22
COVID needs to be addressed in its own right. It's a fundamental challenge to society and the health of the community and so it sits in its own world as a priority for folks to deal with. And it is, indeed one of the biggest things we're dealing with in the world today but that's not to say that there are not a lot of other things going on in the world today that need to be addressed at the same time. To focus on the intersectionality between race, ethnicity, and COVID, as a starting point, folks who are coming up, let's say it the hard way, are in communities that are systemically disadvantaged and those are the folks who are going to be living in the most polluted areas. Those are the folks who are going to be working in jobs where they can't like do work from home, the safe and clear space where I don't have to get on the tube, if I don't need to get on the tube, people are just going to be more exposed. Nurses, bus drivers, and people who are essential workers in our system, many of them are coming from backgrounds that are going be ethnic minorities and so on, and they're more exposed to COVID.
They are living in situations where they may be having more people and multi-generations living in the same home because frankly, they can't afford to be living in some spacious place in the garden. To divorce the two is to miss part of the point, to say that there is a choice between one and the other is to create a false choice in my mind. You don't deal with COVID by not dealing with ethnic matters, they're hand in glove and there's any number of other arguments that where there's less overlap with COVID specifically that you could still say, well, we still have to deal with the greenhouse gases and we have to deal with war, poverty, and malnutrition and so on. COVID obviously needs all our attention. We all need to be working to get rid of that and on balance that needs to be a center of focus but to say that it's not linked to the others or its choice of focus, I think is perhaps an unnecessary split.
Nadia Nagamootoo 35:18
Yeah. And that's very well put, actually. So we're coming towards the end of our conversation, and this whizzed by, I'm wanting to make sure that organisations know if this is the first time they're hearing about SEO London, despite I know that you do an incredible job of getting your name out there but it's possible people are hearing this for the first time. How do organisations get in touch with SEO London to talk about being part of the programmes, in supporting the ethnic mobility that you're offering?
Andrew Fairbairn 35:46
Thank you for asking. Certainly, the simplest and easiest way to get in touch and learn more about what we're doing is via our website, so that is SEO-London.org. So SEO-London.org and our contact information are there. We typically get loads of emails into our info at SEO-London.org inbox on a daily basis and certainly folks can reach out to me directly, it's just Andrew.Fairbairn@Seo-London.org.
Nadia Nagamootoo 36:16
On social media, are you active? Or is SEO London active?
Andrew Fairbairn 36:20
Oh, sure. I mean, we're on LinkedIn, I mentioned that we're at 42,000 followers on LinkedIn, that's probably our primary outlet. For those who are more Instagram oriented, we have all commanders of sort of live streams there and we have a Facebook page. I'm being told that we now need to have a Snapchat presence but I haven't downloaded that one yet. We'll get there one of these days.
Nadia Nagamootoo 36:42
Yeah, it takes a while, doesn't it, to sort of immerse yourself in the social media world and figure out what platform everyone's using but that's fantastic. Thank you so much, Andrew, for sharing all of your insights today, sharing about the programme, sharing about your path and sharing about the systemic issues that we face and still face in the UK, and all the amazing work that you're doing at SEO London.
Andrew Fairbairn 37:06
My pleasure and shows like this are really adding to the conversation, broadening awareness, and getting more people involved and it's a pleasure to be a part of it. Thanks very much.
Nadia Nagamootoo 37:15
Thank you. Well, everything that Andrew and I've spoken about today is going to be available on the show notes page, the usual place Avenir consulting services.com under podcasts. Andrew, I look forward to speaking to you again very soon, I hope, and if anything I can do else to support you, let me know.
Andrew Fairbairn 37:33
Great stuff that's gonna change the world.
Nadia Nagamootoo 37:35
That concludes Episode 10 and season one of the Why care podcast. We covered a lot of ground there. I loved how Andrew crushed the concept of meritocracy and also his pragmatic approach to those who are still in denial that inequity exists in our system. He's right, we don't need 100% to get things going, with just a few we can change the world. So powerful and so true. Do let Andrew and I know what you thought of today's show. You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter with the handle Nadia Nagamootoo. As always, I really appreciate your support of this podcast or leaving a review on whatever platform you're listening to and spreading the word by sharing it with your friends and family. Huge thanks to Mauro Kenji for editing his podcast and Aaron Ferry for supporting with the show notes.