who we are
PEOPLE
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Director, Curious Seed Sower, Empathiser
Abby joined the Collective Impact Agency in December 2020, after eight years at a national education charity, seven jobs, four organisations, two degrees, one child and a partridge in a pear tree.
Abby did her undergrad in Philosophy at the University of Manchester; while her particular fascination lies with the concept of free will, she’s easily drawn into discussions into questions about metaphysics, power and ethics.
Degree number two was a Master’s in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response, which acted as a jumping off point for many other questions about justice, equity and what it is to be human. Realising she wasn’t cut out to be an aid worker, Abby then moved into the field of education.
After five years at an education charity she moved into its sales operations team (job #5) and got a new manager, a certain Andy Crosbie. Together they built a team that thrived on dialogue, experimentation, disagreement and mind reading. A conversation began about the purpose and practice of leadership and culture, the importance of relationships, and the relationship between power and trust.
Returning from maternity leave with Andy long gone, she moved into business development, then a post with many interesting but entirely disparate responsibilities. Realising she loves a jumble sale job but had fallen out of love with traditional structures, she took the leap to the Collective Impact Agency, to pick up the conversations begun several years before.
Outside of work, Abby has a very busy, transport-mad little person. She can often be found dispensing horticultural advice, unsolicited or otherwise, discussing gender equality and playing in various musical configurations.
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Director, Change-maker, Pedant
Having worked as a wedding coordinator, crewed a catamaran across the Atlantic, and spent a summer cooking breakfasts in a Highland hotel, Andy decided he needed a new focus. His solution was to move to Australia to study a PhD in ethics. After four years, he resolved that he didn’t want to stay in universities, but the seeds were sown for several later career decisions.
While studying, he was given many opportunities to teach undergraduates, an activity that he quickly came to love. Despite being a natural introvert, he delighted in the challenge of speaking to and engaging 300+ students at a time. He also found that he deeply loved helping people develop, relishing in their successes more than in his own.
Andy wrote his PhD on the topic of role models – how we are influenced by key individuals in our lives, and what this means in terms of our responsibilities and theirs. This spurred in him an interest in understanding how people work in terms of their motivation and decision-making, and how this applies to groups and organisations.
He then moved into the voluntary and community sector, initially working for the Australian Red Cross, overseeing a community programme to keep elderly people safe in their own homes, before going on to help Australian organisations become more inclusive of Aboriginal people, leading advocacy campaigns to improve the lives of those affected by cancer, and founding the Sydney Volunteer Network.
In 2012, with no business plan, just one initial client, and only half a clue about what he was doing, Andy set up an Ethics Consultancy business, specialising in values, motivation, and culture. Through this work, he helped charity execs, school leaders, and students become more ethical leaders, while also promoting the importance of nurturing culture in organisations. The business doubled in size each year, with many clients hiring and re-hiring him, and some even telling them he needed to charge them more.
The approach he brought to and promoted in this work was that you have to get things right for the people. You can’t just tell people what to do, you have to create the conditions for people to feel motivated by their work. In particular, people need supportive and challenging relationships, the autonomy to make their own decisions, the opportunity to master new skills and fields, and a sense of being part of something larger than themselves.
Andy returned to the UK in 2015, led by his Australian wife who wanted to swap the Australian sun and sand for the glories of North East England. He spent a few years overseeing national sales operations for a UK educational leadership charity and developing advocacy services for a North East charity, before falling in with the bad crowd that is Stuart and Patricia. It didn’t take long for them to recognise the mischievous glint in each other’s eye – and establish the Collective Impact Agency.
creating change
We intend to challenge, dismantle, and then replace the structures that underpin current “broken” systems - creating human-focused, lasting, systemic change from the roots upwards - and we do this collectively, together.
At its heart, the Collective Impact Agency is about building new types of relationships, prioritising learning, questioning conventions and assumptions, listening deeply to people from all different walks of life, experimenting and being brave enough to try new ways of doing things - then iterating, iterating, iterating.
No single organisation can end any of the complex social or organisational problems that we all care about. We believe that the only way to create meaningful change is to bring together a range of actors - community members, organisations, institutions, managers, and employees - in a focused way. This is what we do.
Our work is often radical, confronting, terrifying, and deeply nourishing. We don’t pretend to have the answers, we don’t come from a place of all-knowing authority. We help people find their own way - learning and growing as they do.
COLLECTIVELY
We’re trying to be an organisation where no-one is hemmed in by the confines of ‘that is not in your job description’, where people are able to generate and get involved in work that interests them personally and plays to their strengths. We are trying to rely more on trust and conversation than on role and hierarchy so we trust each other to make the decisions that they are best placed to make, and we work to ensure we are all supported to step out of our comfort zone and develop new skills and interests.
For us relationships matter above everything else. We’re trying to be a company that begins and ends with recognising our own and each other’s humanity, and doing this in service of the work we're trying to do together, rather than as an afterthought.
We see trust as critical - both for honest and embodied learning experiences, for collective inner work, and for the type of (scary) experimental problem solving that systems change often needs.
