Introduction
Craig Pinkney used to believe he could stop youth violence in his community. Then a young man he had mentored, someone he thought of like a son, paralysed an innocent 13 year old boy. Then a murder happened, and the perpetrators were young people Craig had personally worked with. Years of resources, money and shelter had gone into these young men, and it still happened. That is the moment Craig's definition of leadership had to change, from stopping something to reducing it. What follows is how a dyslexic kid from a Birmingham cul de sac became a CEO, lecturer and PhD candidate, without ever leaving the community that shaped him.
Growing up as "Little Craig"
Craig grew up in a small Birmingham cul de sac of around 32 households, one of only two with both a mother and a father present. His father was strict, Caribbean, and consistent: if he called Craig's name from the front door and Craig couldn't hear him, that meant he was too far from home. Craig hated the boundary as a boy. As a grown man, he credits it with keeping him out of the violence that surrounded him. Kickboxing, karate, basketball and Saturday school, rooted in the Pan-Africanist movement, gave him structure and distraction while friends around him got pulled into street life. He watched it all happen without ever fully stepping into it, which is why people from his block still call him "Little Craig" despite the frame he has now.
Discovering dyslexia and learning how to learn
Craig left school with no GCSEs and spent his undergraduate years quietly struggling, unable to read back his own notes at night despite performing well socially and academically in conversation. He was diagnosed with dyslexia in his third year of university, almost by accident, at a free testing session. The diagnosis reframed his entire school experience: the primary school bullies who called him stupid, he now believes, were responding to a kind of intelligence they didn't understand. Once he understood how he actually learned, rather than how he was expected to learn, his Master's degree clicked in a way his undergraduate years never did. He now teaches the same shortcut to the young people he works with: understand a book by finding the author's interviews and podcasts, not by reading it cover to cover.
The mentor who named his double consciousness
At university, Craig met Dr Colton House \[CHECK\], an academic who told him bluntly that he and his peer group were "full of it", performing a version of themselves that wasn't real. House introduced Craig to the concept of double consciousness, the idea that Craig was living as two different people: the Craig from Birmingham with his friends and cousins, and the Craig inside the university. House pushed him to bring his authentic self into both spaces, arguing that version of Craig was the one capable of making change. Craig took offence at the time. He now keeps a graduation photo with House on his own bookshelf and credits the relationship with carrying him through three difficult years of study.
From youth worker to "street academic"
Craig's first real role was as a senior youth worker managing Oaklands Youth Centre in his area. Over four to seven years there, he watched gifted, talented young men exploit each other, take each other's lives, and end up paralysed, hospitalised or dead, despite the resources poured into them. A European research project, the EU Gangs Project, pulled him into academia almost by accident: participants told researchers they trusted Craig's frontline delivery over university academics who had no lived experience of the violence they were studying. That trust became a full lecturing role, then a title he coined for himself: the street academic, someone who bridges the gap between academic theory and the streets, translating complex ideas into language his community can actually use.
The second exploitation
As Craig moved into academia, he noticed a pattern that troubled him as much as the violence itself. Universities would approach his youth centre offering payment per interview to access young people for research, his staff and volunteers would deliver dozens of participants for the money, and the resulting research would be published by "up and coming academics" who vanished from the community and never returned. Craig now openly tells students at conferences to stop emailing him asking him to supply young people for their assignments. His insistence is that no researcher gets access without first showing up and volunteering in the community, because his young people are human beings, not a data source for someone else's career.
From "can I stop this" to "can I reduce this"
The pivot in Craig's own leadership came after two events: a murder in his community committed by young men he had worked with, and the paralysis of a 13 year old boy at the hands of someone Craig regarded almost as a son. Faced with the reality that money, mentorship and resources hadn't been enough to stop either outcome, Craig changed his own operating principle. He stopped believing he could stop youth violence and started believing he could reduce it. That single shift, he says, is what lets him sleep at night: if he can save one young person, that is enough.
Rest is resistance
Craig is candid about the cost of this work. He has been hospitalised from burnout, and he names a specific fear: that his own son will one day tell him he was a "waste man" for pouring so much into other people's children and not enough into his own. He traces this pattern in his own community's history, where some of the most respected community leaders raised children who went on to become the most violent people in the area. On a retreat with Ben Lindsay and Professor Caren Ferman \[CHECK\], Craig encountered Tricia Hersey's \[CHECK\] framing of rest as resistance, and it reshaped how he talks about privilege. He now writes openly about the positive side of privilege, holidays with his family, access to better wellness facilities, the ability to keep his own children distracted from the chaos he sees daily, arguing that struggle should not be the only currency his community is allowed to display.
Building Solve and leading from behind
Craig runs Solve as four connected organisations: Solve, the Centre for Youth Violence and Conflict; Solve Global, which includes his Premier League consultancy work; Solve Housing, which runs two children's homes in the West Midlands; and Solve Online Learning Hub. Rather than carrying all of it himself, he has built a team around his own neurodivergence, hiring people who understand how his mind works to manage his diary and admin, and delegating specialist delivery to people like Dr Lizzy, Dan, Dr Mo and Dr Glen \[CHECK\]. His week is now deliberately structured: Monday and Tuesday for major delivery, Wednesday and Thursday for university and deep work, short 20 to 30 minute meetings only on Fridays, on-call for the children's homes on Saturday, and Sunday fully off. When asked to define leadership, Craig calls it a process by which a person understands their purpose, learns the tools required to make change, and then leads from behind.
