Introduction
Duro Oye's teachers used to tell him he had potential. He remembers thinking he could not take that word to a bank and ask for a loan against it. That flat, practical dismissal of a word adults love to use around young people sits at the centre of everything he has built since: a youth organisation, 2020Change, that has worked with over 1,100 young people, built not on vague encouragement but on the belief that people change through concrete choices, concrete support and concrete opportunity. Oye's own path ran from a childhood dream of acting, through nearly a decade involved in criminality he says he had no real excuse for, to founding an organisation from a laptop and a documentary, largely alone, after the people who promised support went quiet.
A mother's tears and a redirected dream
As a teenager, Oye was set on becoming an actor, had landed an agent, and had engineered his GCSE drama grade by deliberately writing himself the most complex role in his school's final production. When he told his mother, the youngest of six children in an African household, that acting was his plan, she called a family meeting and was, in his words, not filled with the same enthusiasm. Her lifelong ambition was to see all her children graduate from university, an opportunity she never had herself. Oye describes himself as stubborn even then, but ultimately went to university to study graphics and advertising rather than pursue acting, a decision he now credits with fundamentally changing the trajectory of his life.
Choosing his way into trouble, and choosing his way out
Oye is direct that he does not accept the idea that people are simply products of their environment. He grew up in a loving, stable household and says he had no practical need for the criminal lifestyle he became involved in for roughly nine years, from age twelve until he finished university. He attributes his entry into that world partly to the influence of a family member's partner who was involved in criminality, and partly to his own description of having "big eyes," wanting things beyond what his circumstances offered. He rose relatively high within that world before beginning to question it: the money came with legal complications, the material rewards stopped satisfying him, and he watched people around him fail to convert illegal earnings into anything sustainable.
The decision to start over completely
The turning point came at university, once Oye physically removed himself from his old environment and began what he calls internal work. Watching peers face long prison sentences, deportation or death convinced him he had no excuse for continuing, given that his circumstances, unlike some around him, had never forced his hand. He credits his mother's prayers and a series of narrow misses with keeping him clear of the worst outcomes. On graduating, he deliberately gave away everything connected to his previous income, moved back into his mother's house, and immersed himself in church for roughly two to three years, cutting contact with his old network entirely.
Turning a documentary into an organisation almost by accident
Oye's route into youth work began with filmmaking, a passion discovered partly through the isolation of watching and studying films during his transition. He left his job to self-fund a documentary about two rival groups in Brixton and Peckham \[CHECK: transcript renders the second location as "Peking," almost certainly a mishearing of "Peckham"\], spending around £47,500 of his own and investors' money. The premiere drew roughly 650 people and strong applause, with attendees, including organisations he had hoped would help scale the work into schools and prisons, promising support during the Q&A. Almost none of them followed up afterwards. Rather than treat that as failure, Oye decided to build the support structure himself, despite having no prior experience running a charity or community organisation.
Reframing street skills as business skills
The method Oye developed, and still uses, reframes lived criminal experience as transferable professional skill rather than something to be erased or ignored. Sitting with young people close to release from prison, he asks not about their formal CV but about what he calls their "street CV": what they sold, at what volume, at what margin. He then translates that directly into business language, showing them the same skill set applies to sales, marketing and profit and loss, just applied to a different, legal product. He describes this as more effective than conventional programmes that simply redirect young people back to school or standard retraining, which he found many of the most disengaged young people had already rejected.
Building a network from zero, deliberately
In the organisation's early years, before it had a name or platform, Oye used Eventbrite systematically, attending relevant panel events not as a passive audience member but as a strategic networker. He would ask panels pointed questions his own work could answer, positioning himself in front of the audience rather than the panel itself, then follow up individually afterwards. One of the mentors he met this way, whom he calls his "fairy godmother," remains on his board today. He is candid that many of the people who supported him did not share his background, and treats that as a strength rather than a complication, crediting genuine allies with opening networks he could not otherwise have accessed, provided he consistently delivered results once introduced.
Choosing family over unlimited hours
Oye is explicit that his current life, including marriage, fatherhood and a planned four-hour working day once his children reach school age, is the result of deliberate choices rather than default outcomes. He argues that a leader who claims to serve their community while neglecting their own family is inconsistent, and treats his availability to his children as part of the same mission as his organisational work, including actively filtering what they learn given his critique of the education system's gaps.
The mindset shift at the centre of everything
Asked what he wants to see change in rising youth violence, Oye returns to a lesson a mentor once gave him directly: a thief steals because, at some level, they believe the other person does not deserve what they have, while refusing to do the work required to earn the same thing themselves. He applies this same logic to material status built through crime, arguing it never survives long-term, and to his own past instinct to treat expensive possessions as proof of status, something he says has simply lost its meaning to him now. His conclusion is that punishment alone does not produce change; only a genuine shift in how someone sees themselves and their options does, delivered by people willing to walk alongside them through it.
