 Hi everyone and welcome to the final session in the working in the think tank sector event today. We've got about 20 minutes to think about the role of membership organizations and how they differ and interact with think tanks. And to help us do that we have a wonderful panel of speakers including Denise Hawks from the Royal Economic Society. We have Adarsh Ramchur from the RSA, Jonathan Shaw and Clive Gilbert from Policy Connect. We'll shortly be giving you a brief introduction but just to explain the format. After we've been around the panel we'll be taking some questions via the Q&A function at the bottom of your screens here. So do be submitting questions as we speak or you can raise your hand a little bit later if you would like to speak to us directly. In all likelihoods we probably won't be able to get to all of your questions today but don't worry they won't go to waste there will be an FAQ that will follow up. Just to briefly introduce myself. I'm Graeme Griffiths. I'm the assistant director at the Living Wage Foundation. And we're a membership organization in the sense that we built a network of over 7000 accredited living wage employers who will pay their staff according to the cost of living. I also think of us very much as a campaign organization building intelligence and power in order to influence social change. Worked at the Living Wage Foundation for about five years now overseeing the growth and retention of our membership, which has secured pay rises for a quarter of a million people and put 1.3 billion pounds back into the pockets of low paid workers. I'll be going round the panel now. Denise, if I come to you first, do you hope you to give yourself a bit of an introduction. Yeah I am. Thank you very much. So I'm Denise and my day job is as Head of Department of Economics and International Business at the University of Greenwich. I'm also a visiting professor at UCL Institute of Education. What's important is that Royal Economic Society is a learning society and a membership organization. And the point of a learning society is to promote the subject of interest and of course the game is in the title. It is economics. This is the point of being promoted at RES. Royal Economic Society is the chair of Education and Training Committee so I'm just entering my second year of this role. And the point of the committee is to kind of bring a working group together with academic economists and the staff at RES to build our education and training activities. This is a range from everything from undergraduate economics all the way up to professors like myself and CPD events for professional economists. And the point of all those activities is to just bring together the biggest minds in economics and those who are interested in economics and try to get new thoughts in the field. We have an annual conference, Royal Economic Society conference and big journals. But the big piece of it is promoting economics and public understanding of economics and mostly done through Discover Economics campaign, which is the real innovation and something that I'm really proud that the Royal Economic Society does to reach out and try to encourage people who do not look like the usual economists to join. So, I'm very happy to talk about learning societies and how they interact with the disciplines and economics in general. Thank you, Graham. Thanks so much, Denise. Adarsh, do you want to go next? Yeah, thank you, Graham. So my name is Adarsh and I'm a social change apprentice at the RSA, so the Royal Society of Arts. And alongside my apprenticeship, I'm also studying at university at Queen Mary. So I'm part time studying and part time working at the RSA so I'm fairly new to the think tank sector. My experience of the think tank sector has been really good so far and learning so much about how the sector is progressing and the source of research and policy work that the RSA are doing. So the RSA, they really focus on social change and coming up with ideas and research to help policymakers improve their policies. And they cover a wide range of areas such as economy, education, also heritage, just a wide range of areas that could really be going on all day for how many areas the RSA really focus on. And unlike some organizations in the think tank area, we're also a membership organization. So we have the think tank and the membership side of our organization. So we have our members who we call fellows who really, really help us contribute with great research and ideas and help us carry out our objectives to help promote social change and make society a better place. So yeah, that's that's me and that's a bit about the RSA. Thanks for that. And Jonathan you're going to introduce yourself and policy connect and I gather you have some slides. On behalf of Clive and myself, I'm going to introduce a few slides. So policy connect is a membership organization and we're a think tank and so it's a bit of a hybrid and we work in four main policy pillars education and skills industry technology and innovation sustainability which is climate change resources and energy and health and accessibility and Clive is my colleague in the accessibility team and Clive's that specialty is in assisted technology. So we support a number of different all party parliamentary groups, commissions and forums, and we work with parliamentarians civil servants businesses and bring all of those together for discussion. So we have round table events, and we write reports and tomorrow, we're publishing a report on health and climate change, called a green bill of health so look out for that and that's been shared by Hillary Ben MP former environment secretary and Lord Ian Duncan, a conservative who's a former climate change minister. So this is me and Clive. So we're a social enterprise, and we have our income via membership subscription and sponsorship for our projects. We're a disability confident employer employee, disabled people, London living wage employer so pleased to support you Graham in the excellent work that you do at London living wage and indeed I think that some former policy connect staff working at the London living wage as well. And we're a member of social enterprise UK. We think that if you are one of these organizations it's important to support the sector. And so we're really pleased to support the resolution foundation today in this excellent initiative. Okay, so say we've worked with parliamentarians and we're just focusing on Clive's work for the all party parliamentary assisted technology group is led by these two parliamentarians a labor MP and a conservative peer. And we have say events, looking at assisted technology, how it can assist disabled people become more independent in employment in education and in living. So these are some of the MPs and peers that support us right across the house. It's a pretty stimulating work. Our office is often house of part has a parliament, organizing meetings there, or in ordinary times but of course we've been all doing this for the last year but not for too much longer. My background, I was an MP for 13 years, the government minister in various different departments, including I was Minister for disabled people so it's an area of particular interest for my own. These are a number of the organizations that support us particularly in the assisted technology area. They range from businesses to universities to charities. That's a reflection of 300 or so members that support us in our work. Just to tell you about Clive he joined the team in 2019. He's an expert in social care and assisted technology. As you'll see Clive is a very well qualified person, he's got an outstanding education. He's worked in freelance but this was the first permanent position that Clive had and he asked me to say that he uses an electric wheelchair, a chin operated joystick and eye tracking technology. So Clive has access to work, which funds his PA, Genevieve, and an adjustable desk in our office in Great Dover Street. So that is Policy Connect Clive and myself. Thank you Jonathan and Clive. It's great to hear from you all. So do keep your questions coming in. We've had a few already. Denise if you don't mind to come to you first. We've had a question about how we measure the impact of our work. Have you got any insights on that? Within kind of in terms of the committee structures and so on, we've been recently working through identifying KPIs. So Reza's established some four objectives that we want to target towards and I wrote them down and can't find it right now. We're essentially around, again, promoting economics, promoting excellence, diversity in economics. And so all of the KPIs of the various projects that each of the committees come up with are around those strategic objectives for the for the society. So we collect data as we do events. For example, we will run some CPD events for economists and we will collect some information about who accesses those events, who takes part, who wants to take part, and then we'll evaluate those in terms of did we make a difference in terms of our KPIs. So the other thing about how we do that is obviously we've got a very strong comms team and and they will measure how much and how much airtime we have, I guess, but so we've got a very strong comms team that will also look at how we're raising the profile and changing the profile. So it's a combination really but usually. Thanks Denise. And Darsh, if I could come to you as wondering, I mean if you could tell me maybe a little bit about how your role might interact with the work of think tanks and I guess thinking about how the RSA differs from work at think tanks. That's a good question. I think in terms of the research and the membership side of the organization are very connected. And I think that's one of the RSA's biggest strengths in the sector, in that there's like a connected feedback loop where fellows are able to contribute to their ideas and present research and policy suggestions and the RSA can then therefore take that forward in the work that they produce and the research that they do so I think it's a really exciting thing that the organization has and it's very different to the organization in the sector where they're very policy focused or research focused but maybe not so focused on the audience or who they're trying to produce it for. I think that's one of what makes the RSA really exciting. The connection between the fellows and the research and the thinking that goes behind our work so yeah. And Clive, if I could come to you, could you tell us a little bit more about your membership and the role they play within your organization? Yeah, so I'm going to start by bringing you from private companies, charities, universities, and they help fund our work. I just want to note that that's the funding made for RSA, but they take you, they help make you invest in our program of work. We have very little business. We have a lot of people from around the world, because we have online courses, we have food, we have food, we have we have food. We have food, we have food, we have ... I'm a bobbin posh here and practice and we have a new relationship. Clive, apologies, I've only just seen how I can type that so if it's all right with you, I'll just repeat what you just said. The members range from private companies and charities and universities. They all help fund your work and there's no statutory funding for APPGs. They play a key part in delivering your program or developing the program of work and that you work closely with members and they give insights into the sector for both policy and practice. Thank you Clive, that's really helpful. Jonathan? Yeah, just I think that just in addition to that it's important that in joining Policy Connect, these members, they know that the content and the editorial is ours and so it's not we're not there as a trade body as it were. We're there very much as a policy development and to influence policy. It's a very signer code of governance that says, you know, the policy and the editorials with us and the parliamentarians who work with which is important to part of our independence and they support that. Thank you and I mean obviously the Living Wage Foundation, our membership is made up of responsible employers around the country who will pay the Living Wage to their staff and I guess the role that they play within our organization, we very much see it as a movement. So they play a very active role in celebrating their own accreditation but also championing and advocating for others to pay the Living Wage to trying to build the brand of being a Living Wage employer and activate other people in their network to follow suit. So a lot of our role in supporting is offering them opportunities to engage in our work to go a step further than kind of the initial process that they've gone through to become a Living Wage employer and thinking about how they can engage in our wider projects, whether that's becoming a Living Wage funder, creating a Living Wage place. Almost recently we launched a Living Hours campaign which we're asking employers to go that step further to tackle in work poverty by offering more secure contracts to their workers guaranteed minimum hours as well as notification of shifts for weeks in advance. And I mean we've only got a very short amount of time but if I could ask a question to each of you, I mean essentially if you were to offer any advice into a route into your organization, is there any advice you have for our participants on yeah the best ways to seek employment at your organizations? Denise? Yeah so I know that posts within the Royal Economic Society are many and varied around our publications and around communication strategies and also people are all kinds of sides of the business that hold things together if you like, so people have to do accounts and people that we have them in chief executive so on. So those posts are advertised on the website and they're also promoted as well through the Royal Economic Society membership so I know that the TUDE network I'm also linked to is a list of heads of economics departments across the country and Rez can make use of those too as a way of connecting to new graduates in economics but anything in terms of employment with Rez you can see on the website I think in terms of jobs. Thank you and Adarsh any advice? I think my route into the sector is very different to a lot of people the think tank sector has a like you could say like a what's the word like an image that you have to have a master's degree or high level education and I mean I'm currently going through that process with my undergraduate degree whilst working so yeah my route is very different I think with advice I think just staying connected with the think tank sector and particularly with the RSA we have many opportunities for internships I think which are really good. A couple of them have kind of like disappeared unfortunately due to the pandemic but I think internships are really key part of the organization they've offered across the research department in particular and also our fellowship department and they're really good opportunities for those coming out of university to gain experience and knowledge in the think tank sector and learn more about organizations like the RSA so yeah looking at internships will be a really good advice I'll give. Thank you so much and the Living Wage Foundation too I would say similarly internships are a great entry route into the organization and opportunity to really develop your skills and experience for the sector. Clive any advice you would like to offer? Yeah Thank you very much for being making this. I would call him And, and, and, and, and, we've got up by percent as five million, six with, with, with, with people. Here is a drawing, and we've had a number of circumference I don't think there's anything about poaching it, and I think that in general, is that we often have meetings that are open to the public that can provide insight into what we do, speaking about MTK, APVGs, of meetings that are open to the public. So I would recommend just to recap, you might want to just recover what you said about the website, but secondly, the Because Public Connect has quite a lot of decommence from the civil service fast stream, that's another opportunity. And often you're saying that the APVG meetings are often open to the public, so it's a good way of getting involved as well. Thanks, Clive. Well, I think that's all the time that we've got today for questions, so thank you very much. Thank you to the panel for your insights. Thank you to everybody that has attended for listening to us and for posing your questions. The session has been recorded, so I know that it will be available online after the webinar has finished, and we'll also be circulating some FAQs. Thanks again. Have a good evening, everyone. Bye.