This is the research that launched inHive as an organisation, back when it was known as Future First Global.
It’s an in-depth feasibility study across nine countries that demonstrates the universal value of alumni networks in schools and shares examples of ad hoc best practice around the world.
Foreword
Future First has been building alumni communities in state schools in the UK for five years now. Its work has led to a national rise in state school alumni engagement and a culture shift that is far greater than the organisation itself; the country has gone from less than 1% of state schools engaging alumni systematically to nearly 15%.
Future First manages the majority of alumni networks in the UK but has also seen a steep rise in schools creating and managing their own networks since its launch. In addition to this, as attention has been drawn to the resource that alumni can provide, competitive commercial organisations have also been established.
In 2012, Future First and the Open Society Foundations started a conversation about whether the potential for mobilising the local social and financial capital that alumni represent might exist in other parts of the world.
Together, a piece of research was scoped out to assess this potential in five diverse countries across four continents: Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Ghana, and Kazakhstan. With sponsorship from the Global Citizen Foundation, Jordan was added as a sixth country to ensure that the Middle East was also represented.
The research took seven months from inception to publication. Academic evidence indicates that young people from the poorest backgrounds disproportionately believe that people like them don’t succeed, and that such beliefs become self-fulfilling over time. Or, as one Latin American NGO leader put it: ‘people from the favelas never picture themselves as engineers’. Research also shows that young people with less access to work experience and careers insight opportunities are more likely to end up out of education, employment and training alumni networks can, in part, provide the solution to these complex problems by providing role models, access and insight where they have historically been absent.
So, why haven’t these networks been systematically built around every school? This research shows that there is no issue with supply or demand. In each country studied, at least 28% of adults said that they would respond positively to the opportunity to contribute to their alma mater. Meanwhile, young people in every country reported that they would value the integration of former students into their formal careers provision.
Nor is it a question of culture. In every country studied, some form of local alumni activity existed and 65% of young people and 49% of adults identified strongly or very strongly with people from their (former) schools – a higher percentage than identified with people of their religion. Current utilisation rates of alumni were found to be higher in private and elite schools than in state institutions, though expressed desire of former state school students to ‘give back’ was very similar to that of private school graduates.
The opportunity that this finding supports – the propensity for graduates from all types of school and all parts of society to give back – is what has made this research so exciting for everyone involved. We hope that this report sparks ideas, debate and action that can turn the potential and best practice identified into a more common reality for all young people.
