Meet the Solutionist: Baroness Lola Young

AA:

You’ve made a phenomenal impact throughout your career - Chancellor of Nottingham University, former Head of Culture at the Greater London Authority and key shaper of the Modern Slavery Act. Why have you chosen to work with Futerra at this point?

LY:

I’ve known about Futerra and its work for some time. When I met with Solitaire and Lucy more recently to hear about Futerra’s approach, they talked to me about ‘Logic and Magic’. This mixture of creativity and facts, the technical and the emotion made total sense to me. Of course, Futerra has a massive reputation around environmental sustainability, which inevitably incorporates social justice to a degree. Joining Futerra is an opportunity to make that connection much more explicit and, perhaps, do so in a way that hasn't done before.

I've been involved in social justice in very broad terms for some time. But I'm just recently coming to the realisation that environmental sustainability and social justice have to be inextricably bound together, because they are. I have also worked with a lot of organisations in the creative and cultural sector, but they have tended to be unimaginative when it comes to addressing issues around social justice, and more recently, environmental justice. My question has been: why aren’t we applying the inherent creativity within the cultural sector to these issues? Because that’s where we could do something exciting and compelling.

Joining Futerra is the chance to bring all these things together: social and environmental justice and creativity.

AA:

You’ve talked in the past about the power of storytelling to tackle intertwined social and environmental issues – how has this idea evolved for you?

LY:

When I was about six years old, I wanted to be a writer. For various reasons, that was never going to happen, but I have gone on to write a lot and, of course, been involved with the cultural and creative sector. Being honest, my real consciousness around environmental sustainability wasn’t until fairly recently when I became involved with the fashion industry, setting up a group within parliament to address fashion, ethics and sustainability. These two things, the storytelling on one side and environmental sustainability and justice on the other, have been parallel interests for me.

AA:

Why do you think that business has been slow to see environmental sustainability and social justice should as intrinsically linked?

LY:

There are several reasons, but what immediately springs to mind is that we are brought up in a very compartmentalised society, which starts in the education system. In the UK, even in primary school, everything's divided into neat subjects, and you don't learn how to read across those different subjects. And it gets more clearly delineated the further you go along your educational career. At university, you study one subject and very few are making the links between say, geography and history. When you think about government departments, the same separation happens. How do you make that connection between The Department of Health and The Department of Education or The Department of Media, Culture and Sport? It’s also been difficult for a lot of people, particularly – dare I say – in Western Europe, to put together those pieces of injustice, for example the true ramifications of colonial history on the present day.

When it comes to the environment, businesses have historically focused on measuring their environmental footprint or their carbon emissions. They’ve skipped over the complexities of how misogyny, gender discrimination, racism and poverty are connected to climate change. It’s often too challenging to some people's fundamental conception of themselves.

I do think this is palpably changing now, in business and government. It's becoming more commonplace to talk about social and environmental issues together. And now I want people to add history into that mix. A historical perspective will help us more clearly understand how the two work, I think.

"Environmental sustainability and social justice have to be inextricably bound together"

AA:

How could creativity help with some of these challenges?

LY:

It's got imagination. Innovation is the bedrock of the cultural and creative industries. I’ve watched the fashion industry change in the last 10-12 years. Big players, like H&M, for example, have statements on their homepage about sustainability. It shows there are movements, things are happening. But the key thing now is to make sure these businesses go beyond statements. They need to do the radical thinking (and action) to transform their business models. That's why I keep saying: “You're creative, get on with it. Find a solution that’s going to alleviate the anxiety of your customers without encouraging them to keep buying clothes that they don't need.”

But the creative sector has got to stop thinking of itself, as it does, of being pioneering. Because it isn't necessarily the case. They've embarked on this journey a little bit later than some others.

"They’ve skipped over the complexities of how misogyny, gender discrimination, racism and poverty are connected to climate change. It’s often too challenging to some people's fundamental conception of themselves."

LY:

And I'm thinking, well, these are police officers beating up black people and setting their dogs on black people who are just walking on the street or sitting in a cafe. That can't be right. So that's where my broader social justice ideas were informed, and that developed as I got to know more about gender discrimination and later, ablism, which is also a crushing form of oppression. And as I started to learn more about environmental sustainability in the mid-80s I started to see narratives of oppression in the environmental movement. I remember reading an article in the 80s, about migrants being the cause of environmental problems. When I started to trace those ideas back through history, you can see they were directly connected to Nazism and eugenics.

AA:

Is there a dream project, sector or collaboration you’d like to pursue at Futerra?

LY:

My huge love is football. I’ve done some work to galvanise clubs in the Premiership and the top half of the Championship to be more aware of Modern Slavery and child trafficking in football. But there’s so much more potential to work on all of ESG, particularly the Governance piece as the Boards tend to be full of old white men. And I do think there’s a lot more that could be done in the creative and cultural sector, in film and in theatre. And of course I want to continue to keep the energy and enthusiasm for social and environmental justice up in the fashion industry.