Your Own Place

Norwich

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Introducing Zoe, new CEO of Your Own Place

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We’re so excited to give an official Your Own Place welcome to Zoe Webb – our new CEO! 

Emily, a facilitator at Your Own Place, met with Zoe at one of the team’s favourite haunts, The Cherry Leaf Cafe, to grill her with some interview questions. Zoe answered some classic Your Own Place workshop questions and shared a bit more about her background and what attracted her to Your Own Place.

“I met with Zoe at the Cherry Leaf – diet coke for me, hot chocolate for Zoe – and her enthusiastic energy was immediately clear. She also insisted on hearing my answers to the questions too so that we could both get to know each other! 

We kicked off with some of our go-to entryboard questions – we use these at the start of workshops as an icebreaker and something to chat about while waiting for everyone to arrive.

What is your favourite pizza topping?

At the moment, pepperoni is my go to. My favourite changes – sometimes it’s prawns, or mushrooms. The best pizza I’ve ever had was Hoisin duck!

If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?

I have lots of countries on my travelling list. At the top is Japan – there are so many reasons Japan interests me – the culture, the people, the traditions, the Cherry Blossoms! And, of course, the food. I have to read everything before I go and plan it so I don’t miss anything.

If you were a plant, what would you be?

I thought about this for a long time. I’d be a sedum. [picture me looking on, not knowing what a sedum is] It’s a succulent – a ground coverer. They spread quickly and they flower – I relate to sedum as a hardy perennial and an all rounder!

I went on to ask Zoe some quickfire need-to-knows:

  • Coffee order: Americano
  • Breakfast item of choice: Normal day – fruit and yoghurt, treat – pecan plait or sourdough avocado
  • Fave biscuit: Dark chocolate ginger (borders)
  • Fun fact: When I was 13, my friend taught me a secret language that I can still speak!

And next, I learned about Zoe’s background – and the incredible breadth of her experience!

Tell us a bit about your background

I’ve been working in the housing and homeless prevention field for thirty years. During that time I’ve worked across local authorities, the voluntary sector, housing associations and my most recent role was working in a specialist supported housing provider. I’ve worked in a variety of roles – I’ve been an advisor, a community-based support worker, I’ve established a rough sleeper team for a local authority. I’ve also worked on really exciting projects for the Ministry of Justice – I feel really privileged to have been involved in some really innovative projects. Most recently, I’ve worked with a specialist supported housing provider, focused on supporting single people experiencing homelessness or insecure housing. I’ve purposefully worked across the sector, to build a holistic view and understanding of housing. 

That’s incredibly impressive. What attracted you to Your Own Place?

Your Own Place’s values, the asset-based approach, working alongside people while they’re going through difficult transitions – these are all things that really attracted me to Your Own Place. I met Rebecca ten years ago, and I was really impressed by her approach, I really got it. I could see similarities with the work I’d been doing previously as a support worker in Greater Manchester. I was working on a young parents project, mainly with young women living in private rented accommodation that was insecure, unsafe and unaffordable. My focus was working with them – with them being very important – to support and equip them with the skills to be able to negotiate and improve their situation. I see that approach at Your Own Place. I see the strengths-based, asset-based approach and I’m really inspired by that.

Tell us about your passions. Why homelessness prevention?

Everyone has the right to a safe and affordable home. I’m a massive believer in homelessness prevention and a massive believer in early intervention. Insecure housing and homelessness creates trauma – trauma that prevention can avoid. If we invest in prevention, it pays dividends. I’m also passionate about people, creating space for change, creating space for discovering unknown capacity and skills within them and in their community. People have the capacity to find their own solutions, but they may not yet know they have this capacity – or they know they have but they are fighting against a system that’s not always working for them.

Thank you for sharing so much about your experience, values and passions. So…What has stood out to you about Your Own Place as a workplace so far?

The team have been incredibly welcoming. I’ve noticed how abundantly collaborative the team is – communication is excellent, they use Trello and instant messaging really effectively, and it’s so clear that everyone is really connected. This is hard to achieve in remote work [Your Own Place has hybrid and flexible working], but Your Own Place has a great handle on it! I’ve also seen the care and attention that goes into the quality of delivery. It’s very clear that I’m working with a skilled and passionate team.

What are you excited about at Your Own Place?

I’m excited to meet our existing partners and new partners. I’m excited about expanding our reach to prevent homelessness and embedding a collaborative approach to preventing homelessness. I’m also really excited for more and more people to see that what we do at Your Own Place works!

What would you like to say to potential business partners thinking about working with Your Own Place?

First and foremost: You won’t regret it! We’ve got a tried, trusted and successful model; our impact is demonstrated. Come and see us, come and talk to us! Prevention is a wide remit, and I think we can apply our approach across systems – so let’s explore it and contribute towards ending homelessness.

And finally, we simply must know: What three items would you want in your backpack in a zombie apocalypse?

Water, food, weapon [I pressed here for what exact weapon…] …a chainsaw!

An excellently gory and effective weapon chosen to take on zombies!

I had a wonderful time meeting with Zoe and grilling her. I can really see how her vast experience, her enthusiasm and innovative thinking, her passion are all going to be incredible assets to the leadership of Your Own Place.“

Connect with Zoe on LinkedIn

So that’s a wrap

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Waking up at 5am, my immovable exercise hour at 6am, probably a quality coffee in the sunshine (the past is always sunny) and then the usual day of team support, planning a workshop of some kind, signing off a report, doing some finance, troubleshooting and meeting a potential customer, likely after the fifth chasing email.

This day-in-my life feels like the optimal day during my time at Your Own Place.  This was likely somewhere around 2018 .  The recently enlarged team felt settled, I had moved into Norwich, making my work-life balance a lot simpler, there was an excellent coffee shop on the corner near the office and we had the novelty of a base.  It was pre-Covid and post the three-year-hump when lots of Community Interest Companies fail.  The team had grown, but not so much that I was constantly worried about money – every year had seen a surplus.  Something else that changed during and since Covid.

At some point in the second half of my decade, something shifted.  With Covid, the cost of living crisis and the catching up of the austerity years, the financial outlook felt bleak.  Whilst our own fortunes had not radically altered, the backdrop undeniably had.

This final post isn’t about doom and gloom.  Quite the opposite.  It’s about the journey you go on over ten years in social business.  Because at some point something changed for me too. Not for good or for ill, but just different.  Something I see when I look back at my social media output, my email approaches and how I conducted myself. 

Having created Your Own Place from a deep sense of injustice that some people, through no fault of their own are more likely to become homeless than others, the focus of my time, the podcasts I listened to, the articles I read and my broader interests, shifted not away from social justice, rather towards leadership as well.

Effectively a self-employed one-woman band for the first 18 months of Your Own Place’s life, as the organisation grew in size, ambition, quality as well as complexity, I needed to up my leadership game.  This hadn’t been in the plan. With a long way still to go and to learn, I’d like to think I’ve done okay.  I’ve made a gazillion mistakes, but in the impact language I love so much, there’s no counterfactual.  We don’t know what would have happened if I’d done something different/nothing.

That Your Own Place has proved me to be competent and more than competent not just in delivering workshops (it was this skill that led to our model), but in creating profit and loss accounts, public speaking, pitching, managing impact, making decisions, being resilient and tenacious, leading a strategy and a team and influencing and inspiring others is a chance revelation.  And this is exactly why we exist in the first place.  That it’s chance and good luck that I got those opportunities.  And it’s chance and bad luck that others don’t. 

So as I enter my last two weeks, the team is strong, we’re recruiting in Colchester and this year looks very likely to be our best yet financially, I find myself brimming with gratitude.  Brimming with gratitude for the person that Your Own Place has enabled me to become and with hope that others get their opportunities too. I am grateful for every single interaction, connection, opportunity and kindness shown to me .  Please continue to show it to Zoe, our new CEO, our team and everyone you work with or support. You never know what someone can become.

See you on the other side.

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.” 

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.”