Your Own Place

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Good things come in threes

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This article is written by Jess Marsh, Facilitator at Your Own Place.

Light haired person with nose ring smiling while standing in front of grey cement wall

‘Good things come in threes’. 

‘Three is a magic number’.

And my favourite…

‘First the worst, second the best, third the one with the hairy chest’ (apparently!). 

After celebrating my three year YOPiversary on 2nd December, you’ll be as disappointed as I was to find out I never received my promised hairy chest. I did, however, realise that what I got was so much better – some incredible reflections of the last three years.

ONE. Connections are more important than anything. 

Large piece of brown paper on a wall with la of laminated cards naming all the bills (including rent, Council Tax, and electricity) you may need to pay — with a light-haired person wearing glasses standing in front and pointing

If you do the maths, you’ll realise that I’d only been working for Your Own Place for three months before we went into a national lockdown thanks to Covid-19. My first year at Your Own Place was spent trying to find any way to build connections with people when we were so cut off from each other.

We learnt the value of interactive online content to bring people together, of going the extra mile to support people to connect (yes, many a road trip to deliver a tablet or device so someone can join an online workshop) and to let our guard down and be authentic with how we were finding this new ‘normal’. 

My second year was no walk in the park. We tentatively dipped our toe back into running face-to-face workshops, ensuring they were Covid-safe for all participants. Whilst it was a slow burner, trainees did return, and we started to see the increasing importance of bringing people face-to-face to share experiences (more so than pre-pandemic)

This last year, group workshops have given a forum for people to talk about how the increased cost of living has been affecting them. It feels like the emphasis of a workshop has shifted from taking away new skills (although this still happens and is a total bonus), but to listen and share with others in a similar situation. The validation for trainees now comes from hearing they are not alone, and they are doing all the right things. 

TWO. Put your fingers in the pies. 

This time three years ago, there were only two Your Own Place workshop commissions, alongside a mentoring project and our Advisory Board. We all worked quite linearly, as that’s what was needed for those sized projects – ownership and consistency – and it worked.

Three years later, several huge projects, a handful of smaller commissions, two operational managers, five new starters, three goodbyes and three office doggos later, we work in a totally different manner. As a team, the structure has evolved to champion our strengths and enable us to put our metaphorical fingers in the metaphorical pies that look the most tasty and it has only made us stronger and more efficient as a team. 

There is still breathing space to reflect and celebrate, but curiosity has definitely been a huge factor in such a significant shift in a small and challenging time period.

THREE. Don’t take things so seriously. Seriously.

Take things with a pinch of salt. People are always more than their ‘labels’ on a referral sheet. Being professional is important, but always balance this with authenticity and laughter. Making ‘mistakes’ can be just as much a learning experience as getting it right the first time, so don’t worry too much. With trainees, being honest when you don’t know the answer role models this better than anything. And in the office… well, we tease each other incessantly (and respectfully) until we fall into puddles of laughter more often than ever before. 

Completely serious.

Three people standing — one is wearing a head covering, two have short black hair, and one has a beard, with two people (workshop facilitators) sitting

What goes around comes around

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What goes around comes around

You know you’ve been around a while when the same idea that was a good one seven years ago is a good one again now, but this time for different reasons. 

Put simply, the obvious reason for awarding our trainees accreditation certificates back then was to help them get a job.  At a time of job vacancies across many sectors, getting a job is currently pretty easy.  So why are we revisiting accreditation?

Following our ninth birthday in October, this is a moment to take stock.  The world has changed incomprehensibly since 2013 and whilst we should pause to celebrate our successes, so too must we look in the mirror at who we are and who we want to become.  That’s why this autumn we’re entering a rather grandly titled ‘Strategic Review’.  We will be listening to the voices of all our main stakeholders and reviewing our purpose, our vision, our offer and our business model.  At this stage, I can’t tell you what will come out the other end, but rest assured I’m appropriately nervous and excited. 

Whilst we celebrate the 1000 lives we have touched over the last nine years and explore how on earth we navigate the next two weeks, some things remain unchanged.  The enduring and unrelenting strength and resilience of those we support in the face of daily and mounting challenges.  Equally, the absence of long-term answers to sustainability as a social business.

With the rate of unemployment estimated to be somewhere between 57% and 90% among the homeless population, unemployment as a theme remains a constant, despite the high levels of employment in the general population.  When we talk about unemployment this now includes underemployment as well as work that doesn’t pay.  With a keen focus on our mission to prevent homelessness, it seems right that we should always have half an eye on what we do to support un- and under-employment.  Indeed, we have a well-formed and tested employability offer.  But has anyone else noticed ‘employability’ dip off the radar with fewer housing associations offering this kind of support?   It’s certainly not flying off our metaphorical shelves. 

In response to the barriers to employment that those we support face, in 2015 Your Own Place went through the OCN process of accrediting our offer.  I was of the belief that having a recognised certificate would be a string to the bow – or CV, of our trainees.  Accrediting was a mammoth task for a tiny organisation at the time and we nearly didn’t make it.  Cost, time and the practicalities meant that I should have thrown in the towel sooner.  Our offer wasn’t formed enough to take it and it was shelved almost as soon as completed. Among the challenges were the OCN hoops that required us to compromise too much on our neuro-diverse adapted highly engaging and participative style as well as passing on the cost to our customers, many of whom had their own employability offer.

So why are we here again and why am I so excited about it?  Because accrediting our offer, something that will be completed by January, is an opportunity for our trainees first and foremost. Thanks to a new partnership, soon to be announced, the trainees attending and completing a Your Own Place workshop won’t just get a Your Own Place certificate, they’ll now receive AQA certificates too.

For many this will be a quiet source of great pride and even their first certificate. For others it may help open doors with private landlords in an increasingly competitive market. For all, it’s the cast-iron proof of their efforts, commitment and contribution during our workshops.  So as a targeted prevention intervention, the practical door-opening benefits of certification are certain, but the alignment with our values of empowering people and boosting their confidence truly resonate with being able to award them with something that will further propel them forward. What goes around comes around and personally I’m delighted to have changed my mind.

Award Win For Your Own Place

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Award Win For Your Own Place

Your Own Place are thrilled to have won the Impact in Social Enterprise award on 13th October at the Sheraton Hotel, Park Lane, London.

This award is in association with the School for Social Entrepreneurs. It is for our commitment to building public trust through open, fair and insightful reporting. 

With this award Your Own Place’s impact and its skills in reporting and sharing this with credibility has been recognised at the PwC Building Public Trust Awards. You can read more about the awards here.

This award is recognition for the team, the work they do and the people we support.

With every small moment of change in the lives of those who put their trust in us, we see someone move closer to their potential.

We exist to make a difference to people’s opportunities and to prevent homelessness. To achieve this we have to understand that difference so we can do it better.

This sits at the core of our work and builds trust with our partners, funders and investors as well as most importantly, those we support. The team does this with passion, compassion and deep commitment every day.

This award is for the Your Own Place team.

Rebecca White

CEO of Your Own Place CIC

‘I am absolutely thrilled to accept this award on behalf of the team. Every day I pinch myself.  The Your Own Place team don’t just do the day to day work with people in difficult and often perilous and homeless situations, but do it with equity and values always in mind. On top of that they listen, capture and report on the difference it makes – recognising our responsibility to everyone that puts their trust in us, to capture and share that difference. They do it brilliantly and it enables us to go on making a difference.  This is their award’.

What’s a foodbank really like?

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What’s a foodbank really like?

It’s impossible not to have an opinion about foodbanks.  Whether informed by the media or having visited one yourself, with so much coverage of the cost of living crisis, it’s unlikely you don’t have a view on their place in our world.

As I write this, we’re no longer where I thought we were. Our new Prime Minister has announced a massive package of borrowing, borrowing that we will all pay back over decades, in order to freeze utility bills at their pre-October rate.  What we don’t fully know is what impact this will have on the 2.2 million people that used a foodbank last year and most of us that are still paying twice as much on their utilities as last winter.  The energy price freeze means the average bill is around £2500 a year, rather than the anticipated rise to over £3500 in October and £5400 in January.  This  feels not dissimilar to when the train guard announces that the train is going to be half an hour late and you end up feeling grateful when it’s only 15 minutes late. It’s not a great outcome for the many people who still miss their connection. 

Whether this price freeze takes the heat out of the current situation and the subsequent media focus remains to be seen. That around a third of children remain in poverty, in part because the situations for many were desperate before the pandemic, is appalling. This is a situation that has been further exacerbated by the current crisis. Citizens Advice with their superb quarterly dashboard, have already seen more people this year than 2019, 2020 and 2021 combined, who can’t top up their prepayment meter. This is the situation for many based on the current rate that we’re now to be grateful that will be frozen.  

As someone who runs a social enterprise that specialises in financial inclusion and inclusive values, it’s hard not to feel that we have to do more and reach more people. 

Part way through the late spring, I felt compelled to utilise our not inconsiderable skill and track record in the field of impactful financial inclusion interventions with the values that actually make them work.  At Your Own Place we support people with our proven values-led approach to develop the money skills, confidence, knowledge, networks and resilience in the most difficult situations.  What does that mean?  It means deploying our unique money skills workshops so that people have a space where they feel less isolated, gain new skills and feel better about the situation they are in. People deserve to have some control and we can help with that by utilising and magnifying the community’s assets.  Those assets are the people themselves, often called ‘experts’, in the community with the hard-won skills, knowledge and resilience they have developed, no thanks to most of us. It’s remiss not to leverage it, for the benefit of themselves as well as all of us.  This is what an asset-based approach looks like in practice.

Providing an intervention via a foodbank fits our ‘targeted’ model of prevention because people visiting a foodbank have sadly already self-selected as ‘in need’.  Whether it’s prevention, however, is another matter.  True prevention means they wouldn’t need to go to a foodbank in the first place. At a time like this, prevention versus crisis must form part of the dialogue of solutions. I’ll leave that to policy makers. We concluded, as many that volunteer at foodbanks did years ago, that amongst so much suffering, we just have to do something. 

With a decision made, over the spring and early summer, I spent a good deal of my time on my bicycle around Norwich, visiting foodbanks seeing how they work, how people interact with them and putting together both the business case for support and building relationships.   Each foodbank is so different – from the cafe (and some pretty epic cheese straws) at New Hope, Lakenham, a full-English at Alive, Nelson Street to a quick and kind cuppa at the NCBC Baptist Church and St Elizabeth’s in Bowthorpe. The Feed, as a social supermarket, is another model entirely. 

Some have partnerships to offer additional support from a worker from Shelter, for example, and more partnerships planned with Citizens Advice and local authorities. They use their networks and imagination to get the food, get more food, get fresh food and cater to people’s needs as best they can.  Overseen by the Trussell Trust who manage the central distribution centre, The Trussell Trust also brings huge value in coordinating referrals, capturing data and capacity building.

Even more extraordinary is that they are largely run by (often church) volunteers.  This can have its drawbacks of course for those of different faiths or with reticence about engaging with the church, but as someone who has worked in this sector for long enough, we can neither let the perfect be the enemy of the ‘it just needs doing’, nor fail to make it as welcoming and accessible as possible. 

It was at Alive that I was most moved.  Alongside a pretty amazing cooked breakfast, I learnt that it had been a foodbank for over a decade.  Foodbanks are sadly nothing new and into the winter we speculate that people will go there for warmth as well as food.  Beyond physical warmth, what moved me was the human warmth.  Many there to pick up food knew each other. It had more the feel of a community centre than a foodbank, whilst it was quite clear that people were in varying degrees of need and distress. 

That people have to rely on places such as this for all kinds of warmth is a sad indictment of our society.  However, is that bit of Norwich better for having Alive there?  Yes.  If we don’t want people going hungry then we must provide food and we can do so not only with dignity and kindness, but provide more support alongside for many of the underlying challenges people face.

I’m thrilled then, despite these mixed emotions, to be working alongside four foodbanks and one social supermarket over the next year. That Your Own Place can now play its small role in reaching people to build on the inherent value and skills they already have, share this with others, build an evidence base and be a part of breaking a cycle and easing lives is a privilege.  People deserve better and are worth more than the situation they are momentarily in through no fault of their own. 

We are hugely grateful to Norwich Consolidated Charities for funding this work. 

How to help most during the cost of living crisis

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How to help most during the cost of living crisis

Practical tips for people working in housing

In the face of the latest crisis, it is to be expected that we get into reactive advice and help mode. This feels better than preventing the crisis in the first place and to prevent it you have to spot it ‘upstream’ anyway.  This might be why prevention has a reputation for taking longer and being harder.  In the long run, however, it saves you time and money.

Using our tips below, see how you can help prevent crisis by building resilience, creating interdependence, community and network – all freeing you up too. 

  • Triage the need – start with a statement and invite the person to place themselves on a scale from disagree to agree.  This allows a nuanced conversation about why they feel that way. It helps to identify whether they are in crisis or not and what type of support might make a difference.  An example could be ‘I am on top of my monthly spending’.

  • Ask open questions – these help people explore solutions.  And this builds inter-dependence (less dependence on you!), as they realise that previously they have turned to family, friends and other networks.   These might be as simple as ‘Who did you ask the last time you needed help?’ If it starts with W, then it’s probably a great open question.

  • Find their strengths – alongside open questions, drawing out what they do day to day can help identify the skills they have already and in so doing build their confidence and resilience.  A great example of a strengths-based and open question could be ‘So what skill did you use last time you faced a difficult problem?’ – proving that they have that skill within themselves already! 

And here’s a free budgeting exercise we call it ‘I buy monthly, weekly, save’. On the biggest sheet of (coloured if possible) paper and with all the gold stars and funky coloured pens you can find, put four columns and title them ‘I Buy’, ‘Weekly’‘Monthly’ and ‘Save’. With your lovely non-judgemental and open questions, if comfortable, invite them to think up four or five things they buy every week and write them in column one.  It might be milk or cigarettes – it doesn’t matter. Work onto the next column inviting them to estimate how much they spend a week.  You can then move to monthly and have the really useful conversation about a month not being four weeks and how this might have an impact on budgeting (52 weeks divided by 12 is 4.3 weeks on average!). You might even multiply up to a yearly spend to see the big numbers! The conversation ends positively and upbeat with the final column and open questions about the things they can do to save money.  You’ll probably learning something too!