Your Own Place

Norwich

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News

A new Non-Executive Director

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We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Adam Clark as our newest Non-Executive Director.

Adam is an experienced senior leader in the social housing sector. Having previously held Director and Executive roles at Broadland Housing Association and North Star Housing Adam currently works as a consultant supporting delivery of strategic reviews, improvement and customer experience.

Adam is a chartered member of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and a founding member of CIH Futures, a board for young professionals. As a frontline member of staff, Adam was involved in supporting the delivery of Your Own Place early projects and remains focused on that founding purpose.

Throughout his work, Adam has witnessed first hand the impact a good home and quality support can make. “For so many people, a good home is a foundation for a good life”. Outside of work Adam is passionate about the outdoors and runs a freelance photography business.

Announcing our new CEO

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Your Own Place is thrilled to announce, after a rigorous recruitment process, that Zoe Webb has been appointed as the new CEO from 1st September. We know you will welcome her and be as excited as we are to get to know her.

From Warren, our interim Chair:

On behalf of the Your Own Place Board and the Your Own Place team, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to Zoe Webb, our new Chief Executive Officer.

With a wealth of experience in the Social Housing sector, I am confident that Zoe will continue the exceptional and necessary work completed by the Your Own Place team over the past decade.  To fulfil our mission – to prevent homelessness, and our vision – that everyone has a safe and secure home.

Zoe commences with Your Own Place on the 1st September 2024 and I know my Board colleagues will join me in wishing every success for Zoe and the team over the next decade.

And from Zoe herself:

“I am thrilled to be joining Your Own Place as their new CEO. Rebecca and the team have built a dynamic and impactful social enterprise and I am truly excited about continuing to build purposeful and trusting relationships to address the adversity people face and create change.” 

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

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An Election coming might be a time to rethink foodbanks. Many people have found their stride working or volunteering in foodbanks over the last few years.  It’s a boom industry. In turn, (and we’re delighted to have played our part training Trussell Trust volunteers as well as visitors to foodbanks), people have got so much more than just food. Communities and individuals have developed new skills, found jobs, made connections, got and given help and created new more resilient communities.  

You’ll no doubt be aware of foodbanks’ meteoric rise to infamy for all the wrong reasons.  On our high streets, in under-used ecclesiastical buildings and community centres also used for Zumba and Pilates, the Trussell Trust alone has now distributed 3.1 million food vouchers with 3628 of those being in Norwich during 2023.  17% of families are food insecure and 4.7 million people are in food poverty. 

However, the Trussell Trust in particular wants to put themselves out of ‘business’ and at the time of potentially massive political upheaval, it is, well, a timely conversation. 

Is ending the need for foodbanks possible and is it even desirable?  

What would our communities look like without foodbanks?

What might we lose?  

I am reminded of a conversation with a friend.  She volunteered on the phone during Covid19, speaking to people who were isolated.  At this time, going to a foodbank was not an option and many people’s situations deteriorated. She told me of one older woman she spoke to, with almost no training, but who, she quickly became aware, needed mental health support.  My friend, untrained, but full of compassion and common sense, stayed in touch with her, whilst the rusty cogs of the state kicked into action.  Not without trying to pass the buck back to my friend and asking her to make the introduction, such was the woman’s situation that she didn’t want to pick up the phone to the authorities, help was finally sourced. It could have gone horribly wrong and from what my friend says about what she did, she did a lot right, including asking some great questions at the right time and recognising when the time for questions was done and the woman needed help. She was lonely.

So whilst foodbanks have become a part of the landscape, what my conversation with my friend reminded me of, and I’m old enough to remember this, is the gaps they fill in the services we’ve lost.  The neighbourhood housing offices, the SureStart centres, youth clubs and community venues – with food as the hook, foodbanks are now in this space with poverty driving demand.  What many don’t see, is that as well as Your Own Place supporting people with the most obvious and presenting need of financial inclusion support, you’ll also find someone from Shelter, the British Red Cross, Citizens Advice, AgeUK as well as the friendly face of a volunteer with at least a cup of tea (possibly a cheese straw), a crêche, a warm space, possibly a WiFi connection – all at a foodbank. 

1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year in England, at least 309,000 people are homeless, Citizens Advice are seeing record numbers of people in debt and 1 in 4 older people suffer with isolation. If we lose foodbanks we lose spaces that have become a rarity in our communities – a place to come together, meet our neighbours, build communities, learn about available help from our peers, get warm, use the WiFi and more.  Add in your local authority or association housing officer and some wellbeing help, and you’ve got nearly the whole complement of a community.

So maybe their meteoric rise isn’t all bad, or at least, we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater after whatever happens on July 4th.  We should aim to eradicate the demand whilst recognising that they present us with a model to build on and invest in. For the volunteers, the people that work there, local employers and services, local authorities, housing associations, you, me and those that visit them, they are an opportunity to come together and connect. We might develop new skills, be part of creating or finding jobs, make new connections with our neighbours, proactively get as well as give help as equals and play a role in new more resilient communities.

Experiencing the Train the Trainer workshop

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Emily is a full-time facilitator at Your Own Place. She’s currently working on a variety of projects, including facilitating flexible workshops at different Supported Housing Schemes in Colchester, and supporting individuals accessing Food Hubs in and around Norwich.

Walking back into the training room at Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney, I am filled with joy. I see everything set up fastidiously, hand-drawn pictures to represent values and topics, the table covered in brown paper to encourage doodling. 

Three months earlier I walked into the same room to set up for Train the Trainer, four days of training to support professionals to deliver our Tenancy and Money workshops. I applied brown paper to the walls, placed hand-written and drawn cards back to front, and readied my laptop to share simple one-page plans.

The Your Own Place team have been working for over a year on perfecting the templates for our “One-Page Plans”: these are designed to support facilitators to set up for, remember key steps of, and summarise our signature activities. 

One-page plans include:

○ The “Why” of an activity
○ A list of essential resources
○ Steps of the activity
○ Related places to go for support
○ Summary points
○ A photo or diagram of the activity set up
○ A photo or diagram of the completed activity

These have become essential for training people to deliver Your Own Place activities – they simplify the key points of the process of the activity, making it easy for someone to pick up and deliver. It was a fantastic team effort to create these for so many activities – we’ve done all the planning, lived-experience tested the activities, and now we want to share them to support people who want to deliver them.

Hugely proud of these resources – they are a visual skeleton, reminders of the steps. What we are known for is engaging with people others describe as “hard to reach”, so how do we do that? The real magic is in the approaches and values at Your Own Place, which is why we begin Train the Trainer by exploring them.

The Asset-Based Approach

Each person we meet in our workshops will already have experiences, connections, skills and knowledge – this is common sense, right? But how often does someone start to explain how to do something without checking, “What do you know already?”

At the heart of our activities is this core value: we’re not delivering knowledge, we’re providing a space for people to share, discuss, check and enhance what they know already. We ask open questions: “What do you already do to budget?”, “What experiences do you have of debt?” and “What do you know about your housing options?”

It shows trainees that we trust their perspective and value what they have to share.

The Restorative Approach

The Asset-Based approach goes hand-in-hand with the Restorative Approach. We work with trainees – rather than deciding what is best for them, we ask, “How will this work for you?” and “What are your priorities?” 

We extend this “with” approach to participating in every activity ourselves – acknowledging where we overspend on weekly purchases, getting excited when we hear about a new budgeting app from trainees, and sharing our own experiences where it’s useful.

We don’t advise or tell people what to do. We provide the environment and pose the questions to create opportunities for discussion, for people to find strategies and support that work for them.

In Train the Trainer, there’s a fantastically fishy story exploring the Social Discipline window – taking the “teach a man to fish…” metaphor further. (You’ll have to book Train the Trainer to hear it!)

Our values

Alongside these approaches, our values are essential to our work and the way we reach people. We aim to keep our workshops high quality, accessible, and engaging, innovative and fun. We believe our approaches and values are the reasons 100% of trainees recommend our workshops – and a huge reason for 95% feeling more confident. (Statistics from 2023-24)

This is why we spend the time, in Train the Trainer, exploring these values and approaches in depth, and considering how we embed them. In the following days, we model the activities, with the approaches, so that before facilitating the activities, attendees experience them. 

“We were able to put ourselves in the shoes of the people that would be doing the training – that was invaluable for us” – Cecile, Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney

After completing the four days – one day a week for four weeks – I arranged to visit the team at Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney to observe them delivering a workshop, to provide detailed, supportive feedback. I loved seeing the impact of the four days of Train the Trainer – attendees confidently planned, prepared and facilitated activities with companions who really enjoyed it!

“It built my confidence, I felt I’d learned enough, and with the resources that come with Train the Trainer, it’s just all there for you, it supports you through the whole thing” – Jo, Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney


If you’d like to find out more about Train the Trainer, our offer to train your team in the approaches and activities we use to support people’s confidence with money, employability, move on and tenancy sustainment, click here.

As Cecile from Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney says, “Don’t recreate the wheel – use this fantastic service and you will be embedding excellent approaches in your service.”

Ever wanted to use our tried and tested Your Own Place techniques and content?  

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Well now you can with Train the Trainer dates now available from July

With our flexible Train the Trainer offer there is now the opportunity to embed the Your Own Place tenancy sustainment and money support approaches and knowledge in your organisation as well as have access to a vault of resources, workshop plans and support.

Your Own Place has built a stellar reputation for its delivery of Train the Trainer workshops. 

With a proven track record of developing colleagues in housing associations, supported housing and the third sector to become confident and empathic trainers in their own right, our workshops are designed to provide comprehensive money, housing and tenancy knowledge, practical training skills, and engagement techniques that inspire confidence in supporting your tenants and residents.

Whether it’s our use of neuro-diverse friendly Pinpoint facilitation that’s always intrigued you, or the coaching, restorative and asset-based approaches, or maybe the content of a budgeting session, together we’ll take a Show-Do-Review approach as you build your skills as a confident facilitator.

Options to train include a spot purchase option (four three-hour workshops in Norwich with the first two coming as a package) as well as more bespoke group workshops if you want us to train up a whole team and come to you – anywhere in the country.

Spot purchase participants will be able to book immediately onto the first two or all four workshops.

Join us at Your Own Place to reach more people to make a difference in preventing homelessness and experience the transformative power of our Train the Trainer workshops firsthand.
Visit our webpage to book your spot purchase place now.