Your Own Place

Norwich

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Supporting our team to thrive

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It’s Mental Health Awareness Week from 15th to 21st May, so our Chief Operating Officer (COO), Jess Luce-Rackham, has written about how Your Own Place strives to prioritise team wellbeing and to embed values-led team support. 

We embed our values into everything we do. From induction through to workshop delivery to partner relationships, our values of empathy and equity guide our work.

As the lead on the People Workstream, the question I continue to ask is:  what else can we do to support the team to thrive?

We start at the beginning. From induction, we embed our values-led culture, including: time to build strong colleague relationships, a culture of trust (taking breaks, managing calendar, managing working hours), value-led meetings and person-centred support. 

Throughout our work days and work weeks, we identify ways that we can make work enjoyable, engaging and supportive. Some examples at Your Own Place include: flexible working times, flexible working locations, birthday day off, TOIL, increases in holiday entitlement for long service, scheduled team time for relationship building, internal training sessions, opportunities to grow new skills and take more project ownership. 

After reading about Mind’s Wellness Action Plans, I was impressed with its proactive approach to discussing wellbeing and reasonable workplace adjustments, rather than questions being asked reactively. 

However, I knew this decision wasn’t mine alone. I wanted to hear opinions from the team, understand their buy-in to the approach and ensure Your Own Place’s values were echoed through any new tool implementation. I started by co-producing Your Own Place’s Wellness Plans with two team members, alongside working with Your Own Place’s Advisory Board.  Our Advisory Board is made up of people with lived experience of housing challenges, and they’ve all been involved with Your Own Place workshops or services. They offer invaluable insights and keep us from getting too insular, from using too much jargon, and continue to keep us accountable and equitable.

We’re now rolling our wellness plans for everyone in the Your Own Place team – with positive feedback so far. 

What did the Your Own Place Advisory Board have to say?

“It was good to be able to have a look at the existing plan and then use our lived experience to be able to think about which things could benefit from being slightly changed and which bits would be fine to stay the same from own opinion and be able to have comment on something that would be used within Your Own Place- felt productive to do something that would eventually be used. For me that meant that when Jess fed back to us about how our input had been integrated it was nice to see the benefit and also hear that it is being used and has been taken on board and received well. Felt very joined up between YOP and YOPAB and was able to see the impact that us commenting and sharing had” YOPAB member one (Leah) 

“The inclusion was fuego. Really nice to see how it will be implemented and how I’m hopeful that it would benefit YOP. Real improvement from the original WAP, if I do say so myself” YOPAB member two (Beau) 

Bringing together a progressive approach to policy, team input, and Advisory Board feedback forms a robust and constantly evolving approach to wellbeing and mental health. Everything begins and ends with our values — including our approach to internal team support.

Why work with Your Own Place?

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If you follow Your Own Place or me on social media, you may see and read lots of posts about the team. As a social enterprise preventing homelessness, isn’t the most important thing the work we do and the impact we have? Arguably, but let me tell you a little why they both matter and are inextricably linked.

You see, I’ve had a mixed career spanning 25 years, working in different sectors and settings. I’ve worked with some wonderful, inspiring, exciting and thoughtful people. Those that have been less so have been and remain my driver and conscience in leading Your Own Place.

To set up a business that you don’t own, that you’re an employee of, is, without doubt the biggest professional challenge and privilege of my life. That driver has always been to do things better as well as differently, bravely, honestly and transparently. No opportunity has been wasted to reflect on what others do and what I might do in their shoes, without judgement. This includes members of the team. Doing things better matters to me alongside our core values of: Equality, Asset-based, Restorative, Innovative-Engaging-Fun and High Quality.

Of the many reasons we landed on our current values and model, is because of the value we put in every individual. And I mean EVERY individual. When I hear negative language, unconstructive b*tching and moaning about people, I have a visceral response. I want to see and do better than our current polarised, angry, unequal and unjust world. And at Your Own Place we can only make a difference if we are better too.

During your induction, if you get the job, you’ll spend some time with me and I’ll explain how there’s no secret office language, tone, stereotypes or labels (this can lead to wonderful debates about the language we should be using). How we talk about people is how we talk to people. This might be different to where you’ve worked before and we’ll support you through the transition. If the ‘behind the scenes’ language is negative, blaming and judgemental, it’s almost impossible (and unethical) to hide that. People know what you really think! Much easier then, to be consistent in our values, approaches, language and inherent value of people in the team and outside it.

That’s why you hear so much about our team values – because the work we do follows the same path.

If you think this is for you, we can’t wait to welcome you.

Find out about the job on our website: www.yourownplace.org.uk/joinourteam

Rebecca

CEO & Founder of Your Own Place CIC

News from Your Own Place

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Members of the Your Own Place Advisory Board (YOPAB)

Review of our Vision and Mission

In the autumn of 2022 Your Own Place undertook a thorough and robust strategic review. Working with partners past and present as well as those we exist fo support, such as the diligent members of YOPAB, we explored in a series of workshops where we are in the current turbulent world.

Following a successful year, albeit extraordinarily hard on our people, our funds and our communities, we are pleased to say that we concluded the following:

  • The Mission and Vision of Your Own Place will remain unchanged. Our mission is to prevent homelessness and our vision is that everyone has a safe and secure home.
  • Our commitment to our values of ensuring people receive the highest quality service, we measure and report transparently on the difference we make and include people with a range of lived of experience in our design remains unchanged.
  • We remain committed to communities, building relationships and people facing increased risk of homelessness. As an innovative social enterprise, we also continue to seek a diverse income that means delivering contracts where we can add value, make a difference and do a fantastic job. Sometimes this will be beyond East Anglia, but never beyond our mission, values and expertise.

As a social enterprise our role is not to stand still. To do so would almost certainly mean our demise. We must adapt, within our values, to the needs of people and communities around us, whilst being open to opportunities and partnerships that align and bring value.

As we approach our tenth birthday, we have launched this new website that outlines our clarity of vision in what Your Own Place does well and seeks to do more of across sectors, partners and communities.

How we make a difference

Following the strategic review and the deeper understanding of who we must continue to work with in order to make a difference alongside what it is that enables us to achieve this, we clarified our core Service Offers, that can be found in detail on this website. They are:

  • Pre-tenancy workshops with a focus on Money, Tenancy and Cost of Living
  • Community workshops that build on the success of taking our Money Skills workshops and 1-2-1 sessions into foodbanks and social supermarkets
  • Move-on 1-2-1 support sessions with a more practical focus on Money, Tenancy & Cost of Living
  • Train the Trainer for partner agencies, Schools Employability workshops, Schools Money Skills workshops, Employability workshops and Tenant Voice

From Rebecca, CEO and founder of Your Own Place

‘I’m thrilled to have heard so many voices during this review and to understand better what it is about Your Own Place that people value and find special such as building relationships, hearing people’s voices and being flexible and determined in reaching people. Hearing this means we can make the decision to keep doing more of it, with greater clarity and with the aim of high quality and transparent impact on people’s lives. Reaching people across communities, when those communities may not be physical, but have in common a risk of homelessness, a situation not of their own making, is in our DNA. We will work with partners who also share a drive and passion to see people thrive in their own homes and not have to face the utter horror of preventable homelessness’.

Please contact Rebecca with any questions about the work of Your Own Place rebecca@yourownplace.org.uk

Who needs yoga, when you work with Your Own Place?

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So said a team member of our small but mighty Your Own Place conglomerate (currently eight team members and counting). But what does yoga have to do with the housing sector and homelessness prevention? 

Yoga’s early branding, when it arrived in England and North America in the 1960s, was all about flexibility, and receiving teachings from the lived experience of an expert who would pass their knowledge down to select students. In recent years, however, the industry has expanded to become more holistic, focussing on wellbeing, compassion and the effect each of us have on the world around us.

Originally posted to Flickr by Ben Sutherland at https://www.flickr.com/photos/60179301@N00/28442665.

In our sector, too, we see a widening of scope. No longer are housing associations, for example, only tracking number of evictions and rent arrears — there’s a growing curiosity and impetus to understand tenants, meet them where they are, and ensure their voice and lived experience can be heard. 

The vision of Your Own Place is for a world where everyone has a safe and secure home. For this to become a reality, the myriad systems governing economics, politics, and the amorphous ‘culture’ need to free up their rigidity and become more flexible. We play our part in this by listening, responding, iterating and committing to the virtuous circle of improvement.

And not only listened to, but catalyse change and influence policy.

This approach, however, requires flexibility. And maintaining flexibility has always been a key principle of working at Your Own Place.

At the level of team delivery, flexibility is paramount. We deliver workshops in a vast range of contexts. When we’re delivering group workshops or 1-2-1 sessions, this can range from adjusting timings, meeting trainees across community locations, or not knowing if four or eight people will arrive on the day. At all times, we need to be poised and curious when a challenge is raised in the room that needs to be prioritised in an empathic and solution-focused way. 

On a project delivery level, we work with our partners, funders and commissioners to trial new and different ideas. In our partnership work with Trussell Trust Norwich foodbanks and The Feed Social Supermarket, funded by Norwich Consolidated Charities, we’re quickly learning and working out how to best work with people in localised Norwich community areas. Rather than setting a schedule and obstinately sticking to it, we run a test, evaluate, iterate, and begin the cycle anew.

With our service offers, we have honed five main offerings, which you can view here. Considering the context of the people we work with, we can respond in community settings, to people in pre-tenancy or who have already moved on, with group or one-to-one workshops. We work in housing, but also criminal justice, education and health. Responsiveness and innovation are key to us reaching as many people, in as many places, as possible.

This change and iteration is an essential characteristic of the modern working world. Flexibility is inherent in success.

While you may trial a yoga class to stretch your hamstrings or touch your toes, working at Your Own Place offers another level of flexibility. Ensuring we have a flexible delivery style, with multiple service offers, to meet the holistic needs of the world in which we live, and the people with whom we work.