Reinventing Work for the 21st Century | How To Academy

Tue, 15 July 2025

6:15 pm - 7:30 pm BST

Reinventing Work for the 21st Century

Hilary Cottam

The social activist and acclaimed author of Radical Help Hilary Cottam returns to How To Academy to address one of the most pressing issue of our time: the future of work.

“Five years ago, I set out on a journey seeking the insights of everyday experts: those of us who work. I spent time too with business leaders, academic experts and policy makers. I asked a simple question, how could we re-design our working lives?” – Hilary Cottam

It’s time for a work revolution.

For decades, work has been debated and discussed as a narrow economic category. Instead, Hilary Cottam identifies work as a cultural force and one at the heart of good lives, strong communities and nations that have a sense of a shared destiny. Crucially, in these dramatic times, she will show how we can shape this force to meet technological change, our ecological crisis, and the challenges of the world’s deep injustices.

Our challenges – political, social, economic, and environmental – are tangled and growing. But so are the imaginative solutions. In this exciting, inspiring, and optimistic talk, Hilary Cottam will show us how we could work differently and therefore live better.

Praise for the work of Hilary Cottam:

An act of radical hope, radical listening, and radical humility – Hilary Cottam challenges our most fundamental assumptions about our lives and society and most importantly, suggests how we can make things much better. I loved it’ -Rory Stewart

‘Brimming with ideas to transform the future, Hilary Cottam takes us on a fascinating journey to discover how to make work work’- Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics

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Hilary Cottam

Social Activist

Hilary Cottam is an internationally acclaimed social activist whose work in Britain and with communities around the world has focused on collaborative and affordable solutions to some of the greatest social challenges of our time. Her first book Radical Help was hailed as ‘mind-shifting’ by David Brooks in the New York Times and has been translated internationally. Awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to the welfare state, Hilary has been recognised by Fast Company in the US for her pioneering creativity and by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. Hilary’s TED talk has had close to a million views.

Hilary was educated at Oxford, Sussex and the Open University and she holds a Ph.D in social sciences. Her work has received numerous awards, and she has been recognised as Britain’s Designer of the Year.