Interview: A quick Q&A with Noisy Cricket's entrepreneur and founder Lauren Coulman

Hello, Lauren! Can you introduce yourself to our readers?

“I’m Lauren Coulman, social entrepreneur and founder of Noisy Cricket, though it wasn’t always this way. I worked in corporate for over 10 years, heading up digital and tech projects before I made the move into social impact.

“I’d been in campaigning and community organising for years, then, the gift of redundancy gave me the kick up the butt I needed to do the purpose work I’d been craving for a long time.

“Setting up [Noisy Cricket] within six weeks of taking some time out was somewhat of a surprise though!”

Being Noisy Cricket’s founder, what made you want to set up the organisation?

“Working in corporate, I could see the writing on the wall when it came to social impact. A new generation, with big picture concerns and more conscientious approaches to work and consuming was necessitating a shift in how businesses employed and conducted themselves.

“On the other hand, the communities I was working in were generating the loyalty, passion and drive that businesses would pay ridiculous amounts of money for, so with my experience, I knew there had to be a better way to help all organisations contribute to social change.”

So, what does the organisation do exactly?

“Fundamentally, we’re a social impact consultancy, building people-powered movements around social issues.

“That involves bringing lots of diverse people together to co-create social solutions, and we have business and charity clients and public sector partners, but most important is bringing people impacted by social issues into the centre of our work.

“It’s important to create solutions with, not for, and it informs everything from the strategies we design, projects and projects we create and communities and campaigns we lead.”

Can you tell us more about the Homeless Inclusive Future project, which began this month, and how it can have a positive impact on homelessness?

“We’ve worked in homelessness for two years now, supporting the Manchester Homeless Partnership in its early days to bring on board businesses to radically reduce homelessness in the city.

“We educated over 250 businesses across the region, and channelled 50 of those into an action group, working on tactical issues from fresh fruit and veg provision at day centres to WiFi in temporary accommodation.”

Other than your job here, do you have other projects on the side?

“Facilitating and innovating for social impact is a full-time gig, and later this year, we’re planning to bring on product design talent, as well as a campaigner early next year.

“With the intention to bring on board a team to deliver HI Future too, we’re looking at some significant growth in the next year.”

What have been your biggest challenges during your time at Noisy Cricket so far, and how have you overcome them?

“Social impact can be lonely work, but despite rising inequality and a constricting economic climate, I’ve had the great fortune to find my people, and work and play with some of the most progressive, pro-active and delightful changemakers.

“Working in The Federation - a tech ethics space where I’m one of many socially-motivated entrepreneurs, helps. Other than that, it’s getting people to challenge their thinking.”

Looking back on 2018, what was your biggest achievement?

“It’s hard to think of a big moment, as change is often so incremental, but bringing together the HI Future community, and obtaining sponsorship to get the project started was a huge achievement.

“That, and working with The Federation on its purpose and mobilising its tech ethics community. There is some incredible talent in that building! Mostly, though, its been finding my people.

“Other social innovators, who think universally but get down and do the hard work locally and learning from people who have been at the sharp end at life and use that to fuel their work to create equality. They’re all a gift, and I’m just so grateful I get to do the work I do.

What are your goals for 2019 as you look to expand Noisy Cricket?

“In addition to growing the team and launching HI Future, we want to expand our influence in the issues we work on.

“We already do work in homelessness, health inequality and diversity and inclusion, so working with new clients committed to a community-led way of working and scaling our existing clients impact.”

And finally, what is it about your organisation that motivates and excites you the most?

“As well as being very aligned with my own personal purpose - creating human-balanced cultures - what’s exciting is the approach.

“The past few years have been spent shaping our social change theory and modelling a humanity-centred design process, so as we’re scaling, we’re starting to see the impact of these approaches, and how they can scale beyond our current home of Manchester across the UK, and hopefully one day, globally.”