Economy turned TWO this year. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
As 2017 comes to an end, we’re doing the nostalgic looking-back-at-the-last-twelve-months-and-feeling-good-about-ourselves thing we did last year… because, well, it does just make us feel quite good.
This time last year, we’d reached over 100,000 people via our news and entertainment platform; put together a group of over 30 expert journalists, reporters, and editors working with us to reform economics in the media; featured across the UK press to talk about why economics communication needs to change; and partnered with the RSA to launch a toolkit to kickstart conversations on economics among friends, families, and communities.
If last year was about getting people excited about our cause, this year’s been about working with everyone we can get on board to make change happen. Luckily, it’s not been too difficult to find willing partners: turns out pretty much everyone agrees economics needs demystifying, including some pretty awesome, and sometimes unexpected figures — from Charlotte Church, to Mark Carney, to George Monbiot. Good for us, that.
So once we were confident that our cause was the right one, we set about experimenting with pretty much any idea we could think of to achieve the really hard bit – how do you go about making economics accessible, engaging, and relevant for… everyone?!
Digital news
With the support of Cardano Insights and Friends Provident Foundation, our editorial platform has covered everything from religion, women, and love, to the Paradise Papers, the gun industry, and Brexit in the past year. We’ve reached over 200,000 people online, made our social following four times the size of what it was last year, and collaborated with the BBC, HuffPost, and UNILAD to create economics content like you’ve never seen it before.
We were on the BBC on the day of the Spring Statement to explain what it’d be all about, and on the front page of the Guardian the day after the Autumn Statement to call for more transparency and clarity from the government on their economics policies. We’ve also featured on Talk Radio, The Independent, i News, BBC Business, and Russia Today to talk about… well, you know.
Are you a journalist, editor, video producer and keen to work with us? Get in touch with our editorial team at contribute@ecnmy.org.
Schools work
Funded by BlackRock Philanthropy, we’ve launched our Discovering The Economy Accelerator programme in schools across London. Using the toolkit we developed with the RSA last year, we run five week workshops with 14–15 year olds on what exactly the economy is, how it works, and where they fit in. A plan is a-brewing to launch a campaign to get economics into schools, too (fun fact: it’s already supposed to be there in the ‘E’ under ‘PSHE’, but its not essential, and teachers don’t have great support).
Our schools outreach work and ‘Discovering the economy’ toolkit sessions have reached over 700 people in the last year!
If you work in a school and would like to run a toolkit session, drop Ali Norrish a line on ali.norrish@ecnmy.org. If you’re interested in being involved in our schools campaign, contact Joe Richards at joe.richards@ecnmy.org.
Community outreach
We’re also extremely excited about piloting a Crash Course in economics for marginalised communities around the UK, made possible by Esmee Fairbairn. It’ll be a ten-week course (with lots of tea and biscuit breaks) run in partnership with local organisations around the country, designed to demystify the economics of everything from money, to government, to globalisation, and encourage you to think about how you could change the economy around you.
To find out more about the crash course, and perhaps sign up as a host or volunteer, email clare.birkett@ecnmy.org.
Institutional campaigns
Just last month, we released our first research report sharing everything we’ve learnt so far about why people find economics so difficult to engage with, and how the subject needs to change. It’s based on YouGov polls with over 5,000 people across the country, 35 in-depth interviews with our deep, and everything we learn every day in our on and offline experimentations with understandable economics.
Read our research report here
We co-hosted the Bank of England’s ‘Future Forum’ break-out sessions in Liverpool, where members of the public could grill the bank’s governors on what they actually do. We got a personalised shout-out from the governor Mark Carney, which was pretty nice of him.
Finally, this year we’ve secured funding from the Barrow Cadbury Trust to launch an Alumni Network with our sister charity Rethinking Economics, which will lay the foundations for a network for any and all enthusiasts of pluralist, understandable economics to help shift communication of the subject in their organisations.
If you’d like to be part of the Alumni Network, get in touch with our Head Of Engagement Antonia Jennings on antonia.jennings@ecnmy.org.
An awesome team
We’re lucky to have pretty brilliant people working behind the scenes to make our mission happen. We were thrilled to welcome Louise Russell-Prywata, Aoife O’Leary, Rachel Rickard-Strauss, and Ann Don Bosco to our trustee board this year.
We’ve also been joined by our editor Ellie Clayton, who bans the jargon and brings out the gifs in our economics reporting; and seen Clare Birkett and Ali Norrish morph from Operations Officer and Researcher into Crash Course Coordinator and Schools Manager respectively, because Economy staff have magic powers like that.
And the generous-est of funders
We know better than anyone than nothing runs without the $$ (or rather, ££) to back it up, least of all the Economy. So we’re incredibly grateful to our funders – Cardano Insights, Friends Provident Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Golden Bottle Trust, BlackRock Philanthropy, Esmee Fairbairn, and of course to our individual donors who’ve supported us with a grant or a monthly donation.
If you’d like to support our work, donate at www.ecnmy.org/donate.
