Neither of them ever studied at Oxford or Cambridge. Now they each run a college there.

In this milestone 400th episode, Alberto sits down with Professor Beth Breeze, Principal of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and Girish Menon, President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, to find out how their two colleges have become genuine engines of social mobility inside Oxbridge — as Brits refer to Oxford and Cambridge — institutions many people still assume were only ever built to welcome one particular kind of applicant.

• How does one Cambridge college end up with one of the highest proportions of state-school students in the university’s history, without lowering its entry grades?
• What happens to a bright student who’s told, after a single open day, that he should probably just “settle” for somewhere closer to home?
• Why did it take a teacher noticing “a spark” — not a family connection — to get one student through the gates at all?
• What’s actually covered, and what isn’t, once a scholarship pays for tuition but a student still needs a bike, a set of academic robes, or rent?
• Can two heads of college who never earned an Oxford or Cambridge degree themselves see something the system’s own insiders can’t?

Press play to hear exactly how two unlikely college heads are rewriting who gets to belong at two of the world’s best universities.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 400 case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

In 1714, Britain's Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering a cash prize of up to £20,000, worth well over £2 million today, to anyone who could solve a problem that had defeated Galileo and Isaac Newton: how to measure longitude accurately at sea. Tris Dyson, Founder and Executive Director of Challenge Works, runs an organisation built on that same core idea, using big incentive competitions to accelerate breakthroughs in fields ranging from space exploration and agri-tech to urban innovation. But as Tris explains, a modern challenge prize is rarely just about the money: getting the incentives right can mean building in access to data, accelerated regulatory pathways, and new partnerships alongside any financial reward.

One of the problems Challenge Works is currently taking on is also deeply personal for Tris. Three and a half years ago, he was diagnosed with ALS and told he had three to five years to live. In this episode, he joins Alberto Lidji to talk about challenge prizes more broadly, and about the prize he's helping build that could change the odds, for himself and for millions of others living with neurodegenerative disease.

Tris explains what it actually takes to design a challenge prize that works, drawing on examples from the original Longitude Prize to today's hunt for solutions to antimicrobial resistance and even extracting drinking water from lunar rock, and what has to be in place, the right target, the right incentives, the right enabling environment, before a single team ever starts competing.

Neural implants are already restoring movement in people with Parkinson's, and showing early promise for memory too. Tris also talks about "brain twins" that could let scientists test new treatments without ever touching a real brain, and why he believes the biggest obstacle standing in the way of curing these diseases isn't the science, but the bureaucracy sitting on top of it. This episode is for anyone who believes in the power of ambitious thinking to drive breakthroughs.

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Every year, the International Rescue Committee publishes an Emergency Watchlist predicting the twenty countries most likely to face a major humanitarian crisis in the year ahead. For the past three years, the country at the top of that list, Sudan, has received comparatively modest media coverage next to crises like Ukraine, despite being, by the numbers, the world's largest humanitarian emergency.

In this episode, Flora Alexander, Executive Director of the International Rescue Committee UK (IRC UK), joins Alberto Lidji to explore why some of the world's most severe conflicts struggle to make the headlines, and how donors can be confident that the money they give actually reaches the people who need it.

Founded in 1933 at Albert Einstein's urging to help Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, the IRC today works across the full arc of crisis — from Ukraine to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and from resettlement programmes in the UK to frontline health clinics around the world.

What determines whether a humanitarian emergency becomes a story the world can't look away from, rather than one that quietly falls off the agenda? And if you wanted to help the people of a country whose leadership you have every reason to distrust, without a penny of that money ever touching the regime itself, what would it actually take to ensure your donation got to where it was needed?

Flora succeeds David Miliband, the IRC's global President and Chief Executive, who was a guest on the Do One Better Podcast in 2021, and Laura Kyrke-Smith, her predecessor as IRC UK's Executive Director, who appeared on the show in 2023 before being elected as a Member of Parliament in the UK.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.