I went down to Riverford Farm near Totnes in Devon, to meet Guy and see what a multimillion organic operation looks like. What I learnt is that this is a fantastic business, but such success does not come without personal sacrifice. I was also reminded that organic does not necessarily mean best all-round environmental option.

Although Guy started growing vegetables on his family farm in 1986, his story is far from a simple tale of a son following in his father’s footsteps. Guy is the youngest of five children; a position, he says, has made him spoilt and stubborn. He studied agricultural and forestry science at Oxford University before returning to his birthplace at Riverford, with the hope of taking over the family farm. When it became clear that he was not high enough in the family pecking order to win this honour, he left again to become a management consultant in London and New York. However, the desire to run his own farming business was strong and Guy was determined to show his father that he could do it. Aged 26, he came back home at Christmas and started growing vegetables on 3 acres of land, next to the house where he grew up: “Before I knew it I was out in the field with a plough”.

His father’s farm was not organic but an eye for an opportunity along with a sense of self-preservation attracted Guy down the chemical-free path. “I made myself sick from not being careful with pesticides and my brother was hospitalized with Paraquat poisoning.” Around the same time, “There was a bit of a buzz around Totnes about organics, organic veg in particular.”  Today it would take at least 3 years to gain organic status, in the 1980s, you could do so instantly: Riverford Organics was born.

At the outset, Guy was doing all the digging, ploughing and planting and then distributing the vegetables in his car boot to local shops. “It went from 3 to 18 to 50 acres quite rapidly. I was so driven. For the first 5 years I worked 70 or 80 hours a week and then went back to my room and collapsed. I had a demonic determination to succeed and prove myself.” The hard work did not stop there: “By the time I was thirty, I was married and started a family and I continued to work ridiculous hours. For ten or fifteen years. If I’m perfectly honest, the business came first. I don’t ever want to work like that again in my life.”

Back in the late 1980s London was the big market for organic food, but logistics were troublesome and unreliable. Trying to coordinate with passing lorries was a nightmare. Guy tried negotiating with the big supermarkets to become a supplier, but a fair deal was impossible to obtain.

Two organizational innovations were critical in Riverford’s successful development. The first was the idea of a veg box delivered to the customers’ door, inspired by some other local organic farmers, in 1993. This was something unusual at the time, but it quickly caught on. “For the first few weeks I did all the deliveries myself and I knew immediately that I was on to something. The people were really interested in the product.” The second important innovation was linking up with other farmers in a producers cooperative. From 1997 to 1999 Guy worked with ten other farms to become organic, and provide the variety and quantity of produce that was needed to fill the boxes.

Business really took off when they gave up on supplying supermarkets and decided to focus on the boxes. “Between 2003 and 2007 we went from 4 or 5 million to 30 million pound turn over. It was very stressful and probably one of the most miserable times of my life.” Are these the inevitable costs of success? Guy Watson’s marriage broke down a few years ago, and he now wistfully comments on his somewhat belated appreciation of time spent with his children. Guy reflects that there is no easy way to do what he has: “What I’ve achieved has come at great personal cost. I’m not sure what I would have done differently. Lived a lesser life perhaps….”

A few years ago Riverford took on a Chief Executive, so that Guy could have more time for his personal life and work on some of the more thorny strategic challenges faced by his business. Getting Riverford’s environmental performance right is clearly one such tough issue. Their largely middle-class and environmentally-conscious customer base expect that an organic vegetable box is an all-round, positive environmental offering. However, the trade-offs between different environmental concerns are complex. Unafraid of an intellectual challenge, Guy worked with Exeter University and uncovered some surprising facts: The cardboard boxes they deliver their produce in – well designed, 98% recycled materials, easily folding and reusable (up to 10 times) – have a greater carbon footprint than their entire UK haulage fleet and using plastic crates would be better; Using biodegradable bags, which cannot be recycled, is worse than using plastic bags; As the climate changes and becomes more unpredictable, it is better to import food from kinder climates than to try and grow locally and ultimately waste crops.

Guy claims that many customers are too prejudiced to take on these conclusions. This is disheartening but probably realistic. Considering this lack of consumer push, the costs of change are often too great. For example, switching from cardboard boxes to plastic crates would take a £1 million capital spend and a massive logistical overhaul. In a tough business environment this is a difficult step to take. Last year Riverford lost 30 to 40% of production because of the bad weather. That was the equivalent of about 300 pounds for every acre. Even with climate change having such a direct and negative impact on their business, it is difficult not to focus on more short-term business pressures. On the day we met it was actually IT that was top of the agenda. “It’s crippling our business”, Guy sighs.

I leave Totnes struck by the how difficult it is for a business to truly minimise their carbon emissions. We still operate in a world where the true cost of carbon is not accounted for. Until that changes, businesses will focus on the factors that we do value in our society. Guy himself has undoubtedly made a massive contribution to fuelling the nation’s appetite for good quality, fresh, organic food. It shows what a thoughtful man he is, that our conversation has made me as aware of the environmental pitfalls of what he is doing, as much as it has the benefits.

15 years later, Hugh (pictured above) and Phil are both directors of Ebico, the UK’s only not-for-profit energy supplier. Ebico provides electricity and gas on a single tariff, without a standing charge, to all customers. This means that if you are a direct debit customer, you will not get the discount that you are used to and may pay 2 or 3 pounds more a month. However, you will know that you are getting a fair rate, that is always competitive, and that you are helping some of the country’s fuel poor. If you use a prepay meter or use very little energy, you will save yourself from being penalised with higher tariffs and unfair flat-rate standing charges. Ebico is the energy industry equivalent of Fair Trade bananas.

Hugh told me how he knew he wanted to help Phil soon after hearing his idea. Phil was working for British Gas during the liberalisation of the energy markets in the late 1980s and 90s. He realised that the most profitable strategy for a company like BG was to attract those who pay by direct debit and to penalise the less attractive prepay meter customers. He could foresee a gulf emerging in how different customers were charged and that the poorest would end up paying more. He wanted to set up a company which would provide energy at a price that was fair for everyone and decided to quit BG and follow his dream. He needed to get his message out which is why he tried the Diocesan Synod.

Hugh Lee had worked for British Coal for twenty five years and like Phil had an in depth knowledge of the energy industry and a wide network of energy contacts. He was also ordained in the early 1980s and had a strong wish to make a positive difference. The two men decided that the best way forward was to try and work with one of the big energy companies. They talked to lots of their contacts in the industry, but success came when they met with the sales manager of Southern Electric. Although Southern were also keen on the more reliable direct debit customers, they were interested in the opportunity to extend their reach provided by Hugh and Phil’s proposal.

Hugh and Phil used a philanthropic donation of £5000 to write a business plan and set up a company, using off-the-shelf legal documents. Southern Electric organised some focus groups and market research and agreed details of how much they would pay Ebico to manage these customers for them. In February 1999 the company was launched at the House of Commons with lots of publicity.

Hugh told me, “Several of my friends thought that it was amazing that I was starting a new company. Phil and I were doing everything in our free time and there were lots of meetings and discussions, but it was totally fine.”

Ebico now has 50,000 customers. More than half of these customers are of the “altruistic” variety, who could probably find a cheaper tariff elsewhere if they chose to. The others are made up of prepay customers and lower users, who definitely save money with Ebico. “We suspected that this group of customers would be very conservative about switching and that proved to be true. We try reach them by word-of-mouth, as that tends to work best”.

As Ebico is a not-for-profit company, any surplus is reinvested back into the company or into the Ebico charitable trust. Recent years have been so lucrative that the trust has been well endowed and they have been able to invest in eight projects around the country that help those who struggle to pay their energy bills by visiting people in their homes and giving out practical advice.

The plan for the future, just like any successful company, is for sustainable growth. Hugh is keen that they retain the ability to maintain very good customer services (at the moment, if you call Ebico, you will always speak to one of two people who manage the phones). “Most companies want to grow to increase their profits, we want to grow because we want to help more people”.

He wrote down some of their proposals on two pieces of A4 paper and started to arrange meetings with people who might be able to assist. Adam felt that more collaboration between charitable organisations would help and that contributing to the community should be more embedded in the university experience. In the back of Adam’s mind, was the idea that this might be his ticket to a year off his academic work.

Adam says he’s embarrassed now thinking back on the “lofty” people he tried to engage with his ideas, but over lunch one day with a visiting masters student, he had a conversation that would stay with him for the rest of his life. This slightly older, slightly wiser acquaintance simply asked if Adam and his friends had thought of writing a business plan. They had not, and so when he went home, Adam googled “How do I write a business plan?”; that was 2007 and the rest, as they say, is history.

I’m listening to this story in what I consider to be one of Oxford’s most hip restaurants, the Turl Street Kitchen (TSK). It has great food, a relaxed atmosphere and lively buzz. The hugely successful Kitchen is the profit-generating arm of the Oxford Hub: The impressive organisation which has grown out of Adam and his friends’ initial proposals. The TSK sits in a four storey Georgian town house beneath the Hub’s offices and meeting spaces.

The Oxford Hub aims to support and inspire students to get involved in social action while at university and beyond. This Hub is one of a growing network of eight Student Hubs around the country. The TSK opened in September 2011, to help the Hub achieve financial sustainability, after they won a competitive bidding process to rent the building from Oxford City Council. “We created a bidding document of about 100 pages with letters of support from all the colleges, the mayor and the careers service. We’ll never have to do anything like that again because now we can show them what we’ve done here.”

Clearly, a lot of talent and hard work has gone into getting from a first-attempt business plan to a thriving social enterprise. After securing a small amount of funding back in 2007, Adam’s tutors agreed to let him have his longed for year-off to work up his proposals. He worked with a team of student volunteers to start exploring what could be done. The work quickly mushroomed, but a year later as another tranche of funding was found, he returned to complete his studies while fellow student, Adam Grodecki, took over the helm.

O’Boyle came back to the Hub once he had graduated and even now says he’s surprised when people ask him “When are you going to move on?”. “I don’t have any particular need or desire to move on,” he tells me. “The organization is still growing.” His role as Executive Director is both intellectually and practically challenging. When I ask about the potential pitfalls of a volunteering programme, I can see that there has been no shortage of debate. “Soul searching is definitely the hard part. We have had some long brainstorming meetings, which are not to everyone’s taste, but there has to be a constant process of going back to first principles and making sure the organisation is aligned with them.” This is no ivory tower though. The Hub coordinates and inspires armies of volunteers around the city, as well as fundraising activities for local and international causes. At the same time, Adam and his team value the accumulation and retention of knowledge. “Wherever possible, we try to spot good ideas and take what’s useful to us from them.”

Adam tells me about some of their future plans: “We’ll be opening a guest house soon, and hope to start a deli nearby as well”. With financial sustainability, Adam wants to grow the charity: “Hub Ventures aims to create social spaces for social change, with a focus on students at university and afterwards. I hope that vision will expand nicely to operate in a broader context.”

I agree that there is a great appetite in the broader population to make a positive difference. If thoughtful and creative people like Adam and his team are able to channel a wider audience towards worthwhile volunteering projects, we will all be better off. As Adam puts it: “People largely do what’s put in front of them. The Hub tries to create easy opportunities for students to give back to the community. Things that you can do with your friends, that aren’t too scary, but nevertheless, make a difference.” I know plenty of non-students who would willingly take some of that as well.

I met Wendy Tiffin earlier this year as part of a series of portraits of inspiring folks selected by the Media Trust for their annual review. I was commissioned to take her portrait in her room in a Leonard Cheshire home in Poole, where I found Wendy surrounded by personal memorabilia. I posted some of these photographs on my Portraits that Matter site way back in January, but ever since I’ve been meaning to write a little more of Wendy’s remarkable story here. From behind my camera, I couldn’t help but ask Wendy a bit about how she had come to the Media Trust’s attention. She is an impressive example of triumph over adversity. Challenged with serious ill health since an early age, society’s response has been to try and exclude Wendy. Strong-willed and tenacious, she refuses to be discouraged and diverts her energy to campaigning to make life better for all those with disabilities.

Doctors found that Wendy had a brain tumour when she was three, and then again aged eight. When the local authorities wanted Wendy to go into special school, her parents (who clearly share Wendy’s genes) fought against it. She proved them right by gaining enough qualifications aged sixteen to go on and work for the Inland Revenue. In her mid-twenties, Wendy again suffered a long period of illness and was asked to take early retirement. Not a decision she was happy to have to make. Another big operation at that time left Wendy with no feeling below her chest, and she was told that she would soon become wheelchair dependent.

Wendy had managed to live independently with her mother until she died last year. Her grief was compounded with the loss of freedom that was to follow. Wendy decided that she had no choice but to move into a Leonard Cheshire home. Many of the other residents suffer from cerebral palsy or MS and so communication can be difficult for them. However, Wendy, a bright forty-something who just has trouble getting around, has no trouble at all getting her opinion understood.  She refuses to let her loss of career get her down and is determined to use her skills to make a difference in whatever way she can.

Wendy started with local campaigns, such as trying to improve the steep camber on local pavements, which makes getting around by wheelchair treacherous. Then she decided to try her hand at bigger issues: “When the proposed cutbacks to the disability living allowance were announced in the 2010 Spending Review, I was livid and thought “what can I do?” I started by writing to the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Maria Miller to name a few.” Wendy went on marches in London and gave her first speech at a regional march in Southampton. She attracted enough attention that she was asked to participate in the national Low Review; An attempt to assess the impact of changes to the Mobility Allowance for people in residential care. When I met her, Wendy was delighted to report that this benefit would be staying in place: “A relief after all that campaigning”.

For now Wendy is devoting her efforts to making a difference within Leonard Cheshire Homes as a representative on the Service Users Network Association at local, regional and national level. I suspect it will not be long before she finds another campaign for disability rights that needs her support and skills.

As I prepared to leave, Wendy surprised me by asking how old I was. It turns out we are both the same age at 42. As I write this now and I find myself thinking about what was happening in my life as Wendy battled with ill-health, lost her career, her mother, and then her home, I have even more admiration for her ability to forge ahead and make a positive difference to the world around her. Thank you Wendy for sharing your story.

There’s a concept in psychology called “nominative determinism”. The idea is that men called “Dennis” are more likely to become dentists, or those with the surname “Lawman” are ever-so-slightly more likely to take up a career in policing or criminal justice. Well, I’m sitting in a fusty corner of a fusty hotel in Oxford, and I’m talking to Dr Brilliant.

If Larry Brilliant was a character in a book, nobody would believe in him. Trained as a doctor, he joined a group of protesting native Americans – “Indians of All Tribes” – on Alcatraz island, acting as midwife as a protestor gave birth to her child. His resulting fame turned into a role in a hippyish movie, Medicine Ball Nation, the movie role turned into enough cash for a cross-continental bus ride from San Francisco to India, the bus ride turned into a fundraising effort for a cyclone in East Pakistan, and so the epic continued. With his wife, he studied yoga in a Himalayan monastery – pretty much everyone did at the time, he deadpans – before, on the instructions of his guru, he joined the effort to eradicate smallpox in India and throughout the world. It was the first and, so far, the only time that a disease in humans has been completely wiped out.

That’s enough for one lifetime, but Brilliant and his wife also founded the Seva foundation, which has restored sight to over two million people. (It was kicked off with a donation of $5000 from a then-unknown Steve Jobs.) He co-founded The Well in the 1980s – the stone-age version of Facebook that pre-dated the world wide web itself – became a dot-com CEO, worked in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Tsunami, won the “TED Prize”, was the first head of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm – not a happy experience, he admits – and now runs the Skoll Global Threats Fund. These days he is probably most famous for his efforts to nip modern-day pandemics in the bud. Who am I trying to kid? He’s most famous for being called Larry Brilliant, and on this particular afternoon he is on particularly charming form.

Officially I’m there to interview Dr Brilliant for a column for the Financial Times about the economics of pandemics. But I can’t help but hijack my own interview for ten minutes to ask him about his career, and about what advice he would give anyone seeking to emulate his astonishing journey through life.

“People should read the Financial Times instead of the Wall Street Journal,” he begins. Flatterer. But then things get more serious.

“You can over-plan things. Some people have ten year plans. I don’t. The best things that ever happened to me, I planned zero of them.”

Should you just hope to be lucky then, or is it about seizing opportunities when they come along?

“A bit of both. But if you just say, ‘I’m going to be lucky,’ you’re not going to get very far.”

Brilliant is warming to his theme, now. “You have to believe that one person can make a difference. I always quote Margaret Mead: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’”

Well, it’s easy for Larry Brilliant to say. He’s on first name terms with the Silicon Valley billionaires, he’s a media darling. Of course Larry Brilliant can make a difference, but what about the rest of us? I don’t say this out loud, but the question seems to be on his mind, perhaps because he found fame so early and in such an arbitrary fashion. After Alcatraz, he discovered that the world’s media treated him as though three weeks with native American protestors had made him the world expert on the subject of native American rights and culture. But that media glare was out of proportion to anything he felt he deserved.

“It starts with ordinary people. Ordinary people do extraordinary things, and then we lionise them. We make heroes out of them. And that’s a problem, because it makes other ordinary people look at these heroes and think that they can’t achieve the same things. But that path is open to everybody. Anybody at any time.
“There are so many wonderful people who, if they had the spotlight, their lives would read in the same wonderful way as mine. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about the attention. I mean, I wrote a book about eradicating smallpox, about being the mascot of the eradication effort, and everybody thought it was just me – that I single-handedly wiped smallpox from the face of the earth. But it’s a team sport. There were 180,000 people involved in India alone.”

“Think about Zafar Hussain. He was born in poverty, raised in poverty. He decided to become a sanitary inspector – his job was to test for shit in the water. And he became my translator. He risked his life many times because he realised the campaign to eradicate smallpox was something he could help with, something that he could do. He eradicated smallpox.

“It’s ordinary people who become the heroes.”