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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?

It’s probably a difficult decision.  Is it on the whim of the boss, historic ties or issues that matter locally?

Perhaps it’s more strategic than that.  Or a cause that matches the values and aspirations of the business as well as makes the business look good?

It is after all vital that it makes the business look good.

They say that your supply chain is essential to your business and you take up references for your staff.

Why would it be any different for those organisations that your business supports as a good cause?

Because business says it is!

Volunteering is good for business, good for equality and the community and likely good for your staff too.

Many businesses genuinely want to do ‘the right thing’. Equally, many want to benefit their business first and foremost.

Which is right? I ponder this as people and businesses increasingly approach us. I desperately want them to understand how important their contribution is. But the truth is that not everybody cares as much as I do.

And should that matter? Should I take the contribution anyway? Does the end already justify the means.

This is a verbatim account from Sally, a previous mentor with Your Own Place.

I did my mentoring training early in 2015 and was matched with a mentee in the June. I was surprisingly very nervous. Would this young person like me? Would she want to continue with the scheme or run a mile from this strange middle aged woman?!

Turns out I was really blessed. My mentee was super friendly, willing to take opportunities and chatty. It made the experience both pleasurable and positive. I am quite sure not every relationship would be like this but I quickly realised that I could in some small way help this young person.

From the little practical things – explaining why some plugs were not working in her flat. (a light had blown, tripped the circuit, and simply needed flicking back on) Simple IF you have someone to ask. My mentee had not had lights in the main living area for three days. I drove home feeling like I’d really helped and made a simple but practical difference.

It is obvious that my role wasn’t to tackle everything that was going on in this persons life but a theme developed throughout the year that I found us talking about a lot. It mainly came down to being better at time keeping and dealing with things quickly before they created other issues that were bigger.

In response to telling me she needed to visit the Job Centre due to missing a previous appointment, and on a separate occasion, looking for a work experience placement, I would look at my watch and just say ‘Well lets go and sort that now, I’ll come with you’.

Sometimes the thought of doing something, especially when it feels like it is to do with authority, seems very daunting to a young person. My mentee became anxious at the thought of going in, yet when we went together she was fabulous at communicating and getting the information she needed. I was just in the background leaving her to it. She needed a gentle push.

I would like to think my mentee looks back now and knows that by facing something quickly, however seemingly difficult it is at the time, dealing with it there and then reduces stress and helps her to move forward, and life run smoother.

I think one of the biggest achievements for both of us, (well from my perspective), was persuading my mentee to make a phone call having missed an important work opportunity.

She had been volunteering at this place for some time and was being given a chance of some paid work. It was a chance to prove herself. However she had not turned up late, but had not turned up at all.

There was a need to call the employer and apologise, own the mistake, and hopefully continue with the opportunity. If that call wasn’t made there was a high chance she wouldn’t return.

It would have been a very difficult call for anyone to make. We have all been in situations like it and I really felt her panic. Of course it took some persuading and I think had I left her to make the call later it would not have happened.

I helped her write down the opening sentences. She finally made the call while I was with her. 10 minutes and she had resolved the problem herself. Her employee was very understanding. My mentee felt immediately relieved and went back to work the following day.

The mentoring programme is only 12 months. I didn’t really understand this initially but having got to 12 months I felt it was time to wrap it up.

There is only so much talking about the importance of being on time, how to put in place strategies to make sure that happens, how to deal with things and not them off etc. We didn’t crack it during the 12 months and I am a bit disappointed about that, but I hope when the time is right my mentee will hear my voice ‘lets just get that done now’ and ‘what is the worse thing that can happen?’

It has been very rewarding for me. I have learnt things about myself during the process and understand better how difficult life can be for some people.

We don’t all start off from the same place, not everyone has family support, and although the support is there for those who need it, the process of getting that support is often complicated and very daunting.

The pleasure and privilege was all mine and I hope if the scheme keeps running I will be found another match soon.

What makes mentoring effective?

I’ve had great mentors, average mentors and … mentors.

What they had in common is that they were unique!

What they also had in common was a drive and passion to be a mentor, to help someone else, to listen (even when they didn’t do it very well) and to find solutions (especially when they didn’t do it very well).

So having had a few, these would be my top tips:

1. Listen truly without prejudice or expectation.

2. Explain what you have heard and that this is only your interpretation.

3. Use open questions with no other motivation than to elicit better understanding and explore the issue in more detail.

4. Don’t expect to solve everything.

5. Check in and enjoy your successes.

Written by Rebecca, CEO of Your Own Place CIC

It’s hard and we’ve struggled. I’ve generally put our challenges down to the much aired ‘skills gap’ in Norfolk as well as our rather niche area of business.

Most valuable to reflect on is that the first two members of our team are not from a youth work background or any related field. And they’re awesome!

So, in fact, this time around I’m encouraging people to apply who are not trainers or youth workers of any kind! Youth workers are marvellous for youth work, but what we’re doing is something rather different and innovative.

So once again we find ourselves recruiting for values, energy, a shared mission and being excited to be part of our team.

Now to get people to show that enthusiasm when they apply!

Come on Norfolk, prove me wrong!

My colleague Jarrod moved house a few weeks ago. Typically he had loads on at work and was moving in with a friend.

Just as with my own move three months ago, Jarrod found it pretty stressful. Fitting the packing around his working schedule left him exhausted.

He then had to take time off to go and buy expensive appliances as well as to pick up the keys, sort out utilities, sign paperwork etc etc.

And finally, he had a bit of a nightmare with a utility company that turned out not to be their supplier. Two weeks on and things are not resolved yet, and he still doesn’t have a vacuum cleaner!

So, yet again both Jarrod and I found ourselves reflecting on this experience in light of what we do here at Your Own Place.

With support, family. funds and an understanding employer (?) it was still a pretty stressful experience.

For many of our young people they are doing all of this aged 18. They may have very little family support or knowledge of how things work, as well as high levels of anxiety and no history of house moves to build on.

In short, it can absolutely break them. Mentors, role-models, some financial support, someone asking how it’s going can all make a massive difference at this critical time.

It should be exciting and full of fresh beginnings.

Hooking up with a local social enterprise is good for the individual, good for your business and good for the local community. It helps us to achieve our mission of preventing youth homelessness.

But why should you care?

• You want a business that is successful too.
• You want to be fulfilled.
• You might want to do the right thing.
• You want to recruit the best staff, retain staff that are motivated and build your brand.

Hooking up with us can help you to achieve all this.

And whether you want to give back to the local community because you think you ought or because people sleeping in shop doorways is actually keeping your awake at night is up to you.

Social action through people power is all we have. There’s just you and me, no-one’s going to do it for us.

So whatever your motivation, you’ll be doing something life changing for someone else by inviting us to train your staff Volunteer Tenancy Mentors

I signed up as a volunteer mentor for Your Own Place in 2015 because I wanted a new challenge and to expand my skills in working with people. I was nervous about volunteering with young people as my experience has always been in working with older people but I needn’t have worried as it has been a really good experience.

My Your Own Place experience began with a two-day training with a friendly bunch of new volunteers of all different ages and backgrounds. It was a very interactive few days. We covered budgeting (more interesting than you’d think!), shared experiences, and tried to pin down exactly what the mentor role was and importantly what it is not.

The work I do as a volunteer mentor has been great. I have been lucky enough to meet and work with two great mentees.

Although there have been difficulties and challenges, Your Own Place has always been on hand to talk me through them. Seeing the people I have been matched with make positive life decisions and grow in confidence has been the best bit.

Being alongside when a mentee takes control of their life and starts making their own important phone calls, making positive life decisions, showing their ability to manage their finances independently and getting their new home looking like a home makes it more than worthwhile.

Through it I have learnt a lot about the complexities of the benefit system – argh!

But on a serious note I have begun to be able to structure meetings with mentees with a clearer sense of what they want to achieve and what is needed.

It’s a continual learning process but at the end of the day it is about getting to know someone, and matching them with appropriate support.

My experience shows that mentee and mentor both benefit and learn from taking part.

I trained to be a mentor in March 2015. I missed working with people and was looking for my first voluntary role when came across the opportunity at Your Own Place. The two-day training gave a great overview of what we were to expect during the mentoring process. We all left feeling excited for what was to come.

I was matched with my first young person within a month. This young person was living in a Bed & Breakfast – temporary accommodation, having been homeless. They were in a period of massive change in their life. We tried to engage with them but they had too much on and too many disruptions.

They simply were not ready. I was a little disappointed at first, questioning whether it was something I had done or I could have done more of. I quickly learned not to take it personally, timing is very important when building a good mentor relationship.

I have gone on to have two successful mentoring relationships, both totally unique experiences. The first was with a young person living independently, struggling with their mental health and in particular the isolation they were feeling. We would often just meet for a coffee and a chat.

They needed someone to talk to, and I was there – not to advise, but to listen. We also had a few practical sessions around things like budgeting and debt and I would be there to encourage them to tackle things head on and not hide away. This relationship ended when the young person moved away.

The second mentoring relationship was completely different.  The young person was a single parent and needed support around the practicalities of moving into their first home.

Where would they get furniture from? How would they move their belongings? How could they afford all of these things? We did a lot of work around budgeting, sourcing affordable items and saving for them. As well as accessing support and applying for funding.

This relationship ended over a cup of tea in their new place, when they said “I think I’m okay now, I think you’ve done your job”.

It’s fantastic having a positive impact on young people, especially at a daunting and confusing period of transition. I’ve enjoyed my time as a mentor, it has increased my confidence and adaptability. I would definitely recommend it to others!

I learnt this half way through our last volunteering project.

Volunteers voluntarily giving up their time is one of their biggest USPs.

It’s not that they might have had similar life experiences or even an apparently relevant skill set from their working life.

The message that they’re not getting paid is a powerful one.

It can be a lightbulb moment for a young person who has had lots of professionals in their life

– that someone doesn’t need to be paid to care!

Our mission has always been to prevent youth homelessness.  What’s commonly misunderstood, is that we don’t (tend) to work with existing street homeless people.  Instead, we work with those that evidence tells us are most likely to become homeless (which includes the currently homeless).

This means we work with young people who have grown up in care, had a period of homelessness already, been in the criminal justice system and/or are on very low incomes.  This is where we can have most impact.

So whilst our mission it to prevent youth homelessness, we’re not seeking for example to change the care system.  For as long as Children’s Social Services inadequately prepares young people for adult life, there will be work for us to do.  Our impact will be on the services further down the chain than us – such as local authority homelessness services, supported accommodation, health services and welfare departments.

These are services that impact on all of us either from taxes we pay, communities we live in or perhaps even a loved one or personal experience.

Having just come through Christmas and these images of rough sleeping that I loath, I pause to think of the massive and in many ways, welcome, focus that Christmas brings to homelessness.

There are so many amazing people doing things that genuinely ameliorate the plight of people who are homeless or otherwise struggling.  We see soup kitchens spring into action, increases in donations to food banks and incredible fundraising for sleeping bags and clothes.  In Brussels there was even the invention of cardboard tents for rough sleepers.

With all this good will, fundraising leverage and time and effort, I can’t help but think we could make a more lasting impact than the annual ‘feel-good’ sticking plaster.

We passed our fourth birthday last month.

We got over the CIC bump (many fail around 33 months) and have cruised into our fifth year.

We’re growing at a sustainable rate, but true to my naturally impatient self, I want more and faster.

Start-ups were something I hadn’t heard of five years ago and now they’re not just everywhere, but there’s almost something desirable about being one.

I’m not sure we got a huge amount as a start-up, other than being shiny and new.

Well, we’re no longer shiny and new and maybe no longer a start-up. On balance I’d rather be on a slightly more secure footing and looking to the next five years.

Maybe you’d like to be a part of it too?  If so, take a look at this Business Development Consultant role:

Our Team

Because our values are central to everything we do.  It can be tough as a growing enterprise to keep hold of your values.

I still know why Your Own Place was created and what it set out to achieve.  We’re still achieving it – the route has detoured however. It’s detoured because amazing opportunities arise as well as amazing people come along.

Do the ends always justify the means?  If an investor came along tomorrow offering capacity and resource, it would be easy to go with it because it would enable us to reach more young people and achieve our mission of preventing youth homelessness.

In truth I’ve seen organisations sell out as well as grow too fast.

So we always look for people that share our values, because of the contribution they may to our mission.

Get in touch if our latest opportunity is of interest; rebecca@yourownplace.org.uk

It seems that every day there is a ‘… day’ to mark either incredible people (teachers, health professionals, space explorers etc) or a specifically dysfunctional aspect of modern (and not so modern) life.

Do they make any difference?  Don’t misunderstand me.  Homelessness matters.  And so does mental health, whose ‘day’ also happens to fall on 10th October.  To us at Your Own Place, homelessness is our bread and butter.  We live and breathe its spectre every day.

Except that we sit firmly in the prevention agenda.  Our aim, my aim, is that the young people we all support in our various ways should never have to be homeless.  It must never be a right of passage for a care-leaver to have their possessions bundled up in a plastic bin liner just before their 18th birthday because their isn’t a coherent plan for what happens when the state exits.

People of all ages get in a muddle with their bills and their rent.  It’s a normal part of the ebb and flow of life.  I believe there should be a genuine, appropriate and accessible safety net that means it never gets so bad that a person is homeless.

And of course the young people we work with rarely sleep rough – the most visible form of homelessness.  This is one of the many reasons we don’t use that negative, stereotyping and damaging imagery.  I have of course known young people to live rough in tents, caravans, in woods and more commonly between friends’ sofas and squats.  Thankfully there is a marginally more effective safety net if you are young.  So, that’s why we work with young people.  Because their resilience, astonishing determination and belief in a future makes our job easy.

Together we can prevent homelessness.  So, if one day helps us all to focus just for a minute, to share how amazing young people are at avoiding homelessness through their strengths and that of their community, then it’s a day well-spent.

I’ve can’t quite believe I’ve been working with young people for over 20 years! I know, I don’t look old enough!

On the one hand I’ve learnt a lot and on the other, I know nothing.  My confidence in working with them has grown immeasurably.  Particularly in the last four years.  Because of course they’re just human beings like you and me.

I’ve worked as a secondary school teacher, a homelessness support worker, a prison resettlement worker, guns, gangs and knife crime commissioner, a school governor, a leaving care commissioner and a youth worker.  So it’s fair to say I’ve had a range of experiences.

Twenty years feels like a long enough time-frame to be able to look back and see trends, commonalities and shifts.

One of those is that young people have never seemed worse off financially.  I’m always conscious that I’m not comparing like with like and that this is in no way linear.  But I started my career in London for heaven sake.  And with careful budgeting young people could just about make ends meet.  Today even in Norfolk this is no longer the case.

It took me a while to understand the difference in my work with young people in London and young people here in Norfolk.  For me both present a specific challenge.  In London it was violence and risk.  This was the overriding aspect to my work and like those working in the secure estate, the backdrop against which everything else was delivered.

I’m pleased that when I arrived in Norfolk I had some excellent practice to fall back on and am often surprised at the cursory approach many organisations in Norfolk have to managing risk.  And this against a clearly escalating and very worrying knife crime problem in our county.

The biggest difference I see between the loud and often violent young people I worked with in London and those in Norfolk is what looks like apathy.  They’re not apathetic and it’s not to be confused with a lack of aspiration.  It’s poor emotional health and probably partly a consequence of having some of the lowest social mobility in the country.

It’s an absence of seeing people who are like you achieve their dreams.  And it breaks my heart.  Because it’s based on the luck of where you were born.

So this is what gets me up in the morning – removing the barriers that I was mostly lucky enough not to have.

What gets you up in the morning?

No, of course I haven’t, but thank you for reading!  In fact on the curve of learning, I’m not even off the bottom of the curve yet.  What I am, is starting to think about it  – a lot.  This is partly because I’m moving closer to work (much closer) and am worried that I will miss the clear divide 12 miles puts between my office and my home.

I’m also planning what my workspace at home will look like in my new house and how not to resent working in my home.  Let’s face it, we all do it.  Now that emails need responses as quick as texts and can be completed from our gardens, we’re all letting work encroach on our home lives.

To most outsiders my output levels are pretty high.  I get through a lot.  Partly because I have to, but mostly because that’s innately who I am.  Of course I make a rod for my own back.  As things get even busier, my current CEO role as ‘jack of all trades’ is not going to disappear overnight.

Through some careful naval gazing, I’ve realised one thing I do to prevent myself from resenting working from home and it’s happened automatically.  I save the ‘fun’ work-related activities to the weekend (this is being written on a Sunday afternoon).  That way I can’t resent it.  The pension stuff I’ve got to sort out can be done on Tuesday afternoon at the office – much less fun.

What’s your trick for not resenting it?

Am I just putting the pension stuff off?

I sometimes get a bit befuddled by these new terms and I assume that I’m just a bit slow on the uptake.  And then the penny drops.  That’s how my brain works – I mull things for a while and then I suddenly get it.  It was the same I remember when learning German.  I just couldn’t get by head around the ‘accusative’ case and what ‘direct object’ meant.  It all seemed a bit abstract.  And then one morning I literally woke up and suddenly got it.

And so it’s been with ‘Digital Social Action’.  Not only did I suddenly get it, but I also saw a way of doing something by bringing together one of my long-held dreams along with tackling Norfolk’s social mobility doldrums.

So, here it is – ‘Your Own Network.  It’s a great partnership.  Thanks to funding from Santander, support from Norfolk Pro Help and Naked Marketing and the web build from SoftApps, we’re now creating a website to bring young people together with all sorts of help from you!  That’s their local community, be it individuals, businesses or providers of services.

It will be managed safely to allow young people to share a profile that includes their dreams and aspirations.  And you can then help them to be fulfilled.  You may be able to offer words of encouragement, point them towards a job advert you saw, buy them something for their new flat or even get involved as a Volunteer Tenancy Mentor and provide some non-virtual support.

That folks, is digital social action.  You will be the ‘pointy elbows’ that many young people lack!

And we’re launching it very soon, so get in touch if you’d like to be part of something pretty groundbreaking.

rebecca@yourownplace.org.uk

What is your business offering that makes its recruitment package stand out?  What do keen young things look for in an employer?  This is something that has been preoccupying me of late.  Partly because I find recruitment in Norfolk difficult and partly because we want to start working with businesses to help them be awesome employers.

It’s a while since I was a young thing (cue violins) and almost as long since I went to a traditional job interview.

Generally my job search was as sophisticated as the following.

• How much will it pay?
• How many days holiday will I get?
• Where is it based?
• Do I have the skills and if not can I blag it?

I’m thinking things have changed.  Has it become more competitive with more graduates than ever?  And does this mean that businesses as well as prospective candidates are looking for different things now?

Much is made of the ‘millennial’ debate (don’t personally like the word).  Millennials are supposed to be more discerning in seeking ethical, environmental employers as well as a better work–life balance.

So, as employers, what’s your experience of hiring?

And as applicants, what are you looking for (and do tell me your age if you dare!).

Therein lies the reason I’m so committed to social enterprise.  I can’t help but feel in this age of squeezed local authority belts, that old-fashioned funding is just plain wrong.  A couple of years ago, when we were in our infancy (and not choosy), we received £11k through a European funding route.  Don’t get me wrong, we did some good work.  But there were two things that felt totally misguided in the way we were funded.  The first are the strictures put round the funding bid.

Between the submission of a funding bid and starting the project, the world has moved on in a small organisation.  You might have said you’ll spend £5k on staffing, but in fact it’ll need to be more like £6.5k (or even £4k!) due to unforeseen development.  It’s ok thought isn’t it, because you can move 1.5k over from another part of the funding bid?  Except, you often can’t  So you’re forced to fudge it.  This incentivises ‘creative accounting’ and often a project that is not as cost-effective as tax-payers deserve.  And they’re all doing it!

There was a second seemingly farcical aspect too.  We were told we had to spend at least £1k on capital assets.  We didn’t need any, but to get the £11k we had to.  How is that meeting local operational and strategic needs?  We got a lovely printer and projector and some other goodies that have turned out to be useful.  However, I remember a time working for a large national charity, where I came across our loft space one day and found literally 1000s of hoodies and water bottles – a consequence of the same contrived wasteful spending that the voluntary sector is often forced to undertake.

So, that’s why we want to be a sustainable social enterprise.  That way things cost what they cost and we invest when our mission requires us to invest with our modest profit.  What do you think?  Do things need to change?

If the answer is yes, then Your Own Place can help.  How? We’re going to be training ten of Norwich City Council’s staff in October to become Volunteer Tenancy Mentors.  You can find out why they think it’s a great idea here.

With the average cost of an eviction hovering around £8000 (not including related costs of temporary accommodation, benefits etc) and youth being the biggest determinant of failed tenancies, then what better way to get involved and prevent the problem and the spiralling cost?

We can offer housing associations and housing authorities an amazing staff development opportunity that not only sees huge rewards in staff skills, but also in the new young tenants they go on to support.  And we can offer 50% off if you buy more than ten spaces!

We provide two-day Volunteer Tenancy Mentoring training to groups of ten staff.  We’ll cover Child and Vulnerable Adult Protection, how to work restoratively and take an asset-based approach as well as all the dos and dont’s of being a Volunteer Tenancy Mentor.  You’ll also get some great money skills ideas and how to approach them with young people. This is an amazing opportunity to provide your staff with new skills ranging from social skills, leadership and time management skills, empathy and learning about working restoratively and effectively with young tenants.

Once trained they will go on to meet a mentee just once a week or fortnight and support this young person in transition in their first tenancy.  No-one should underestimate just what they have to offer a young person starting our in life.

Through the development of their own skills a new tenant will benefit too.  And in turn social landlords will see fewer failed tenancies, evictions and spiralling costs.

This is what we call a win-win-win!

So get in touch to book your training dates and start preventing youth homelessness with us now!

Like many of the young people we work with, Tiff came through one door to Your Own Place CIC and then accessed another service whilst she was here. She was struggling. On the face of it she was quite settled in supported accommodation and pretty mature.

After spending some time with her Volunteer Tenancy Mentor we learned just how complex her previous life had been and how desperate she was to start a new life.

I recall first meeting her. She wouldn’t make eye contact and no matter my most expert open questioning (!), I couldn’t elicit more than one syllable. It was ok because she started to open up to her Volunteer Tenancy Mentor. Most importantly they built trust which built trust in our organisation too.

In time the Volunteer Tenancy Mentoring came to a successful close. In truth the mentor worried about a dependence, but Tiff showed she was made of stronger stuff. Tiff currently receives support from Alex. Through step by step Employment Support Tiff had made extraordinary progress.

She attended our Joy of Food course and Alex and I both remember the moment she made full eye contact, laughed with her peers and left with a spring in her step. We were delighted to reward her progress with a generously donated Next voucher for some interview clothes.

Tiff is now in part time bar work. She still seeks lots of reassurance and needs ongoing help navigating the impact of work on her benefits – which poses a really threat to work sustainability for her.

But she also has a dream beyond bar work. She’s playing the long game as we all do/did in our first job. She aims to get as much out of this employment as she can and build her CV. The difficulty is that everything to do with her current and future employment is online. She has no computer and no Wifi. This puts her job at risk and her chances of finding a better one. Her rotas, training, payslips, message boards – are all online. And she isn’t.

Never one to give up, having devised a savings plan with Alex, she has incredibly managed already to save some money already. So I’m asking the LinkedIn community if anyone is able to help her out with the remaining amount needed to buy a laptop? We’re looking for around £150.

We thought of asking for a laptop, but we’d rather teach the life skill of saving than providing a hand out. Your Own Place will match any contribution made and Tiff will continue her journey to confidence and independence.

If you don’t measure it, then how do you know if it makes a difference?  Of course, your bottom line isn’t the only reason for getting involved in Corporate Social Responsibility, but let’s not pretend that in this era of social media, you don’t want some visibility.  We all do. I do! But we want more too.  With our new offer to businesses, my organisation wants to work with yours to understand the impact that ‘buying social’ has.  That’s because it’s not traditional Corporate Social Responsibility and just ticking a box.  I feel passionately that by investing in your business and staff (something you do anyway I’m sure) that we can invest in young people and communities at the same time.

Doing business with social enterprises is increasing – something we look forward to discussing on Social Saturday this year.  Social Saturday is an annual event led by Social Enterprise UK.  In October every year we celebrate the £26bn that is spent across the social economy.  From businesses buying their fancy branded macaroons from Miss Macaroon to buying water from Belu and knowing how their profit is invested overseas in water aid projects.  Often the ‘buying social’ relates to goods.  We’re offering you the opportunity to ‘buy social’ when purchasing your staff training.

By ‘buying social’ for staff development and training, your business will be joining the likes of PwC, Santander, Wates, Robertson Group, Amey, Johnson & Johnson and many more who don’t just tick a box – but get a service that makes a difference too.

On October 2nd we’re launching a project in Norfolk and Suffolk that will not only tick your CSR box effortlessly if that’s what you want, but will see tangible financial returns in your business too.

Following our two-day Volunteer Tenancy Mentoring training and becoming a Mentor:

• Your staff will discover the leadership that is hidden in all of us
• The huge potential of your staff will be unlocked resulting in increased motivation
• A sense of team through social purpose and new-found social skills will appear
• Money will be saved on staff retention and recruitment
• With an amazing recruitment package you will be able to recruit the best in their field
• Your staff will have a reason to go to work that money can’t buy!

We know that this training and development opportunity will make a difference and save you money because ACAS, the leading employer expert since 1896,  tells us that:

• 68% of workers say training and development is the most important workplace policy.
• 40% of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year.

   

   

BiTC (Business in The Community) tells us that 82% of employees that volunteer feel more committed to their employer.  And if they don’t leave, your business saves money in recruiting new people – and  we all hate endless costs relating to lost productivity, recruitment fees, job adverts, new training and induction, reading CVs, interviewing etc etc.  In fact, can you believe that the true cost of replacing an employee can be as much as £30,000?

So by providing staff training to become Volunteer Tenancy Mentors, you will see your staff flourish and bounce into work like Tigger, as they know that they’re making a difference to people’s lives at the same time.  And we know it mentors make a difference.

Your investment in them will be a win-win-win.

That’s a win for your staff, a win for your business and a win for the young people in our community.

You can download a short PDF here about why you’d want to get involved as well as take a look at our webpage just for you.

As a social enterprise in the current climate, I can’t decide if I’m more excited by developing a new potential revenue model or all the amazing people I’m going to meet as part of this initiative.

I’ve worked with young people for nearly 20 years and they never fail to surprise me and keep me on my toes.  And it’s the same with adults.  It’s so easy to ‘put people in a box’ and think they are part of your tribe or not part of your tribe depending on which newspaper they read or what school they went to.

If I’ve learnt anything, it’s that this is perfectly not the case.  When recruiting Volunteer Tenancy Mentors we’ve never had to turn anyone away.  Once we’re clear about the opportunity for them as well as the commitment expected, people tend to self-select.

What you’re left with are people that always humble me in their openness to learn, contribute to their communities, but also be honest about what they are going to get out of it.  It’s a total win-win.

Many reading this will empathise with the dilemma of a founder CEO going on holiday for the first time since being a fully up and running social enterprise.  People have been saying for ages that I need to take a holiday.  I know this, so why is it so hard?  It’s not that I don’t trust people to run things whilst I’m away.  It’s not that I think there will be a disaster that only I can deal with.  And it’s not that I think without me opportunities will be missed and things will grind to a halt.  Being honest, part of me will really miss it.  I no longer know who I am in the absence of my business.  It’s who I am and defines me, provides my sense of self and self-esteem.  I remember when I was a teacher I used to worry that after the six weeks summer holiday I may have forgotten how to teach.  I think it’s a bit like that.  I feel I’ll lose the ability to do things at pace, make decisions and achieve all that output.  In reality of course, I’ll be so refreshed that I’ll come back able to do all those things and more.  As well as come back with a whole host of crazy new schemes that I’ve had the headspace to dream up…

With little attention in the current political climate, the Bill became an Act this week.  Extending the period by which a local housing authority will intervene to prevent homelessness from 28 to 56 days is welcomed by most.  It’s an amazing opportunity not just to put crisis-measures in post, but to undertake service-related to work to put right what has gone wrong, before the consequences result in homelessness, misery, expense and a crisis.  We worked with a young man who was summoned by his local housing authority with the threat of eviction from an Introductory Tenancy.  In the few weeks we had he was able to sort out his Universal Credit claim, attend our Tenancy & Independent Living Skills (TILS) course, communicate with his social landlord about what he was doing and regain control and confidence about putting it right.  His arrears are now cleared, his risk of eviction put to one side and his home as secure as it can be.  It can be done, but it takes time and resource to do it.

John Bird joined us last week to tell us his story of setting up The Big Issue. Thanks to a relationship with one of our non-executive directors, he had agreed to travel to Norwich and share his passion.  And share it he did!  I’ve seen him talk once before, but I don’t think there were many in the room quite ready for the energy, passion and spittle that landed on the front row! Like so much of what happens when establishing yourself in any enterprise, to outsiders it can look like chance, fate or serendipity. Personally I don’t believe in these things and broadly believe that ‘the harder I work the luckier I get’.  You can train yourself to see the opportunity in every meeting (without becoming an opportunist).  Saying ‘yes’ to the world is a great start.  It’s exhausting too, which means you can also be strategic about it, without being ruthless.  It’s a fine balance and one I’m loving learning as a social entrepreneur that is lucky enough to be able to hear from people like John Bird to challenge everything I thought I knew!

Last week we trained six young women in Great Yarmouth.  Kindly hosted by The Benjamin Foundation, we delivered a bespoke two-day course to six care-leavers at Aspire.  They are facing a multitude of complexities as they navigate the often unsupported world of managing your first home on a tight budget.  We were able to answer many of their questions and offer them tools to approach managing their finances as well as how to be a great tenant.  67% of the small group said that they had improved their knowledge of the skills required to keep their tenancy.  You can read a one-page impact report of the course here.

This vexes me almost daily.  Mostly because I meet so many amazing people and businesses wanting to ‘help’.  We’re not a charity and therefore this notion of ‘helping’ needs to be re-branded. That’s why I prefer the term ‘social investment’.  It aligns with our values of supporting each other (including our young people) as equals and in an ongoing capacity that allows a relationship to develop.  Take our Volunteer Tenancy Mentors for example.  I am perpetually bowled over that hard-working people are prepared to give up their free time to be trained to provide voluntary support to a young person in their own tenancy.  When trust in charities is at an all-time low and millenials want to work for ethical employers, it’s right for businesses to build an ongoing relationship with a local social enterprise.  That way the business gets to see the results of their investment over the long term with real people. They get to hold onto motivated staff and invest in a ‘social business’ as equals.  This kind of social action is so much more profitable for society than a CSR tick in the one-off paternalistic box.

‘What’s that?” we hear you cry.  It’s a way of getting people involved in good deeds, including volunteering, via a digital platform.  And we’re quite excited about it.  Thanks to funding from Santander and N4NE via Norfolk Community Foundation, we’re developing our very own digital social action platform.  This web app will leverage support from the local community, individuals as well as businesses to help young people move forward with their dreams.

How will it work?  Young people will upload their aspirations, including what’s needed to achieve them.  The community will respond online with encouragement, advice, contacts, opportunities, donations and even by becoming Volunteer Tenancy Mentors.  We will be asking for voluntary subscriptions to use the site and to become involved in this practical way to support young people.  Subscribers will get the satisfaction of seeing them achieve their aspirations and making a local social impact.  We’ll be launching it in October.  Get in touch if you’re a business who would like to support young people in this way, have local social impact and improve social mobility.

In the last week we’ve had some very positive conversations with businesses who want to get involved with Volunteer Tenancy Mentoring. We’ve got a track record of delivering mentors for young people who need this support most.  And now we’re looking to local businesses to get involved as those mentors.  Nothing matches people power!

I read with excitement last week about a long-lived campaign to make PSHE in schools compulsory, finally coming to fruition.  Excited because it reminded me of when I used to teach it in South London and excited because since then, having set up a social enterprise, I’m excited about getting involved again.  Just about every young person we train on our Tenancy & Independent Living Skills (TILS) course tells us that everyone should do our course and what their education lacked was a ‘curriculum for life’.  Our young people tell us that they come out of school with lots of ‘stuff’ they never use. On the other hand no-one has told them how debt and APR works or how to understand a tenancy agreement.  I’m not suggesting that the other ‘stuff’ they learn isn’t useful, but can’t claim not to be excited at the prospect of taking our unique delivery into schools.  We want all young people in schools to benefit from our delivery in budgeting, bills, shopping around for utilities, understanding housing options, running a home and loads more so they feel prepared for adult life.

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You never know it all when you work with young people.  I’ve been working in this field for around 20 years and because nothing stands still,  (not least me or the young people), my perceptions of what I thought I knew are always changing.  I can’t categorically state that things have got harder for young people, but it certainly feels like it.  That’s why we’re asking local retailers to offer small discounts to young people setting up home for the first time.  Picture the scene:  You’ve been living in supported accommodation (‘hostel’ – don’t use that word) since you fell out with your parents two years ago.  You’ve got little savings and the clock ticks inexorably towards the day when you have to move out into your own place.  You’re both excited and anxious about it – that’s natural.  It feels like the opportunity for a new start and you want to make your own place a home.  A little money can a lot further with some help.  There’s all that furniture, flooring, kitchen utensils, paint etc to buy.  If you know a local retailer that could offer our young person a small discount, please share this post with them.  Having a safe and secure place to call home should be minimum expectation for everyone.

We don’t often post other’s articles here, but it’s worthy of note that Norfolk, and more specifically, Norwich, features in this piece. The impossible decisions that the local authority is making are something of a given. We can’t turn back the clock. Many, many people will suffer as a result of these plans. The real concerns are twofold. One lies in the timing. With so much daily hyperbole about cuts and the strains the NHS is under, many people are desensitised to terms like ‘a perfect storm’. There are services being drastically cut alongside wholesale welfare benefit changes and cuts, a housing system that simply doesn’t work for many and hitherto unseen pressure on statutory services. These combined factors are going to have an impact beyond policy-makers’ comprehension and not just on people with ‘protected characteristics’. The other point of note, which probably isn’t unique to Norfolk, but sometimes feels so, is the absence of truly groundbreaking and innovative solutions. Saying that services will still be delivered to the vulnerable no longer stacks up against cuts of this magnitude. It requires root and branch re-thinking and where is this going to come from?  I’m not going to sit here and say that social enterprise has all the answers, but if you look at just some of the drive, leverage and social impact they have, are they not worth bit of investment locally?  What have we got to lose?

I feel compelled to share my observations about my guilty pleasure, as I’ve only just identified it.  I’ve had no time off for 18 months and people who know me will know that ‘downtime’ is not my forte.  One profound enjoyment I have is my 12 mile bicycle commute, of which more in the spring (there’s more to see in the daylight!).  However, at this time of year I find myself curiously able to relax at the weekend thanks to a surfeit of second-rate Christmas films.  I’m not talking about the good ones starring people you’ve heard of like Richard Attenborough in Miracle on 34th Street or James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.  I’m talking about the ones with actors you can’t name and never saw again after their one 80 minute outing on Channel 4 or 5.  Sitting down on a Saturday afternoon in front of the fire and a crappy Christmas film with a hot chocolate (and a splash of Disaronno – try it!) is my guilty pleasure at this time of year.  I have been struck by the four genres they fit into, so here goes.  1) Films set in cutesy upstate New York towns, permanently covered in cotton wool snow 2) films starring (usually an older person) playing the role of a relative of Santa Claus sent to be a moral arbiter 3) films where the hero/heroine is secretly royalty from a fictional country normally in eastern Europe and 4) films where the hero/heroine gets stranded in a remote cut-off village where they go on a ‘journey’ to discover their better self.  Naturally, they can be a combination of all of these and have in common terrible dialogue, cardboard good looks and more cliches that you can shake a santa at.  However unemotionally involved one feels about them, they are an utterly compelling and relaxing way to re-charge the all important batteries at this time of year.  Treat yourself, try it and have a great break one and all!

With this blog we want to show a bit about what we do and you can draw your own conclusions about the arena we work in.  A young care-leaver, James,  that we’ve just started working with has found himself in a council flat, lonely, waiting for his benefits and immediately facing eviction due to non-payment of rent.  He reached out to us for help and has openly admitted that he hasn’t been as pro-active as he could have been in getting things sorted out.  He has received confusing communications from his landlord and due to a lack of support, his own anxieties and complex system has struggled to know what to do first and to represent himself appropriately.  He was asked to attend a meeting with his landlord on 25th November and asked my colleague Alex to go with him.  She nearly didn’t go, as her diary was already full.  Thank goodness she did.  It turned out that this meeting was in fact an ‘eviction hearing’.  James froze as accusations of his inaction and reluctance to put things right were thrown at him.  It is not our style to do things ‘for’ young people.  We prefer to work ‘with’ young people to equip them with the tools for next time.  However, on this occasion Alex had to step in or he would have lost his home and been street homeless that afternoon. Alex convinced the landlord that James was engaging with us, was putting things right and wanted to keep his home.  He has been given one week to put things right pending a full decision.  Colleagues at MAP are supporting him with his benefits, budgeting and managing correspondence and he will now attend our Tenancy & Independent Living Skills (TILS) training next week.  This is the right support at the wrong time.  James, and others, shouldn’t be abandoned without sufficient support to help maintain a tenancy in a complex system of housing, benefits and moving in and out of low-paid work.  Support for a group of people five times more likely to be homeless needs to be more responsive, empathic and ‘care-leaver-proofed’ to support a group of people that any society should be doing the utmost to help.

It’s not long now to go until Christmas.  Having spend most of my adult life working with young people in and leaving the care system, I find this time a difficult one to discuss.  I am acutely, and probably overly conscious of what a fraught and frightening time it can be for many young people.  Having grown up away from parents, many adolescents decide with trepidation to spend a few days with family over the Christmas period.  Like many of us, they are pray to the media’s portrayal of an idealised image of families eating and laughing together.  When the reality is quite different, it can be a painful reminder of everything that defines you and your current situation.  I can’t help but think of our young people over this period and want to make our bit of it as festive and warm as possible.  I’m not pretending we’re compensation for families, but some moments of Christmas warmth and cheer don’t go amiss.  We’ll be decorating a tree with young people on 1st December showing as much empathy, sensativety and warmth as we possibly can.

People who know Your Own Place know that we’ve years of experience of working with fantastic young people facing all sorts of challenges as they transition to adult life.  We believe wholeheartedly that with the right support at the right time, this often difficult time can be be made smoother, happier and less difficult.  I have to admit that even I have felt challenged on this belief this week.  In the last week two young people that we have just started working with, both leaving care and both living independently at age 18, have found themselves in total crisis.  Just as winter arrives.  Both have received benefit sanctions for one reason or another, one has had their Housing Benefit stopped and both are hungry, cold and totally alone.  Apportioning blame to local agencies isn’t especially helpful here.  It’s systems that we’ve created that are impossible to navigate if you’re young, alone, unsupported and have emotional barriers to resolving difficulties.  Both young people take responsibility for their actions but don’t know where or how to start to unravel the mess they’re in.  The traipsing around, with no bus fare, inadequate clothing and an empty stomach to try and put it all right would test anyone, let alone someone who neither values themselves nor the cold empty home they are returning to at the end of it.  I’m not saying we have all the answers.  I am glad that we were there at the right time to at least alleviate the worst excesses of hunger and cold and can now start the slow process of recovery for a young person who deserves a better start to adult life.

Social investment appears to be a term that means different things to different people.  It started with old-school philanthropy when some well-meaning (usually) men wanted to alleviate suffering of people begging on the streets in the late eighteenth century.  I’ve no doubt that at an individual level early philanthropy eased individual suffering on a particular day and the philanthropist went away feeling a bit better about themselves.  It’s no different when I give a few pennies to a homeless person by Norwich station today.  Fundamentally though, it doesn’t change anything for the long term.  Social entrepreneurs want to solve big problems like inequality and poverty, not provide handouts.  Then Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) comes along and lots of big businesses and shareholders again get to do some good by making substantial contributions to third sector organisations who hopefully use them wisely.  The issue with both of these is that they are top-down and short-lived.  For more impact I like an approach that sees an ongoing partnership and shared outcomes. Let’s have business involvement in achieving those outcomes with a view to bringing about systemic changes in attitudes and ways of working.  At Your Own Place we are now actively seeking social investors who get something back. They do this not just by being active agents in our social impact, but by bringing new skills and empathy to their own workforce through volunteering, broadening the skill sets of future employees  – and we’ll allow them some good brand awareness too!  Click here for more detail.

Being new to this sector I’ve had an awful lot to learn. I previously had some volunteering experience with young people. Coming into this role I wasn’t sure about the ways to communicate as a professional working directly with young people. In my first few months with Your Own Place I’ve learnt an awful lot on this.

During my first few weeks, on a handful of occasions, I was mistaken for a young service user. I took this as a compliment, naturally. But I was so disheartened by the way I was treated – little to no eye contact and little interest in listening to what I had to say. In these moments of confusion I felt like a burden, I felt judged and I felt uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, 99% of the experiences I’ve had throughout my journey so far have been positive and there are some amazing organisations working with Norfolk’s young people. But these handful of experiences still resonate with me.

For me this was the best learning experience I could have. While professional boundaries are fundamental to the work I do, I place mutual respect at the same level of importance. We cannot build up the aspirations of young people whilst rolling our eyes at them and muttering under our breath.

There are oodles of articles in the related press about the purpose of social enterprise.  Each one confuses me afresh and I’ve decided that my conclusion is to sit on the fence.  There’s no doubt that we’ve got to be at least solvent to exist.  And we’ve got to exist if we’re going to have social impact.  It’s making social impact pay that’s the hard bit.  I increasingly wonder if the broad spectrum of social enterprises is being reflected in these articles.  I have maintained for a while that like every sector, social enterprises are a broad church.  Some, like ours, sell services mostly to local government (cash-strapped) customers.  Others, like Innocent Smoothies, sell healthy drinks to the general public.  Which of us most depends on profit?  Personally I struggle with the concept of ‘social enterprise’ and having shareholders.  Is it ever transparent to have a proportion of your profit going to private individuals?  Here at Your Own Place 100% of our profit goes back into adding value and opportunities to our interventions.  Will that be the case when we grow?  You’ll have to wait and see.

As a social enterprise we’re always looking for ways to generate income that is not funding-based.  When I started the enterprise three years ago I was determined that I wouldn’t be a slave to pursuing endless pots of funding.  Today I remain just as determined (having been that slave for three years!).   It’s about more than just not wanting to spend my evenings meeting someone else’s random deadline.  I genuinely don’t believe it results in good outcomes.  How can jumping through the hoops of a national funder create a project that meets local needs?  We have our mission and whilst keen to avoid mission-creep, in a world of lessening funds, we are required to twist our objectives to fit the requirements of a funder, some of which are sometimes frankly ludicrous in their demands.  That’s why I prefer to talk about ‘customers’.  Our commissioners are customers.  They know best what they want.  If they are buying, then they are in charge and should be getting the outcomes they want.  In times of austerity we accept that their purchasing power may not be high.  That’s why we’re looking at models of joint funding.  We can secure a proportion of the project costs through traditional funding routes and a proportion from a our ‘customer’.  That way we get their literal buy-in, they get a project better matched to their needs and it stays local and outcomes-focussed.

This week has genuinely been one of the most amazing of my career.  We’re all very good at telling everyone how amazing everything is on social media, but this week it’s really true.  Those who know me know I’m capable of cynicism with the rest of them.  However, with the development of our Tenancy Training Flat I have genuinely had my eyes opened to corporate goodwill and the scope of social enterprise to do differently against a backdrop of local authority cuts.  We have been overwhelmed by personal and corporate donations.  Individuals have recognised immediately the value of our work and reached deep into their pockets to help us.  As a fledgling social enterprise we are able to act quickly and efficiently and take advantage of these amazing opportunities.  We are leveraging support we never knew was possible.  Partners such as B&Q and Ikea, whilst wanting to help us furnish and equip our venue, now want to offer our young people work experience and develop a long partnership with us.  Is this the future?  Is social capital and social investment how we are going to make up for the shortfall of the state?  If it is, then it’s great fun, full of possibility and has the potential to reap rewards we didn’t know existed.

The Answers

1.  What is the average amount of debt (excluding student debt) that a 16-25 year old is in? £3000
2.  What is the average age young people start shopping online? Ten
3.  What is the average house price in Norfolk? £280,ooo
We’re getting tricky now…
4.  What is the shared accommodation Local Housing Allowance rate for Norwich £61.45
5.  What’s the new name of the social enterprise for young people’s supported housing services that was part of Flagship? Empanda
6.  Which ward is our Tenancy Training Flat in? Town Close Ward
7.  To the nearest 20 how many young people has Your Own Place worked with in the past year? 134
8.  What is the APR at Norwich Credit Union?  19.6%
9.  Which type of rented accommodation is responsible for most evictions?  Social or private? Private
10.  Most young people lose their tenancy by being evicted because they don’t pay their rent.  True or False? False.  Young people tend to abandon their tenancies because they get in a muddle and don’t know when, how or where to get help.

This is why Your Own Place exists.  We aim to prevent failed tenancies from ever happening to ensure all young people have a safe and secure home.

Most of the time I’m not even sure we’re talking about the same thing.  When speaking with colleagues across sectors and across the county we seem to be variously using words such as ‘philanthropy, social investment, investment, social impact bonds and corporate social responsibility’.  Like any good conspiracy theorist I’m in no doubt that there are people making this field overly complicated so that laypeople like me need their help to unravel it.  However, here in Norfolk we’re not even off the starting block.  I frequently have to telephone funders to ask whether they fund social enterprises and they don’t know themselves.  When putting together a business plan, how can it be robust if we don’t even understand the different methods of raising finance ourselves?  We’re in a vicious cycle of needing to scale-up and not having the funds to get the funds.  Many of my colleagues across the social enterprise sector are pretty sceptical about social investment and the barriers and demands that a group of people that don’t understand their socially minded world don’t understand.  Personally, I’m a magpie.  I like new shiny things and I want to explore it.  But I’m also an experiential learner and until we’ve actually tried it ourselves, I’ll reserve judgement.  But will anyone give us a chance?