Last week, Here I Am turned five.
One thing I've learned as the CEO of Here I Am is that organisations today can't afford to be static. The moment you stop evolving, you start becoming irrelevant - not slowly, but quickly.
I used to work at Nike, where we often reminded each other, "the ground is always moving." Today, it feels less like movement and more like sinkholes. The conditions we work in are shifting faster than our brains can think.
Here I Am began as a digital studio building digital tools to reach and include the excluded.
Despite being 'the digital people', more and more, we began to explore the wider world the digital service would inhabit, with a deepening realisation that inclusion won't happen within the service, but within the system it lives in.
If we carried on thinking and acting just as 'digital people', we were powerless to create inclusion.
Imagine this scenario (it probably won't be hard):
A funder commissions a new digital service to connect young people to critical real-world support. The brief is clear. The intent is good. A strong team is assembled.
- The service is well designed.
- The content is right.
- The model works in testing.
On launch, uptake is low. Not because the need isn’t there or because the design is poor. It isn’t.
It struggles because of the hidden barriers in the system the service lives in:
- The app assumes young people can safely open it in shared homes where privacy doesn’t exist
- It expects them to book appointments in advance in lives shaped by uncertainty
- It sends them to buildings they have been taught to avoid
- It routes them to offices where they must speak to adults in authority, alone
- It requires written forms in contexts where literacy is uneven and mistakes carry shame
- It asks them to name a “problem” before they have language for what they’re experiencing
- It assumes they control their own time, travel, and decisions
- It treats referral as neutral, when being seen seeking help carries social risk
- It presumes trust in institutions that may have failed them before
- It overlooks the unspoken rules about who belongs in which spaces
The service itself is fine. The system around it isn't.
This is what happens when things are built in isolation from the world they must survive in.
That’s why, at Here I Am, we now design and build inclusive systems: human, digital and organisational.
Because inclusion doesn’t live in the interface. It lives in the world that interface leads into.
