Social change and work - Germán Bencci

00:00

... work is such a big part of our lives. We spend so many hours doing it and it's a such a repetitive day to day after day after day for decades that it has to resonate with your life whenever it's possible. Or at least that's the aspiration for me, it has been the driver. I say CodeYourFuture exists probably because of that pursuit of harmony, in a way.

00:33

Why did it take starting such a profound company for you to find fulfillment?

00:43

So I think it's a personal experience really. No, it's something that inside of me, there was always a voice or calling or a longing that my work in the... Whatever work I was doing was not complete, was not whole. I identified many years ago that for me, this is a very, very personal thing but for me, fulfillment in what I do has to connect to other people's lives, has to affect in a way positively society and individuals.

01:39

How did you know that?

01:41

It's an emotional response to work, to the stuff that you're doing. Things like I would go to these big events, technology events, or I would talk to these super clever people and they were doing this super incredible, very sophisticated kind of work, but then I would look, "Okay, but what's the impact that this work is doing? Or what is it for? Who is it helping? What is it doing for society?" I would have this... These questions would come to me and if they were, in most cases, they were not doing anything positive, then I wouldn't feel that my work was really enough.

02:28

And that, to someone else, might push them towards doing something in their spare time that might help them find that fulfillment, or maybe taking smaller steps than the steps that you took, which were profound. What drove you to make such a dramatic change in your life at that point?

02:48

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think the more we can experience through small actions, through small missions and small journeys that we set up to do, that all informs what we want to do. So for example, when I came first to the UK, I started fairly, very, very early on, I found another charity that was doing a great work that I felt very inspired about. The name is Charity: Water, it's originally from the US. They build water pumps for people that don't have access to clean water. And that was another aspect that I was very interested in and I started organizing fundraising events and I set myself goals of... They were saying back then if you fundraise $5,000, they're going to build a water pump in a place that is going to help a whole village. I said, "Okay, great. I'm going to fundraise this $5,000." And it was amazing to do it, to see it.

04:05

Were you doing that whilst you were at Samsung?

04:07

Yeah. And then I actually ended up fundraising more than $20,000 because then it was not one, but then I wanted to do more, had to do 2, 3, 4, and I would contact another local organization here in the UK that was doing a similar work because so that I could have that direct contact. But then there was another element that worked for me, very powerful, super early on was this very tangible whole project. It wasn't just fundraising for an org is there is something specifically that is happening with a certain amount. You know, you raise this amount, this specific thing happens, and this action is affecting all these people and I was fascinated by that concept, by that idea and I guess that informed a lot later on, I also [inaudible 00:04:56] CodeYourFuture.

04:59

It's funny, how, from the outside, it looks like it was one big thing that happened in a moment, that sounds like it was more seeded.

05:06

Oh, definitely. Yeah, there's loads of lots of layers there. Definitely.

05:10

Because I think people who look at your story may look at it and think, wow, like, it's so amazing what you've done with CodeYourFuture that you might think, oh my goodness, how an earth would I, as an individual, have the confidence and the same type of courage to go and do something similar. Like it's... I think you would almost look at it and think, oh my goodness, that was such a noble thing to do. Could I possibly be a person who could go and do the same thing? The same thing too?

05:45

Mm. I mean, I think there are two elements there. First, I didn't really want to start something new necessarily. I always tell the story that very early on, I saw another organization abroad doing this kind of work and all I wanted to do is just help whoever was doing it here in the UK. And then I started searching and no one was doing it. And it was only then that it became obvious like, well, there's no one, this is... You feel really strongly about this, let's do it but one of the things that excite me so much about CodeYourFuture is that people don't have to repeat it.

06:31

They don't have to do this thing. They can just join and create impact and make a difference and even start new projects or new classes, or do so many things within this framework and then a lot of the people that have joined are about this, and a lot of they say, "Oh, I wanted to do something like... I was thinking about this" you know? And this is, the beauty is like, we do not have to create companies or organizations all the time, it's about finding the one that addresses your calling, that voice in a way,

07:13

For anyone who doesn't know, CodeYourFuture fights social inequality by helping more people get careers in tech. How has watching so many people find their best work helped you find yours?

07:36

I think it fits.... With organizations and missions like CodeYourFuture where our work is about kick starting all the people's careers, that end feeds our careers and feeds our work, we do not need any other kind of recognition or any kind of return beyond the basis that are needed to run an organization so seeing that, seeing every individual find that new opportunity, that is our fuel. That is our return.

08:24

What have you learned from the people who are going through CodeYourFuture, that's helped you find your best work?

08:36

I mean it's... There are two parts there. I think seeing this work make a difference have reassured me that this was my work, this is what I wanted to do. That I don't need to search. I don't need to keep searching. I found it right? So it was a reaffirmation in a way. I don't have that search anymore. I'm not in that quest because I know this is my space. That's the first thing, and then in terms of learnings, there's so many things. What is incredible, one of the key learnings is how many people, when they start their journey, to find new careers, to start a new life, how many people don't believe in themselves? They're not sure they're going to make it and they're actually, most of them say, "I'm probably not going to make it", but they still do it so they have this element of faith in it, of belief, of there is I don't think I'm going to do it, but I'm still going to blindly try and go for it.

10:05

What courage.

10:07

Yes. They go for it but inside, if you ask them or if they say it's like, "No, I don't think I'm going to make it. I don't think it's going to happen." But if they go for it, despite this belief, the rewards are so, so big.

10:27

Besides the obvious economic disadvantages that a refugee has, what other obstacles are there to a refugee who's come to this country or a different country and is trying to get into the workforce? What particular unique struggles do they have when finding their best work that the rest of us may take for granted?

10:56

A big one is legal safety. There's a lot of uncertainty on being a displaced person and despite having a piece of paper that tells you, yes, you're allowed here to stay, you have the right to work because if a person has a refugee stages, they can work, but people feel very insecure. They feel this can be taken away from me at any time. If I don't find a job, if I don't integrate, it's going to be taken away so this uncertainty on the legal, on the legality of being in the place, it creates, it puts people in a very uncertain territory.

11:49

The other one is isolation. The lack of connection. People come here and they don't know anyone and they don't belong to circles. They don't connect with others especially outside their ethnic group. They might know other peoples, they might come to the UK, they try to make it here because they have a few people they might know, but outside that, there's nothing else so that lack of connection, again, it makes such a huge difference in the reference, lack of reference, lack of encouragement, motivation, inspiration, guidance. They don't have any of this.

12:37

Whereas for people that have been here or people from here, there's always someone, there's always someone that acts as a connector, at least as some sort of reference. That's a big one. Then there is the cultural one because of that lack of integration, lack of connection, then reading a culture or behaving, following the right set, given the right signals, these unspoken cues are a big barrier for people for sure. They will not know exactly how to apply for a role, what are the right things that you have to say, how you have to behave, what protocols are expected? And people think a lot on the interview stage and yes, of course that's an important element, but it's like getting to the interview is already a big challenge. You need to follow a lot of procedures in order to do that, so those are some of the big ones.

13:56

Almost like natural procedures as well that we take for granted in our subconscious, like half the things that you said there, I feel like I never looked at them as necessarily advantages from my own privilege, but they so are, like that's... It's almost like there's this underlying kind of quiet infrastructure to my life that I don't notice is helping me find work because I treat it as just normal.

14:28

Yeah, and that's culture, yeah? That sort of that hidden layer that it's among all of us that is just there and that is this, the unspoken element that for someone that comes from a very different culture likely, it will make it really hard for others, for companies to value them, to understand them that there is even, from... You know, I've heard companies saying that they are scared but not for the wrong reasons, it's just like, we just don't know how to behave, what it is, what does it mean to hire a refugee, to hire someone that is very different to us and it doesn't come from any bad intentions at all, it's just simply, it's just the unknown. It's just different. So imagine that comes on both sides.

15:32

The people who go through CodeYourFuture have... I don't know whether they've kind of like involuntarily been exposed to large amounts of risk, is that fair? And if that's true, then it must make deciding where to work and what job to do a different type of equation than if we just went through a normal education system and applied to a job.

16:07

In the lives of refugees, displaced people, so many experience have taken place and they all vary a lot from person to person. When I would say like, what a lot of them have described is that is a very different circumstance and people react and behave in a different way when they're in a situation of stress or danger, than once they have arrived and many of them describe how being here, trying to integrate is actually harder than escaping.

16:58

Really?

16:59

Yeah. Because escaping, fleeing, it doesn't give any time to take decisions. It doesn't give any time to reflect. It's a natural instinct, it's a survival move. People just do it and it is stressful but you just go for, and you do whatever needs to be done. Once people arrive here, it's all very different. Everything slows down, everything stops in a way. Okay, yes, now people are safe and now? Now what? Before was the purpose, was the move, the drive and now it's all this complexities of a new society, of a new language, of a new culture and all of that is becomes this weight so that's when they started to navigate and that's why organizations like CodeYourFuture help them create that environment of support and guidance but they describe how this part is actually harder. It is more rational, it's more conscientious. It requires a lot of intellectual and labor to learn all these things.

18:34

I'd love to talk about the way that you've gone through and tackled the paradox of kind of choice yourself, because it sounds like your passion for fighting social inequality is super clear, but there are so many different ways that you could go about tackling that and the one that you've chosen is educating individuals and getting more and more people into tech.

19:07

How do you know, on a kind of day to day or week to week or month to month basis whether the route that you've chosen is the right one to tackling that inequality and do you ever, I guess I'm asking kind of, how do you not... How do you get over the fact that the grass might be greener tackling inequality in a different way?

19:34

As you say, there are lots of ways how inequality can be tackled and they're all needed. It's an accumulation stage. For me, the decision of using, of getting people to be trained and then later employed is a choice that resonates a lot with me and it's an area that where I put very high value to, and probably it's an area where I can put a lot of contribution to. I've always been fascinated by education, in the sense of people being able to learn something new and that learning then makes people the power, the empowerment to become independent and then carry on and do not need anyone else to sustain themselves to go on with their lives. That element for me, it's very, very powerful of the different elements of inequality is you are giving people the tools so that they may turn, they don't need to rely on charity. They don't need to rely on any other aspects.

21:17

And then the part of education I connected very strongly with employment and that's why it was just this action effect that I thought it was really, really important in CodeYourFuture, because I spent a lot of years in the tech sector and then I saw how many opportunities are out there and how much there was a need to diversify the area, how it was an area where you could see very similar backgrounds all the time coming along. So you connect both and that's sort of the area that I felt, okay, this is my part-

21:59

But it's almost like-

22:01

... [inaudible 00:22:01] lots of different, different ways how it can be done.

22:03

So accumulation of your own experience that's able to, where you can combine multiple parts of yourself and of your experience and then apply it, like it almost sounds like it's... That's the choice wasn't made for you, but it's not that you're... You can just look at the inequality and say, right, I pick this way of trying to tackle it, because you've got to pick the way that you tackle it based off the experience that you've got.

22:35

Experience and values, I think the values is, and I guess the experience is fed by the values, that the things that we give very much importance to or that we enjoy a lot, things, seeing things happening.

22:55

And it sounds like the way that you are choosing your motivations sounds like you're listening to your... So it doesn't sound like there's anyone else who's necessarily guiding your decision making. Is that true?

23:12

I try to, particularly in that sort of, pre CodeYourFuture era, I tried a lot to understand myself a bit more, to understand my motivations, my drives, and to understand what are the things that I wanted to do to be able to find that part.

23:27

On an individual level, we're all motivated by things in our subconscious that aren't necessarily immediately available to us, whether that's kind of fulfilling a desire that our parents had that we've internalized, or whether it's a trauma that someone's gone through when they've been moving from one country to another that spurs on a certain type of work. In some ways we can do work that is fulfilling and you leading CodeYourFuture is all of that but I wonder if there's also a personal element to it too that's that's driving you?

24:13

You know, I come from Latin America where inequality is so present, is so palpable since I was a child and over time, it actually got worse.

24:31

Yeah. I was going to say, it's got worse.

24:33

To see my country fall apart in pieces and how nowadays it's a society where there is... So much poverty, there is so much... The levels of inequality are so different to Europe, to most places in Europe. That's always been there and I guess it's just over time, it became stronger and stronger. To me, I always see, I remember when I was doing the fundraising for Charity: Water and Pump Aid, I was thinking I have access to clean water and just turn on the tap and turn on the shower and it just happens. We don't have to think about it. For 600 million people, that's completely different life. So I could always, I could imagine like, okay, we are so... I am so privileged here. I have to do something for others to bring that. It was, that's always been an element, like so many people out there that have so... Have fewer opportunities, fewer resources. It is my, is a duty for me. It's a mission to try to bring them closer to the level of opportunities.

26:02

That's funny how the geography that you were surrounded by the place that you were in, as you grew up and came of age has in informed the work that you do now. And it's funny how the work that you do now is so good, even though it comes from something that's not pleasant. And it often tends to be that way, that in order to have a fulfilling, life fulfilling career, fulfilling future, you have to find the kind of internalized contradictions or the difficulties, the practical difficulties that you've been through in order to create a life of meaning somehow, almost as if it had been perfect, then fulfillment would be very difficult to find because there would be nothing to put right.

27:06

Mm, oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always remember that phrase of change comes out of inspiration or desperation.

27:16

Yeah.

27:17

And it's, we always connect change to that first, the inspiration part, but in many cases, it's just this feeling of seeing everything so wrong that it becomes a driver to do something.

27:34

Yeah.

27:34

I think we are so influenced by our surroundings where we grew up, like Western Europe has so many resources, so many opportunities, probably I would be a completely different person if I had been raised here.

28:00

Where does the desperation go too far and then become a kind of a blocker, and you must see this all the time, because you have people who come through CodeYourFuture who have such incredible potential because they have been through that desperation and their drive to create that fulfilling future for them and their family and the companies that they work for is so big, but then on the other hand, sometimes that the experience that they would've gone through would've been so difficult that it's really difficult to integrate into the workforce. Is there a line there and is there any way of knowing what side of the line someone falls on?

28:45

Yeah. I think the desperation aspect becomes vicious or negative if we don't do anything. If we don't try to do something. If it's something that affect us. I think a lot of people, a lot of us can feel that, if we are... We look around all the stuff that is happening in the world, this is negative news after negative news, it's horrible things that we know most of it, the vast majority of it, there's nothing we can do about, nothing or very.... We might think nothing, right? Particularly when we start seeing the numbers, the dimensions, the extension of it but if we start looking to, okay, what can I do? What is my part? Oh, I can help this person. I can bring this action. I can raise this amount that is going to bring this change, or I can connect these people, I can do this mentorship or training or whatever it is, that desperation starts fading away.

30:01

One of the things that comes through from you is that there's... It's not this one decision that you make where you say yes or no, it's that you find ways of exploring yourself and applying yourself in different circumstances to explore whether this work is right or not.

30:25

Correct. Correct. Yeah and in the past, for example, I did lots of volunteering myself. Apart from fundraising, I was involved in many other organizations so all of that, it became experience and helped me understand what do I care about, what I could do, what I could develop, what I was interested at.

30:46

It's almost like if you were to compare it to existentialism, it's almost like we are at any point in our life, probably haven't been through the experience that will give us enough information in that moment in order to make the right decision. So we're always going to be in a perpetual state of, I don't have enough data here to be able to make the decision or the life move that I want to make and we expect people to kind of self reflect and figure out what it is that is their dream job when actually, like they haven't had any experience or been exposed to the things that might give them that type of inspiration.

31:29

Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big believer in trying things out, small things like I think the theoretical realm, it's to a certain degree, yes, it helps us inform, but we are not just the brain, the rational mind. There's so many elements of when we go there and we put ourselves in new circumstance.

31:53

Yeah.

31:55

We are learning so many new things and the beauty of things like volunteering is that there is no risk. We're not changing the job. We're not stopping salaries.

32:11

Yeah.

32:12

We're not... We're dedicating the hours that we have available, whatever it is, there is that slot of time that we can put so it's a low risk, high return, high experience.

32:23

It's such a profound question that how can we find our best work and limit the amount of risk that we expose ourselves to at the same time and that's an absolutely obvious answer to that, that's staring you blind in the face, but it's easy to forget.

32:37

There's so many things that people can try and looking into the multidimensionality of whatever is out there, I think that's when we will find that richness is like not to assume, oh, the only place to learn something is, oh, by working at a company, but like to think what else could be out there?

33:01

Thank you for breaking down your own story and that of CodeYourFuture [inaudible 00:33:06]. It makes me personally realize just how much of my own infrastructure that's around me and the opportunity that's around me is a huge benefit that I could be reaping even more of and that I am so fortunate to have opportunity around me. Thank you for building CodeYourFuture because it's such an important part of London's ecosystem. It's such an important part of how we should tackle social inequality and the more people who do work like CodeYourFuture, the more people who support you the better.

33:51

No and thank you for your contribution so early on, like putting, since the very beginning of your organization to put CodeYourFuture as sort of a key element of your growth, that has been super inspiring to see, because it's similar to how we talk about individuals. Like what can companies be doing? Companies, always thinking, what can we do? We are too small and I tell them, no, you're never too small. You contribute, you do relative to your size and if you embed that from the very beginning, your company will grow with a different set, with different type of values with another identity and the fact that you've been, your organization, your company you founded has been supporting CodeYourFuture since you were so small, so that has been incredible for us to see and be able to utilize it for our own growth. So thank you so much for that and I think we have to keep talking about this because they has to inspire other organizations to do the same and to contribute to whatever mission they believe in, but just to know they can do something about it, no matter how small they are.

35:24

All right. Take it easy.