Chris Ashworth (Marketing, 1998, Pendle) found his whole outlook and career path changed in a moment, on a Pendle College trip to Dublin, when a homeless girl approached him outside a street cafe with his fellow students and begged him for money.

Now Head of Social Impact at Nominet (the official registry for dot UK domain names) Chris is still emotional in speaking of the memory: “For whatever reason it broke my heart that this girl had to walk up to a group of lads and ask for money. I could not shake the memory off. I couldn’t sleep for days I think that’s where the seed was planted for my social justice work.”

This ‘seed’ eventually grew into a career which has seen him recently honoured with an OBE for the work he has done - particularly during the pandemic – on digital inclusion, to galvanise technology to combat mental health issues and to combat sexual exploitation of young people on line. It follows many years working for Oxfam.

What Chris describe es as his ‘still-visceral memory’ from Ireland underlines his total conviction about the value of Lancaster’s collegiate system and the way it shaped his life: “Pendle gave me this opportunity. The colleges at Lancaster are really well supported by the Deans and you feel part of a community. When you have a community around you, people you can trust, new relationships and close relationships, then you can achieve anything.”

Before Lancaster, Chris had not had social justice in his veins, but describes himself as ‘just a kid from Bolton - interested in football, girls, a little study and nothing much else’. After his Dublin experience he threw himself into his first attempt at fighting for social justice, as charity secretary for Pendle.

He has always applauded his decision to go to Lancaster. His school friends wanted a city experience, but he was captivated by the idea of a campus university and the idea of being ‘locked on a hill with 9,000 other people of your age’.

Within the first hour of arriving at Lancaster he remembers meeting the fellow Pendle student Paul Wood, who is still his closest friend. He remembers a first meal of a packet of supernoodles and a four pack of John Smith’s, and spent the night playing pool in Pendle bar and dancing to Charlatan and Oasis. He says he was in paradise.

He’d chosen Lancaster for its academic reputation for marketing, but admits that he only began to take his studies seriously in his second year. He was excited by the array of cutting-edge courses on consumerism, advertising and market research in digital’s early days.

“I really really enjoyed the course, he says. “I liked the approach by the school and the esteem in which many of the lecturers were held. It felt fresh and dynamic and very hands on. It got the mix right between academic and practical even back then, compared with other subject areas.”

His social life centred around Pendle, for which he played football and cricket. He also spent “too many hours in the bar” building a network of friendships which is at the centre of his life to this day.

He also met his wife Jodie at Lancaster University - in his second year, on a Blind Date event on Valentine’s Day - and they became engaged before he graduated.

After graduation Chris worked in Manchester, initially for Littlewoods, until his awakened sense of social justice was reignited by the HIV and AIDS crisis in South Africa. Within weeks he and Jodie had given up their jobs to volunteer in an orphanage in South Africa, and then set up a volunteering charity called 'Be More'.

The decision changed the couple’s lives forever. When they returned, the world of commerce held no interest. They both applied to work for Oxfam, and were successful in jobs they loved. Chris had various jobs in his nearly nine years there including being representative for the charity in Thailand and founding Oxfam Korea, which he regarded as ‘a real adventure and a privilege’.

Whilst at Oxfam he realised there was a third industrial revolution around digital technology as big a lever for change as campaigning and advocacy work. This was proved the day he spoke to the Head of Philanthropy at Paypal while on a bus journey and within 24 hours they had crafted an idea that raised more than a million pounds for Haitian earthquake relief.

His current job is at Nominet, which he describes as “a bit like the switchboard at BT” in that it manages all the domain names for web addresses using the ‘.co.uk' country code for 11m businesses and individuals - including schools, the government and the NHS.

His job is to put Nominet’s surplus to good use - to tackle big social issues such as social mobility, education inequality, online harms by designing programmes that can unlock positive impact . He and his team work closely with researchers, experts and charities to unlock and invest in systemic social change.

His position on technology is determined neutrality. He believes in the importance of being a critical friend of emerging technologies to retain a helicopter view of what is happening in areas such as AI, who is shaping its course and staying alert to the consequences and implications on society.

With climate change too in mind, he is also studying for a Forestry degree - a part-time distance Masters - so that he can again be dispassionate and most effective in helping tackle the climate emergency at a practical level in the future.

Chris continues to attribute much of his life today - his family, friends, work and personal philosophy - to his time as an undergraduate at Lancaster. He says: “Socially the University had something special. There’s a culture and a climate that Lancaster creates that you can not recreate easily in other environments - a real sense of community.”