<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Collaborative Future is a social enterprise actively advocating for a society where everyone is valued and empowered. They help teams, networks and organisations to learn from, nurture and recruit individuals that they wouldn’t normally meet, and support people looking for work to pave their own career path.
Most organisations Collaborative Future work with are reluctant to touch pay, assuming there are huge barriers in the way of innovation. Tessa Cooper, founder of Collaborative Future, is adamant this isn’t true.
Collaborative future have a small team (three), and flat pay. We spoke with Tessa who works with other organisations, advocating more equal, more transparent approaches to pay.
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Before Collaborative Future, Tessa worked on a pay review committee, where they witnessed pay increases determined by who argued most vociferously for either themselves or their team. Often, a pay-setter's opinion of what was considered a valuable skill was purely determined by opinion, or what the pay-setter themselves couldn’t do (e.g. design).
Collaborative Future was founded to get young people opportunities in local businesses. Initially, six young people rotated working for six businesses, and because of the challenges involved in getting them on a payroll in each organisation, Collaborative Future took responsibility for paying each young person.
They began by paying young people as “consultants”, but it was often fiddly for the young people to navigate self employment, particularly when they’d previously been on benefits or universal credit.
This led to Collaborative Future deciding to put everyone on their programmes onto PAYE earning above London Living Wage. This was a big financial risk for an unfunded social enterprise to take, but Collaborative Future believe more organisations need to take risks like this in order to provide the financial freedom and security needed to achieve economic justice within our society.
Today, Collaborative Future self-funds its programmes for young people by offering paid consultancy services to help other organisations with equity and inclusion and creating environments where people can thrive.
“Pay usually only comes up in the context of monitoring pay gaps, rather than unpicking pay and everything we think about it as a society.”
“A lot of what we stand for is making sure that work is accessible and everyone is equally valued. So as a core team [of three, plus freelancers] we decided that we’d all have the same salary.”
Collaborative Future decided on flat pay because all parts are needed for the company to run effectively.
They are a team of three and all are paid £35,000 (as of our conversation in 2021).
While Tess (30), as the original founder and traditionally most 'experienced', might shoulder a lot of the responsibility and risk around income, Sonia (26) and Prisca (24) are equally valuable team members when it comes to making Collaborative Future's work possible and are very aware of how their work influences the financial sustainability of the company. Sonia and Prisca are taking on more and more responsibility as the team learns together and grows, but Tess believes explicitly valuing people as equals first and foremost regardless of title and experience is what provides people with the space, time and confidence needed to fulfil their potential.
“Value is not just about skill, years of experience, or how quickly you can do things. Actually, there are lots of the people we work with who will ask one question that's hugely poignant, that could completely impact the way we might think about a piece of work. That person asking that question is massively valuable. And for me, that's about like the perspective that people bring into their work.”
While flat pay isn't achievable for many organisations, there are stark differences between how workplaces value 'seniority' or 'experience' in comparison to 'fresh perspectives' and 'creativity'. In many organisations CEOs are often paid 5 times, sometimes 10+ times more than the most 'junior' member of staff and Collaborative Future believe in closing that stark pay gap.
With pay gap, imagination can be worse than reality