Spark+Mettle: an overview by founder & CEO Eugenie Teasley

Editor's Notes

1. Can you all put your right hand up in the air, like this? I’m not trying to get you guys to salute me, I swear. Imagine that your hand represents the best possible version of you. Now use your left hand to show me where you think you actually are right now in comparison to what you could possibly be.
2. There are people in this country who are not fulfilling their potential, who are very far away from being the best possible version of themselves.
3. In fact, there are lots of people like that right now. We are not flourishing, and it’s not all down to the crummy weather.
4. I want it to be different. I want us to be a nation that is thriving—a bright land of happy, shining people; hashtag smiley isle. I want us all to be getting closer and closer to the ideal version of ourselves. This is a philosophy festival, so that gives me license to talk about Plato. And while I do, I’d like you to imagine in your head a horse.
5. Plato thought a lot about horses. He had a theory of Ideal Forms, and he used a horse as an example. According to him, reality consists of two realms. First, there is the physical world, the world that we can observe with our five senses. And second, there is a world made of eternal “forms” or “ideas”: perfect templates of things we actually observe. All the horses we see in the world or imagine in our heads are imperfect representations of the Ideal Horse, but they all have elements of ‘horseness’ that allow us to recognise them as horses.  I don’t entirely agree with Plato and where he takes his argument. But I do like thinking about the ‘horseness’ of horses, or the ‘chairness’ of chairs—the attributes that make us recognise and categorise things around us. So what makes the ‘humanness’ of humans? Or the ‘Eugenieness’ of me?  Flourishing, in my mind, is all about discovering and then bringing to life these ideal templates. We can all do that for ourselves, and for other people.  But that’s not happening.
6. There are bright pockets of innovation and hope, such as this festival and the work of other speakers. But there are not enough of them. And what really makes me mad is that if you happen to be born into bleak circumstances then you’re all the less likely to flourish and become the best version of yourself.
7. In 2010 the Equality and Human Rights Commission said that Britain is falling short in its aspiration of providing equal chances for everyone to thrive.
8. In 2011 I founded Spark+Mettle. I’ve been a classroom teacher in Elephant and Castle. I’ve stepped back from the chalkface to do a Masters in Education out in Berkeley, and I’ve worked for educational organisations both here and in the States, including the brilliant 826 Valencia. And after all these years of looking at education from different sides, I remembered something very simple. To ‘educate’ doesn’t mean to ‘indoctrinate’, to ‘stuff full of other people’s ideas’, or to ‘prep for the test’. No. To ‘educate’ just means ‘to bring out’. I wanted to do what wasn’t being done. I wanted to find a new, seamless way to enable people, especially young people, and especially young people from marginalised backgrounds, to bring out the best versions of themselves, to flourish.  I see us as the Ronseal of youth organisations: we do exactly what we say on the tin. We develop their spark and their mettle, two key character strengths needed to flourish and fulfil their potential.
9. We bill ourselves as an ‘aspirations agency’: we love acting as the middleman who brings people, ideas and organisations together to help each other realise their aspirations.  Our programmes work by laying the foundations for success in both work and life: building the character strengths, soft skills and networks needed to flourish.
10. Firstly, we enable young people to identify, articulate and improve key character strengths such as spark and mettle and creativity.
11. Our character strengths framework is based on research from the University of Cambridge, Penn State and other renowned academic institutions. We see the development of these nine strengths as the foundation needed to build a flourishing and happy life.
12. So only once we’ve got to grips with these, can we then go about developing work-focused soft skills—skills that will equip young people for the jobs of today and tomorrow—such as collaboration, decision-making and an ability to handle stress.
13. Unlike character strengths—which are general and can be applied across numerous situations—soft skills are specific learned aptitudes that draw on a number of character strengths. Being able to make good decisions, for example, requires you to have a sense of agency and purpose as well as mettle.
14. And finally we help to broaden networks for the young and youngish alike. I might be accustomed to sitting next to strangers or a bus or tube. But actually speaking or interacting with someone else, other than saying sorry after they bump into me? It’s rare.
15. We create opportunities for talented professionals to connect and collaborate with aspirational young people.  Over the last two years, we’ve grown to support over 600 young people through a number of different programmes. By the end of Star Track, our core, online personal and professional coaching programme for marginalised, 80% of our jobseekers are in work. They say things like “it’s literally changed my life.”  We also run offline events and seminars for young people and professionals alike, on topics such as curating your digital presence. Think TED talks but with fewer chinos and a heap more interaction. Our newest project is an online platform called Discoverables: it’s a gamified learning journey through which millions of young people will be able to identify, articulate and showcase their key strengths and skills, and earn badges along the way.  Asides from all these programmes, we also supply dream-realising products to any aspirational anyone who needs a tool or two to get to where they want to go. The products are all co-designed by young people and professionals. If you’re aspiring to be the best version of yourself and you really need some time, we can provide it. Bags of it.
16. Throughout our programmes we maintain three core tenets to our approach: everything we do is co-created by the young people we work with; everything we do creates opportunities for intergenerational collaboration that is fun, flexible and productive; and everything we do harnesses technology and digital for positive effect.
17. That last one is important because 18 to 24 year olds spend more time online than any other age group; and three quarters of their online time is spent doing things just for fun.
18. We love converting some of that “fun” time into productive, meaningful activity. That is still fun. When I talk about ‘we’, there are only two of us working full time at Spark+Mettle. But we’ve grown a community of likeminded people who are excited to join together and help us bridge social, cultural and knowledge-based divides that permeate this country.
19. How The Light Gets In is a music festival too. Which give me an excuse to talk about a conductor and an orchestra. In a small way, what we like to do at Spark+Mettle is to bring diverse people together, just as a conductor brings a collection of different instruments together and in the process creates something greater than themselves.
20. Or, in modern terms, how a musician lays down a set of different tracks to create one tune.  Because even though we’re now all glued to our own little screens so much of the time, there’s still hope. There’s potential. We can use technology to connect ourselves together in ways that were previously impossible.  I love that idea.
21. Yesterday I met a famous business woman who, when I asked her what skills she looked for in her staff (and she employs over 10,000), said, “You can teach skills, but you can’t teach attitude.”  I one hundred percent disagree. Saying you can’t teach attitude is like saying you can’t teach a language. Usually it starts through a process of osmosis—it gets picked up unwittingly, we adopt what those around us do, and then it gets reinforced or undermined by whatever life might throw at them. Lucky people, like me, have great families who are for the most part unaware that they are great at teaching character or attitude or non-cognitive ability. But what about less fortunate people, like many of the young people we work with? They have the same capacity for determination or confidence, they just haven’t been given the opportunity to practise and improve these strengths to the same degree. So I say: anyone can learn attitude, not everyone realises it can be taught. I guess that means our aim is to teach the unteachable. My vision for Spark+Mettle is that we become the global heavy hitters for this soft stuff. That we support individuals and organisations to teach and learn about character strengths and soft skills—the all important stuff that might seem nebulous but really is fundamental to flourishing.And I would love it if you would join with us. We are creating a space for each of us to build our own strengths and skills and networks, to find commonalities among our differences, and to work together to get closer to the best versions of ourselves—in other words, to flourish.