Spotlight: 5 questions with Bridget Gildea, Subak Mentor
Subak’s mentoring programme connects our Member Organisations with a dedicated individual to support them during the programme. We carefully selected a talented and impressive group of mentors. We then strategically paired mentors with mentees according to their respective areas of interest, focus, and expertise. In this blog series, we’ll introduce some of our incredible mentors, showcase how they support our community, and hear about how and why they chose to get involved with Subak’s mentoring scheme.
For our first mentor Spotlight, we spoke to Bridget Gildea, Consultant for Public Good, advisor, board member, and mentor for Subak’s European Cohort.
Bridget is a consultant, advisor and board member, working at the nexus of innovation, behavioural science, policy and learning (mentors and advises at accelerators and VC programmes Astia, Stanford Seed, Zinc.vc, and Subak). She leads strategic projects applying behavioural science to learning, sustainability and product and programmes creation, including for UN Habitat on the circular economy in Africa, European Climate Foundation, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; illuminates ethical consumer behaviour for start-ups; creates and tests enrollment and retention strategies, and learning programmes frameworks creation in edtech.
She consults for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, crafting partnerships with OPMs and edtech platforms, and building adult learning programmes, and has taught behavioural science, innovation and decision architecture at the University of Cambridge Judge School and Jesus College Intellectual Forum, Imperial MedTech SuperConnector, and is an affiliate of the University of Cambridge Behavioural Insights Team.
“Mentorship to me is about focusing your thinking and process around the mentee, understanding what they want and need, and then co-creating with them a framework and pathway through your mentorship time, to provide a platform of learning and a support structure for what they’re trying to do and build.
Each mentorship is different, because it’s based on the particulars of what the mentee needs, is, and wants to be and do - so it’s inherently a mixed methods approach; and you learn from your mentee as they do from you - so it’s an inherently really valuable process to you as well as them.”
How did you get involved as a mentor with Subak?
As soon as I heard about what Subak is and does, I was really excited to get involved, as an important part of my practice as a Consultant for Public Good is applying behavioural science to sustainability issues, and I really wanted to find a way to help and support the amazing work the founders are focused on.
The more I got to know about how the Subak programme and framework was put together, the more I found it addressed gaps in other ethical innovation programmes I’ve worked with and climate-focused acceleration in general; and the community building work and focus on impact and scale through their data collective in particular have impressed me hugely as I’ve learnt and collaborated with the team and founders more. It really is one of a kind.
Why did you get involved in mentoring?
I’ve been mentoring, especially women and other minoritized groups, since the start of my career, and one of life’s great joys is when one of your previous mentees reaches out and you hear about their experience and where life has taken them, even if it’s decades later.
Mentoring in an accelerator/entrepreneurship sense was something I started doing in focusing on female founders, given the 97% gender gap in VC funding - in other words, fewer than 3% of VC funding goes to female-led start-ups; so mentoring, advising, and supporting women is critical to start addressing that gap. As well as Subak, I mentor through programmes which focus on issues like these - gender gap, climate, cooperative businesses in the US, entrepreneurs in the Global South, which I find incredibly powerful, when both you and your mentee have a shared interest in an overarching mission.
Describe a situation with a startup founder or team where you felt like you made a difference.
I asked my Subak mentees Will and Julian if they would answer this question, rather than me, in the spirit of centring their views and user-centred design (one of the foundations of behavioural science practice), and also because I really wanted to know the answer:
We found working with Bridget to be very useful - particularly tapping her knowledge, networks and accumulated experience within the start-up / university / non-profit interface. We are attempting to build out our digital services, including our pitch and our more general offer. Working with Bridget, we are now in a much better (and confident) place in this regard, and look forward to working with her as we grow.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to other mentors who are looking to join Subak’s mentorship programme?
Understand as much as you can about your mentees and their work, strengths and areas for growth, before suggesting any specific actions; and those actions should be co-created. I think a major issue we have in the accelerator world, and any other programme which relies on volunteering like mentoring, is the potential for unevenness or disparity in experience on the part of the mentees.
Subak’s commitment to design a system to counter this is really good, and one of the overarching projects I’m working on is looking at the expansion of a theory of change around mentoring in entrepreneurship - how we can measure and improve it, using behavioural science and in collaboration with a systems design colleague. Watch this space!
Why is supporting climate tech startups so important to you?
Climate change is the most urgent problem of our time, and we’re largely failing to grasp it through policymaking, concentrated collective action or solely for-profit mechanisms. The costs of failing are unimaginable. Subak founders are concentrated on finding solutions at scale rather than focusing on making money primarily; I think this is the only way we will be able to avert some of the disasters coming our way.
There’s a lot of fantastic climate-focused tech thinking by my for-profit startup mentees too, but I find those founders are often frustrated by the hidebound thinking of investors, who are still locked into a 20th century model of what value creation is. Doing nothing is a choice with as major consequences (in some cases, worse consequences) as doing something, and often we don’t look at the urgency of climate breakdown as something that’s as important as the conventional rules of investing. That’s changing, but slowly. So anything I and others can do to support the rapid evolution of this landscape, the better.