The Change Makers: How to Create Better Lives – Details, episodes & analysis

“Survivors feel different to other people, like they don’t fit in, whereas here they meet each other and they connect...” In the last episode of the Change Makers Sir Tom meets Fiona Ellis and Clare Wilson, founders of Survivors in Transition helping survivors of sexual abuse.

In the second last episode of the first series of #TheChangeMakers, Sir Tom meets with Sophie Humphreys OBE, founder and driver of two charities: Pause, focusing on the wellbeing of children taken into care and SHiFT, a charity enabling children & young people to escape the destructive cycles of crime.

In episode seven we listen to the extraordinary story of Sister Mary Joy as she moves from being Europe’s first female professional firewoman to being a jockey, a nun, and then a Change Maker. Sister Mary Joy established The Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre which provides riding and equine therapy for children with special needs and people with dementia.

In this episode, we meet Geoff Stevens, who inspired by his faith and his fathers dementia founded Pathways Care Farm, which gives vulnerable people the opportunity to learn, re-build and grow through a range of hands-on farming activities. This might include planting, fruit and vegetable cultivation, helping to restore a barn, animal husbandry or even the basics of machinery maintenance.

In this episode Sir Tom talks to Sophia Parker, who founded a very successful charity Little Village while looking after three children under six. Little Village is a "food bank", but for clothes toys and equipment for babies and children up to the age of five. Last year alone they supported 7,281 children.

In this episode we meet Marcellus Baz. Born and raised in Nottingham, Marcellus grew up to become a product of his surroundings. Involved in gang activity from his youth, Marcellus spent much of his time running from the law and dealing with the consequences of his lifestyle throught he deaths of loved ones including his best friend. A moment of chance changed Marcellus’s life forever, when he was avoiding the police and found himself in a leisure centre boxing class. Supported by the coach, Marcellus reformed his life through learning to box and now in a similar way he is reforming lives of others through Switch-Up.

This week Sir Tom talks with Dame Stephanie Shirley who arrived in Birtiain as an unaccompanied child refugee in 1939 from nazi Germany on the kinder transport. She started what became Xansa plc (now part of the Sopra Group) on her dining room table with £6 in 1962. She is now a successful IT entrepreneur, serial charity founder and ardent philanthropist. She established Shirley Foundation and co-founded the Oxford Internet Institute.

This week we meet Ed Fidoe who in his twenties decided to create a school that had an entirely different approach to education, hence he established School21, where children did things differently, develop skills and attributes that went beyond what was tested in exams, including speaking skills, craftmanship, grit and spark.

In this episode we meet our host Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett who will talk with Lady Juliet Hughes-Hallett, his wife and inspiration; co-founder of Smart Works, a UK based charity that provides high quality interview clothes and interview training to unemployed women in need.

In episode fifteen of The Change Makers we meet Brad Gudger whose personal experience with cancer has given him an asset and skills to create a charity Alike to support and guide other people diagnosed with cancer.