Meet The Founder: Mohsin and Sheena from Change Ahead
As part of our series showcasing our amazing non-profit and impact startup community, we chatted to Mohsin and Sheena, the founders of Change Ahead.
Thank you for joining me today, Sheena and Mohsin. To kick-off, could you describe what Change Ahead is?
Sheena: Change Ahead is a platform that supports vulnerable individuals to find support services, either online or within their local communities. We support people in the areas of housing, employment, wellbeing and having access to every day essentials.
Thanks, Sheena. I know that you worked for GE for a long time before founding Change Ahead; what inspired you make that career change?
Sheena: I was with General Electric for 15 years and last year, I decided to end that chapter. I’d travelled with GE around the world, learnt so much about finance, about business structure and organisation, policies, processes, tech, platforms - and now I can bring all of that knowledge to a start up and I can envision what I want it to be, and what I don’t want it to be.
So, I can use all of that knowledge and experience and have something more meaningful to me - have a social impact in a world where it’s really needed today. I really wanted to take what I’d learnt and put it into another space.
Mohsin, I know you’ve had a varied career history - what inspired you and motivated you to found Change Ahead specifically?
Mohsin: As you say, I’ve had a varied career path, but everything has been around property and finance from a business perspective. From a personal perspective, it’s been around charity, around supporting, giving - I was a special constable for about 7 years up in Yorkshire, I supported Keep Britain Tidy for a few years, I was a Cub Scout leader for a good number of years, and a mental health shout volunteer. A combination of those things were my experiences - which were fantastic really.
And then… life happened.
I ended up with different challenges; getting divorced; financial challenges; emotional challenges, and it all led to one thing - sleeping in a car.
So, here’s a landlord, plenty of properties and everything else, questioning “why am I still on earth?” It can happen to anyone, and that’s the point of Change Ahead.
Then, I met Sheena. She’s very organised, structured, has a great background. So we joined forces and said look, what can we do with the challenges that I faced, with our understanding of property, finance, business and life - and we came up with Change Ahead.
Sharing stories like yours is a central aspect of what Change Ahead do, isn’t it - how important do you think that is to humanising the experience of homelessness?
Mohsin: Sharing stories is fundamental. I have so many stories I’d love to tell… we don’t have enough time. Along our journey we’ve met so many incredible people. One guy - last Thursday - graduated his masters degree after 13 years of being homeless. My hairs stand on end just saying that.
It’s not just what we see on the streets; that’s a small element of what homelessness is. Right now, in the UK, there are 10 million people who are one month away from becoming homeless. It can affect any one of us at any time and it’s important to share those stories and lower those barriers of being uncomfortable. Only by sharing can we help other people.
What else does Change Ahead do to support vulnerable people?
Sheena: The whole culture and goal of Change Ahead is to collaborate with organisations to re-purpose skills and resources that are already out there. Through this collaboration we can really help vulnerable communities have access to these support services. They do already exist, it’s just a matter of highlighting them, bringing them to surface so that it’s available to people and its not hard to find them, or to find the right support that they need - so that they don’t fall through. It helps them on their journey to wellness.
Mohsin: We’ve just got a mandate to house 5,000 tenants, 5,000 people. Through collaboration - through our network of partners - we’re able to provide them with housing, with a deposit, with rent and even if they have pets, we’re able to provide them with pet insurance that helps the landlord feel comfortable taking on those tenants. So we’re taking the friction out of the market place.
We need systemic change, and it takes time for those wheels to turn. It’s not enough just to rely on the government, we need collaboration and partnerships to create this change.
Since you’ve founded Change Ahead, have there been any stand out highlights or challenges on your journey so far?
Sheena: What the pandemic brought to the surface was digital volunteers. A lot of us want to help, and a lot of us are also lonely - around 9 million are experiencing loneliness in the UK right now - and we all know that when you help others, you feel good.
That’s something we experienced in the pandemic - we had volunteers popping up and wanting to help in whatever way they could. It didn’t necessarily mean that they were there in person, but it did help us establish some of our processes, the platform design, it helped us outline what policies we needed, what culture we wanted to create, how to tackle social media strategies, and so on.
We also developed a Youth Executive Board and brought in young people to help us keep our ear on the ground, to help and guide us in some of the decisions we made as a startup. It was an opportunity for them to learn but also for us to have insight into experiences and knowledge from a different perspective - I was really proud of that.
In terms of set-backs, because we are a social enterprise we’re not able to find funding as easily as some more traditional charities. A lot of the grants we apply for are looking to fund traditional activities, rather than something like us that’s innovative, tech-for-good.
Sheena and Mohsin at London Tech Leaders, with 2 of their Matchable Volunteers - Sarah from Softwire and Aubane from Deutsche Bank.
Hypothetically speaking, if you were given funding now, what would you want to do with Change Ahead next?
Sheena: Definitely fund the development of the app - creating that platform and testing it. The platform that we’ve designed and want to create is a search engine that helps you find those support services online, in the areas of housing, employment, essentials… but its to bring that tech onto peoples phones, onto tablets for outreach workers, onto digital screens. This information should be available and accessible everywhere - that’s one of the key areas that I’d love to get funding for.
We’ve also met some incredible people, incredible volunteers and I’d love to get them on board officially to help make the support scalable.
Mohsin: Yes, definitely the scalability opportunity - Sheena and I are very focused on what we do but there’s only 2 of us. We’ve got a great set of volunteers, about 27 at the moment, who are wonderful, and have great skills. The only problem is, they all have full time jobs and - quite rightly - are only able to give whatever time they have available or is allocated to them through their CSR programme etc.
But we do also need full-time people, so it’s all about people, hiring and scaling.
Do you think employee volunteers will always be a crucial part of Change Ahead?
Sheena: Definitely. You’ve got 3 types of volunteers - those who are digital, who like and share and comment and help spread information to people; you’ve got volunteers who want to offer their digital skills or time in the evenings, and you’ve got the peer to peer volunteer who actually wants to work directly with vulnerable people, who wants to go to go and visit them, run errands for them, and have that touch base regularly.
There’s all types of volunteers through Change Ahead and it’s really up to you where you’d like to support the organisation.
Thank you so much for chatting to me today Sheena and Mohsin - I’m very excited to see the Change Ahead platform on every phone, tablet and computer screen in the UK and beyond!
Sheena: Thank you Lauren and thank you to everyone at Matchable for volunteering, you’ve been a huge support and we couldn’t do this without you, so thank you.
Mohsin: Exactly, and we’ve made some great friends as well through Matchable, so thank you to everyone.
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