Welcoming Tim Griffiths as our Chairman

Tim Griffiths has joined Young Social Innovators as Chairman of the Board, taking up the role in the year we mark 25 years of working alongside young people in schools, Youthreach centres and communities across the island.
He succeeds Gerry Fitzpatrick, who stepped down in the summer after six years in the chair. 

What 25 years looks like
Since 2001, more than 200,000 young people have come through YSI. They work in teams on a social or environmental issue they care about, something they have noticed in their own school, youth centre or community, and they spend the year trying to turn an idea into something that actually happens. The projects are rarely abstract. A team at Tullamore College in Co Offaly, working under the name Grass Sheets, turned discarded grass clippings into an alternative to paper and used the material to make everything from paper bags to a wearable jacket. Students at Rosses Community School in Dungloe, Co Donegal, who call themselves Tick Tack Go, put together tick removal kits and ran an education campaign on Lyme disease in an area where the risk is high. SAOR, Free the Flow, from Portmarnock Community School in Co Dublin, took on period poverty with reusable sanitary pads, training and advocacy, work that now runs from Ireland to Lesotho.

In every case the issue was chosen by the young people themselves. That is the part that matters to us. What they come away with is a set of working skills they will use long after school. They learn to research a social issue and work out what is actually causing it, to design a solution and budget for it, to stand up in front of a room and pitch it, to run a project to a deadline, and to work in a team. We call it social innovation education and teachers and guides tend to describe it as the year a quiet student finds their voice.
 

Why Tim
Tim studied Economics at University College Dublin, graduating in 1991. He spent more than 25 years in the communications industry before moving into the non-profit sector. He co-founded and ran Initiative Media Dublin, OMD Ireland and Omnicom Media Group Ireland, and was chief executive of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland from 2021 to 2025. He has supported social entrepreneurship for over two decades, first through the Ashoka Support Network, and completed the Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management programme at Harvard Business School in 2023.

His reason for taking the role is a simple one.

Tim has recently led Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, building capacity in social enterprise across the island, as well as three commercial businesses within the corporate world, so he knows what it takes to scale a charity such as YSI and enable it to achieve its future goal of another 500,000 young changemakers over the next 25 years. But the reason he fits here is simpler than that. Empowering young people to take action on the issues they care about is what this organisation exists to do, and Tim has spent twenty years backing people who want to change something.

Our chief executive, Roger Warnock, said the board had been looking for someone with a deep understanding of social innovation who is also passionate about the future of young people and about inspiring them to lead change in their own communities.

What comes next
The ambition for the next 25 years is to reach a further 500,000 young people across Ireland and Northern Ireland, supporting them to act on the issues in their own communities and to contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Tim is firmly behind the team and has no plans to change what already works.

The young people are the story here, they always have been. YSI's job is to equip them with the structure, training, and the funding that turns an idea into something real. Do that well enough and you get a generation that knows how to look after the place it lives in, and knows it is allowed to.

Welcome, Tim.