What If You're Already a Changemaker?

On Friday 2 October, our CEO J.R Josephs took a seat on the Changemakers Panel at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, as part of the college's 2026 Changemakers Annual Residential.

The question put to the panel was deceptively simple. What does it really mean to be a changemaker, and what if you already are one without knowing it?

It is a question worth sitting with, because most of the people doing the work never gave themselves the title.

Four routes, one room

The panel was chaired by Paula Rogers-Brown, Director of Engagement for Homerton Changemakers, and the line-up was deliberately mixed.

Nicolina Andall is a corporate solicitor of more than twenty years who now sits as a Judicial Appointments Commissioner, helping decide who becomes a judge in England and Wales, and who founded an initiative to get more people from ethnic minority backgrounds into boardrooms.

Pooya Kamvari is a Homerton alumnus, founder and CEO of a technology company tackling traffic and emissions around the school run, and a mentor to the college's own Catalyst Fund teams.

Gisela Otten is a molecular biologist working on treatments for cancer and neurodegenerative disease, who also captained Cambridge United Women for much of six years and now sits on the club's board.

And J.R came to it from a different direction again. East London, the first generation of grime, youth clubs and pirate radio, a car wash and a tuck shop he ran at school, and twenty years later a creative charity working with young people aged 5 to 25 across London.

Four people, four completely unrelated routes, all of them described by someone else as changemaking long before they would have used the word themselves.

Paula let the real stories out

Credit where it is due. A panel can easily become four people taking turns to say sensible things. Paula opened the floor instead, and pushed for the actual experience: the setbacks, the years where nothing moved, the decisions that looked reckless at the time.

That is what made it land. Students do not need to hear that it worked out. They need to hear what it cost, and that the people in front of them were once exactly as uncertain as they are now.

The Homerton Changemakers curriculum is built around three domains: Self, Society and World. Friday's conversation lived mostly in the first one, which is the right place to start. You cannot change much outside you before you have worked out what you actually care about.

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Why this matters to Sirlute

Our position has not changed. Young people aren't hard to reach. Services are hard to access. So we built one they would actually walk into.

The students in that room at Homerton have something many of the young people we work with do not: a college with a fund, a mentor list and a showcase waiting for them. The talent is evenly distributed. The scaffolding is not. Friday was a reminder that our job is to build that scaffolding in East London, and to keep connecting the two worlds so that ambition in one place can draw on the networks of the other.

Staying on for the Catalyst Fund Showcase afterwards made the point again. Student teams pitched real ventures to a panel of judges for additional funding and mentorship. Watching that, it was impossible not to think of our own young people and what they would do with the same platform.

What comes next

J.R was also briefly introduced to Lord Simon Woolley, Principal of Homerton College, a conversation we look forward to continuing.

We want this to be the start of something rather than a one-off. There is a bridge to be built between what Homerton is doing in Cambridge and what we do with young people across London, whether that runs through mentoring, Catalyst Fund teams, or the wider systems change work. We intend to help build it.

Thank you to Paula, to Mel, and to Michelle, who has been a consistent supporter of J.R and of Sirlute. And thank you to the students, who asked better questions than most rooms do.

If you are reading this and still wondering whether you count as a changemaker, that hesitation is not a disqualification. It is usually the first sign.