The story starts...

We Are What We Do began life in a corner of East London. It was a project of Community Links, an inner-city charity that helps one of the poorest communities in Europe.

Back in 2004 Community Link's founder, David Robinson, decided to write a paper. It was called Reconnecting and it included his thoughts, based on 25 years as a community worker, on the need to find new ways for change in society and the power of people coming together to make it happen.
He began to gather a group of people from the creative industries, business, voluntary sector and government to do something about this.

This group eventually included Eugenie Harvey, an Aussie with a background in communications and marketing, Giles Gibbons, founder of the responsible business consultancy Good Business and author of a book by the same name with Steve Hilton, Steve, himself now director of strategy for David Cameron, Marksteen Adamson then at Interbrand now running his own consultancy, Tim Ashton, founder and Creative Director of the creative agency Antidote, Russell Davies, a legend of the interactive marketing world, Gail Greengross from Business in the Community, Paul Twivy, founder of two communications companies and comms guru for a number of charities including Comic Relief, TimeBank and The Big Lunch, and Steve Henry the co-founder of ad agency HHCL .

A few urns of tea in East end caffs later, We Are What We Do was born.

Many of the original team are still closely involved in We Are What We Do today. Eugenie became a full time part of the organisation running We Are What We Do with David for several years and still sits on our board. Tim and his agency have been behind all our creative work over the years. Giles, David and Paul sit on our board.

Change The World For A Fiver

We asked a simple question, "What would you ask one million people to do to change the world?"

Thousands of people from all over the world replied.

The result was our best selling book, Change the World for a Fiver - 50 actions to change the world and make you feel good.

It has been endorsed by Number 10, bigged up on telly, placed in hotel rooms, published in 6 countries and sold over 1 million copies worldwide.

Change The World 9-5

After the success of Change The World for a Fiver, people starting asking us for actions they could do at work. So we asked you. Thousands of suggestions later our next book appeared.

Working with other companies

Whether it's talking to people in their own workplace, like the employees engagement programme we're running with Sainsbury's, or working with companies to spread our message further, like the minibooks and website we're producing with the drinks company Menos Es Mas in Spain, we've worked with lots of brands and companies so we can reach more people.

I'm Not A Plastic Bag

#001, Decline plastic bags, is such an easy thing to do. But a few years ago it was only tofu-eating sandal-wearers that considered bringing their own hemp carrier to the supermarket.

So we asked handbag designer Anya Hindmarch to help. Together we created the “I'm NOT a plastic bag” shopper. People saw it, loved it, and cottoned on.

Teach Your Granny To Text

Can kids change the world? Well, we certainly think so. So we decided to make a book especially for children. And asked them to create it too.

Erica suggested we teach our grannies to text. Cato and Edward told us to Walk our Dads. Jone told us to not start a war. All good advice.

Thanks to the DCSF, every school in the country has a copy to stick and tear and grow and unfold.

Working with schools

We provide training and workshops in both primary and secondary schools, and create toolkits for student campaigning.

For the last couple of years we've also recruited 200 young people from schools and colleges in England to be part of our Young Speakers Programme,

We take them to a farm somewhere near Bristol, train them up, then send them out to run campaigns and do presentations in their schools and communities. Last year our Young Speakers spread the We Are What We Do message to over 50,000 children.

The Young Speakers programme is funded by the Aldridge Foundation and v.

Our new campaign

Talk to old people, they know great stuff you don't.

Talk to young people, they know great stuff you don't.

Our next new campaign is all about Action #014, Spend time with someone from a different generation.

We've got loads of things in the pipe line. Together with Google we're getting you to dig out some old photos and collect them on Google Maps, there will be new ways for you to do Action #115, Teach Your Granny To Text and some new actions for you to do.

Watch this space.

What happens next...

How do we get more people, doing more actions, to bring about even more change?

Everyday we are concocting plans for what we do next.

Eugenie's idea for a 24 hour TV programme showing live footage of an energy saving lightbulb hasn't made the short list... but a few others have.

And we're always keen to get suggestions from you too. Drop us a line.