Alex Smith is a bridge-builder. He’s spent his career bringing people together across generations, neighbourhoods, and divides. As the founder of The Cares Family, he created a movement that connected 30,000 older and younger people in shared friendship and purpose, tackling loneliness and building community in an age of disconnection. 

A 2018 Obama Fellow and now Senior Development Advisor, Europe, at the Obama Foundation, and a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Alex is continuing in his mission to strengthen civic life and nurture the next generation of inclusive leaders. His work embodies a conviction that change begins not with grand gestures, but with human connection – one conversation, one act of care, at a time. 

HF: Just simply, what does purpose mean to you? Just to make sure we’re all starting from the same playing field when we use that word. 

AS: My understanding of purpose is found in my reflections on childhood: what I learned about the world, both as it is and as it should be. As a child observing relationships, and then as a student of history, I began to understand the role that individuals can play in the gap between those two worlds. I recognised agency and power, and how people can expand that power by connecting to the experiences and hopes of others, whether those are similar or different from their own, in order to become part of something bigger than the individual human experience. 
 
As I was growing up, I thought those individual human stories must all be unique. As I got older, I realised that most journeys share key contours – of love and loss, hope and heartbreak, and then mischief and misadventure, those more playful elements of the human condition. I realised that these experiences can be fundamentally unifying not just at the individual level but collectively too.  
 
So my concept of purpose is always connected to the people and experiences that motivated me to do the work I do: my grandparents, my childhood friends in Camden Town, and those I’ve looked up to through my life. Purpose, to me, is a continuum, something passed down through generations. The work we do now, in our families and in our lives, is the unfinished business of those who came before us. Those are the concepts that get me up in the morning and doing the work that I do. 

HF: I love that idea of purpose starting with our roots. Intergenerational relationships are important to you, what inspired you to start The Cares Family? 

AS: I was a council candidate in north London, knocking on doors, and I met a man in his 80s. He said he’d love to come out and vote, he hadn’t missed an election in his life, but he couldn’t because he hadn’t been out of his house or spoken to anyone for three months, apart from his carer. I noticed a wheelchair and said, if you’re comfortable, I’ll wheel you down the road so you can vote. He said yes. While we were out, he came alive, waving at neighbours he hadn’t seen for months. He was telling jokes, being cheeky. Afterwards, he said, “If only I could get a haircut.” 
 
The next day, having lost my election, I took him to the barber’s. He told me his life story in the chair – barber shops are places of community that encourage this type of open-hearted storytelling. I was inspired by him and I think he felt, through his interaction me, a connection to the modern world he’d otherwise lost. Fred and I became friends. 

I realised there must be a lot of people like Fred, isolated in a rapidly changing urban landscape, and also a lot of people like me, commuting to offices and spending time in front of screens or with other people with very similar life experiences, who are also isolated from part of the world they could benefit from. The two loneliest age groups in society are older people and younger people. So the idea for The Cares Family was: let’s bring them together. It was rooted in this notion that we all have agency in the space between the world as it is and the world as it should be – that we don’t need to wait for big business or big government to fix problems in our own communities; that it’s on all of us to make a contribution. My goal was to try and start a movement to make a difference in that space. 
 
I met Fred on 6 May 2010 and I started The Cares Family in north London in 2011. When we eventually launched, it was relatively spontaneous, in response to the riots that August. We started by mobilising young people to connect with the idea that “this is my community and we can do something positive.”  

HF: How has your sense of purpose shifted now that you’re with the Obama Foundation? 

AS: I don’t think it has shifted too much. The motivations and the philosophy I live and work by are quite consistent. My work has always been about bringing people from different backgrounds and experiences together to share their stories in a pluralistic way – creating space for multiple viewpoints to be heard and for people to be seen, particularly by those who in the narrow media landscape do not often see those stories, and stemming division and polarisation. This was something I practiced in my time in politics too.  
 
The Obama Foundation is a logical extension of that. It trains the next generation of leaders to do this type of community and coalition building work on issues like health, education, climate, and democratic renewal. 
 
When I joined, I wanted to evolve my leadership by supporting other people to have opportunities to have platforms and speak out about the importance of participation and trust. Moving from The Cares Family to The Obama Foundation, I knew I’d have less of a public voice. That was intentional, to support others to tell their own stories. 
 
Now I see my role as enabling the impact of the next generation of leaders doing similar work – deepening belonging, community, inclusion, togetherness – enabling their work to create more inclusive and participatory systems, processes, and cultures that can engender belonging long into the future. 

HF: What keeps you motivated on tough days when it feels like it’s one side against the other? How do you stay motivated?  

AS: Two things. On one level, I was a history student, fascinated with the ways the world broke in the past and the human consequences of those ruptures, which were catastrophic. The period we’ve lived in for the past 80 or 90 years – at least in Europe, the United States, the West – was a period of relative security after the Second World War. In the last decade we’ve become conscious of forces beginning to break the world again: deindustrialisation, globalisation, inequality, digitisation, oligarchy. So I’m conscious of the long threads of history and progress post-war, and how current forces are buffeting against that progress. 
 
Secondly, on a personal level, I’ve experienced polarisation too – complicated relationships in my family and communities around politics and Brexit, equality and progress. In those relationships I’ve walked almost to the cliff edge of permanent polarisation and mutual isolation, then found a way back – reducing the temperature in dialogue, finding areas of common ground beyond disagreements, not ignoring others’ experiences or views but finding better ways to listen and communicate. 
 
Although we’re living in difficult times where systems and togetherness are being challenged, I remain an optimist because of those 80-odd years of improving democracy, inclusion, global health, and education outcomes. We’ve experienced in living memory catastrophe and progress, and I think humanity will choose the better of those two experiences.  

HF: When do you personally feel most purposeful? 

AS: When there’s a feeling of collective motion, when an individual or a group has seen an opportunity for change and acted entrepreneurially and then collectively to meet a challenge or do something difficult that they might have been daunted by, then put their heads together, grasped the challenge with energy, accomplished something meaningful, and then asked what’s next.  
 
One example is when The Cares Family was still a young organisation, a team of just six or seven, and our development director, Emily, had the idea of doing a comedy gig at Leicester Square Theatre, a 400-seat theatre in London, which might have seemed over-ambitious at the time for a scrappy community organisation. A month later we’d confirmed six performers, including Stewart Lee and other nationally known figures. We’d sold out 400 seats, raised lots of money, and it was a real milestone moment in our growth. Emily felt energised: “We did it!” I said, “You did it, this was your idea.” Then I said, “Next year, let’s do this at Brixton Academy.” 
 
That’s what energises me: seeing something difficult, doing it anyway, working together, promoting the leadership of others, using collective agency and energy to build progress, and then making that the new benchmark.  

One lesson I’ve learned about leadership is: live in the joy. There are many frustrations and setbacks in social change work. When you have an achievement, feel the joy and celebrate together – and then re-imagine what could be possible next. 

HF: What are your hopes for the future?  

AS: Given the progress made in the last 100 years – greater access to education and healthcare, people living longer, more distributed power and opportunity – I believe that societies will continue to strive for the next step forward and new ways to include more people. Right now, that ideal is being challenged, but the human spirit – being entrepreneurial, never settling, always seeking to get better – demands that this period of tension is temporary, and that, ultimately, we will find a more hopeful course.
 
Having seen that long arc of progress, I believe the future can continue along that more hopeful trajectory, where more people feel inclusion, belonging, justice, and community,  within countries like the UK and the US, and globally where many still live in poverty or conflict. 

Technology can help educate and improve human outcomes, and a younger generation, having seen injustice around the world, can no longer claim ignorance. Generations coming of age today have already faced the financial crash, conflicts, the pandemic, and bitter polarisation. They are resilient. Though challenge and change will continue, I believe young people will finish the job of previous generations and continue to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice.
 
There is always progress to be made, but there is the possibility of great leaps ahead. That requires patience, perspective, and intergenerational connection – learning from those who have lived through both challenge and progress. If this next generation stays resilient and works together, there is the opportunity for a thunderbolt of progress to accelerate the human condition and opportunity for everyone.