Interview with an Entrepreneur: Jessica ShortallGrown-up children want the best for their parents as they go through the aging process. But in reality many people feel squeezed for time and don’t know where to find the right advice or who to ask. Jessica Shortall is working with Health Launchpad on a ground breaking website providing ‘adult children’ with practical support to help them care for their parents. She talks to Zenobia Talati.
Age: 29 Project: Kidsof.com Job Title: Social Entrepreneur
Jessica’s approach to her work is single-minded. She says that what she does is more a way of life than a job because she never really switches off. She admits she rarely sleeps through the night because her mind is awash with ideas about her latest project. Rather than sounding obsessive, the sheer joy she has in her work is inspiring. Jessica, who was born in New Jersey, comes across as very focussed. “Since I can remember, I’ve been interested in achieving social impact” she says. Her dedication stems from a belief that she can make a real difference to the world, “you have to believe that," she says. “You have to fall in love with your idea. Otherwise there is no way that you could justify the sleepless nights and the stress." You can almost imagine she popped out as a baby with the word ‘entrepreneur’ pasted on her forehead. In fact, Jessica studied Art History at university, with vague plans of working in a museum or gallery. It was only when she began to find out what entrepreneurs did that she realised that a vocation existed for the way that she approached life. She then obtained an MBA from Oxford and has experience working on a number of social ventures. She says her mind has always been tuned to listening to people’s questions and complaints and finding patterns in what they are saying. Jessica believes successful social ventures must fundamentally be responsive to what people want, “I don’t like ideas that are put upon people,” she says. “I think that’s what can get charity, business and government into trouble.” Jessica has a knack of flipping over the obvious and finding solutions from another perspective. After graduating, she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, teaching English. She quickly realised that there was a huge demand for learning English - but only one of her. So she helped create a learning centre in order that the community could continue to study long after she had left. Jessica says she can be a bit brazen and take opportunities and resources before they are offered to her. So, not seeing lack of resources as an obstacle, she had a single letter published in a magazine, and from this received donations from around the world to stock the centre with thousands of books. When she returned to the US, Jessica joined a team to start an organisation called The Campus Kitchens Project. The idea behind it is to use the food and kitchen space that usually go to waste each day and prepare meals that are delivered to homeless shelters. The team took the simple concept further by setting up a franchise model that has grown to around 15 campuses in the country. The kitchens are run by students who also provide nutritional education as well as training in food services for unemployed people. The idea for Kidsof.com, the provisional name for the practical web tool for people to share information about caring for their parents, came to Jessica during a conversation with a friend. They realised that while there are many organisations that provide advice to older people and to carers, the needs of grown-up children, who may not live close to their parents or who do not provide full-time care, have not been collectively addressed. She recognises that many people want peace of mind that they are doing the best for their parents but experience extreme guilt and pressure to juggle their lives, “they are busy people, they have jobs and kids and they are trying to care for their parents at the same time,” she says. “We forget that everyone who does it is going through it for the first time. It is like having a baby except there is almost no joy in it. It’s very stressful and everyone is looking for the same information from scratch.” Kidsof is envisaged as a web community that gives users the opportunity to manage, create and share local knowledge and personal experiences. Say your parent becomes ill, you could join a virtual group to find out about what services are available in a local area and compare how useful other users have found them. You could find information about support services to help if your parent has a fall, for example, or you could access information about care homes in a particular area, or read insider tips and experiences about how to help manage health conditions such as Alzheimer’s or incontinence. There would also be the potential to create personal networks to share important medical information, contact details or health updates with family and friends. Jessica is firmly against the tendency of some organisations to ‘hero-worship’ entrepreneurs. She believes successful social ventures are inherently collaborative, rather than reliant on any one individual. In this way, she hopes Kidsof will bring together a group of people who are literally "freaking out," and give them a forum to build user-generated information to help themselves and each other manage their parents’ aging, “information coming from one organisation is useful” she says. “But it’s not nearly as useful as information from a million people.” Read Interview with Susan Langford Read interview with Nick Temple Read interview with Mary Rose Cook Read interview with Elizabeth Bayliss Read interview with Andrew Brough Read interview with Jos Belgrave
|
 do more |
Name: Jessica Shortall