ICAS ICAS logo

Quicklinks

  1. About Us

    Find out about who we are and what we do here at ICAS.

  2. Find a CA

    Search our directory of individual CAs and Member organisations by name, location and professional criteria.

  3. CA Magazine

    View the latest issues of the dedicated magazine for ICAS Chartered Accountants.

  4. Contact Us

    Get in touch with ICAS by phone, email or post, with dedicated contacts for Members, Students and firms.

Login
  • Annual renewal
  • About us
  • Contact us
  • Find a CA
  1. About us
    1. Governance
  2. Members
    1. Become a member
    2. Newly qualified
    3. Manage my membership
    4. Benefits of membership
    5. Careers support
    6. Mentoring
    7. CA Wellbeing
    8. More for Members
    9. Area networks
    10. International communities
    11. Get involved
    12. Top Young CAs
    13. Career breaks
    14. ICAS podcast
    15. Newly admitted members 2022
    16. Newly admitted members 2023
  3. CA Students
    1. Student information
    2. Student resources
    3. Learning requirements
    4. Learning updates
    5. Learning blog
    6. Totum Pro | Student discount card
    7. CA Student wellbeing
  4. Become a CA
    1. How to become a CA
    2. Routes to becoming a CA
    3. CA Stories
    4. Find a training agreement
    5. Why become a CA
    6. Qualification information
    7. University exemptions
  5. Employers
    1. Become an Authorised Training Office
    2. Resources for Authorised Training Offices
    3. Professional entry
    4. Apprenticeships
  6. Find a CA
  7. ICAS events
    1. CA Summit
  8. CA magazine
  9. Insight
    1. Finance + Trust
    2. Finance + Technology
    3. Finance + EDI
    4. Finance + Mental Fitness
    5. Finance + Leadership
    6. Finance + Sustainability
  10. Professional resources
    1. Anti-money laundering
    2. Audit and assurance
    3. Brexit
    4. Business and governance
    5. Charities
    6. Coronavirus
    7. Corporate and financial reporting
    8. Cyber security
    9. Ethics
    10. Insolvency
    11. ICAS Research
    12. Pensions
    13. Practice
    14. Public sector
    15. Sustainability
    16. Tax
  11. CPD - professional development
    1. CPD courses and qualifications
    2. CPD news and updates
    3. CPD support and advice
  12. Regulation
    1. Complaints and sanctions
    2. Regulatory authorisations
    3. Guidance and help sheets
    4. Regulatory monitoring
  13. CA jobs
    1. CA jobs partner: Rutherford Cross
    2. Resources for your job search
    3. Advertise with CA jobs
    4. Hays | A Trusted ICAS CA Jobs Partner
    5. Azets | What's your ambition?
  14. Work at ICAS
    1. Business centres
    2. Meet our team
    3. Benefits
    4. Vacancies
    5. Imagine your career at ICAS
  15. Contact us
    1. Technical and regulation queries
    2. ICAS logo request

Changemaker: Dreaming spires, inspiring dreams

  • LinkedIn (opens new window)
  • Twitter (opens new window)
By CA Magazine

28 October 2020

At Oxford’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, students brainstorm solutions to global challenges, from accessibility apps to mental health services in rural Africa. Chris Blues CA explains why he is helping these budding entrepreneurs change the world for the better.

Read November's CA magazine now

In the public imagination, studying at the University of Oxford is a romanticised Brideshead Revisited-style fantasy involving shuffling between honey-hued quadrangles, balancing dusty tomes on bicycles or arguing about Plato and Socrates in creaky medieval pubs. For the most part, it’s a vision that rings true (except for this year when students were forced to swap lectures in Wren-designed colleges for watching webinars in parental homes), with Oxford’s academic ambience having changed little in centuries.

One department does things slightly different, though. At the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, part of the university’s Saïd Business School, students might be seen in the school gardens soaked in sweat playing table tennis between classes. Or watching spoken word artist George the Poet riff on social inclusion. Maybe they’re having “walking meetings”, stopping under an oak tree to discuss Latin American fair trade. Because, as one Skoll employee tells CA magazine, “trees are a metaphor to talk about things”. Then there’s Skoll’s headquarters – an incongruous ziggurat in this city of dreaming spires.

It’s a can-do attitude: let’s get deals done and make things happen; shoot first and aim well.

“Skoll is the rebel on the block,” says Chris Blues CA, who, as Skoll’s Programme Manager for Social Ventures, helps to develop Oxford-led businesses that benefit the environment or society. Skoll aims to hatch a breed of ethical entrepreneurs and develop innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, from accessibility to forging more ethical ways of doing business with developing countries. There’s no specific social enterprise degree course at the centre; rather, it runs co-curricular courses open to Oxford students. There are also fully funded Skoll scholarships available to four lucky Saïd MBA students every year.

Skoll might be based in Oxford, but its origins lie more than 5,000 miles away in Silicon Valley, California. The centre was founded in 2003 with a $7.5m (then £4.4m) donation from Jeff Skoll, who made his fortune as eBay’s first full-time employee and President. As such, the free-thinking, “think-big, fail-fast, fail-well” idealism of tech titans such as Google or Apple is palpable at Skoll. “Our work has evolved from a North American approach to entrepreneurship,” says Blues. “It’s a can-do attitude: let’s get deals done and make things happen; shoot first and aim well. Skoll’s methods don’t just come from academia, but nature retreats, yoga and Google X-inspired accelerator workshops. Because we have such a diverse cohort of MBAs [95% of 2019-20’s class were international students, spanning 64 countries], beliefs and mindsets from Africa and Asia also have a big input; we listen to them and change the curriculum accordingly.”

Over the past 17 years, Skoll and Saïd alumni have spawned a slew of innovative social enterprises, such as Zoona, which delivers fintech services across southern Africa, and Kai Pacha Foods, which sells quinoa-based milk purchased from Andean farmers at fair prices. According to Blues, it’s important to view these enterprises as dynamic start-ups in their own right, rather than charities that might pop up on a friend’s JustGiving page. “None of these ventures have a long-term reliance on charitable donations,” he says.

“Instead, they look to capital to scale and grow just like any other business.” He also believes that the economic damage unleashed by Covid-19 may, conversely, create more purpose-driven firms. It’s an idea shared by Skoll himself, who gifted $100m to his California-based Skoll Foundation earlier this year specifically to fight the pandemic, including helping firms founded at the centre pivot their business models.

New paradigm

Blues’s backstory is no less socially responsible than the enterprises he works alongside. Following the completion of a geography degree, a desire to “understand how things work” led him to EY and qualification as a CA in 2013. “I reflect upon the CA qualification a lot,” says Blues. “It’s enabled me to speak the language of finance and understand the building blocks of any organisation.”

Following his departure from EY in 2014, Blues spent the next five years working for a series of socially responsible firms, such as grant-making group Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, online learning platform FutureLearn, and a two-year stint in New Zealand at social enterprise development firm Ākina, working with indigenous communities in the South Pacific. When the Skoll job was advertised in 2019, he applied immediately. “What made me apply was curiosity,” he says, “I wanted to spar with some incredible intellects.”

But social enterprise is a verb. Whether you’re an EY auditor, HR director or a social entrepreneur, considering social and environmental impact in your everyday work is a choice

The centre certainly attracts star wattage, not least at the annual Skoll World Forum. Billed as a “non-profit Davos”, it sees 1,000 social change luminaries such as Jimmy Carter, George Soros and Arianna Huffington gather in Oxford to discuss global problems. “Skoll puts you at the table, rather than being outside the room shouting in like Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion,” says Blues. “Trying to change the conversation at the table is messy… [but] if you slightly move the needle of powerful individuals, interesting things happen.”

It’s an ethos that also extends to Skoll’s MBA students, who, Blues believes, will carry a lasting social consciousness throughout their careers as a result of being immersed in the organisation’s values. “Some MBAs might go into big business, and that’s fine,” he says. “But social enterprise is a verb. Whether you’re an EY auditor, HR director or a social entrepreneur, considering social and environmental impact in your everyday work is a choice.

“Social enterprise has changed a lot: 15 years ago, it was seen as ‘other’. Now, social and environmental responsibility is part of strategy at places like BlackRock and BP; it’s viewed as a competitive advantage, driven by shareholders, stakeholders and consumers who want transparent supply chains. And a need for talent – millennials and generation Z don’t want to work for companies that aren’t socially responsible.”

As we become accustomed to living with Covid-19 long term – and Skoll has responded by running a mix of in-person and virtual activities for this academic year, “designing flexibility into each programme,” he says – Blues reckons those working in financial services will play an instrumental role in any new purpose-driven corporate landscape. “I truly believe accountants will save the world,” he says. “Accountants are seekers of truth, guardians of fairness; our role is to articulate what is valuable. We should redefine ‘CFO’ and consider ‘CVOs’ (Chief Value Officers) instead. Accountants should also think about the social and environmental work of a business, rather than just the monetary aspect.

“We’re living in a Goldilocks phase. We have the data; we know how to physically solve the causes of global problems through technology without having to deal with the symptoms. If we wait 15 to 20 years, my niece and nephew will have to solve both the causes and the symptoms. For me, it’s a call to action. Most people from my generation – and those at Skoll – feel the same way. Sometimes, it just falls upon certain generations to step up and do things.”

sbs.ox.ac.uk/skoll


Every year, the Skoll Venture Awards grants £50,000 in funding to a socially impactful business founded by an alumnus. Here are some of the success stories

Accomable: Rental accommodation platform founded by two childhood friends. After winning the Skoll Venture Award in 2013, the “Airbnb of accessibility” was itself acquired by Airbnb four years later.

I-Drop Water: By installing its water purification machines, Waterpods, in grocery shops throughout Africa, the company aims to reduce the price of drinking water on the continent.

Wazi: The company, which won in 2020, plans to connect rural communities in east Africa to mental health services.

2-23-totumpro 2-23-totumpro
ICAS logo

Footer links

  • Contact us
  • Terms and conditions
  • Modern slavery statement
  • Privacy notice
  • CA magazine

Connect with ICAS

  • Facebook (opens new window) Facebook Icon
  • Twitter (opens new window) Twitter Icon
  • LinkedIn (opens new window) LinkedIn Icon
  • Instagram (opens new window) Instagram Icon

ICAS is a member of the following bodies

  • Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies (opens new window) Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies logo
  • Chartered Accountants Worldwide (opens new window) Chartered Accountants Worldwide logo
  • Global Accounting Alliance (opens new window) Global Accounting Alliance
  • International Federation of Accountants (opens new window) IFAC
  • Access Accountancy (opens new window) Access Acountancy

Charities

  • ICAS Foundation (opens new window) ICAS Foundation
  • SCABA (opens new window) scaba

Accreditations

  • ISO 9001 - RGB (opens new window)
© ICAS 2022

The mark and designation “CA” is a registered trade mark of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS), and is available for use in the UK and EU only to members of ICAS. If you are not a member of ICAS, you should not use the “CA” mark and designation in the UK or EU in relation to accountancy, tax or insolvency services. The mark and designation “Chartered Accountant” is a registered trade mark of ICAS, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales and Chartered Accountants Ireland. If you are not a member of one of these organisations, you should not use the “Chartered Accountant” mark and designation in the UK or EU in relation to these services. Further restrictions on the use of these marks also apply where you are a member.

ICAS logo

Our cookie policy

ICAS.com uses cookies which are essential for our website to work. We would also like to use analytical cookies to help us improve our website and your user experience. Any data collected is anonymised. Please have a look at the further information in our cookie policy and confirm if you are happy for us to use analytical cookies: