Rebecca White

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that Your Own Place hasn’t always gone to plan. As far as there has ever been a plan, a good deal has been jettisoned and I’ve not always even admitted it or had time to reflect. 

Thanks to the extraordinary (and mostly hugely positive) experience of leading a team in London where almost everyone had ‘lived experience’, this was the early ambition at Your Own Place. On arrival in Norfolk eleven years ago this was not common – or maybe people just weren’t talking about then. They are now and rightly so. 

Whether you call it ‘participation’, (my favourite), user-voice (yuck!), client engagement (double yuck) or any other euphemism, listening, including, inviting and responding appropriately to those with mixed and lived experience, as equals, is fundamental. Lived experience is a euphemism too, of course, and covers a vast spectrum rather than a binary ‘them’ and ‘us’. Be in no doubt that many of us have trauma and support needs that remain unaddressed and unhealthily play out in the workplace.  

What participation of those with lived experience of homelessness can’t and shouldn’t be is the only voice – any more than than those without lived experience or any other exclusive experience. 

Faced with the dilemma of wanting real participation and inclusion in the business and some pretty tough moments from south London still resonating hard, it was with this ambition that I started Your Own Place. in 2013 it wasn’t about including people in strategy, finance, the Board and marketing, rather in direct delivery. The very first funded course at Your Own Place saw five young people trained (brilliantly by The Participation People) to be TILS+ trainers. This was to be a fabulous virtuous circle of people gaining job skills whilst being the most authentic and credible in delivering our workshops. 

Sadly, the lessons of London remained pertinent in their readiness to work (and the business’s readiness to give them work too!). Making the judgement about when people are ready to work with you versus just how much resource your HR department (me!) has to support people facing many of life’s challenges, remains as much of an enigma now as it was then. Still committed to employing and involving people from all backgrounds, we also have to be honest that some people (as with any member of any team) simply won’t make it in our particular line of business. 

The sector, our customers and commissioners need to start being honest about this or we set people up and let people down. We are not in the business of, and neither do we have the resource to, ‘fix’ people. How then do we decide who is ready, well enough and happy to join our team? If they self determine this, is that enough? Can people ever know enough about a role and full-time work to know they are ready for it? These questions are no different to any of the mysteries of HR and recruitment. It’s a very imperfect science with potentially damaging consequences. 

When you’re ‘keyman/woman dependent, as a small business is, these are huge decisions. The risk isn’t only to the business, but another potential ‘failure’ for the individual involved as well as ending up with a bunch of colleagues who look and sound like me! No thanks – there’s way too much of that already! 

Working in this way remains the ambition. However, at the moment it is mostly a stretch too far. Having said that, we have some superb peer volunteer mentors acting as people who have walked in tough shoes. As a route into employment, this is a brilliant one. Mostly though, people deserve better than employers doing it badly. We all deserve the right help and support to get to where we need to be – to be well and happy. It therefore requires the right resource, universal and Board commitment and skill. 

Instead, our Your Own Place Advisory Board (YOPAB) contributes in other impactful and important ways, gain the benefits of doing so and we’re resourced, for now, to making it work. Thanks to Covid19 delays, we are seeking ongoing temporary funding with a view, long term, to investing our profit in doing it our way and better. Whether commissioners will pay for this, that they apparently hold in such high regard, remains a moot point. 

So my top tips for meaningful participation after all this time (still) are:

• Value your people by rewarding them

• Make it a win-win – the organisation gains as much as the individuals

• Be patient – members come and go

• Make it inclusive for people to get involved in a way that suits them

• Have a variety of projects people can get involved in so that there is something for everyone

• Reflect in 1-2-1s between meetings and learn from member’s feedback

• Have progression and exit routes – paid work, if desired, should be the next available step

• Believe they can do anything – our aspirations should never be the limitation

In the midst of a complicated schools project, recruiting 100 new volunteers and multiple commissions in new areas with new customers, 2021 hit us at full speed.  When Jess, our Operational Manager, kept speaking of things we’d get done in ‘quieter times’ I didn’t have the heart to say that there probably wouldn’t be any.

As a start-up there are no rules – just vast uncertainty, ranges of emotions and assumptions that if you’d only done something different then wouldn’t things be better. Self-doubt is part and parcel. I honestly don’t think ceasing and furloughing crossed my mind last year and quick decisions were undoubtedly made. That they appear in hindsight to have been the right ones doesn’t necessarily mean they were – rather our skill for making the best of the situation we find ourselves in. I’ve always thought this a brilliant self-preservation characteristic. 

Your Own Place is in its eighth year. As a Community Interest Company that is still here after eight years,  survived Covid19 and is in fact growing its paid team with increased traded income, makes it something of an outlier. 

Many businesses have talked about years worth of transformation during Covid. We are no different. Faced with temporary closure, a return to a charitable model and ploughing on to do the work we do, there was simply no choice. Being mission driven to deliver complicated and sophisticated interventions meant that it would have been hard to simply start selling something else. This combined with the very early warning signs that the need for our service and the difference we make was only likely to go in one direction. That need equates to demand is not an assumption we make – it is my job to ensure our offer meets the evolving need sufficiently to receive the elusive investment required. 

2020 was always going to be a pivotal year for Your Own Place, with social investment resulting in our first Operational Manager. I for one am thankful for the light that the horrors of the last year have shone on the need for our service. Pairing back, distilling the core parts of our service, taking it online and starting new conversations have all led to our current growth and new contracts. 

Our need to grow, to recover, to deliver quality has meant a relentless focus for 2021. Finally, I know what it is we do best, what it is that is needed, what difference we make, what we need, what is commercially viable and how to talk about it. These moments are years (and pandemics) in the making. Sometimes conversations go on for years before a penny drops, demand is unlocked and trust created. We have no right to exist and no charitable donations that we get regardless of whether we’re any good. 

So when people say to price yourself properly because you’re a life-time in the making, it is the same with a social business and the contracts we’re starting with new customers. One such contract we’re thrilled to have got off the ground is with Saffron Housing. During the pandemic, their charitable foundation very kindly donated money to Your Own Place and they’ve been lovely, supportive and encouraging ever since.  I recall being genuinely touched as I’d had little contact with Saffron and didn’t know we were on their radar. And so the conversations, alignment of values and need for our service emerged too. We can’t wait to train their tenants, learn from their experiences and provide the catalyst for people who just want to call a house their safe and secure home. 

Even before Covid19, if you were remotely interested in your team, your income or the world around you, then employment was probably on your radar.  If you’re lucky, unemployment may have been less so.  We all started somewhere and when earlier this year we ran a social media campaign to ask people to describe their first job in emojis only, we got a brilliant response.  Either it’s the echo-chamber in which I exist online, or a lot of us started out in jobs that bear no resemblance to the one we have currently.

This is a really important part of our career journey that whilst powerfully communicated when the Careers and Enterprise Company take volunteers into schools to share their journey, tells only one part of the story.  

You may have climbed the greasy pole of the career, spun off in new directions or even followed a loved one to a new corner of the globe, but what we almost always fail to talk about is the truth about how we really did it (and no, the answer wasn’t hard graft).  We also didn’t do it in a vacuum.  Each decision we took had an impact on another area of our life, our income, our relationship, our health and who it brought us into contact with.

As an organisation that exists to prevent homelessness, hopefully working in the arena of employability doesn’t seem like an outlandish leap.  Having a home and job are inextricably linked, especially in an economy where work for many doesn’t pay, provides little prospect of saving for a mortgage and career progression is hard won.

CV and application letter writing workshops alongside employers coming to visit a school are an important part of preparing people for work.  There is no doubt that some will struggle with those technical aspects.  But that’s all they are and they are overdone in a crowded employability marketplace.  They say nothing of the ‘soft skills’ that employers want.  This isn’t necessarily because employers are recruiting people from prison, off the streets or other minoritised groups, but because the ability to build positive relationships, navigate difficult conversations, assert yourself appropriately and be heard are missing from this curriculum. And because they are much harder than running a CV workshop.

At Your Own Place we have the benefit of not only being money and budgeting experts and so able to support people to find (and keep) the right job for their lifestyle, but we deliver all the extras too.  People and relationships are at the core of our model and the starting point of any transaction – from getting a job, to getting a home and getting married (we don’t teach that!). Our workshops develop the recognition of the value of soft skills, the confidence and knowledge of how and when to effectively use them and why they matter.  Armed with these skills our aim is of not only supporting people to progress to a job, but to a home and the life they want to lead too.  That’s the PLUS bit!