Our Blog

No this isn’t a blog about Coronavirus or taking a rest. It’s about finding solutions for impact and whether this is inherent in who we are – a social business.

Last year we picked up the last year of a schools mentoring project. This forms one tiny part of a three-year Department for Education funded social mobility project under the banner of the Norwich Opportunity Area. We’ve spoken before about short-term funding and it’s deep inefficient and wasteful flaws. This has never seemed so stark than in the arena of tackling Norwich’s entrenched low social mobility.

Every event over the last few years, whilst citing some amazing early years work, committed headteachers and signs of joined up working, has also referenced the need for interventions that become business as usual. We need interventions that are resourced not for three years, but ten or twenty. Turning the tide on poor social mobility will take generations and for today’s ten year old – we get only one chance.

Having launched Mentoring Training2 last year, we’re thrilled now to put this business to this purpose. And that’s why we exist. As a social business with social impact at our core, we have found a way of continuing the project, continuing the impact, continuing to tackle social mobility – that doesn’t rely on short-term funding and benefits everyone.

We have four mentoring training dates with Norwich and Norfolk’s small and medium size businesses in mind – you’ll be able to purchase just one or two spaces on our mentoring training, utilise the skills in your workplace and in a Norwich school too.

This is where purpose, social impact, workplace culture, values and community collide. It’s a new way of doing business and the future for a fairer place to live and work for us all.

Find out more at www.mentoringtraining2.co.uk

I’ve been lucky enough to watch this biographical film twice. It charts the transition of six people incarcerated, along with roughly the other 83,000 we lock up in this country (fewer in Europe only than Russia and Turkey), to freedom.

Working with the Timpson Group, who have to date provided jobs for over 600 people on release, they are given an opportunity to train in prison and then work for the company on release. The impact of having a job and a home (and love) on release cannot be underestimated, with reoffending costing the tax payer over £18bn a year.

So a little about the six who starred in the film, including Anthony, a murderer who talked eloquently last week at the showing I attended. People who’s lives have been blessed enough not to grace the criminal justice system, often ask me why people offend. If there was a succinct and simple one-line answer, I almost certainly would not have spent the last six years working my ***e off to make a small difference.

There are as many reasons as there are people, including all those who skirt the law, get away with it, hold power fraudulently and haven’t been caught yet. This is not a binary question relating only to the 83,000 on the ‘inside’. Every one of us that has offended (broken the speed limit for example) must ask ourself how it occurred. Even this minor infringement presents us with relevant learning into how easily offending happens.

Every single one of the six in the film had experienced trauma. From a childhood of beatings, sexual violence, to drug use (to escape the violence), their children being abused by others, multiple unaddressed childhood bereavements, absent parents (dead, divorced, prison), parents forcing them into crime or abusing them and so on and so on. The question as to why people who have experienced the same don’t go on to commit crime remains hotly contested and still something of a mystery.

What these six tell us is that unaddressed trauma, pain and neglect goes on to have catastrophic affects on people, their victims, the community and us as tax payers. How many of us are walking around with our own pain, causing pain to others, even if it doesn’t result in breaking the law?

I for one cannot be certain how I would behave if I had experienced their lives. They are culpable, take responsibility for their actions and have done their time. But they cannot be blamed for being victims of harm, crime, abuse, neglect and wider societal failings. And for all those reasons they deserve second, third, fourth and fifth chances.

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With so much written in the wellbeing space I’m a natural sceptic about lots of non-expert people doing very well out of ill-informed recycling of advice. Of course it’s big business amongst the busy, stressed and self-loathing. Generally I’m of the belief that I know what’s best for me and will listen, reflect, test and review my decisions – my way!

So when people talk of keeping gratitude journals and finding three good things on a tough day, I am equally sceptical. So much of this is ‘money for old rope’ – this is something resilient and self-aware people do a lot unconsciously.

If you looked at my diary, the last few weeks have been average. I’ve not worked much harder than usual and there haven’t been too many curve balls. However, I think I’ve become accustomed to how draining every week is.

Running your own business is exhausting. Even when things are ticking along, people de-rail you all the time. You’re constantly managing other people’s emotions whilst trying desperately to maintain an even keel. In addition, you’re making dozens of decisions a day. Whether it’s a safeguarding query, whether to commission some help, run a new project, try something new, spend some money, change a system, try a new approach, speak at an event, weigh up whether to meet someone – it flies at you – and this is just the ‘big’ stuff. All the time you’re actually trying to keep to a schedule, stay healthy, get your own work done and if you’re really lucky, bring in some business and create a positive workplace.

And so I turned to gratitude after a few utterly draining days. And as was usual when I was a teacher, it was the people where I found it.

I now try to write three things down every week on my private Trello board. I don’t dwell on them – things moves too quickly for that, but there is always something to be grateful for.

When’s you’re not in a position to make one. This blog is a series of thoughts that have distilled over the years. Rarely am I in the company of suffiently ‘lefty types’ to find much agreement and too frequently come across indifference or a lack of compassion. I’m still unsure which is worse. I use the term lefty for affect. Along with ‘bleeding heart liberal’ and less polite terms, I’ve heard them all. The beauty of age is confidence. Rather than veering right as many do with age, I’m pleased that my career choices have clarified my thinking on this.

In areas such as appointing Powers of Attorney and The Mental Capacity Act we have tools to conclude whether someone can and should make certain life-influencing decisions. And yet all too often we hear the word ‘choice’ referring to people sleeping rough, begging and refusing services of support.

Let’s just be really clear on the choices available to many fellow humans in tough times. Choices may be between a twenty-bed hostel where a known predator or violent criminal are resident and sleeping on the streets. Choice may be to stay with a violent husband or fear worse (severe harm to yourself or your children). Choice may be between begging to have enough to stave off hunger and prostitution.

Furthermore, when it comes to homelessness, the choice of services really are minimal. Many people will have been through them before, met the same workers, heard the same doors clanging shut and been through the same broken systems that led them back to where they are.

This blog isn’t about the paucity of human-designed services or huge cuts to public services however. It’s concerned with how we make decisions. The best case scenario for making a decision is being warm (the brain works much better when warm apparently). Ideally, if I’m buying a car for example, I’ll get in possession of the facts. Do some research. Weigh up the pros and cons. Get onto google. Speak to some friends. Work out what I can negotiate and compromise on. Knowledge is power and networks remain the greatest source of support.

We know from research that enduring poverty, money worries, abuse, hunger, physical pain and poor mental health cognitively impair the brain. We know that children and adults who have been abused suffer from PTSD. In light of this, faced with the trauma of poverty, hunger, abuse and sleeping on the streets, who of us would make the best ‘choices’. I argue very strongly that not only are they not true choices, but that we’re asking people to make them who will struggle due a complex cocktail of factors.

So let’s hear more empathy the next time someone says that a homelessness person turned down the offer to go into a hostel – as though this absolves us of compassion.

Your Own Place is seeking simply the best Operational Manager. We don’t get hung up on qualifications, perfect CVs or the finished article. Here’s our top five for this post.

1. We recruit for values. They are: equality, being innovative, fun and engaging, asset-based, restorative and high quality.
2. Whilst we remunerate competitively, we’re also offering an independent mentor and the satisfaction that money cannot buy – making a difference to lives.
3. You don’t have to have a degree – we want to hear what you’re passionate about and driven by.
4. Show us that passion through self-improvement, professional curiosity and an active interest in the outside world.
5. And more than anything, show us how you care about our people.

Full details on how to apply can be found here.

If you haven’t been over to The Independence Hub yet then you may not have met Stacy.

What will you be doing to support the community around you this year?

Many of us will volunteer, buy from charity shops, fundraise with your business or something else. How do you decide? And how do you know it has an impact?

These can be difficult questions to answer, especially when there is a wealth of volunteering opportunities and we are bombarded by good causes to jump out of aeroplanes on behalf of.

I lack time and already have two voluntary roles. So I tend to think strategically – that there’s more than one way to have an impact. You don’t always have to get directly involved.

This has turned my attention to our fine city of Norwich, the small voice and influence I have and what I can do to leverage more community impact. So this year my thoughts turned to how we can make it easier for businesses to make a difference.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the goods and services that businesses buy anyway were bought from other businesses that employ homelessness people or guys out of prison? (Did you know that every time you get your keys cut at Timpson’s you’re doing just this, as they employ ex-offenders?).

That means that this year I’m running a Buy Social Steering Group working with key partners from Norwich City Council, UEA, Chambers of Commerce, Norwich BID and local social enterprises. We will be looking at how we can register Norwich a Social Enterprise Place and make it easier for businesses as well as individuals to spend their money with businesses that have real added social impact.

Taking on a loan is never a decision to be taken lightly. Ironically (or not), just as we promote due diligence amongst our trainees around borrowing, so we at YOP have considered this very carefully, starting the conversation over a year ago.

Why have we done it? Being a social enterprise is tough. In that way we’re no different to a charity. What we do is complex, and therefore time-consuming, and therefore expensive. We are genuinely striving to find solutions to one of society’s most intractable problems – homelessness

What is different to being a charity? Our ambition to a) not be dependent on short-term restricted income, the shortcomings of which I have written about before b) to be on a level playing field with business in our language, professionalism and ambition and c) to reinvest 100% of our (unrestricted) profit into achieving our aim.

Why Sumerian? We’ve been approached and have approached social investors over the past few years. There is little experience to draw on locally and most investors’ terms simply don’t suit the small, high-risk, stand-alone business. I met Chris from Sumerian giving a talk to us on The Young Foundation accelerator programme. A chance encounter that I followed up on and started a conversion. Chris, Amy and Sumerian Partners get us and they get the sector.

They understand that social enterprise is tough. That progress is slow and that at our age it’s common to hit a brick wall, through which many enterprises fail to push and therefore stagnate or close. As such the terms of a long-term loan that has been negotiated as equals on a journey of learning, feels akin to our values, ambitions and the work we do.

What are we going to do with the cash? We’re recruiting an Operational Manager. This post will be overseeing YOP, all projects and our incredible team. This will in turn free me up to develop the business and make it sustainable.

To say it’s exciting is an understatement. To say it’s squeaky bum time is also an understatement. It’s the most fantastic opportunity for a new member of the team, for me, for YOP and we can’t wait to work alongside Sumerian.

It’s my last blog of 2020 and I’m delighted to tell you about a new partnership. We can share what we will be aiming to achieve as well as a few reflections about what makes a good partnership.

The sector is constantly told to collaborate. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. After all, you don’t generally hear of Superdrug and Boots collaborating do you? And yet we’re all meant to against a backdrop of increasingly finite resource and growing demand as well as need.

In January we will be working with Prince’s Trust, a small group of volunteer mentors, a number of local employers and HMP Norwich to support a small cohort of men pre-release. With the overall aim of preventing reoffending, we will be tailoring and delivering a fantastic package of life skills training and soft employment skills training to prepare the men for release.

In addition we will be delivering our uniquely restorative and strength-based workshops to both employers and mentors to equip them with the skills and confidence to support the men on their journey to release.

The employers will be offering interviews, work placements and even jobs as well as accommodation.

We are very excited to be offering this unique package as a pilot project in an area where it can have a massive impact on people’s lives, offending, homelessness and life outcomes.

Partnership is never easy though. What has made it easier is a shared mission and ambition. Prince’s Trust bring this passion to achieve the mission as well as connections and capacity. We bring the expertise, experience and skillset to make this happen and in our uniquely engaging and impactful delivery style.

What has been vital to the partnership is ongoing communication, complementary capabilities as well as patience and forgiveness. We all work differently and sometimes think we’re the best. Chances are we’re not and that each party brings something to the table. Without each other this wouldn’t be happening at all.

A good message this Christmas perhaps.

We can’t wait to share the learning with you and hope you have a fantastic break.

Thanks personally for taking the time to read my blogs too!

At last it’s December and that means we can talk about Christmas. Are you looking forward to it? What makes Christmas difficult for you?

It’s an odd time of year for many of us. Professionally it seems that many people try to squeeze everything in before the holiday starts. It’s as if time stands still after 24th December, when we all know that the same challenges, albeit without baubles, will be with us again before we know it. Who sets a funding deadline for 20th December? 😉

It’s possible my diary has never been busier as we all plan 2020. It’s important to remind myself of how lucky I am having time to plan the year ahead (and as a business that there is a year ahead!).

Inevitably, in our line of work we’re acutely aware of how personally tough this time of year can be for many people too. Not just other people, but many of us and in your workplace too. True, it’ll be tougher for some than others. Some are losing jobs this month due to the pressures on the high street. Others might not know where they’re going to be living during those weeks or how they’re going to feed their family and keep their home warm over the break.

So whether it’s clearing our desks and trying to squeeze everything in or putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to spend money we haven’t got, eating and drinking to the point of discomfort, do let’s all be kind to each other above all else. For so many this can be a really tough time of year. For those alone, struggling to make ends meets, feeling family pressures, remembering people they’ve lost, difficult anniversaries and not knowing what 2020 holds – your smiles, words, time and kindness makes a difference.

It’s the amount in pounds that people get released from prison with.

It hasn’t gone up for over a decade and they are still fairly unlikely to have a bank account to put it in. Had I been writing a blog at the outset of my career working with the secure estate twenty years ago, it would have likely been not dissimilar to this.

That we lock up more people than any other country in Europe, that 60% reoffend within a year and that this costs us all around £15bn is a sorry indictment of a country, political system and us all as the electorate.

People are doing extraordinary, albeit piecemeal things to intervene, ameliorate fairly locally and develop the evidence base. There is no shortage of evidence for what works however. What is lacking is long-term investment and commitment for true change and this will only come about with the depoliticisation of the justice system.

Save your £46 and resolve issues of housing, work and community resettlement. People leaving prison with nothing have few options open to them. To have a live worth living, such as we all aspire to, takes time and relationships whilst having other specialists for those more complex cases too.

Seeing the difference our mentors make is just one small part of this. Seeing that someone cares, can reflect your own thoughts back at you in a meaningful way to make sense of them and having someone in your life with no agenda is a powerful tool at all our disposals.

With greater access to local, national and international research, we hear the Gallup statistics a lot these days.

That leaders and managers can make a massive difference to staff wellbeing and that 87% of employees worldwide are disengaged at work is a real ‘dur’ moment for any of us that have been poorly managed (which is clearly most of us at some point).

Should someone running a tiny enterprise be worrying about this?

How many HR departments are putting meaningful actions into place to address the challenges of the workplace?

Assuming we have our ears and eyes open to what’s going on around us, there is a wealth of advice, data and ‘good practice’ to draw on. And in the social media age we’re all shouting about the great stuff we do with our teams. With this bombardment critical faculties have never been more important.

Having worked for the local authority, I’m conscious that trying to shift culture, invest in people and bring about change can pretty much only be achieved by superheroes.

So when you give up on being a superhero (or waiting for one) you start your own business. This means working for a micro enterprise you have it really easy ;). You can build culture and employee engagement from the bottom up and tweak it quickly and transparently when it falters. We can choose our people with care. At scale it becomes about systems that don’t forget people.

In this knowledge my focus for staff engagement in 2020 will be the following three things:

⁃ Finalising and communicating our Staff Engagement Strategy embedded in our values. This will include wellbeing, staff remuneration, volunteering at work, flexible working and living our values through who we partner with and buy from.

⁃ Developing metrics across the organisation, the team, the Board and myself to ensure real progress as well as a sense of shared common purpose.

⁃ Being financially sound. Healthy finances mean better job security, prospects to develop, exciting projects and more resource to relieve pressure.

Do you have a safety net? Is it a rainy day fund, parents, a partner or perhaps a friend you trust with your life?

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a Spark Debate as part of Hot Source Norwich, on homelessness. With plenty of compassion and commitment in the room, it was Alex that really stood out. At 18 Alex found himself homeless after been chucked out by his parents.

Alex came from a really normal family and no one had told him about places to go for help, housing benefit or any of the other institutional or systemic safety nets we are lucky to have in our society. If Alex hadn’t spoken last Wednesday evening, you wouldn’t have known he’d been homeless and slept rough. He didn’t have the cliched shaggy beard, missing teeth or sleeping bag of the rough sleeper.

What struck me most of all though was his answer to what might have prevented his rough sleeping and what helped him. His responses are the hardest for a society or organisation to replicate. He cited luck and humanity! He met his girlfriend and others at the right time who helped him.

It reminded me of how easily people become homeless – and the luck or chance of having a safety net. I know that I could do literally anything and my dad would still take me in and bail me out. What must it feel like not to have that? How many of us never consciously realise that we take this for granted and the incredible sense of self, security, resilience and belonging it gives us? Without it, when things go wrong, they can go very wrong and very fast. And that’s down to luck.

Most of us have mentors in our lives, both formal and informal. We have gained different things at different times from different people.

Who have been your mentors and when?

‘Mentoring’ is one of those words that everyone broadly understands. I always contest that if there’s ten people in a room there’s probably ten differing definitions. With mentoring having become a more common and professionalised world, you can throw in coaching too if you want.

When might you turn to a mentor? In leadership circles we’re hearing more and more of this being a routine offer of professional development for the CEO. As a fifteen year old your first conversation with an impartial adult when seeking a different perspective, might also be your first mentoring experience. A chat with a mate after a tough day may help to unlock your next steps too.

We didn’t realise at the time, but we’ve benefited from differing views from the moment we’re born. What happens next determines whether we’re prepared to listen, truly hear, reflect and make any changes to our lives and actions as a result of them. It’s why we travel – to see another world from another angle. Like travel, a mentor broadens the mind.

You don’t have to be broken or sad to have a mentor. It’s not advice, as this is more likely to be something you pay for professionally to fix something specific. I know we’re encouraged to focus on our failures these days, but sometimes the best mentoring conversations occur when things are going well. In this situation we can focus on what’s next or why it’s going well. A mentor at this time can help with growth as another might equally help when things are difficult.

I’ve experienced all these types of mentoring. In adult professional mentoring there is a place for high level conversations, but I’m currently finding most benefit from tackling specifics. This is quite likely due to the isolation one experiences as CEO founder too. By putting real trust in the mentor’s skills, recognising that they don’t have to know anything about your world, you can work through tricky situations and come out feeling confident and empowered.

Like much in life, you get out what you put in. A small amount of preparation, a lack of cynicism, trust in the process and a bit of listening goes a long way.

There are valid and even evidence-based reasons for using positive imagery about people. Most importantly though, it’s about respect and breaking the stigma.

It’s understood that charities are facing tough times and need to raise money. I’m a member of the public and tax-payer too and will choose carefully how I make donations.

Here are some ways our sector fundraises and I’d love to know how you feel about them.

Chugging: To be lured in the high street by a rattling tin and a smile in a fluorescent bib has to be my least favourite means of making donations. Partly because I’ll decide who and when I want to talk to someone and as an introvert would rather stay in control of that (same with door knocking). I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I hope when I’m on my uppers, I’m worth more to society than that. Ironically they stand alongside beggars, metaphorically rattling their tin too.

Soup kitchens: Then there’s initiatives like the soup kitchen. Established and run relentlessly by incredibly well-meaning people wanting to ameliorate the suffering of people. Perhaps a bit Victorian for my personal taste.

Sleep Outs: Marketed incredibly effectively by corporate teams, amazing leverage of the business sector and astonishingly successful in raising unrestricted funds. Almost always they are accompanied by those ubiquitous pictures of people in hoodies and sleeping bags. Sleeping for one night in a sleeping bag is neither a true experience of homelessness (and they go to great pains to say this, to be fair), or a fair representation of what homelessness really is or often the scope of their work.

You’ll know by now that homelessness comes in myriad forms, with rough sleeping being the tip of a very large and complex iceberg. Imagery should therefore be myriad too. Pictures of people who no longer look like the rest of society (often ragged beards, missing teeth and this mermaid effect of a permanent sleeping bag) desensitise us and rid us of the opportunity for a real debate about homelessness.

By seeing the homeless in this limited way they become ‘other’, not like us and defined by this one (possibly fleeting) moment in their lives. This negative imagery promotes stigma, prejudice and takes us back to Victorian initiatives that make lots of us feel better for helping. There’s no doubt that money gets raised, some of it gets well spent and some lives are improved.

However, this should never be at the expense of someone’s dignity, right to respect and equal treatment.

Telling nuanced stories is difficult and doesn’t grab headlines. The fact is the route to homelessness is nuanced and could happen to any of us. With that in mind how would you want to be represented? We don’t even post the occasional picture on our social media of us looking anything less than perfect, so why would we do that to someone else?

So if/when (heaven forbid) something happens to you, would your rather be represented as someone with some positive past, hope for the future and smiling or looking your absolute worst?

Donation points: This week in Norwich I was pleased see the BID launch their donation point, #NorwichStreetAid to enable shoppers and others to donate real money to go into training and skills development as well as useful household items and even people giving their time, though I’m not sure how this works.

You’ll know by now what I’m going to say. It’s still not prevention and it’s still ‘them and us’. Most people never ever have to get into those situations. It’s incredibly important we hang onto that belief as we see homelessness skyrocket and assume that it’s a normal part of life. It’s not. It’s preventable and a governmental and policy choice.

So whatever way you choose to help, and you are, please find a way that doesn’t just ease your conscience or fill a belly for tonight, but one that you feel confident has treated someone with respect and dignity.

In a week that sees the launch of our Mentoring Training2 with a talk on leadership and workplace cultures, I find myself reflecting on my role.

Much is written and spoken about leadership and there’s no doubt that to be a CEO you have to lead.

But I have two further questions. What kind of CEO does YOP need and and how do I become it?

Imposter syndrome is real and after all, as a founder, I am a self-appointed CEO. This means I can be doubly hard on myself for not really being a CEO.

This week is also the summation of a lot of hard work by a lot of people that most won’t see. The nature of starting a small business, of any kind, is that you wear lots of different hats. This provides both a wonderful diversity of roles, an opportunity to get under the skin of all aspects of the business and fantastic learning (and failing).

Much of my time is operational. In fact most of my time. I’m a really good project manager, a safe pair of hands and diligent. But am I a CEO, do I want to be one, what kind does YOP need and what kind do I want to be? There are precious few role model CEOs I really aspire to be. Maybe because social enterprises are in fairly short supply.

Ultimately though, it’s probably not sustainable or healthy. And it’s not being a CEO. Making the leap from a one-woman band is one thing, to really becoming CEO and handing over some of the reigns, quite another. And not just financially.

So by handing over large amounts of the operational day to day management, not just a peril in itself, I will be freed up to lead the business. It’s going to be another learning curve and one I want to prove to myself I can do, but I’m also aware that just maybe I can’t!

Our sector is rightly concerned about cash at the moment. Unprecedented cuts combined with unprecedented demands are undeniably having an impact on services. This can be the availability of services, the accessibility and thresholds of those services or the ability to innovate and partner and develop better ones.

Last week I wrote of my itch for work in schools and the education system. A similar itch exists around the criminal justice sector. Unlike schools, fewer people have had direct contact with them, and yet like, education, even the non-political take a view.

Following an intense baptism into the youth criminal justice estate in my twenties, I have skirted around criminal justice my entire career. From the sharp end in south-east London anti-knife crime work to our recent Serious & Organised Crime (SOC) Home Office Project and most recently, mentoring. There’s no denying the numbers and the cuts that the prison service has suffered.

And yet it feels curiously static, albeit I’m not entirely comparing like with like. Prisons in my experience were always stretched, always focussed on the priorities of security (not resettlement) and always full of well-intentioned people working in an almost impossible environment.

Now volunteer mentoring isn’t free! We go to great pains to explain that our prison and other mentors bring a great deal to the table, their ‘freeness’, in many ways being the least important. Good and safe mentoring costs money to run and our men and women being resettled from prison are worth every penny.

But despite their absolute commitment and passion for mentoring a person due for release, can mentors really make an impact against this tide of dysfunction? Because prisons haven’t changed in twenty odd years. They’re stills stretched to the limit, it’s still hard to work with agencies on the outside and their primary objective is still the day-to-day safety and security of the prison. Only now, they are releasing people to a worse prospect of getting housed, finding a job, having effective probation support and experiencing less tolerance from employers and the public at large.

Volunteer mentors can’t and absolutely shouldn’t try or think they can fix this. Their strength is in being another voice. Someone with no agenda. Someone to talk to when it gets tough (and it will!). And someone to talk through the options and opportunities calmly, impartially and with the wisdom that any living empathic human can bring.

Short of the massive amounts of cash needed to fix failed policy making, this is an impactful and cost-effective way of affecting positive change in someone’s life – because you can’t change the world, but you can change the world for that person.

For anyone that’s made a fairly momentous career leap, looking backwards can be a fleeting discomfort. Most of us justify our own current decisions as the best ones so it’s natural to turn our backs on the past and assume we’re making progress. Just as society does.

When people ask if I would go back to working for the local authority we go through the rye laughter and knowing looks. The reality however is more nuanced and I’m a firm believe in ‘never say never’.

And of course what many of my former and current colleagues in Norfolk don’t always know is that most of my career has been outside Norfolk. Starting working life as a teacher in south London, it’s to these memories I now return.

With our Schools Mentoring I am finding myself back in two schools I knew as a child growing up in Norfolk. That education had changed is undeniable. Academisation, continued and growing demands of Ofsted, as well as parents and children, the birth of the digital age and an utterly different range of post 16+ prospects, pressures and types of employment make this arena formidable. My respect for the those tackling it is off the graph.

Looking back at my own teaching career, I’ve always said with certainty that I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today without starting out as a teacher. If you can stand in from of 30 fifteen year olds and teach them German and Russian as a 22 year old in south-east London, you become fairly fearless pretty quickly.

So what’s the itch I feel in schools? Is it just that I’ve always felt I ‘failed’ by leaving the teaching profession? Or is it that there’s still that idealistic passion for the classroom and everything it can and should achieve for children?

Either way, it’s unsettling to be reminded of my early career and I’m embracing that for what it is. With this in mind it can be positive to look backwards to look ahead at the opportunities this affords in a new setting. Never say never!

Turning need into demand. I’ve talked about it before. Just because of all the reports we read about homelessness and its causes, it doesn’t mean that what we do is running off the shelf. Money is tight out there!

Like any business we have no right to exist and should exist only because we achieve our mission – and not for people’s jobs, egos or vanity projects.

This can sound ruthless, but in a tight sector it’s important to keep on mission. Only with this focus can we be the best we can possibly be. And all our people deserve no less.

Progress is slow. Repeat customers a must. This is Norfolk, not London. Reputation is everything.

So we’re thrilled to be working with North Norfolk District Council over the next year to deliver nine Tenancy & Independent Living Skills Plus (TILS+) courses.

Like most local authorities they have seen a rise in homelessness and it is exactly this population we will be supporting and preventing too! To develop the necessary knowledge, skills and resilience to live independently sometimes has to be taught.

Over the year we can evaluate our impact on those that have moved into their tenancies and created that safe and secure home that everyone deserves.

For all the marketing, impact reporting, pilot courses and more that we do, this piece of work came down to trust and relationships. These take time in our sectors and we cannot wait to take this partnership to the next level.

Following a holiday I experience that familiar energising feeling – it’s akin to a new year and inevitable resolutions fall out of it too.

I read recently about how the warming and slowing of the brain (like during a holiday or even a long hot shower) really does make it respond differently and generate new ideas. And so when when I returned from my holiday without the new ideas I was disappointed. Until I acknowledged that this August instead of the lightbulb moment there had been smaller and apparently less impactful realisations instead.

As a non-goals setting, non-long-term-planning commitment-phobe, I set about making a series of small action focussed plans for the coming weeks, months and years. These are partly personal, but all impact on the year ahead.

Struggling, like many, to fit everything in I realised I simply have to make a change to the email tyrant in my life. The popping up of new emails thwarts progress throughout the day. What I didn’t realise were the huge added benefits of restricting email checking to before work, after work and once during normal working hours.

They are:

• The freeing up of my time to focus. If I put an hour aside to write a report, I actually have a whole hour and the report gets done.
• Picking up the phone – I expect there will be some mishaps when people email me that day about a cancelled meeting and I won’t find out. But we’ll all just have to learn the hard way. Picking up the phone is a dying art and one I want everyone at YOP to do more of – so it should probably start with me.
• Being more present. This is almost one of the greatest benefits. When the team arrive in the morning I’m not in the middle of an email and when I am rushing to meetings, the meetings are more productive because I’m not distracted by that tricky email I shouldn’t have opened half way down London Street.
• Less email traffic for the team. In a tiny office we shouldn’t be emailing each other. Knowing that I won’t reply means they are more likely to find the answers themselves or come and talk to me. Great all round.
• Better quality of communication. Because I now focus time just on emails and probably on a desktop, the responses I make are better. It’s dedicated time to respond and with any luck by the time I’m responding the matter will have been dealt with already anyway.

I’m three weeks in, with the first week of September being the most challenging as the volume of email traffic climbs. But right now it feels it’s a very necessary ‘new year’ goal.

With the start of the new academic year, it feels like the right time to talk about things getting busy. When things were busy a colleague once likened me to a duck. Serene above the surface but wiggling wildly underneath. (Naturally I would have preferred to be likened to a swan!).

However, I had never seen myself that way and felt pretty frazzled at the time. As time has gone on, the pressure has mounted and will continue to do so. Oddly however, I feel calmer today than I did then.

And this is my observation of people who are very busy and under pressure – whether they are self employed, running their own businesses, CEOs, leaders, politicians – that they have an inner calm.

It’s as if there’s an inverse proportionality. The more pressure people are under the calmer they appear.

I’ve said before that I’ve got to meet fantastic people in this role that I would never have managed to otherwise. And the people that impress me (other than the kind ones) are not on their phones replying to emails, they are fully present, they are giving you their whole attention, they are quietly and calmly getting on with it.

Where does this inner calm comes from? Could it come from their humility – that they trust their team and believe it doesn’t all depend on them. Or perhaps arrogance or nonchalance – that they’ve got it all in hand.

The more pressure we experience the more important this ability to manage calmly becomes. If things feel messy and chaotic around you, it’s really important not to mirror that. Not just for your own health, but for the team and business too.

The risk of being calm is perhaps appearing not to care, being blasé or taking risks. The reality is that making decisions constantly, changing plans, finding solutions all whilst juggling the endless demands of people and business requires a resilience and approach that ensures survival. Staying calm has to be part of that approach.

So when people give meaningless lists about the behaviours of leaders, ‘being calm’ should be in there too.

More on the ‘how’ to be calm next week.

This is a blog, not just about mental health, but about how our interaction with it plays out in a world of social media and self-publicising.

As someone who has set up a social enterprise and truly believes in what we do, I find myself more public than I would like, because to some extent, the end justifies the means. Social media allows this and has been my friend.

Social media and our Instagram obsession however has made us not just more comfortable talking about our emotions, but what we look like too. Is it just me or do people feel more able to make comments about appearance? Having had a gap in this from about the age of 20 I assumed it would simply wain with age.

However scarcely a week goes by without someone making a comment about the way I look and most sadly of all, if it’s a woman, they are usually making self-deprecating comparisons. As an adult I cope with most comments and increasingly make a conscious decision to ‘big up’ the other woman whilst making no reference to appearance. With my nieces playing out their lives (and holiday bikinis) on social media, how equipped are they to protect themselves and support their peers?

In an age of memes, leadership speak, authenticity and workplace cultures I understand why CEOs, footballers and other would talk openly about their mental health.

As someone building a values-lead organisation I desperately want staff to feel they can be appropriately open about it. We have an additional role in modelling these behaviours for the people we support too.

It’s undoubtedly becoming normal on LinkedIn for people to talk about their mental health and be a bit personal. As the pendulum on mental health swings I feel this can only be a good thing that is the silver lining to much of the status envy, downward comparing and trolling that occurs when people lay themselves bare (sometimes literally!) online.

Everything has a flip side however and it’s important to see it and prepare people for it. But this isn’t about the importance of digital resilience, it’s about my right to a private life. As a deeply private and introverted person, this remains my right.

We’ve all got s*** we could share and some of us do. Not always relevantly or appropriately in my view. But because I don’t talk about it publicly doesn’t mean I don’t commend the pendulum swing and more open conversations about our mental health.

There are so many challenges of my role that I have embraced (more on this next week) and some even with some degree of success. Others I’m blissfully unaware of at this present time.

I pride myself on being a rational, empirical human being that is able to reason with my chimp (see the brilliant Steve Peters) on a daily basis. And yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, including my own experience, I still struggle to take a holiday.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh on myself. This is the second year in a row that I have taken a two-week break in August. Despite August been more expensive and not having children, the quieter time eases the pile of emails and requests I have to return to. I love Southern Europe at this time of year too.

We pay for it of course. Not only have the past two months been incredibly busy, but knowing these weeks were coming has made it especially hard. I have become better at saying no and have been quite ruthless about the two weeks leading up to my leave. This time is about the team and operational matters. With this focus however is an inevitable compromise in developing new business. This is not a compromise unique to the holiday period!

The real challenge I haven’t conquered though is the guilt. It’s pretty much the only time of year I take a proper break and I’ve never felt like I needed it so much. I know full well that I’m grumpy, making bad (if any) decisions and haven’t had a new or exciting idea in weeks (sorry team). And yet I know that lightness I feel after a few days away as my brain can finally see the wood for the trees.

At this vantage point (two days before I go away) I see the two weeks as time I could be spending on strategic work and business development. Imagine what I could achieve with two whole weeks! And don’t even get me started on ‘abandoning’ the team! But I’ll get over it and by Sunday evening will be sunning myself in a bar in Seville, putting things in perspective and feeling very grateful.

So expect a rejuvenation, some strategy and some ideas in September. And enjoy yours. See you in three weeks!

And if you love European train travel half as much as me, hop over to my Instagram account and keep an eye @rebkawhite.

Like many social enterprises we got started with funded, or restricted, income. This blog isn’t going to be about the rights and wrongs of this or whether it makes us a true social enterprise, rather some observations of funding relationships and the changes ahead.

I hope I’ll never forget our first grant of £3774 from the Norfolk Community Foundation. Many more have been generously awarded along the way. The commitment had always been to move away from this and whilst an evolving picture, this remains the ambition.

What do funders want from an organisation in return and what can they expect for their £3774?

It’s totally understandable that they must be accountable to their donors, trustees and for some, the public more broadly. And with an eye on raising more cash, they want good stories of impact too. So do we and the people we work with incidentally.

But if society’s most intractable and enduring problems could be fixed for £3774 then I guess we’d have done it by now. This means we have to have an honest relationship of equals and trust about the impact this money might really make. I would argue that this takes time and is another reason scrapping most short-term grant giving.

Most funders don’t understand social enterprise and whilst asking us how we will ‘sustain’ their project after the funding ends have no insights to offer.

Usually a one-size-fits-all reporting template is used – no matter the size of the grant. Some funders want it completed every three months with phone calls or meetings asking the same questions. They want photos, film, quotes and good news. The more enlightened want honesty about what’s gone wrong, recognising that there is learning in this for all of us.

What is most infrequent is helpful feedback on what you’ve shared and insights from other organisations that have almost certainly hit the same difficulties.

The larger funders are moving towards a Funder Plus model where they get grantees together, offer added extras (office space, online learning portals and events) with still little talk of true sustainability plans. Again, if this was easy…

Most important for us is a relationship of equals. This takes time and can be started long before a grant is awarded by a good grant manager. It means meaningful, constructive and open dialogue. Believe it or not we don’t just want the cheque. We want to reflect with someone invested so we can develop and learn and be better.

Tom started with Your Own Place nearly a month ago. Any new employee in a small and tight team makes an impact. Their personality, style of communication and approach to the job alters a small team – not for better or worse, just alters it.

Something Tom brings to his role his curiosity. It’s quite disarming when someone asks lots of questions and forces you to think about your answers and why you are doing things the way you are.

It’s made me reflect on my own curiosity too – or historic lack of it. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that almost everything can be learnt. At school we are lead to believe we are arty or science types and this feels increasingly limiting. As a linguist and musician I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told ‘I can’t do languages’ or ‘I’m tone deaf’. I’m not a social entrepreneur either, but hey! So we can learn to be curious too.

Tom has helped me realise how important being curious is. It’s easy to be scared of asking the ‘wrong’ questions and it’s occurred to me that my upbringing did just this. I wanted to be invisible and asking the wrong question (or any question) would have undermined this. I wish I’d asked more.

So this is something I’m learning to do. Sitting in a meeting or planning a project I’ve become much more assertive about what information it is that I need to progress. I believe a lack of curiosity is why some people/organisations waste so much time with endless meetings – because no-one asks any questions – let alone the right ones. Maybe they don’t dare or aren’t professionally curious.

Alternatively, we are so quick to rush on with ‘doing’ we haven’t established the basics through asking (and of course listening). This is vital in services that meet a human need.

And of course people love being asked questions.

Every week a well-meaning person forwards me an email about a restricted funding opportunity. Usually they are for around £20,000 over a year and broadly in our arena of work.

Five years ago I can remember winning our first £20,000 bid and it felt incredible. There’s no doubt that all the incremental steps along the way have lead us to today.

But below are my six reasons why it’s thanks, but no thanks.

1) I set up a social enterprise and not a charity (they are not mutually exclusive). I naively wanted to be majority trading within two years. This wasn’t and isn’t the case, but in my stubborn way, absolutely remains the ambition.

2) Restricted income simply doesn’t excite me. I have to accept that to put in the hours I do and take the personal risks I do, that there has to be something in this for me. Restricted funding is was it says on the tin and is the opposite (mostly) of innovative and exciting.

3) It’s usually very short-term. We are working in one of the most complex sectors there is. The idea that you can deliver quality and complex change to lives in the space of a year is a deceit we are all complicit in.

4) It’s often set by someone who doesn’t know the local scene, the local needs or even care that much beyond reporting back to trustees or investors. External cash will often not meet the needs of people locally. If it did we wouldn’t be having the same conversations about social mobility for decades.

5) It’s not outcome focussed. Too much funding is generic, output focussed and many funders just aren’t great at demanding great outcomes – because it’s hard.

6) It feels counter to our value of Equality. We believed in ‘hands up’ and not ‘hand outs’ and much funding feels like a sop to the poor and needy and just a bit Victorian.

The people we are and work with deserve better than spare change in a bucket and cake sales.

As a business, if the customer buys from us (including the public sector) through partnership, dialogue and track record, the customer gets what’s the customer wants.

And this means we have the impact we want to have.

Nothing is binary and funding has and will probably always have its place as long as we make a strategic decision on fit.

Many organisations do amazing things with it. Just not us.

Following a question at an alumni event at my old school last week about my typical day, I got to reflect on just how untypical my job is and how much its variety suits me. So I thought I’d give you a snapshot of a day last week.

5am alarm. I’m an early bird and sit with a a cup of tea, catch up on emails, schedule daily social media/marketing and arrange my Trello to-do list for the day.

I look at where I will be as well as where the team will be to see if there are any pressure points throughout the day. We’re all looking out for each other and I need to be contactable.

6.15am I head out the door for a run or the gym. Always with music or a podcast, this might be my only me-time today and is essential to my health, both physical and emotional, managing my workload as well as feeling energised for the day.

I love breakfast and eat a lot while I can. Learning a language is also something I love! I normally spend a few minutes on my language app over breakfast. Using a totally different bit of my brain feels fantastic and I’m currently learning Portuguese.

7.45am. If I’m working in Norwich, I’m in the office for around this time. Managing an operational team that may need to speak to me on and off all day, rushing around a number of counties to meetings, keeping on top of admin and even doing some direct delivery means that this first 75 minutes of the day is precious.

It usually enables me to reconcile the bank account, undertake some marketing and strategy work as well as report writing, update systems, do some reading/research, prepare and plan for a meeting and quite often grab a coffee at NR2 in the process. There’s often cleaning, DIY or other office-running things too as I want to ensure our heavily utilised space is a nice place to come to work for the team and the people they support.

On this particular day I dash across town to meet Cara, our Chair of Directors at her local gym at 7.45am. We have a productive hour finalising the agenda for our next Board meeting (with new members) and their Induction.

9.30am Back in the office I have a good meeting with Jessica, our Employment Project Coordinator. Her service is being launch at the start of 2020 as a traded offer. We reflect on what we’ve achieved so far in terms of her Theory of Change and the modules of delivery that she is going to design. We then finalise her key marketing messages and timeline for the launch process.

10.30am. Meeting with accountant. I’m having some difficulties getting everything signed off for the last financial year and just need to get the accounts out the door. Sigh!

12pm. Catch up with Simone and our newest colleague, Tom. Methodically, using Trello (of course!) we go through all our mentees – from referral through to closure to assess progress and agree any actions for the team. This includes me as I’m excited to be conducting a mentor match on Friday!

1pm. Meet Tom to talk through some mentee processes and make calls to referrers so he can shadow me.

2pm. Some admin time. Catch up on emails, annual leave requests, file some invoices, check payroll has worked correctly, update pension with new employee and schedule our monthly newsletters. Probably some silly tweeting and team WhatsApp messaging too!

2.30pm. Get a call from a customer wanting to commission a one-day TILS+ course – yay. Drop everything to work up a quote, draft an SLA and schedule actions in team Trello. Manage to get one of five reports due this week off my desk too. Phew!

3.45pm. Call another customer wanting an update on a commission. No reply. Grrrr. Been chasing for weeks now…

4pm. Off to the Norfolk Show with Simone and Jessica. Heavy traffic, but lovely to show our faces and meet some very friendly ones. And so much more fun to do this with the team too.

8pm. Back home and must make something for the YOP team lunch tomorrow and prepare for my alumni talk at my old school!!

9pm. Zzzzzzz

This, our sixth year running as a social enterprise, is a year in which I wanted to pause. If you asked the team whether it feels like that, I’d be slightly fearful of the answer!

It doesn’t mean taking our feet off the gas or endless naval gazing. It means consolidating our thinking, reflecting on learning and just being a tiny bit more considerate of our next steps.

Just this week I was asked as Expert Witness to talk to an enthusiastic bunch of people setting up their social enterprises. They were me six years ago and in many ways I feel no less green today. Having to consolidate six years of thinking about social impact measurement into a thirty minute talk made me realise it’s more coherent than I thought. Of course the horizons are endlessly receding in our world, but the doesn’t mean we haven’t travelled far too.

So whether it’s impact measurement, understanding the finances, putting in place systems and processes or focusing on creating a great team, not only have we achieved a lot, but hitting the pause button to recognise that is vital – for my sanity if nothing else.

Honestly I’m really enjoying focusing on the Vision, Mission and Values as well as the infrastructure right now. It’s what I say to any start-up – get things in place so that you don’t have to retrofit them later on when you’re really busy.

I could have followed my own advice more, but thanks to a great team and reaching the point of a really clear Vision and Mission, we are better able today to focus than we would have been at the start.

I was lucky enough to attend #AltitudeConference last week hosted by EY in the photo above. Not many conferences are for the social enterprise sector and quite likely it will spawn more blogs and quite possibly an existential crisis!

Breakfast started with a discussion about the three sectors that many in our sector work across – business, third sector and local authorities. We broadly agreed that there is more in common than divides us. It’s a shifting continuum now more than ever.

And I don’t just mean Serco delivering prison contracts, but those businesses with meaningful foundations (not just Corporate Social Responsibility tick boxes), social value lead supply chains and investing in mission-lead enterprises.

Is big business then a threat rather than a partner, investor or customer? Big business has the cash not just to spend on marketing and therefore shouting about their good causes in a way no third sector organisation ever could, but in so doing will start to hoover up the young talent seeking values-lead organisations to work for.

For now we lead in values-lead cultures and big business is looking to us to learn. After that learning the difference is that they will have the budget to implement these cultures. With the shifting sands of politics, these businesses will continue to move into the spheres that many big social enterprises operate in – health and social care among others.

Patrick Butler of the Guardian spoke at the event of a slowing in awareness and development of our sector. We need to keep all those great values, but perhaps be more transparent.

Is the sector a bit messy? We are certainly very diverse. From tiny charities through to large spinout companies limited by shareholders – this is complicated for customers, commissioners, the public and beneficiaries to understand.

Patrick suggests we need to be more open to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests as local authorities are as well as unionised.

We must hold our ground on purpose and not be complacent about this (given recent news about Oxfam). But I never feel so at home and humbled than when I’m a room of social entrepreneurs. Being purpose lead is what marks us out, for now.

To survive and thrive we need to have the transparency of a local authority, the business acumen of a FTSE 100 company and the purpose and values of who we are proud to be – a social enterprise.

When I was 17 I worked in a bakery in central Norwich (from which I got the sack – another story). I hated every second of it. From the getting up early and dragging myself into Norwich (spending my first hour’s wages on bus fare alone), to the grease, the indifferent customers, my patronising boss and the harsh reality that if I wanted driving lessons, this was probably the only way.

I tell a lie. I didn’t hate every second of it. There’s something incredibly special about the feeling of owning a place before anyone else has. It’s why one of the first things I do when I arrive in a foreign town or city is go for a run – to explore it anew. As I would trudge up Gentleman’s Walk, the early market traders would be rattling their stalls, whistling and chatting. The days was ours and full of promise.

I didn’t plan to return to Norwich. So it is with some surprise that after five years away at university and another ten living in London and then more living outside Norwich, that I experience this again.

Because of the kind of work I’ve always done I have an anthropological thirst. It means that wherever I am I’m seeking out the underbelly of a place. This is neither good nor bad, but it can be emotionally draining and mean every holiday is a busman’s holiday.

And so, I again find myself walking up Gentleman’s Walk in the early hours. The pleasure of the new day is the same. With perspective and hopefully increased empathy, I look at those around me. The same rattling, chatting and whistling on the market to be sure.

But who else do you see on our streets at this time? And this isn’t just another piece about the homeless in doorways, despite each person filling me with the sadness of their individual story. I meet street cleaners, people (usually women) cleaning shops, people waiting alone for buses to work, joggers and the successful high-flyers too.

I project my obsessions and see many striving to get by, often in low paid work, away from their families because of distances to be travelled, a lack of choice and opportunity and life on the edge. I ponder how far any of us is from not being able to enjoy the new day as much.

You tell me! Having spent time this week considering the role of the church in our sector as well as faced with cuts to the public sector, this feels pertinent.

Do I think we can do better by and with our volunteers? Absolutely. We don’t always get it right and neither do our volunteers. Who hasn’t signed up to something in haste and then changed their mind?

If volunteers are not valued then they won’t value us. But someone somewhere has to pay for all that support we want to give volunteers. It’s a waste of money to recruit and lose volunteers at the rate it happens. It couldn’t be financially tolerated with paid staff.

Much of the impact of volunteering is in its very voluntary nature. Not being paid to care sends a powerful message to a person who has only known paid professionals. Our volunteer mentors are wonderful for the specific contribution they choose to make. And if that comes from a place of wanting to ‘do good’ then we’re very grateful, but they will be asked to share our values and follow a robust process that keeps people safe and supported.

Where things get more complex are the skills gaps that this sector should be able to afford. Should these be filled by volunteers? Doesn’t it send the wrong message to our beneficiaries about their worth if we have no choice but to fill skilled roles with unpaid staff? I’m not saying many volunteers aren’t skilled – they are.

But you wouldn’t expect your bank to be staffed by well-meaning volunteers with a few hours a week to spare, so why would we? It would be a business risk.

So let’s value all our people and what we do by valuing our volunteers as volunteers. That way we can give the right support, have the right impact and keep people safe as well as achieve our mission.

So a big thank you today to our (past and present) Volunteer Mentors, our Board of Non-Executive Directors and our Your Own Place Advisory Board (YOPAB) – all of whom are different types of volunteers playing to their strengths, not our sector’s weaknesses.

This week from Simone.

I drove in to work this morning, rather than walking in the sunshine, as I had a meeting booked with a young woman in Yarmouth who is interested in having one of our mentors.

I love this part of my job. It is a pleasure to explain that there are people out there who happily give up their time for another human being. 

On the way I got a message to say that she was no longer able to see me today as she had been offered work.

There is lots of talk of how the ‘gig economy’ and zero hours contracts effect peoples finances, but what about the knock on effect on other aspects of their lives?

Luckily, I am happy to find another time to see her, but she is not the only one of the young people we work with who has to drop other plans when work is offered. Countless appointments must have to be rearranged, including those for physical or mental health, plans to see family and friends, boring jobs like the washing and life admin constantly having to be fitted in elsewhere.

This constant rearranging must be exhausting and in turn have knock on effects. Not all organisations are as open to giving third, fourth, fifth chances as we are. And this has a financial cost for our business too.

Whilst I have been writing this she has responded to my offer of meeting her tomorrow. She lets me know that she is also working tomorrow as “I have two jobs”. I have asked her to let me know when she might be free next.

Fingers crossed I will be able to move my plans to accommodate her ever changing work schedule.

I have just finished signing the beautiful cards our lovely new, and very artistic, administrator has created for our volunteers to say ‘Thank you’ this Volunteers Week.

Some of those I am sending cards to have not even met a mentee yet,but have patiently tried to organise various meetings with me to do so – often our young people’s diaries change unexpectedly due to work or even anxiety. 

Some have had a match meeting with their mentee but then not been able to organise a meet-up after that – I wonder whether some young people engage at the first meeting as they are used to having to attend appointments with organisations but are not actually 100% sure they want a mentor.

Our volunteers who are facing this issue and gently trying to maintain contact and offer an opportunity for a meet-up are also due our gratitude.

The majority have been meeting with their mentee for some time and providing invaluable support which ultimately will prevent homelessness. I am sure that these fun meetings over coffee and cake with our vibrant and awe-inspiring young people is enough of a reward, but I also hope they know how grateful we are.

They underwent two days of training, jumped through the inevitable hurdles of getting a DBS and references we need for safeguarding purposes and now give up their busy time freely to mentor a young person who needs a non-judgemental cheerleader to tell them ‘you got this!’

So here is a big THANK YOU to you all and I look forward to training lots more volunteer mentors in the future.

The first blog of two this #VolunteersWeek is unedited from one of our mentees:

‘Mentoring is, if not the most effective way to have a great impact into a person’s life then it’s definitely in the top 5. I had no family no friends and moved into an area I never lived or wanted to live! Yet with my mentor I was able to keep it together and push forward step by step in order to build my life.

It would be easy to say I can be a mentor and it maybe is easy to say yes but it takes a special kind of person to put that into action.

Are you that kind of person ???? If so please at least give it a try. Help others like me have the best chance of feeling excepted in this unforgiving world we all live.

The throwing around of jargon such as values, employee engagement and authenticity generally brings me out in hives! Usually I have to find what it all means to me and Your Own Place until I’m prepared to adopt it. Even then it feels stolen and fraudulent.

I’m so impressed by the CEO/Founders who know their values from the start. To have that courage of conviction when you’re 25 is just astonishing to me. I certainly couldn’t articulate them at the start and if I had, it would have only been to myself.

So it is after six years that they have been distilled into these. And they’re not finished. With the team we will be turning this jargon into something that means something. Something that means ‘us’.

Because I believe there’s not necessarily a right or a wrong way of doing these things, I’m glad we’ve been living the values before defining them. This way they’re not just words on a corporate wall somewhere.

Most of all, it’s only because of the team that we’ve arrived at any words at all. With a new team member starting next month, I always return to who we are and what our values are. With the best team ever, living the values daily, our new employee will be in little doubt about what these really mean.

If you’ve followed me or Your Own Place at all, you’ll know that we’re busy, excitable and like to make an impact.

Growing is one way to have more impact and there’s no doubt of the need for our service. Doing everything when you’re a micro enterprise is fine. If we’re going to grow however we have to understand what it is that we do that has the most impact. It’s simply not affordable to replicate everything.

Whilst the content of our delivery is key to our mission of preventing homelessness, it’s the core values that make it work. I’d argue that you could make the Hayes car manuals interesting, if you took our visual, upbeat and values-lead approach to them.

I have loved starting out on fidelity monitoring our interventions. This helps for quality, replication, staff development and understands what’s core and what we can lose.

Getting snapshots of each of our three core interventions has been invaluable and will continue. They are very different, but what the monitoring has shown me is that they all have our values.

The upbeat, visual, unrelenting solution-focused approach that the team executes so beautifully builds resilience. This in turn builds a legacy of empowerment for the people we support and train.

If we replicate that then we can hope to replicate our outcomes too.

Over the last few years no application for funding/income is absent of the word ‘sustainable’. ‘How will you sustain your project?’ they ask.

And over the last few years I’ve moved my thinking on this. There’s no doubt that you don’t have to scale to increase your impact. But do you have to be scale to become sustainable?

I used to trot out the line that success would mean we go out of business – because homelessness is solved. Of course that’s trite and not within our gift. As a true believer in equality I’d also like to see interventions like ours embedded in the community and not driven by people like me from outside.

So I shall happily contradict my naive former self. Assuming that for my lifetime at least there will be children in care, people in prison, people on low incomes and housing still a challenge for many, we can assume our service will be needed. And I’m not afraid to say that it should have certain expertises, expectations, levels of quality and outcomes that require certain levels of investment. As such it should be run as a separate entity (albeit more embedded in the community and including the people it serves).

All of this costs real money. Traditional restricted funding is short-term, output driven and offers little support for sustainability. With almost no infrastructure support funders expect us to become ‘sustainable’ beyond the life of the funding whilst delivering their outputs and reports.

Delivering the project and designing a new sustainable one are two separate projects. And yet only one gets the funding. So if you wonder why I work long hours, it’s because all the additional projects to get sustainable have to happen outside the funding envelope.

With scale comes sustainability in the form of a back office, people to share ideas and generate income, business continuity and a better response for our customers. Getting there alone is the harder part.

Gaining the voice of your team and all your people is just one part of employee engagement. It’s wrapped up in my other preoccupations of leadership, culture and values. So I want to explore it a little more in this blog and hear what it is for you too.

Most of us now recognise that our people are our greatest asset and to stifle their voices would be to the detriment of everyone. They know best what’s going on, what’s motivating our customers and what it’s like to work here. As CEO founder I’m the last person to talk objectively about any of this. Moreover, I enjoy their voice.

As a micro enterprise we’ve no time or money for fancy consultants telling us about 360 stuff or to write an engagement strategy. So it’s down to me to reflect, write blogs and get on with it.

You may now know that I’m obsessed with ‘what works’. Time is too finite to shoot in the dark. So without the fancy strategy, how do we capture what works so that when we grow we can take it with us?

For now though, let’s start with the ‘what’.

Employee voice is definitely not sterile staff surveys or suggestion boxes. These don’t get anyone excited or engaged. We’re not likely to be unionised any time soon either!

From thoughtful listening conversations over the morning coffee, to meaningful supervision and a place to park ideas or share innovations (Trello for us) – these all form a part of employee voice.

Sometimes you’re doing it already! For my part, I need to get better at feeding back where their voice has made a difference or altered what we do.

In addition, I want it to be more meaningful. I want their input into our strategic direction, recruitment and other important decisions.

There is a balance however. They are very busy and I often choose not to ‘burden’ them with additional things to think about. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that whenever I do it’s hugely worthwhile and they always think of an angle or view I hadn’t considered.

Why do we do it? Because having employee voice means a workplace culture of engagement and trust. This means people are safer (can whistleblow) and more motivated and productive too.

And who is responsible? All of us. It comes back to values and recruiting people who want to be a part of this culture.

So we’ve no consultants for a fancy strategy, but maybe I’ve more understanding of ‘what works’ than I first thought.

My mentee keeps sending me pictures of food. These don’t just make me hungry during the working day, they inspire me too. 

Being the CEO of a tiny enterprise means that in reality I’m an operational manager 90% of the time.  Supporting the team with the day-to-day running of the enterprise and keeping everyone well and watered are my priorities. 

With only 10% of my time to work ‘on’ the business rather than ‘in’ the business, things naturally take a lot longer to happen at a strategic level – and this is a massive business threat as I get pulled into operational matters. I didn’t do the maths on this when I started out. And it’s why people like me work long hours. We’re wearing multiple hats and I can’t just swan around meeting people for coffee. We have to deliver to bring in income and survive.

I’m excited by social enterprise, by its impact and by the small privilege my role gives me.  It give me a voice, marginally less tiny than the one I had before, but a lot bigger than that of many of the people we work with.  I want the voice to grow, whilst feeling undeserving of the privilege in equal measure.

So when I got asked to speak at an NHS Leadership Day about all things leadership earlier this month, I felt mostly like I was constantly looking behind me to find out who they meant when they said leader!  Any minute she will appear! ‘Leader’ is a word I’m already a bit bored with, as people impose it at their will – I’m the person who gets to decide what I am!

So to say my days are fun and varied would be an understatement.  Being busy notwithstanding, with Mentoring so integral to what we do, it’s now the case that the whole team has taken on a mentee.  We’re leading by example as an employer.

Mine has been regularly written about in my blogs.  And I want to finish this blog by saying that every time I feel that things are impossible, intractable and I’m alone in finding solutions and trying to forge a way ahead, I remember that after 26 years in prison, he’s battling the world – and winning!

It has been a few months since we got the news that we were successful in receiving further funding from the #NotWithoutMe Accelerator programme. As I sit back and reflect on this time, I can’t help but smile and feel joyous about all of the work the team at Your Own Place has done so far.

As you may (or may not) know we have given our TILS (Tenancy and Independent Living Skills) course a well-deserved makeover. Part of this makeover was to offer more – 24 modules to be exact – and that is how TILS+ (with a Plus) was born.

But what is the Plus?

In short, the Plus is everything we were adding on top of what we were already doing. A large part of the Plus is also reserved for our digital offer. We are seeing more and more need for digital skills and discovering lots of people excluded from this.

How can we tackle such a giant? What can we do?

Part of our solution is to add digital elements to every module we are delivering. Every course will have digital components which range from turning on an iPad, navigating the internet to digital resilience and being safe online. This ensures every course we deliver will always have digital at the core, increasing impact but more importantly embedding digital skills in young people across the board. No matter if it’s a three-day course or a two-hour session, even if they don’t select the full digital module there will still be a digital element to the course.

In January we delivered our first TILS+ course with digital skills included. We were nervous! We were unsure of how it would go! The first words spoken during this session were ‘Here’s an iPad’. I was expecting to see eyes rolling and hear a sarcastic ‘I know’, however there was a slight curiosity in the room. Some young people already knew how to work the iPad, whilst others looked at it like it was an alien object.

What we discovered was the success of this first digital session came from the peer to peer learning. It reminded us that young people so often have the confidence, skills, knowledge and resilience that they are so willing to share with their peers. It’s safe to say that the young people were the plus in TILS+ during this course!

Fast forward to the last week of February. During the digital component of the Debt and APR session Angela, who is in her 60s, set up the iPad and was navigating it online. She was being assisted by Ash who was in his 20s. He was helping her find what she was looking for by giving hints and tips, he never fully gave her the answer. He successfully allowed her to build on her own skills to solve the barriers that were in her way.  In doing so he learnt new digital confidence too!

This was a monumental moment for Angela, Ash and Your Own Place. It was the first time we could reflect and see that adding digital to our offer is already making a difference. It allowed us to unintentionally bring communities together, incorporate a whole new element of peer to peer learning and play a small part in bridging the gap between generations.

So this was us before we knew we’d won the Carnegie UK Trust digital skills funding. Following the #NotWithoutMe Accelerator programme we applied to take digital skills further into our programme.

Having this focus on all things digital is opening up a whole new world for us. I love seeing Jarrod disappear down rabbit holes of learning and realising we have an opportunity to do something groundbreaking.

With over 800,000 young people reportedly digitally excluded, we know those include the young people we support. It’s an anodyne term thought isn’t it? ‘Digitally excluded’ – what does it really mean and why does it matter?

Let’s start with the second question first. It matters because the world is digital by default. I’m writing this blog on my phone, giving not a thought to the WordPress app, iPhone, WiFi broadband and associated complexities that enable me to do that. I have the skill, digital knowledge and confidence and frankly, the cash, for all this to happen. It helps me and my business to communicate and embrace the world.

Without that skills, knowledge, confidence and cash you’re excluded. Excluded from communicating, excluded embracing new opportunities, from building your network, from getting the best utility or car deal, from meeting new people and from easily and cost effectively getting the basics of ‘life admin’ done.

So to answer the first question, being digitally excluded means potentially being shut out of opportunity – the led up to everything. In a city with almost the lowest social mobility in England, we exclude still further by going digital by default.

Somehow we’ve created a panacea that for all its unquestioned revolutionary brilliance, manages to continue to exclude those with most to lose.

If you’ve been with me for any of the last five years you’ll know most marketing and selling speak brings me out in hives! Whilst accepting that it’s an absolutely vital part of what we have to do, it will always feel uncomfortable alongside our (more important) mission to prevent homelessness.

So it was without my usual self-loathing and trepidation that I ventured to the Eastern Landlords Association meeting in Colchester last week. With 95% of private landlords owning fewer than three properties, I accepted some time ago that they are unlikely to become our customers, even if what we do helps them to avoid costly evictions.

And so it was with this in mind that I decided to go on a fact finding mission. I took no flyers or business cards. Instead I just prepared some questions and chatted to half a dozen different landlords.

Wow – I learnt so much. They opened up about their worlds, the challenges they face, the changes in legislation, how they feel about evicting tenants and why they do what they do.

So whilst they may not become customers, I learnt a huge amount to enable me to leverage resource and find another way to support their tenants and avoid evictions.

My lesson from this is twofold. I will identify at least one networking opportunity a month where I will just listen and not sell. This aligns beautifully with our values.

And whilst I will use the language of sales and marketing to move forward strategically, I still don’t really think it does the social enterprise sector justice.

Interestingly this image was from a car dealership. In some ways our challenges couldn’t be more different – or could they?

Charities and social enterprises are generally run by people like me. People with no lived experience who have read lots of strategic documents and think they have half an idea of what works because of their professional experience.

One of things I love about running a tiny enterprise (and I hope this thing never changes) is that I am close to the action. I meet the people that make use of our services and we talk with and about them all day long. They really are at the heart of what we do.

None of this means we have a right to getting it right though and that we shouldn’t take a firm look in the mirror from time to time.

Mentoring, on the face of it is such a fantastic solution to so many issues. Truly restorative and asset-based mentoring goes to the heart of all our ills – it develops resilience, independence and an ability to find the right solutions to our problems. It couldn’t be a better fit with our values.

And we know that services for young people have been cut, care-leavers find themselves isolated and young people often leave things until crisis to get help.

And yet all this need doesn’t equate to demand. We have far more mentors than mentees. Our wonderful mentors are ready in the wings waiting to be matched.

We’re endlessly invited to team meetings (no more!) and are told that our enthusiasm is infectious and our mentoring wonderful. And then they make no referrals.

Being a responsive service we try to understand what their barriers are, remove those we can control and improve the access to our mentors. And still nothing – tumbleweed – and volunteers who give up and drift away. What a terrible waste of your money!

It’s not all doom and gloom. We have some incredible mentoring matches. In fact this makes it all the more frustrating, because when it works we can see how incredible it is.

So need doesn’t always equate to demand. It’s our job to create the demand from those we believe will really benefit from our service. Just as Apple convinced us all that we needed an iPhone before we knew what one was or the car dealer who convinces us we need heated seats!

So where next for Your Own Place? 2019-2020 is our year of consolidation. We’ll be six next birthday and whilst the terrible toddler years are over, we’re not grown up yet either.

Being a start-up got us to about five years old. Everyone gets terribly excited and then like good wallpaper, you’re just background and you don’t need any help…

Like any small enterprise we could be gone next week. There would be a small article in the local press and we’d be forgotten. We talk of prevention, but I see little real commitment.

The funding landscape is deeply flawed. There are tiny amounts of short term cash for new ideas, large cash for scaling and long term social investment for the big boys. That leaves very little for us who are meant to be sustainable by now, right?

Wrong. We’re still tiny, committed to quality above all else and know that quick growth would probably kill us off. Short-term cash for crazy outputs and new ideas doesn’t help us to become sustainable. It just distracts us from what we should be doing.

And that’s measuring what we do well, understanding our impact, financial modelling and bringing about real systemic change. I don’t work this hard to nibble round the edges and ‘do what we’ve always done’.

And so, whilst growth and the ‘new’ excites me, there will be one final step before this happens. And that’s why this year is our consolidation year. We’ll be getting under the skin of our impact, ensuring fidelity of the model and outcomes and getting the right people on the bus in the right seats.

Who’s in?

This week a breather from mentoring. Mostly because I need to reflect on its ups and downs.

We recently welcomed Hannah to our team. Hannah’s role is an invaluable one. She our shiny new administrator. Just two days a week and I can feel the difference already. In a tiny organisation you can’t afford a full-time CEO let alone a range of vital back-office functions.

I have fought shy of taking these steps for financial as well as control reasons. Over the years I’ve endeavoured to systematise and batch tasks as far as possible. But ultimately, just as having the right team is vital, so is having the right people doing the right jobs.

The right people on the bus and in the right seats makes us all more productive. I knew this in the abstract and am now starting to feel it too!

And she’s another talented artist!

#AddedValue

Sam’s progress and determination astonishes me. How can someone released after 26 unspeakable years in prison to a town he doesn’t know, with very few prospects, possibly be as resilient and determined as he is? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be.

Since speaking to him a week ago he’s been for housing advice, he has a housing assessment lined up (please cross your fingers for him) and is pretty certain he’ll be on Skype this next time next week.

Unsurprisingly he’s finding housing pretty hard to navigate and doesn’t understand why the local council doesn’t manage its own housing. And why it’s all online. And why a local connection matters. And why, most importantly for him right now, he can’t go through all this in a part of the country that he actually wants to put down roots in.

It all comes back to housing. Whilst he’s exploring setting up his own business, he needs a permanent address to feel settled. And yet he can’t get one anywhere near where he actually wants without a real income.

I know he’s committed a serious offence. And I know we have systems and processes that are supposed to manage resources fairly, but we also can’t expect to rehabilitate people without the proper support.

In the coming week I’ll be posting some requests from Sam about things he’d like to find out about in relation to starting his removals business and relocating.

Sam has been out of prison a week. He called me this week and he’s bearing up. He is working hard and patiently to navigate a broken system.

Ever articulate, he described himself as ‘not ticking a box’. He can see support is available for every variable apart from a fifty-something lifer. He likened his experiences to being in an open prison. Yes he can come and go (within restricted hours), but at every turn his opportunities are thwarted by his identify as an ex-offender and a lack of support of impregnable services.

Services don’t appear to know how to help and even relevant professionals seem unable to identify the right local support available.

We chatted twice this week and he sent me two emails. One was an automated third party email from the housing authority. Like most who have spent 26 years in custody I expect, Sam is utterly bewildered by an impersonal automated email. It asks him to click on a link and create an account with a password. Something he’s never done before and that I talked him through.

I’ll tell you about his experiences with DWP next time.

You may be wondering about the image for this post? A former chef, Sam texted me this photo of a meal he cooked last week. He clearly enjoyed shopping and the variety of ingredients available in the shops delighted him. It met his complex dietary requirements and got him some kudos from guys he’s living with.

Being really honest, I’ve yet to see it done really well. Including by us! That’s because it’s not a one-off workshop.

It’s like mentoring, in that everyone has a different idea of what it is.

Having held some highly successful one-off (or two-off) workshops with young people as well as housing officers, there have been a number of outcomes.

People have felt included and valued. They’ve helped shape a project through vital lived experience. And they’ve developed buy-in on the resulting project, thus making it more likely to succeed.

For me these are the minimum requirements of co-production. To be achieved to their ultimate potential, engagement has to run from the outset, clear outcomes agreed, co-production designed into each aspect of a project and expectations managed as to the extent of influence.

As part of our TILS+ commissions, we’re now offering co-production workshops as part of the package. It’ll get a better outcome for the commissioner as well as the person receiving the service.

The ambition however, is to find the resource to do more, earlier and ongoing.

When engaged properly I trust young people 100% with the conclusions they draw. So why wouldn’t we include them?

Sam was released from custody last Friday. He was transported by car to his probation hostel 100s of miles away and to a town he has visited only once.

I spoke to him for the first time today on his new mobile. It’s the first time he’s been (legitimately) on the outside in 26 years. I couldn’t help but satisfy my own curiosity and ask how it felt.

(As an aside, we get on very well and laugh a lot, so he knows how curious I am. He seems genuinely pleased that someone is interested).

He referred to himself as an ‘alien’. Repeatedly. He said that he walks down the street and doesn’t recognise the cars. He has conversations with people and wonders if they think he’s an alien. I reassured him they probably didn’t, but how would I know? I wondered at how normal that feeling is for people who have spent the best part of three decades in prison.

He continues in his usual industrious way. He shared his new email address with me, which following my email, he immediately responded to.

As the next phase in our mentoring relationship begins, I’ll be exploring how I can continue to support him remotely as his mentor.

There’s another reason my final session with Sam was hard, other than the obvious. The obvious being a deep sense of my own egotistical inadequacy in affecting the next stage of his life. The other being just how likeable he is. In many ways he utterly affirms my view that you can’t judge a book by its cover. It reinforces Your Own Place’s restorative and non-judgmental approach in spades. 

But it was hard for another reason too. In the knowledge of his index offence, I found my compassion and non-judgmental approach pushed to the limit. It begs so many more conversations, all of which would be solely for my benefit. My curiosity and judgement serves no purpose other than to label a man who is already acutely aware of how his past will never leave him.

He’s still the same likeable, resilient and worthy human. He’s worthy of a second chance. He’s done his time and for him and for all of us I really hope he makes it. 

Today was a tough visit. Knowing full well that mentoring is likely to be better over the long term, my third visit is the last. Nothing ever goes to plan in either the secure estate or third sector (or life?). I reluctantly decided that some intervention was probably better than none. There’s actually plenty of evidence to contradict this! 

So Sam gets released mid February. He has worked so hard to put things in place prior to release and done as much as any man in his position could. 

He’s neither naive about the challenges nor lacking in his ability to take responsibility for his actions. All this resilience, self-awareness and the best will in the world are not got going to make the transition after half his life in custody, much easier. 

Those of us in this sector know that support will be minimal, opportunities lacking and prejudice in abundance. 

He was complimentary of the mentoring experience and said he was surprised at the value of just ‘chatting stuff through, whilst having a bit of a laugh’. I told him of the value to me too, as our conversations were often philosophical and insightful about a criminal justice system over nearly three decades. 

We’re staying in touch by phone, I’m going to signpost him to some social support and I hope our support can perhaps move to Skype or FaceTime. 

Last week a had a throwback moment. I decided to get a taxi from the station to the prison for my mentoring session (I did this a lot ten years ago).

Conversations with taxi drivers always offer vignettes on worlds I don’t often encounter and it felt worthy of note due to the contrasts.

I’m familiar with the ‘throw away the key’ brigade and have learnt tolerance and the art of listening and respecting other’s views. So it was with interest that my third generation south Asian taxi driver shared his feelings. He felt frustrated that people couldn’t make the best of their lot and turn their lives around. Punishment featured quite heavily.

On further probing he felt that prisons should probably offer more holistic support, education, mental health support and confidence building. It was extraordinary – in the space of a 25 minute journey he totally changed his position to one of frustrated and empathic tax-payer.

On the way back, a woman told me about a mother she transported to the prison a week ago. From Newcastle, she’s had to find £300 to travel, stay over and visit her son on a Saturday at a remote prison in a part of the country she had never been too. As another mother, the taxi driver was visibly upset by how this must feel.

I love travelling by taxi and train!

My prison mentee has aspirations. Sam’s aspirations aren’t much different to you and me. He wants a safe and warm home, a job, is thinking of his retirement and wants the odd evening out down the pub or going to the cinema. What struck me on my second visit however, is how much he wants to put the past behind him.

He articulates that every intervention in prison (in his view not always necessarily) fixates on his past. Whether it’s mental health, education, free time or the gym, everyone is measuring every success against the backdrop of his identity as a criminal. And Sam is the first to take responsibility for his actions.

Understandably Sam wants to shed this as soon as possible and redefine himself. But without a job and a purpose, he’s struggling to find that identity.

He’s sees his baggage as a huge barrier to moving forward. As a mentor it is not my place to minimise just how significant that baggage is going to be. However I tried to re-frame it for him. I told him that I saw someone with life experience, huge resilience, courage, ambition, solutions and someone who was taking responsibility for his future. When Sam meets barriers he goes around them and just keeps going!

Today was my second session with Sam. After 26 years in custody, he’s due for release next month. It was clear at the outset that we both felt more comfortable in each other’s company today and good to meet without a prison officer present.

As has already become the norm, he respectfully (and unnecessarily) apologised repeatedly for his attire and lack of shaving. I made a joke of not having shaved myself and got the first of his wonderful smiles.

Last time we met Sam talked a lot. It was the second time we’d met and there was 26 years to cover! This time I wanted to focus on his priorities, as his release is just around the corner. As a result of the demanding timeframe his horizons had shrunk to the practicalities of where he will be living, how he will feed himself and how he will manage his mental and emotional health.

I decided to focus on the past two weeks of preparation in order to inform the next two. Sam shared his extraordinary focus and work-ethic with all the tasks he is ticking off, albeit with steps forward and back as is the prison resettlement system. From meeting with CAB and DWP, to lining up health assessments for his benefit claim, resolving his bank account (with no address) and getting a TV sorted for his probation hostel – he made me feel exhausted.

He knows himself best and that he will struggle to socialise with the other residents. By nature of his curfew he’ll be spending a lot of time in his room. Suddenly a TV becomes a mental health issue and with £40 to last until his first benefit payment, it’s going to be tough.

I quoted back at him his productivity of the last two weeks to focus on the next two. He came up with six things he wanted to move forward on that would allay his anxiety about release.

None of this is going to make his release stress-free or straightforward. And it’s important to stress that Sam is pushing all of this. I’m just there to ask (mostly) helpful questions.

Next time I’ll be talking about how we turned his ‘baggage’ into a positive.

I thought I’d flesh out some of the nuts and bolts of the first session for those of you less familiar with mentoring and prisons.

The secure estate is certainly the most extraordinary environment I have ever worked or volunteered in. And like any sector, they are all different. This one was bleak. Perhaps they have that in common after all. It was made even more bleak by arriving on the first Saturday of January with a special visiting arrangement ie no-one else around. Thankfully, rather than sit in my car, the visitor cafe was open. I was served a lovely cup of tea by a nervous trainee barista from the prison.

My journey into the prison couldn’t have been smoother. Partly because I am now familiar with the routine of ID, patting down, mildly officious smiles and leaving all my worldly possessions in the car.

The officer who collected me was empathic and gentle. She told me she knew little of Sam, but that he was excitedly nervous and the prison grateful for the support of the outside world.

Sam sat in a warm well-lit corridor waiting for me. He welcomed me with a shake of the hand and fleeting eye contact. We proceeded to a side room where the conversation oscillated between the mundane, the profound, the political and the sad. We laughed, I asked questions and he offered thoughtful and reflective answers.

My exit was just as smooth. Whenever I leave (I had a lovely sociable lunch lined up in a nearby town) I’m acutely aware of how I take leaving for granted!

The people that give up their time on Christmas Day have always bemused me. As a selfish youngster I imagined it was just something to make yourself feel better before getting on with the presents, the people and the Christmas you really wanted.

This year I spent a couple of hours literally making tea and washing up at a community cafe. Like most of us who are lucky enough to get to this age (I am acutely aware I am now the same age as the average life expectancy of a homeless woman) I’ve been through some stuff. Life has changed immeasurably. So this year I decided to shake things up.

It is core to my values and those that are the backbone of Your Own Place that we are all equal. The people I made tea for on Christmas Day have also suffered in their lives and have extraordinary stories to share. I was privileged to hear them.

My existence is pure luck. My family, privilege, resilience and character are things that I can take little credit for. My circumstances could change on a sixpence and nearly did.

Those I served tea to have simply been less lucky than me because of where they where born. Which is why social mobility matters. It didn’t just make me feel good, it made me open my eyes, feel human contact with people I don’t spend a lot of time with and privileged to learn of others’ lives. And it’s why following my brief stint of volunteering on Christmas Day that I will be doing more in 2019 (watch this space for volunteer mentoring starting this month).

In short, my least favourite EDP headlines over Christmas reported of Christmas meals/food parcels/cheer etc for the ‘poor’, ‘homeless’ and other destitute people. I truly believe that until be start seeing people, all people, as like us, there will be insufficient will and therefore policy change to bring about true societal change.

It is in everyone’s interest to live in a more equal society. As someone who is probably half way through their working life, I passionately don’t want to be talking about this in 23 years time.

This week we wanted to share Lewis’ experiences of becoming a mentor and how this has impacted on him professionally.

“I recently got a promotion, my first management role and mentoring with Your Own Place really helped. I was able to provide examples from my mentoring of empowering people and providing one-to-one support, both of which are key leadership skills I’ve developed with Your Own Place.  

During our mentor training, we learned about the importance of open questions and active listening and how this empowers people to find their own solutions, which are also important skills for a team leader to have.

I’ve already been putting these skills to good use in my day job and the outcomes have been far more successful.  I’ve noticed positive changes within our workplace too, staff morale has improved and mentoring has created a feel good factor within the team as it’s rewarding to help others, develop existing skills and learn new ones.  

I’ve also seen how mentoring can improve confidence and self-belief, giving us the determination to develop ourselves, aim higher and seek new challenges, such as my new role.”

I was lucky enough to be at the launch of some research on the health services provided at Norwich’s City Reach service last week.

Dr Emily Clark spoke clearly and with feeling about working. Observing a misunderstood need, Dr Clark successfully secured some funding to undertake a trawl of the service. Her aim was to start the commissioning conversation with informed data of how the service is accessed, utilised and the extent to which needs are met.

I’ve worked in homelessness for 20 years and am well versed in the average age of death of a street homeless woman being 43. However, some of the statistics of triple morbidity that Dr Clark presented were spine tingling.

Here in our leafy city are people suffering with TB, predicted by their GP to die within a year and unable to access a service because they feel judged.

Yet again stories of multiple complexity were told, including those in profound housing need. Included in these stories was the woman who had left children’s social care, not managed to pay her bills and lost her home. She felt that she’d been set up to fail by not being prepared for independence properly.

So there it is again. The wider impact of not preparing those who need it most with basic independent living skills. Here was a care-leaver, homeless at 42 and suffering immeasurably.

I happen to think this was preventable. The moral reasons for doing so are a given. But the economic ones seems pretty apparent too.

So after five years of some success at getting young people in a room, it’s time to take a bit more time. Perhaps because we’re in the third sector, perhaps because of our values and perhaps because of some good partnership work – we’ve done reasonably well at filling courses.

However, if you’re not from this sector you’ll be surprised to hear that it’s the elephant in the room. It’s one of the reasons that services add more and more services – because it’s easier to engage young people that they already engage!

If we’re going to fulfil our ambition of being traded and sustainable in our TILS+ delivery, we have to find a solution for our customers. These are often statutory bodies and the last people that want to engage with them are THEIR customers (no disrespect!).

This was the case recently for Norwich City Council. They commissioned us to deliver TILS and it didn’t work. No-one came!

So I’m delighted to say that it’s back to the proper drawing board. With both YMCA Norfolk and Norwich City Council we’ll be running co-production workshops as part of our offer. We will not only get to hear from the experts about what they want the offer to look like, but it will then be designed around this input. Further to that, through our workshops they will get a flavour of our uniquely engaging delivery style and build relationships with us at the same time.

This is a great start to 2019 and right where we want to be.

Most people won’t argue with prevention being better than cure. But is evidence strong enough to make the investment? Is the money even there when the evidence is strong enough?

I’m beginning to think it’s smoke and mirrors. With every intervention we create, it seems that we taketh away too. The NHS I always think has some of the strongest success stories in prevention. Through Public Health initiatives we see people’s behaviours change and subsequent improvements in health outcomes that impact positively not just on lives, but on the bottom line too.

So too in my arena, there are some pretty simply and inexpensive things that can be done to ensure young people remain housed. Homelessness impacts on all of us after all, as well as all the services that are under acute strain. A homeless person is more likely to use emergency health services, mental health provision, criminal justice services, the benefits system and more.

Whilst many of us in the third sector should and could do even better to prove our worth and ‘spend to save’ argument it just doesn’t seem to carry the weight it had even ten years ago.

Most of the positive impact we have is cross-departmental and long term. The strain on silo budgets is not.

So whilst every homelessness strategy in Norfolk will cite their prevention intentions, children’s services will talk of independence outcomes for care-leavers and the NHS knows it makes sense to prevent preventable diseases, the pressures are too immediate and too acute.

If austerity really did end tomorrow the legacy of these spending ‘choices’ will affect generations to come.

This mythological and unfounded line was even uttered by a guest speaker we invited to come and talk to our young people. He wasn’t invited back!

It’s lazy, patronising as well as inaccurate. This digital myth has been the subject of our Accelerator Programme with The Carnegie Trust, sadly coming to an end next month.

As many as 300,000 young people are digitally excluded. And whilst many may be on their phones some of the time, most usage relates to social media.

Why does this matter? Aside from the myth that as digital natives they must be expert users being harmful, if means they are missing out too. As the poverty premium goes, it’s needless to say that those with the least have most to lose by not being online.

For young people making the transition to independence, it’s not just shopping around, getting better deals, applying for jobs and Universal Credit that are ‘must-have’ activities.

It may be as simple as finding out what time the buses run from their village, downloading a payslip for the job centre to keep their claim active or setting up their Council Tax payments. Being digitally literate might even help them to find out what is going on locally and reduce isolation.

The world is ‘digital by default’ and humans are not. It is our aim to ensure the most vulnerable young people are more confident online as well as better skilled and with improved access.

Do you see what I did there? This blog won’t be all about young people – quite the opposite. And it’s one of many revelations that Michael Young has shaped.

It’s a name I vaguely knew and now being a part of The Young Foundation’s Reimagining Rent accelerator programme I felt it was time to reflect on just how much of my life he has touched.

Having attended The School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) as part of their start-up and then scale-up programmes, I became aware of Michael Young. A Labour politician under Clement Atlee, he was a man with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. When I think about how much SSE has shaped who I am today, can Michael have known just how many lives he touched?

Thanks to my time this year with The Young Foundation I’ve had revelations about the work we do and not needing to focus just on young people to have impact. SSE set the foundations for this iterative learning style and The Young Foundation are helping it to continue. It’s provided a clarity of vision, mission, purpose and with a renewed level of focus.

There are so many institutions that we have Michael to thank for, from The Open University to Language Line.

One of my personal favourites is Samizdat. As a graduate of Russian I was a particular fan of this ‘self-published’ movement. It enabled hitherto banned materials to be circulated in the Soviet Union. It was one of those words that used to crop up frequently in late night translation exercises!

I didn’t know of Michael Young’s involvement when I was an undergraduate or that he would keep cropping up in my life through the choices I made.

But I’m rather glad to have made his acquaintance and wish I could thank him.

As a social enterprise we have a clear mission. Charities are no different. We were usually founded by a person or well-meaning people that want to solve a social problem.

Even in the last five years the world has changed. Let alone if you’re the YMCA and have been around over 150 years.

I see two main reasons at the moment for mission-creep and I think it’s threatening the sector in the long-term.

The first is financial. The climate is currently very threatening. Alongside more competition, dwindling traditional funds the funders and commissioners expect more. At the micro level the need is higher too. This is a perfect storm and requires not just some pretty clever accounting.

The second feels a little less obvious. Perhaps due to high levels of need, perhaps due to the digital age. And perhaps due to a distance between beneficiaries and the organisations that run them, we are all finding it harder and harder to actually engage with our beneficiaries.

This landed with me this week when we talked about ‘need’ versus ‘demand’. Too often we come up with great and even evidence-based ideas in a darkened room. We know they work – in the abstract. When no young people use them we re under threat of closure.

Co-production and all the other fancy stuff is part of the answer to this. It has to be done right and that means you need the cash and the expertise.

In this climate it’s obvious to diversify income. New projects mean you can provide that thing you think your beneficiaries need and because they are already engaging, you’ve done the hard bit. It also means you are bringing in more cash.

So if a domestic violence specialist organisation diversifies into employment support because there is a need, is this watering down the mission?

In some cases I think it is. We have a duty to report on our mission, which we don’t do brilliantly now. If we’re doing all these extra things it requires even more sophisticated impact measurement to tell the story of impact against the core mission.

We’re simple beings being spread too thin and expected suddenly to be experts in everything. I feel that this puts the whole sector at risk of being average and generic.

So we’re no longer a start-up as we enter our sixth year. And this feels like exactly the moment to launch a new product.

Maybe it’s not so much a new product as a perfected one. True to the lean start-up model we got hold of an idea and ran with it. It has changed massively since day one and will keep changing.

We have learnt that the demand is there (the cash less so!). TILS has grown up into TILS+. It ensures that the impact on people is true to our newly clarified mission.

Our aim is that people can access safe and secure homes resulting in improved life outcomes and reduced homelessness

The only difference with adding the + onto TILS being that it allows us to do more of it with more focus and therefore more impact.

And I’m going to dispel another myth too. Not all children and young people are addicted to their phones. Digital access and skills among vulnerable groups however, is the subject for another blog.

This one is about mental health and the role of social media and the online world. Young people suffered poor emotional health long before the Internet. We all did and do. And evidence of the impact of social media remains equivocal.

Some of our young people are on social media and some are even kind enough to follow and interact with us online. We do a lot across eight social media platforms and scheduling apps mean we might be posting 24/7.

So where does that leave us when a young person needs emotional support and assumes we are online at 2am? These are new boundaries for the third sector to navigate that I see very little discussion about.

So what can we do in the face of a mental health epidemic? It’s a given that this is a crisis for young people (Norwich was recently cited as one of the worst places in the UK to get mental health support). From a business perspective it impacts on our ability to work successfully with young people. If we can’t engage young people and replicate a successful model of engagement we go out of business.

What can we do? We can do more of what we do well, build trust, maintain our boundaries and operate our safeguarding procedures. But that’s no longer enough for me.

I have recently found myself signposting young people to support via Twitter and other platforms. Anecdotally it appears to alleviate some degree of isolation and provide other avenues of untapped support.

There are some fantastic online initiatives out there and we will be looking at partnering with Big White Wall. Some services decide to do it in-house and develop their own mental health provision. I want us to remain focussed on our mission and find external and innovative solutions that require us to build relationships.

We bang in enough about this with young people after all!

Have I arrived at an answer about what a social enterprise is? Of course not! Again this week my perceptions of what a social enterprise is and who can call themselves this were shaken to the core! Ok, not quite, but I’m loving still learning and questioning what I really know about this sector.

I accepted a long time ago that being a social enterprise is fluid. This is one of the most appealing things about it. It allows us to evolve and develop. This can also be abused by those that want the social kudos.

For me social enterprise has encapsulated charities and very broadly not-for-private-profit social businesses (of which we are one alongside Belu Water or Miss Maccaroon). This is an evolving spectrum.

As part of #SocialSaturday we heard last week from both Adnams and PwC. They are both very committed to having a meaningful impact on society. They are going considerably further than traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Whilst many businesses may do amazing things in their community, be environmentally sustainable and have a social impact as a result, is that enough to call themselves a social enterprise? No!

In my view the difference lies in your core mission (let alone what you do with your profit). Is your core mission a social one? If it’s not then you’re a business with some very good social values etc etc. This isn’t worse or better. It’s different. I think for now that a distinction is valuable, or we will lose what little focus the social enterprise sector has and benefits from.

Our social mission and reason for existence is to prevent homelessness. No matter how many solar panels Shell puts on its oil rigs – it doesn’t have a social mission and I won’t be calling it a social enterprise any time soon.

Except this comes from a number of angles because the impact is so widespread. And because this week it upset me because it upset my team.

Much has been written about the shortage of mental health provision. In truth it has felt this way my entire career. I’ve always felt unable to compare like with like because when I set out on my career I worked in London.

During the pre-austerity years, the need was so great in our criminal youth justice sector that I can’t imagine a scenario where provision would ever have been enough.

After a heart-breaking episode with an incredibly vulnerable young person this week, I realised that of all my management responses, getting her professional mental health support wasn’t really even on the list. And that’s because I knew it wouldn’t really be possible. It’s scarcely there now as an intervention we can call on.

And what does that mean for all those stretched services around the periphery of this young person’s line? It means we pick it up. With our own workloads, our own and different areas of expertise, our own fragilities and anxieties that we’ve probably not done enough.

My team are good enough. They are more than good enough. But an inadequacy of services makes them feel not so. And that’s not good enough. In that scenario it’s a race to the bottom and literally everyone loses – not least the young person who had just one stab at life and for whom right now it’s going horribly wrong.

Having felt pretty overwhelmed, fraudulent, time-wasting and all the other imposter-related feelings following the SEWF last week, I decided that I had to make time to properly digest.

At the time I had nothing to say, such was the scale of ambition, breadth of enterprise represented and scope of what they were doing.

It can be easy to discard and move on. Putting things in the ‘too hard’ box can be an easy way of dismissing them with justification.

My five takeaways definitely belong in the too hard box. They also belong in the strategic planning box – which I find less and less time to delve into. But here they are in no particular order:

1. Data and impact. The importance of recording everything, but more importantly, understanding what it tells you, how this relates to impact and sharing it (see number 5 below).
2. Stick to your guns. I’m passionate about our values. In the quest to get things done, scale, recruit, manage budgets and people it can be easy to lose sight of our values. Never!
3. Trade. Become sustainable through trading. What else can we sell?
4. Innovate. Keep talking to new, interesting and global enterprises and keep learning.
5. Inform policy. Use all that data, impact and learning to inform local and national policy relating both to social enterprise and working with young people.

So that’s the list. I’ll have that done by Christmas…

Well that was a different week. In truth every day and every week is different when you run a small social enterprise.

That variety may not work for everyone, but I discovered very early on in my career that I struggle with repetition and too much structure. I can take no credit for ending up in a role where ever day is so new and so challenging and which suits my lack of concentration very well.

So a week jetting about, literally, to Dublin and Edinburgh, felt not just like an amazing opportunity, but a luxury and enterprise adventure too.

To justify it I did quite a lot of homework. I researched all the people I’d be meeting, made notes on what I wanted to get out of it and further live notes whilst there.

In Dublin at the Carnegie Accelerator Programme I definitely made progress on our Big Idea for digital skills inclusion. It has generated a number of actions and ideas to implement.

And in Edinburgh at the Social Enterprise World Forum, I was inspired and met new interesting people doing new interesting things.

As the ‘lonely at the top’ adage goes, hearing some familiar stories and challenges, but with solutions too, was also some solace. Whilst able to hold my own in workshops, I felt like a minnow in a very large oceon as entrepreneurs from across the planet told of the incredible things they were doing.

You knew there was a ‘but’ coming didn’t you? For all it was a brilliant and anomalous week, I really wanted to get back to the The Training Flat. I miss the ‘real’ work and the inspiration within our own team. I want to put the ideas into practice and I want us to be better!

We’re no longer going to be providing spot purchase places on our Tenancy & Independent Living Skills (TILS) training as of the end of the year!

We’ve propped it up and tested the model endlessly. The truth is that it’s not valued. Referrals are made and it’s left to us to get an anxious young person, with whom we have no relationship, in the room. Unsurprisingly attendance is usually about 30% lower than anticipated and we lose money.

It would work if we doubled the price. However, the time has come. What we do is of value. And if commissioners don’t value it enough to buy it on some kind of medium-term basis that allows us to plan and recruit staff, then they don’t want it.

Of course it’s a risk. A risk to the entire organisation. But the risk of continuing the current model is greater – a risk to our quality, a risk to our bank balance, not fair on young people when courses get cancelled and not fair on staff who plan them.

This will hit individual social workers the most. Those that do individually hugely value it, but have little influence to ensure it is commissioned across the board.

Over the coming months we’ll be promoting the options to commission TILS+ for your service. We’ll be launching it on 29th November.

With prisons in the news so much, and let’s face, not with happy stories, I’m left still pondering on whether our resources as an organisation are best spent there.

The common threads of poor emotion health, poor educational attainment, being in care, housing difficulties and more make this a tough nut to crack.

Can our courses really affect any change and how can we ensure a ‘through the gate’ offer when finances are so tight?

As our TILS offer evolves, it’s good timing to have these reflections and discussions with the team. Our conversation more and more often turns to how the content of what we do is secondary to the way we make people feel. This must come first and foremost and therefore we must learn to replicate it and grow it.

Our offer will include more of the fluffy stuff, that is so much more important than the time it’s given. We will develop more workshops around goal-setting, identifying resilience, personal relationships, true independence and finding strengths.

This is an exciting development for us and our learning curve.

The best thing about the residential we went on with six young people in August? Recognising my irrelevance!

Not only was it a gargantuan achievement to pull the whole thing off, but it was in totally safe hands.

Just before we were all due to leave, I learnt that my stepbrother was in the UK for one night only! I really wanted to see him so gently asked if I could settle them in on the Friday evening and then leave them to it for the night. I didn’t expect the team to bite my hand off quite so readily.

The following day I turned up and it was like being late to – well, to a residential. Everyone had forged friendships without me and I was irrelevant.

It took me a little while to go from feeling slightly put out to sanguine, proud and relaxed that my team ‘got this’.

Whatever achievements I may or may not have had, this felt like a big one.

So in July we were commissioned by People Plus within HMP Norwich to deliver our signature three-day Tenancy & Independent Living Skills (TILS) training.

It’s been a few years since I worked in the secure estate and to be honest I’d not worked with adults and not at HMP Norwich.

My rational brain told me everything I know from my career. That people in prison are just people and that I can problem-solve my way out of most situations.

With a colleague a bit more nervous than me, having never worked in a prison, my own confidence was momentarily brought into question. I told him that it was normal to be anxious and that we needed to be more prepared than ever, because once we’re in, we’re in!

One of things I’d forgotten about the secure estate is that it’s – well, secure. The endless locking and unlocking of doors and prohibitions on what we could take in, meant we had to adapt the course.

Additionally, timings are at the mercy of the prison – and their security regime. An already oddly shaped day (8.30am – 11.50am with a toilet break only and then 2pm – 4pm with no break) was further interrupted if the roll was down i.e. one prisoner was unaccounted for. This meant that most days we lost at least another half an hour. More adapting!

We trained four young men over the three days. One of the biggest challenges working with slightly older people in this setting can be a fixed mindset and an outlook that the world doesn’t work for them. And it doesn’t! That is absolutely their reality and it’s not our place to tell them that if they behave a certain way everything will be fine. This would almost certainly be a lie.

As ever, what we had was a fantastic mixed group with mixed views. So whilst there were some challenging conversations and behaviours, at no time was the course de-railed. We enjoyed talking about their barriers, what behaviours they felt were unhelpful and how they could set themselves small actionable goals that they alone identified.

We finished on a positive with everyone getting their certificate and showing genuine pride at their achievement.

But I remain torn. The course was of value, but having built those relationships of trust, I want to do more. They need more! Of which more in another blog!

The #NotWithoutMe Accelerator is an innovative development programme which provides organisations the time, resources and support from peers and experts to develop their approaches to delivering digital inclusion projects with ‘vulnerable’ young people. During the six-month process the six successful organisations will be supported to develop, critique, challenge and refine their project ideas with the input of valued sector experts. Throughout the programme each organisation will provide their own reflection and insight into the process and deep-dive into key themes that arise.

In our first #NotWithoutMe Accelerator blog, Rebecca White from Your Own Place, reflects on the launch of the programme and first workshop – ‘Defining Digital Skills’.  

Getting to know each other 

The first day of our digital skills #NotWithoutMe Accelerator was, well, accelerating.  There are six organisations involved in all (two from Norfolk!). We are all working with young people, from refugees, to gypsy and traveller projects and the library service too.  Having been chosen to be a part of the programme we were whisked up to Manchester by the Carnegie UK Trust to start our journey of learning, peer support and idea-pitching. By the end of the year we will have a fully formed idea to improve digital skills/access for young people and will pitch for £40k.

For Carnegie this is a departure in how they work.  And for me, a particularly welcome one. I vowed (a vow I quickly broke) not to apply for lots of short-term funding.  Whilst cash is always welcome, I increasingly value learning, skills development and the support required to keep Your Own Place relevant, innovative and unique.  With this in mind, the six ‘acceleratees’ will come together six times between now and Christmas in each other’s locations and get expert insights as well as peer support to develop our idea.

We kicked off with a ‘welcome dinner with a purpose’ and got to know more about each other, the programme and the legacy of Andrew Carnegie himself.  They feel like big shoes to fill as a man responsible for extraordinary vision and social impact. It felt like a successful way of coming together not just to celebrate, but share the incredible passion and empathy in the room for working with young people.  Even the group size was just right, enabling everyone to have a voice and contribute.

What are digital literacies?
We spent the following day in Manchester hosted by Reason Digital, a social enterprise specialising in digital projects that do social good, moving between post-it notes, the roof terrace and beanbags! Guided by the expert Dr Doug Belshaw, we explored what digital literacy really means for the young people we work with and how to create a framework against which to develop our idea and measure its success.  Not an easy ask for anyone, particularly when the perception is that all young people are digitally literate. Of course, the whole programme is about dispelling the myth that young people are ‘digital natives’ when we know from research, including work by  the Carnegie UK Trust, that young people are often digitally excluded and disadvantaged by their digital skills and access.

What we learned
So, whilst this day in Manchester was very much the end of the beginning, it crystallised one aspect of our ‘Big Idea’.  That we’re not going to create anything new. There will be no new app, website or game. We want to keep pace with the digital revolution and what it means for the young people we work with. This means strategically integrating digital skills into all aspects of our delivery.  We’ll be seeking ways of road-testing and cataloguing the tools that young people want to use, are safe to use and support them in moving to independence. Young people will tell other young people what works best for shopping around for their utilities or which app is great for budgeting.  There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, rather find ways of making it work for everyone.

Our next workshop in August will focus on Measurement and Evaluation. To keep up to date with the developments of the #NotWithoutMe Accelerator follow #NotWithoutMe on Twitter and you can also access our Padlet to see any resources recommended through the programme.

People are so kind and interested in how a languages graduate ended doing what I’m doing.

No amount of reflection can really pin it down for me. I generally make a flippant remark about making it up as I go along and quickly change the subject.

I don’t know how I got here any more than I know what comes next. But when people ask for top tips or advice on getting started, my answer has certainly crystallised. Just say ‘yes’.

Say yes to everything. For as long as you can juggle multiple projects, ideas and be remotely sustainable, just do it.

Saying yes has lead me to meet so many people. At the time many felt random and not ‘on mission’. However, I’ve learnt that there is no such thing.

By being someone who is responsive, positive, solution-focussed and says yes, you get offered new opportunities, introductions and keep learning.

I shall keep saying yes for as long as I possibly can.

In the case of mentoring, this is definitely the case.

Our commitment to someone who is generous and empathic enough to volunteer mentor, is to make it a great experience if we possibly can.

This means not just ensuring that mentors are trained, vetted and supported properly, but that we wait for the right match too.

Volunteers often sign up to new opportunities in a pique of enthusiasm and this is a wave we want to ride. However, it wouldn’t be fair on our young people to cut corners or have anyone not feel 100% safe and supported.

This means there can be some waiting around for paperwork etc and we recognise that some volunteers will want a quicker fix. For others, the empathy we ask you to have for the young people we work with goes the same for the proper process. This was always designed to be the Rolls Royce of mentoring projects.

Taking our time will be worth it in be end!

I like this picture (couldn’t find one with women though, sorry!).

The deeper into understanding mentoring I get, the more I realise how fluid and evolving it is. Aside from communicating this to our customers, this has caused me to pause and reflect on mentors in my life too.

Some have been leaders, people who have inspired my, albeit briefly.

Others have had a sage piece of advice at a particularly pertinent moment.

One even gave me a kick up the backside when I probably deserved it.

In many ways they have all been a mentor – someone who has taken the time and trouble to help me come to my own conclusions and bring about change.

Am I getting this right or do I just need a holiday?

I’m asking about the requests of me that verge on the consultancy. It’s probably flattering if I had the time to think about it, but in the last week I’ve been asked to mentor someone (for free), to write a funding bid (for free) and to advise someone on setting up a social enterprise (for free).

Now I’m grateful for all the help I get and especially in the early days. But I’ve scarcely time to run my own social enterprise, let alone anyone else’s.

Am I being grumpy or just really shattered and in need of a break so I can see the wood for the trees?

There, I used my least favourite ‘j’ word!

That said, it is a journey and one I’ve just started enjoying. The principle recognition is not so much about marketing, but about how uncomfortable I feel when I’m feeling consciously incompetent.

And that’s how I felt about marketing. It was not even a conversation I wanted to have for fear of not knowing the jargon or revealing myself as a total idiot.

And now I’m starting to really enjoy not just my development, but marketing as an academic exercise and mostly, becoming (slowly) consciously competent.

So whilst the marketing knowledge is valuable and vital, most valuable is knowing that it is the fear of my own idiocy that is most uncomfortable. Being ok with that and knowing how to tackle it has huge application.

And because we work with young people, let’s not forget what a barrier to learning and engaging that exact same feeling is for them too!

As you know, what social enterprise is and isn’t is something I conjure with daily.  I’ve been asked about three times in the last week.

One of the skills I most admire is being succinct.  So I was wondering how to explain what a social enterprise is in a way that is a bit simpler.

Sometimes giving an example is best. It then struck me that the approaches the voluntary/third sector take in communication with a range of partners might be one of the things that distinguishes social enterprise from others in the voluntary sector.

There are lots of posts from charities asking for free help, services and expertise.  As a social enterprise, my thoughts turn to how we can help you.

If we’re to generate sustainable and (not for private) profit and income, we need to provide goods or services that people don’t just want to buy, but that compete with the best in the private/commercial sector.

I don’t want to buy second-rate cake from a cafe that is a social enterprise, just because they have a social mission.  I want to buy that cake because it’s the best cake on the market.  I don’t buy the Big Issue because homeless people sell it – I buy it because it’s a darn good read.  The fact that the money goes to the homeless is a bonus.

So this is the case with our mentoring training and my thinking.  We’re not asking people to do us a favour.  We’re selling mentoring training because we’re darn good at training mentors!

it’s definitely the way that we do it.

I’ve always said that it’s social inequality that drives me and not youth homelessness per se. However awful this is for individuals and a community, it is but one awful manifestation of inequality.

And so I observe an evolution in Your Own Place’s position in the market. What we do remains utterly committed to supporting those most at risk of youth homelessness. But because young people don’t fit into funder’s neat outcome labels, this is just one outcome that impacts on many others that we can also achieve through what we do.

Increasingly it is dawning on me that it’s not just about budgeting, savings, tenancies and home options. These outcomes are a given.

No, the real success is in how we deliver the intervention, how we make young people feel and therefore how they want to work with us. Once engaged, we could in truth be delivering any intervention with any outcomes. And what an opportunity that is for anyone wanting to work with young people!

The engagement comes first and this is our strength and unique selling point.

We have 99% retention on our TILS courses and are proud of this.

Now we want to understand, consolidate and replicate it to the best possible end – which may or may not be just preventing homelessness.

As a small enterprise that has worked hard on its public profile, we get lots of lovely attention. People are so positive about what we do and if I could I’d have a coffee with absolutely everyone who takes any interest at all. That would be a lot of coffee!

But I can’t. I’m busy painting the toilet floor, updating GDPR policies and ensuring we all get paid.

To be honest, some people just want some free consultancy, others want me to help with their PhD. I get about one request a week to be a part of some social enterprise research. All this is incredible when I reflect on where I was four years ago. And it’s often interesting too. So how do I say no to the right ones?

I truly believe in the power of saying ‘yes’ to opportunities. But if I met everyone I’d be bankrupt, my staff team would leave and we’d have nothing that anyone would want to talk to us about!

So please don’t think me rude, but I might just have to say ‘no’ from time to time. And if it’s a really vague ‘shall we meet for a coffee?’, I’ll be asking ‘why’ too!

Anyone who works with me knows that I’m mildly obsessed with the asset-based approach. That’s because it works and because I see the impact it has in our work with young people.

My team are absolutely brilliant at revealing a young person’s asset-base as a starting point for any intervention. It means we get to see for real how incredible our young people are. This isn’t putting a positive spin on things. They really are.

But here’s the rub. The wider conversation is not in the same vein. Funders require us to tell them just terribly deprived and vulnerable the young people we work with are.

Tender processes require us to quote just how marginalised they and their communities are.

And partners, volunteers and local businesses want us to tell stories that reveal positive change so that we all feel great about the difference we’ve made.

Case-studies are most powerful when authentic, but this isn’t Love Actually or a rags to riches tale.

To treat young people as our equals means telling the truth. The truth is that they are strong, capable, human and with their whole lives ahead of them. We are all mere catalysts.

It’s not such a great narrative, but patronising them with stories of them and us is not asset-based or equal.

So I’ve ended up doing exactly what I set out not to do. Spending my Sunday evenings writing funding bids or funder reports.

It was always my aim for Your Own Place to be 75% traded. We’re currently around 20%. The truth is when you’re starting up that getting funding is relatively easy, especially with my background. Taking something new to market when you don’t consider yourself a salesperson, is not.

Having said that, I’m proud of this year’s profit and true to our constitution, it is going back into our mission to prevent youth homelessness. We’re self-financing the Your Own Place Advisory Board (YOPAB) as well as supporting individual young people.

Moving away from funding is going to be hard, but I believe that to be sustainable it is vital. And in a world of receding horizons, it’ll feel like a significant achievement.

I’d love to know if other small, service providing businesses and enterprises experience this too.

I am simply staggered by the number of people that call or email to find out the basics of our offer. 99% of the questions I am asked are to be found one click away from our homepage on our website.

As we grow this is becoming quite a resource issue as we take increasing numbers of enquiries.

What are we doing wrong? Is it the website? Is it our marketing (monthly e-newsletter, loads of social media and direct marketing etc) or is it something else?

For background, these enquiries are coming largely from social workers and providers in the third sector and I accept that many of our customers are not on Twitter and Facebook etc.

I’d love your thoughts.

We’ve been running for four years now. And whilst our traded income has increased year on year, it’s still not where I want it to be.

Partly because of the financial constraints many of our customers find themselves in and partly a failure on my part, we’re just not getting the block commissions we need to be truly sustainable.

This approach works for no-one. For our customers they pay an over-the-odds spot purchase price, we struggle to recruit to full-time posts and therefore pay high sub-contracting prices and worst of all, we have to change our delivery plans which affects the service young people get.

It’s a total lose lose and yet (as an ex-commissioner), getting commissioners to plan and commission long-term is almost impossible.

I’ll let you know when I achieve it (you’ll hear me singing!).

Sticking at it pays off it seems. I’ve always been certain that creating Your Own Place wasn’t a flash in the pan and I’m cautiously hopeful that we will continue.

Someone said to me the other day that business must be good as there’s so much homelessness. I’m pleased to say that we don’t make more money when there’s lots of homelessness and arguably the same lack of investment that has resulted in that homelessness is not investing in us either. We want to prevent it ever happening. This is a better investment for the tax payer, the community as well the person involved.

But I didn’t mean to get political. The point I want to make today is the power of sticking with it. Not only can you test, test and test your model again, but people start to have heard of you banging on about it.

I totally understand why some businesses fail. There are times when I earned next to nothing and quite possibly will be again. I’ve been outside my comfort zone from the start.

But today is a positive note. Customers of all kinds are contacting us for our services. People who we’ve never met, never directly marketed and didn’t know would be interested.

It feels like a critical mass and if you can weather years of pushing and making next to nothing, it seems a tipping point must come.

Your Own Place was incorporated as a Community Interest Company in 2013.

Are we still a start-up? Not a hugely important question you might think, but one that I ponder most weeks.

All sorts of support is available for start-ups and their founders. Much of this has now drifted away.

Exciting seed funding for exciting new ideas exists for start-ups. We’re no longer shiny and new. Should we keep innovating just for the sake of it?

Start-ups are trendy and notable. How do we keep note-worthy for all the right reasons?

If we’re no longer a start-up are we meant to be totally self-sufficient by now?

And finally, most significantly for me personally, do I have the skills to take a start-up to a scale-up? Arguably I didn’t have the skills for a start-up, so I guess we’ll have to see!

It’s all got a bit more complicated hasn’t it? When I normally think of the spectrum – traditional charities involved in CSR at one end and FTSE 100s at the other, I think of values-based charities like Oxfam (!) and perhaps ruthless giants like the banks.

Of course in the modern era, neither is quite what we imagined them to be.

Reflecting on sustainable models of income for our sector, in a world where capitalism is being questioned daily, I can’t help but be drawn to added social value.

Large corporates can and increasingly should, be looking at their supply chains and who they do business with.

New recruits of all ages (not just millennials!), want their employer to do more than tick a socially responsible box.

These slides describing how PwC overhauled their supply chain to bring in social enterprise make it seem like a no-brainer!

If your business is buying goods and services anyway, why not buy them from an enterprise that does the social good for you?