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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course people love being asked questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9pm. Zzzzzzz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week from Simone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what is the Plus?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s in?

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

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

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

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

And she’s another talented artist!

#AddedValue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love travelling by taxi and train!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to know each other 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking our time will be worth it in be end!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it’s definitely the way that we do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d love your thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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