Young Foundation

The Young Foundation is a not-for-profit, organisation driving community research and social innovation.

It is named after Michael Young, the British sociologist and social activist who created over 60 organisations including the Open University, Which?, Economic and Social Research Council, the School for Social Entrepreneurs, and Language Line.^[3]

The Institute of Community Studies (ICS) was set up by Michael Young in 1953. The ICS is a research institute which combined academic research and practical social innovation. In 2005, it merged with the Mutual Aid Centre and was renamed The Young Foundation, in honour of its founder, Michael Young. In both current and previous incarnations, The Young Foundation has been instrumental in leading research, driving public debate, and implementing social innovation in the UK and abroad, with an emphasis on combining research and practical application.

During the second half of the 20th century Michael Young was one of the world’s most creative and influential social thinkers and doers. After 1945 he helped shape the UK’s new welfare state. In the early 1950s he set up the Institute of Community Studies and used it as a base for research and action.

Together with collaborators including Peter Willmott, Peter Townsend and many others, he wrote a series of bestsellers which changed attitudes to a host of social issues, including urban planning (leading the movement away from tower blocks), education (leading thinking about how to radically widen access) and poverty.

Young pioneered ideas of public and consumer empowerment both in private markets and in public services, some of which are only now becoming mainstream (for example NHS Direct, the spread of after-school clubs and neighbourhood councils can all be traced to his work).

Young coined the word "meritocracy" and published the satire The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958. Family and Kinship in East London shone light the role of the family in working class communities.

Young's greatest legacy was institution building. He initiated, and in some cases directly created, dozens of new institutions including: Open University, Which?, International Alert, University of the Third Age, Economic and Social Research Council, National Extension College, National Consumer Council, Open College of the Arts, Language Line and School for Social Entrepreneurs. It was the commercial sale of Language Line to a venture capital company that provided most of the funding for the establishment of the School for Social Entrepreneurs.

Other organisations Young created pioneered new approaches to funerals and baby-naming, neighbourhood democracy and the arts. He was described by Harvard’s Daniel Bell as ‘the world’s most successful entrepreneur of social enterprises’.^[4]

The Young Foundation has continued to incubate new social enterprises. For example it established the Social Innovation Exchange^[5] in 2007 which spun out as a separate organization in 2013.^[6] The Young Foundation is currently involved in different areas including health and well-being, place-based work, inequality and support for young people.^[7]

• Michael Young
• Peter Hall
• Geoff Mulgan
• Rushanara Ali
• Charlotte Leslie
• Peter Townsend
• Yvonne Roberts
• Peter Willmott
• Ann Cartwright
• Karen Dunnell

• Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington
• List of UK think tanks

• Young Foundation