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Even before Covid19, a lot of our lives, passions and pastimes were online. In an increasingly virtual existence, many of our workplaces are now almost entirely online too.   In teams of people with differing skills and motivations, moving business online can pose a significant person-shaped challenge.  Small enterprises like ours, existing on a limited budget, have a huge amount to gain by automation, creating systems, using cloud technologies and systematising routine tasks. That the whole team are on the same page is not a given. There is a potential for huge risks and harms to a team when things move too quickly.  There’s no such thing as a digital native and as such any new system poses a threat to our short-term efficacy as well as a person’s motivation, satisfaction, self-esteem and ability to do their job.  This will probably always be the case.  Because it’s likely that new technology will stay ahead of even the most switched-on user.

Having incorporated Your Own Place in 2013 and being a fan of Apple as well as efficiency in things, I sought from the outset to ensure that technology in the workplace was an enabler rather than a barrier.  If my team is reading this, they won’t all agree that this is always entirely successful. However, even when it’s a bit clunky, usually due to a constrained budget, our technology is purposeful and ultimately supports us in the most important aspect of our work – to achieve (and to prove we achieve) our mission sustainably.

Tools, platforms and systems

At Your Own Place, we’re entirely cloud-based.  Thanks to so many accelerator programmes and the inspirational people I’ve been lucky enough to happen across over the years, we have adopted platforms and ideas that I hadn’t even heard of. Below are some examples, the first being Wufoo. Loathing as I am of Word forms (the team will hear my exasperation when I’m sent one to complete) we use Wufoo for all our referral and application forms, including job applications and some questionnaires.  With the magic of Zapier, referral forms are zapped to Trello, where, as a team, we can all have oversight in real time and shared accountability.  One of the most significant benefits of cloud technology is of course business continuity – especially in a small team.  

We’re a creative bunch and make good use of Canva for our social media and now for our interactive and appealing Zoom workshops too.  Further to that, our use of Infogram makes our reports extra special.  They even download to PNG for social media, to PDF for sending as well as become interactive via a URL. Behind the scenes I have a love of E-days for HR purposes. On top of this and via BrightPay the syncing of payroll with payslip software as well as banking with Auto Entry and Quickbooks is a joy when you’re a bit of a Jane of all trades and not a finance one.   There are no spreadsheets in sight!

Trello, a brilliant collaboration tool or virtual whiteboard if you will, remains my greatest love. Not a single team member, even after the induction grumbles, doesn’t grow to depend on this incredible tool. It’s the only place I can imagine being able to manage and oversee such a fluid and complicated set of interventions, people and workflow. We’re grateful for some partner portals too that do things like generate volunteer applicants via Voluntary Norfolk as well as mentee referrals via the Norfolk Community Advice Network (NCAN) referral system. Lamplight is our simple and not always user-friendly cloud-based platform (with no app yet sadly). It’s where we capture all the demographics, outputs and outcome data to measure impact. For now it serves our purpose and moving across to new databases is both a large piece of work and would have to have a cost-benefit.

Additional week-to-week evaluation narrative observations are captured on Trello and photos and media carefully and safely filed for future use in marketing and managing impact folders accordingly.  Naturally all these platforms sync to our work iPhones.  In normal times and even now, we’re on the move a lot.  It seems nonsensical to have to wait until you’re back in the office when you quickly have an idea you want to tag a colleague in or an important safeguarding update that needs capturing whilst fresh. When report-writing season is upon us, everyone is grateful for all these systems and approaches.

On top of the systems there’s our five social media channels, the team’s individual Twitter accounts (and scheduling tools) and newsletters via Mailchimp too. To say that I had planned this approach at the start would be overstating my competence. More likely I had a vision of the outcome I wanted. This vision was shared accountability, collaboration and creating an organisation in which we could all tell the story of the high quality impact we had. As a helpful baseline, what I had was an awareness from working in the public sector, of the consistent underuse of the technology that is not only available, but often free and at times, beautiful. As a tiny social enterprise, we can avoid hefty procurement processes and simply try new ideas. Don’t tell the team, but I think HubSpot might be our next investment…

Staff adaptability

So far so great.  But of course in reality it’s messier than this.  Some platforms and apps are free and some, given our current team size of seven, we now have to pay for.  And we all know that ‘free’ platforms are rarely free when considering staff time, so user experience is vital.  Conversely, using the cloud and Macs mean that admin time for maintenance is miniscule – a must in a micro enterprise without tech support.  

There are other staff costs too.  Some people struggle  – and that’s understandable and OK. Patience, appropriate challenge, accountability and a lack of blame are vital. Where there is struggle, there’s time devoted to communicating its purpose and a shared understanding of the value of the systems.  This is undertaken proactively and starts in recruitment and induction with transparency about the expectations of working at Your Own Place.  

Lots of systems means lots of changes. Changes to interfaces, upgrades, safety implications, changes to payment plans and functionality, changes to policies and regularly changing passwords. None of this is cost neutral and it’s important that the benefits outweigh the deficits.

This brings us to recruitment and the skills we now need in the team.  Whilst we are explicit about the skills we require during recruitment (and have a values-based approach, rather than qualifications-based), digital skills don’t take precedence over our core skills currently – those of working with people. They do feature in all job descriptions though. As a social enterprise and someone who is perhaps a little disenchanted with some of the historic aspects of the wider third sector, I’ve made an active move to recruit from a variety of sectoral backgrounds.  I will argue strongly that the sector, at our end of the size spectrum anyway (and perhaps not just our size) is not strong on technology and most of us are not even beginning to use its full capability. Recruiting from outside our sector then, from the private sector, has proven invaluable in the digital skills mix brought to the team.

Going into lockdown was an entirely different story.  The skills needed by the team both increased and changed overnight. Not only were there the relationships with our own community to maintain, there was our own wellbeing, staying a team and figuring out a sustainable way forward. Zoom became a way of life. We upgraded immediately and from then on it was in use all day and every day from our spare rooms (if we were lucky enough to have one). The strain and stress of introducing new cloud-based systems, just when you think you know what they are and how they work, is not to be underestimated in a small team without a designated tech lead. A pandemic is not the time for big decisions (who do you collaborate with, what new services and systems do you invest in etc), except of course it was the only time for big decisions.

Using the Strategy Triage Tool I cited in the last blog, and as a team, we worked through it together.  The mission, our end goal and our people always determine the approaches and in this case the new tools we needed.  Ultimately they are just highly sophisticated tools. The biggest challenge I would argue was not the tools, but the pace we had to move at. Not everyone can move that quickly – even outside a global pandemic. We had to have time out and to allow people to vent and cry.  These were not so much growing pains or even technological pains as changing quickly pains. 

Embedding digital & resilience culture

We’ve a ‘high support’ and ‘high challenge’ culture.  Thanks in part to the ‘high support’, we’ve created a safe enough environment to do the really important ‘high challenge’ bit too.  The pain of challenge is hugely mitigated by the asset-based approach we take across the board.  We seek to make visible the positives in people’s behaviours and approaches in specific ways.  This instils in them the self-confidence to repeat the positive behaviour and the resilience to know they can take the risks. No-one gets thrown under a bus if it doesn’t work out.

Thanks to this workplace culture and the driving force of the mission, team resilience has held up.  For me personally, having purpose made a big difference to my personal resilience. I don’t think I’m alone in that. If culture is that important to team resilience, it’s worth investing in from the start. You can neither implement a values-led culture overnight in a pandemic, nor overnight outside a pandemic. Both a digital and values-led culture have to have their roots outside the crisis, making you better equipped to navigate it when it comes.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start now – this is a marathon and not a sprint.

What about that skills mix in the team?  A godsend.  Their different approaches, different skills, different mates they could call on and even differing degrees of flexibility and working styles meant that the internal collaboration was all the stronger.  At times, team members gave up whole days just to sit with fragile colleagues and show them the ropes of a new system.  In turn, team delivery became the norm, allowing one person to operate the tech of Zoom interactive presentations and another to do the ‘people’ bit.  This has financial and resource implications in the long run, but in the short run was vital to getting through together and building confidence.

I write this as we enter possibly even more uncertainty and a second retreat from face to face delivery.  What we do know is that there’s little doubt that our current shape and approach has huge HR ramifications, whilst maintaining the balance of what’s most important – people and values. Our new Board of Non-Executive Directors contains people with phenomenal digital skills and connections.  This probably wouldn’t have been the case only a year ago.

We’re now digital for good. Whilst we will always be committed to face to face delivery for the purposes of relationship building, digital forms part of our present and our future.  For people purposes, going digital means it has to be built into our staff wellbeing, staff development, recruitment and induction strategies.  Maybe it will even become one of our core values?

I hope you’ll join me for blog three when I’ll be exploring the challenges of keeping people safe as we all jump online.

https://youtu.be/IdW-ArpknBE

In a week when our new Board of six Non-Executive Directors are being fully inducted, it feels like a pertinent moment for some myth busting.

When people misconceive what we do my first reaction is to take offence.  My second is to assume I’ve done something wrong.  Granted, we’re complex, accomplish a lot and not everyone is living and breathing it.  So the lovely Jordan Domin had the great idea of doing some myth busting about who we are.

Here goes:

1. We work with people of all ages.  In fairness we started out working with young people and the majority are still under 35.  However, we have delivered tenancy training to people with ages ranging from 17 – 62.
2. We’re a for profit limited company.  As a Community Interest Company we are asset-locked and 100% of our profit goes back into the mission to prevent homelessness.  We have paid Corporation Tax every year since we started.
3. We have no core funding.  Passionate about being a social business, rightly or wrongly I set us up with something worth selling to meet a social need.  This started out with commissions worth a few hundred pounds during which I worked two jobs.  Slowly these have grown until Covid19 struck.   
4. We don’t encourage donations.  As we’re not a charity we prefer to sell our services as business to equal business.  This is congruent with our values of equality and developing independence.  We think people deserve a ‘hand up’ and not a ‘hand out’ and as a business I take the same approach. Naturally this gets hard when people want to donate, something we reneged on during lockdown to get through the tough times – and we are incredibly grateful for those that saw us through whilst we build the next phase.
5. We work anywhere!  The beauty (and risk) of being a social business is that we’re not reliant on core funding and funders telling us what we can and can’t do.  As such, if we receive a commission from the other side of the country, and it stacks up on mission and finances, we’re in!

I’d love to know what, if any of these were a surprise to you.

As I ventured into the unknown nearly seven years ago, marketing was something that fashionably dressed and overpaid young professionals did in cool offices with slides. 

I now understand some of that (perhaps not the slides!). Not only is marketing done by trendy types, it also commands vast sums of money, huge tracts of time, and when done well, great talent. 

Marketing is a nightmare. And a joyous revelation. After seven years I might have expected to know a higher percentage than when I started. I don’t. Thanks to my unconscious incompetence evolving slowly into conscious incompetence, I am at least now aware that I know much much less than when I started. After year one I probably thought I knew about 10%. I reckon I’m about 1% now and it’s still receding. Here’s hoping I plateau soon. 

What I’ve learnt is relevant across sectors, albeit we’re marketing different things to different audiences with different values and intentions. Like any specialist area that takes itself seriously, there’s jargon. I’m fairly anti-jargon on the grounds of elitism and exclusion, whilst (as a linguist) accepting the importance of nomenclature for the purposes of specificity. 

That terms like ‘key messages’, ‘value proposition’, ‘personality’ and ‘target audience’ now get bandied about in our team is a source of great pride and self-loathing (and team-loathing of me!).

Below is what I wish I’d known, but probably couldn’t have grasped without discovering it for myself:

1. Less is more. The best marketing quote I have heard is ‘great marketing is saying most with least’. This is my sense check. 
2. Know your audience. Understand who you’re communicating to, what they care about, what your offer does for them and be lovely to them and about them. 
3. Target one thing to one audience. Our messages have been mixed and confused because our offers and customers are multiple. Focus on one at a time on the right platform. 
4. Keeping doing it. I’m a quitter. So if it’s not yielding results after five minutes I’m probably bored and want to move on. Don’t. Hammer it in for weeks and months with great images, stories, values, brand and key messages. Again and again. And again.
5. Measure it. This doesn’t have to be complex. Every platform let’s you get under the bonnet and check the analytics. The clicks, the unsubscribes, the likes and the right time of day. This isn’t rocket science and you can do it yourself. And then apply a return on investment. 

What these have in common is focus, simplicity and probably doing a bit less. 

Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself clicking on articles, posts and blogs.  I’m searching for the answer, an answer, the silver bullet, the good advice and hope.  What I find is a mixture of soul-searching, clickbait and unhelpful advice.

It was only after an eye opening conversation with a someone I respect, that I started to put my finger on a number of possible reasons why we’re making so little progress here in Norfolk.   The white privilege I possess, our utterly inept efforts as a society, my own sense of inadequacy at even discussing this and the need for change are not up for debate.  

Following the horrific murder of 46 year old George Floyd in March this year, outside a shop in Minneapolis, at the hands of an officer of the law, I did what many people probably did. I asked for help in my role and responsibility as CEO of Your Own Place.  That we are not representative of the community we serve is a source of deep shame. It’s simply no longer acceptable to sit back and wring our hands or attribute our lack of progress to our geography.  

The first reason I quickly realised, was inexperience among our business community.  Having enquired after the practical steps we could take, I was presented with a template of an Equality and Diversity Policy.  Seriously, that was it.  To think that this is what’s needed is highly indicative of why we are where we are. In short, if this all we’ve got to offer businesses here in Norfolk, is it any wonder at our lack of progress?

My reticence in writing this piece comes from fear of using the wrong words, my white privilege and my right (or not) to speak on such things. Some, but certainly not all, of this trepidation, comes from the bile that social media is at times party to.  It happened last week too. I wanted to share a pretty innocuous tweet about male mentors. Then I stopped to consider if I was allowed to refer to ‘male’ mentors.  And no, I don’t think that it’s ‘political correctness gone mad’.   I think it’s an appropriate pendulum swing that provides us with a moment to be thoughtful about the language we use when in so many arenas prejudice still pervades.  However, that pendulum has another side and that’s to stifle exploration and conversation when we don’t feel equipped to have it. 

We have recently recruited an entirely new Board of Non-Executive Directors.  Despite ‘considerable efforts’, not one person from a minority background applied.  This is a failure and one I now plan to put right.  It seems clear that it’s never been about quotas or positive discrimination at particular times (although these may have a place), but about an ongoing approach, value-system and effort.  It’s simply no good during your recruitment campaign to think you’ve done the right thing by advertising in certain publications.  Doing the right thing is doing the right thing and something proactive for 365 days a year.  That means giving people from a range of backgrounds the opportunity to get involved in your business.  This won’t happen by accident and there’s no point waiting for others to make to happen.  There’s only us and there’s only now.

So when my friend, whom I respect, says, ‘but that’s just Norfolk’ I no longer accept that. It’ll only be different when we make it so. Who’s with me?

Following our Unconscious Bias training in November with the team, I will be exploring, with our incredibly limited resource, what we can do to build relationships across communities and provide people from all backgrounds with belief that they can be a part of anything, including a respected and equal member of our team at Your Own Place.  

Like so much during this pandemic, we can’t be absolutely certain, as we’ve not been here before.

The ban on evictions in the private rented sector was announced by government on 18th March.  What seems like a lifetime ago, was a moment of reassurance for many that eviction by their private landlord was on hold (this included social landlords, although it was broadly felt that the risk of eviction was lower).

It is estimated by Shelter that some 230,000 private renters face the risk of eviction having fallen into arrears during the pandemic.  Rent arrears of eight weeks or more can legally trigger automatic eviction. 

That private landlords get a bad press is not new and often unfair.  More likely it is the result of their being ‘accidental’ landlords rather than bad ones.  Most landlords don’t own 100s of properties or make millions of pounds.  They have mortgages to pay too. And like those of us running a small business, they frequently lack the skill, knowledge and capacity to do everything well.  However, this combined with undoubtedly a ‘landlords’ market’ has led to some unethical and downright illegal behaviour too.

On 20th September, the temporary extension on the eviction ban ends.  As the lid lifts, evictions will flow. Concerns now abound that this temporary halt is simply a time for people to pack their bags as courtrooms fill with landlords seeking possession.

Proper safeguards are being called for to avoid a significant rise in homelessness.  Whilst street homelessness is always most visible on our streets, more likely are homes and families being put under increased pressure.  Families and households already experiencing worklessness, children living in poverty and sometimes violence, are about to find themselves under further pressure.  For those seeking help from the local authority for housing, if they are lucky enough to be housed they will be putting more pressure on a squeezed system that already lacks sufficient housing capacity.

The cycle of unemployment and homelessness is an all too familiar one.  Try holding down a job without a home.  The situation post pandemic however, is that it is the loss of the job that it more likely to result in the loss of a home.  For those that are lucky enough to get another stab at a home, finding an income to sustain it has never been harder and for some the revolving door of homelessness beckons.

It is for this reason we have this week launched our #privaterenters social media campaign.   With our limited resource, but great friends and champions, we will provide online, flexible and accessible information to help private renters during the looming eviction crisis. This will include anything from coaching to crisis help and signposting.

Follow us, share, comment and like on our social media – it’s a small thing to do to reach people who may need our help right now.

www.twitter.com/yourownplace

www.facebook.com/yourownplacecic

www.instagram.com/yourownplace_

The first thing I realised this week following a call with my learning programme and helping a friend with their new business, is that our sector doesn’t network. What’s that about? We’re told endlessly to work in partnership and collaborate, but this fundament of business simply hasn’t made it over to the third/social enterprise sector. Which means when it is contrived onto the end of meetings, we’re a bit rubbish at it.

Which brings me to collaboration and why I don’t think we do this well either. Because of competition? Admittedly resource in our sector has always been tight, but do we really think the high street, restaurants, phone shops or solicitors don’t have competition? Personally, I’m really excited when I find a competitor. I can learn so much, reflect on what we do and this is so much more effective than bouncing of a blank piece of paper. Trust me, what we do is do darn hard, I really don’t think someone is going to steal it!

So if you’re bridging sectors as social enterprise does, have high standards, values matter and those in your sector really aren’t interested in going for a no-strings coffee, trust me, it makes collaboration hard. It’s hard for other reasons too. Because it’s hard to do something else/more unless you’re resourced to do so without seeing immediate gain. Is that what collaboration means? And that’s the other reason it’s hard.

Do we agree on what it actually is? Are we collaborating for the immediate aim of linking the people we support up with other services (this seems to be the general definition of the sector)? That’s great, but believe me, we could literally spend all our time doing this and wouldn’t actually achieve what we set out to do. Are we collaborating to enhance our service? This requires thinking. It can be hard to see the opportunity to do this, how to do this, who to do this with and to find the time.

So, following a FANTASTIC collaboration that we’re about to announce, my reflections are actually pretty prosaic. That like everything else, it takes planning. It takes:

• knowing your mission
• knowing how you’re going to achieve it
• knowing your negotiables
• knowing what added skills, resource, time and friends you need to achieve it
• going out there and making it happen – step by tiny step

What can we do, with limited resources, limited budget, massive business challenges and right here in Norfolk?

What is utterly clear to me that doing nothing isn’t an option. ‘It’s just Norfolk’, updating our Equality & Diversity Policy and gnashing my teeth really isn’t going to cut it. I’m pretty certain that there’s no evidence base that these things have made much difference to date.

Another turning point during the Black Lives Matter movement for me was our recruitment for Non-Executive Directors. I thought we’d made an effort by pro-actively trying to reach a more diverse audience. Not one non-white applicant. It matters because it matters. The fact that we work to prevent homelessness – and arena where minority groups are over-represented is only one reason this matters. Our place as an employer and as role-models matters too. Oh, and the deep systemic and structural injustice many right here in Norfolk continue to experience.

Thanks to a chance meeting our next steps include:

• Unconscious Bias training for the team. This is about equipping us all with the language and confidence to have the hard conversations.
• Equipping us all with the skills and confidence to appropriately challenge others who come on our training.
• Using my role to reach diverse groups of people. Recruitment is not a one-off event. Putting together a schedule that includes messaging, speaking at events, pro-actively contacting a diverse range of under-represented groups to raise awareness of us as a welcoming business.
• Adding this work in to our strategic plan.
• Inviting a diverse range of people to work for us, volunteer with us and share their experiences.
• Working with our own #youthvoice group to influence other businesses by sharing our learning.
• Challenging others appropriately and holding each other to account.
• Recording incidents of racism, hate, micro-aggressions and prejudice to understand better the issues we face as individuals and a business.

So in the interests of this not being a rant, I thought I’d include a list of ways we show, in the professional sphere, how we value others. For clarity, people have intrinsic worth, whether we plan to do business with them, know them or like them and now more than ever, I believe it’s time to behave in a way that displays that worth.

We are lucky to have many champions, but in truth, there are not nearly as many customers and investors as there are armchair champions. Virtue signalling is a thing, even allying yourself publicly to a tiny organisation like ours. Like others across the business spectrum, we don’t survive on ‘likes’ and good vibes alone. We require customers, most importantly, to make an impact in people’s lives.

If I sound frustrated, then I am. The calls, emails, proposals, impact reports and phenomenal work that my tiny team compiles apparently disappear into the ether never to be seen again when we contact so many people. So I’m asking – if you’re in our customer-base (everyone – especially housing, public sector, local authorities and private sector!), or know people that are, introduce me, tag me, contribute to the conversation – and let’s make this happen. Oh, and reply to my emails please. Actions speak louder than likes.

This is how I value my team – and how I ask to be valued in return.

• I give them meaningful work
• I pay them
• I pay them on time
• If I can’t do something I tell them why
• I am responsive and available
• I listen to them
• I have difficult conversations
• I provide reasons for the ‘no’, provide feedback and acknowledge their efforts
• I involve them
• I treat them as equals

It’s not rocket science. In fact I’d argue that this is the bare minimum for people we claim to value and respect.

As if major changes and challenges in your job weren’t enough during normal times. Sometime around late April Simone and I chatted about how we could develop our own highly regarded mentoring training online. It already seemed pretty clear that that we weren’t the only third sector organisation that didn’t want the safety and competence of its volunteers undermined at this vital time.  This was a pretty big change for her and us.

Last Saturday we soft-launched online Volunteer training in collaboration with The Learning Tank. All thanks to some starter cash from George Vestey. 

Now I know I’m quite excitable and use lots of superlatives, but objectively, this blended self-directed and trainer-led online and interactive training is one of the best things we’ve ever done. 

It was hard. I’ve a team of four operational staff who have experienced the extraordinary mix of lockdown intensity and furlough uncertainty. 

I think this is our most professional brand yet and thanks to a team with a keen eye, a lot of opinions and deep sense of ownership – it shows. 

Our online Volunteer training provides the most comprehensive online training programme for a sector now on a budget.  In a world where we still need volunteers, organisations still wants to give them the best as well as a flexible, online (or blended) and engaging training programme. 

We want to ensure all volunteers feel confident and safe in their role. This is what matters most and I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of that solution. 

Take a look – we’d love your feedback: https://www.yourownplace.org.uk/onlinevolunteertraining/

What I love about this real quote is that although it’s from a lifer that we have mentored, it could be any of us in any situation in our lives.

We’re well known for being champions, ok, evangelical, about taking a coaching approach to moving people forward. So I’ll tell you a little story about how I arrived at this as a manager.

I’ve always worked with people who are a bit ‘stuck’. Again, this could be any of us at a time in our lives. In this case, it was Daniel. Daniel was 17 and being trafficked by a Soho sex ring from Leicester to London. It was also my first job in this sector. Although I’d been at uni in Leeds and lived in Moscow, nothing prepared me for the extraordinary lives people lead. It was 2004. I was 29 and didn’t have much of a clue.

I was about to move on to a promotion in a prison and I was desperate to see Daniel more forward before I left. To cut a long story short, I got Daniel enrolled at the local college in the belief that a focus and education would help. Two years later I ran into a former colleague who basically told me, it hadn’t worked out well for Daniel. In her view this was because Daniel hadn’t been involved in the decisions or the execution and all I had done was what I thought would have worked for me! Daniel has haunted me ever since.

What I now know is that not only were Daniel’s challenges way beyond my skillset and the support he had access to, but that yes, I was guilty of that which I was accused. I did everything FOR him, with little consultation because I thought creating a mini-me was probably the answer. Well, it works for me, so why not him?

What would have helped Daniel? Some good open and strengths-based questions for a start. Like what? Like:

‘Daniel, where do you want to be in a year’s time?’

‘Daniel, what are your next steps?’

‘Daniel, what are you good at?’

‘Daniel, how will you feel when you’re out of this situation?’

‘Daniel, when you’ve been in difficult situations before, what’s worked and who did you turn to?’

You get the idea. This would have taken months if not years, but he wasn’t short of brainpower or time and we’d have got to the right solutions for him, I’m certain. I’m guessing that what we’ve all just been through counts as a pretty tough situation too. Not the same as Daniel, for sure. But those same questions can help with colleagues, friends and family who may be scared, feeling stuck and want to move on too.

As a social enterprise that claims to be innovative and looking for solutions to homelessness, the last few months have been exhausting.

We are that organisation and I aspire, at this time of all times, to be more so. In this sector nothing stands still for long. Needless rounds of short-term funding, short-term thinking, changing goalposts and a bombardment, thanks to being plugged into a world of opportunity online, of ways to be more effective, more digital and more connected, mean we never stand still for long. Should we?

Pre Covid19 the longest period of funding, and therefore financial security, was 18 months. Looking back on those heady days we had to move at pace, had huge funder pressures and all whilst planning for what would happen when the funding ended. Planning for a sustainable future is a project in itself and yet it’s often something that takes a back seat. Funders always ask for how the project is going to be sustainable when the funding ends. How you plan this when you’re just keeping your head above water, I don’t know. 

As someone who loves new ideas, I’m prone to liking finding the new solutions. What we need however is security that allows us to test them to destruction against a backdrop that isn’t fraught with under-resource. We usually have to move on before we’ve built the evidence base we all need because the money moves on first. 

A colleague reflected to me recently that we never stand still. Not good at pause, reflection or self-congratulation, I accept this challenge. Balancing it with the need for speed at a time when our sector is being decimated will be more of a challenge. 

I’ve learn’t a lot and you’ll be thrilled to know that like any parent, I’m about to make a whole new raft of mistakes as we recruit new Non-Executive Directors! But as the Cycle of Change goes, you have to know you have a problem before making change.

It seems that there isn’t a company or charity or social enterprise out there that doesn’t at some stage have issues with its Board. And let’s face it, it’s not like we’re accused of tax evasion, paying shareholders too much or poor governance. It’s just that we’ve not been as effective as we might have been.

So what would I have done differently or will do better this time?

1. Shoot for the stars from the start. It’s natural to surround yourself with the people you like, like you and are broadly behind the venture at the start. After all, when no-one has heard of you, you need all the support you can get. So I’m grateful, honestly I am, but I should have been more ambitious in the attention we could have garnered.
2. Create a buzz and clear expectations. Getting the Governance paperwork right takes time. I contest that some of this can’t be done at the outset, because you don’t know enough about what the enterprise is. This doesn’t stop you defining the role, its parameters, modus operandi and being really clear up front about this – and how it will likely change.
3. Include them, play to their strengths and induct them properly. This is a balance of course. In order not to have just retired people on your Board, they’re likely to be busy too with their own careers and lives. Open and honest conversations about how they want to communicate, how involved they want to be and where they can add value will be vital to getting them most out of them and for them.
4. Know the skills you need. Discuss this with others, as it likely involves spotting your weaknesses, gaps and being audacious in where you want the business to go. It contributes to getting them best from them too.
5. Love them. Show you value them. Not just bottles of bubbly at Christmas, but by the impact that have had and what you can do for them in return.
6. Short terms of office. Actually I got this right. We can set the term and as I like freshness and we don’t stand still, it makes sense for everyone to avoid getting stale or complacent that people move on to the next thing.

I can’t wait to introduce our new team to you. With the right skills, commitment, passion and reasons for being involved, their impact will be huge.

Fifteen weeks and fifteen blogs in lockdown is finally over. Last week was ‘back to school’ for us at Your Own Place. For many, back to school has so many other resonances right now, and I can only imagine how this uncertainty feels for many.

So what do you do when you’re welcoming a team back from furlough to massive uncertainty, changes in your direction and all on top of their own personal challenges?

As someone who is pretty focussed, resilient and driven it can be easy to assume that others are too. The truth is that we are experiencing this next phase differently, just as we did the lockdown phase. Whilst HR departments are better in recent years at taking a holistic approach to employees, this has never been more important.

My principle aims are to be clear and honest. When so much uncertainty abounds, I meet chaos with calm. Without a shadow of doubt there is a great urgency to what happens next. This can still be delivered with a compassionate approach. If compassion, empathy and tolerance aren’t your values, I’d say now is a good time.

Second for me is honesty. There is almost nothing that you can’t share with your team. It might not be a great message, it might even be too late because it’s out of your control. What’s more it may be a message that is difficult because of something you got wrong. Honesty about this will be appreciated – not making mistakes right now seems pretty implausible, to not to admit them would be weirder still.

Creating a safe space may seem to take time. One where employees can ask the silly questions, voice their anxieties and be open about their struggles. It can be achieved quickly. By treating people decently, avoiding blame, praising specifics and taking ideas on board you can quickly create a safe space. A safe space is one where the team get to make the business a better one. I reckon this is a pretty virtuous circle.

Authenticity is talked about a lot and I’m still figuring this one out. The best anecdote I’ve found on this is one I came across recently in The Culture Code. A jet plane, almost certainly destined for almost total wipe out, is saved by the captain’s three words to his crew. ‘I need you’.

It’s been a funny old month…

at Your Own Place. The team has been furloughed, I’ve had some time off and things have gone quiet. So of course that sounds like an easier month than usual – fewer interruptions, time to strategise, no personal crises and time to focus. Whether it’s the perversity of the ‘grass always being greener’ or the seemingly endless array of challenges, it’s been far from an easy month.

Among my leadership network, the same feelings are echoed loudly. I think I’m ok in a crisis. I think I’m rational and fairly calm. Routine bores me and new ideas excite me. As such, as we entered the extraordinary time of lockdown, my brain went into overdrive with ideas and opportunities. Naturally I felt guilty and opportunist about this. But it wasn’t about me – rather about meeting a heartbreaking and overwhelming need in new ways for the new world.

We did well in the first few weeks and months We secured income, friends old and new, ideas and opportunities appeared varied. Potential partners, supporting the same people we strive to support, needed our ideas, our capacity and our positivity. Filled with optimism for things moving quickly, so did we.

Some of those opportunities rumble on, some have stalled and some are simply no longer relevant. As things return to a very odd normal, I feel vindicated in moving quickly and securing a modest amount of income. That income (not including proportionate reserves) runs out at the start of August. I feel vindicated because, as we enter what I regard as phase two of this crisis, the urgency may be less, but the challenges greater. Money is drying up and businesses, local authorities, housing associations and others appear to be turning inward. Turning inward to save their own skins, find their own new normal – and survive.

I can’t possibly know if we will survive. Our prolific social media sometimes gives people the false impression that we’re bigger and more resilient than we are. The fact is we’re a team of fewer than six full-time staff pushed to the limit with our own bills and mortgages to pay and personal challenges.

We are still looking for those new opportunities and for us to be here in twelve months time, they have to be realised.

So I can’t wait for the team to return tomorrow, to resume our work and be reminded of the incredible impact we have, even when it feels like not everyone else values it quite as much as me.

And we’re seeking new skills

We haven’t even finished our recruitment for an Operational Manager and we’re seeking yet more people with the skills we need. 

Against a backdrop of ongoing turmoil for many, it remains the case that we must strive to be decisive. This is not the same as being certain. Whilst decisions must be clear and have a plan, we may also accept that it was the wrong decision and/or executed poorly. Curious then that we champion the iterative and lean approach in business and yet damn the government for doing this with Track and Trace. Agreed, a great deal of money has been spent and the stakes couldn’t be higher. I just can’t help think we would laud a business for honestly changing tack. Government isn’t a business however, is democratically elected and is tasked with saving lives. 

I digress. Our decision is that we need new people with new skills. To that end next Monday will see a recruitment campaign for more than one Non-Executive Director, including a Chair. In truth these were people we needed before this crisis. Now is however the right time to press forward. This was something that sat with me for a while, not wishing to exploit the current crisis in any way. 

The greater good wins however and this is about the end justifying the means (this never justifies anything incidentally). 

We will be seeking Non-Executive Directors who:

– share our values and approaches – you too will wish to be a part of change that is bigger than you or us. 

– want to give back to their community in an active, equal, participatory and accountable way. No nodding dogs or sleeping ones either!

– bring skills and expertise in (social) entrepreneurship, finance, business, education, digital delivery, scaling, HR, legal, chairing, policy, social equality, local authority, housing & homelessness. 

– are well connected, prepared to utilise those connections actively and pro-actively champion Your Own Place. 

– are prepared to be accountable, step up, challenge and forge great relationships. 

I am so excited by this and can’t wait to join you on this next step.

So I’m back at work. I’ve had two weeks leave and skilfully managed to choose the two worst weeks of weather this summer! Seriously, I needed a break whilst the team break on furlough. Following twelve weeks of very full-on work, I’m not sure I had quite the holiday I needed. More time alone and in my home made switching off difficult. As did the incessant news and analysis that I kid myself I can’t afford to miss.

I have of course found some time to reflect between indoor DIY jobs. Wouldn’t it be brilliant to jump ahead ten years and look back at our individual, collective, sector and political decision-making at this time?

One of the things, with just a little perspective, that has surprised me, has been the speed with which words like ‘pivot’ and ‘Re-start’ started to abound. The glass half half full among us cling to the opportunity for life returning to our businesses and communities. The glass half empty contingent see too many reasons and anxieties and hold back.

Back then at the end of April I felt I knew too little to make big decisions, whilst recognising the psychological and financial reasons for doing so. Making some decisions was probably going to be better than making none at all.

What still surprises me among all the conversations of Re-starting and pivoting is how little talk there is of the health of our people. Not only has the case for employee engagement in the broadest sense never been higher, but doing so with compassion, empathy and honesty is surely non-negotiable. Our lives literally depend on it.

This feels like a missed opportunity and disappointment, kind of blog this week. Did anyone else experience a curious moment of this? A moment of inspiration – an almost euphoric moment of possibility in amongst all the horror of the last three months?

In the last few weeks I’ve used the word ‘mandate’ a lot. It feels like the moment is now. It also feels like that moment is slipping away.

In the early days I grasped the nettle. I went out with a focus to secure income. With some success. The mix of responses from traditional sources was telling. Some that I had low expectations of simply excelled themselves and were generous, empathic and frankly amazing. I’ve never known anything like it.

Others, disappointing. People I thought we had good relationships with didn’t get back to me, obfuscated, tied themselves up in knots and seemed unable to grasp the magnitude of the situation. I suppose the good news is that there is still time – the sector is going to be in crisis for a while yet!

As a social enterprise I found myself having thrilling conversations with potential partners and customers, creating an offer that met their needs even when they couldn’t define them. Considerable time was taken to develop, cost and discuss new offers of help at a time when we had people to support who were in crisis.

Was I wrong to follow those leads? No. Dead ends and kissing frogs are part of the business. But was I naive? Yes. I now feel so. I thought key agencies had changed – would move quickly, would respond, would empathise with our knife-edge existence and would make an effort not to waste our precious time. Not so sadly.

The briefest of windows when there were new opportunities to work together has now almost passed. With many partners we are back to not just a new normal, but some of the bad old normal too. Back to ill defined ideas, months of communication only to change the goalposts and an inability to move with the speed that’s needed if this sector is going to survive and people are to be supported.

The time is still now, just. It’s not too late and we do all have a ‘mandate’ to be brave, be a bit different and do the right thing.

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This one should be called furlough, but it’s not. Because after ten weeks of hard graft we enter this period of pause with huge expertise and knowledge under our belts. Now of course, everyone is a digital expert. We’re not. We’re experts at us, so that means finding the digital solutions that chime with our values, approaches and desired outcomes.

Here’s what we’ve learnt in turning TILS+ into DigiTILS+ and Mentoring Training into eMentoring Training.

• It’s worth spending some time asking around. Ten weeks ago not everyone was a digital expert. We were all finding our feet and many had not heard of Zoom. We spent time asking people across sectors about different platforms and how they integrate.
• Decide your negotiables. our values are always our non-negotiables. This makes it so much easier to make decisions about what the best platforms are for your needs.
• Don’t be precious. You’re going to make some mistakes, get some things wrong and have to start again – it will be better for it.
• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There’s time to make it perfect (don’t worry, that’s always the final aim), but imperfection at the design phase is fine.
• You’re innovating at amazing speed. Literally no-one else on the planet is more of an expert at this moment than you. Don’t be hard on yourself.
• Enjoy it!

Thanks to a kind share of a Volunteers’ Week post on LinkedIn, I got to thinking about volunteering in the current crisis.

There seems little doubt that there have been truly magnificent (don’t like the term ‘hero’) efforts by so many to support those in their time of need. Of course we work with people whose time of need is always, but for now, that’s a separate issue.

Many now understand the power of community, kindness and compassion in ways they perhaps didn’t before and I welcome this. As unkindness drips back into our lives and our sector (as others) fights for its survival, I can imagine there being a surge in new volunteering opportunities as well as willing volunteers.

Whilst I too welcome this, as running an organisation that is not only going to see increased demand for our Volunteer Mentors, but will be seeking not one, but two Non-Executive Directors later this month, I am cautious too about some of the messaging around volunteering.

We can be in little doubt of its benefits for CV building, self-confidence and skills development. For many however, giving up time for free is a privilege (just look at the profile of your average volunteer).

We must not build our volunteer army as some cheap substitute for jobs that pay. People, especially young people living independently without parental support, need decent jobs in order that they might have the privilege of volunteering one day too.

It’s a much overused analogy, but boy, what a rollercoaster. Is this why it’s so exhausting? As a CEO founder entirely responsible for the continuity and wellbeing of a small enterprise, the lows have been very low indeed and the highs, well, not really high at all. They can’t be when there’s so much suffering.

This week is no different in being a rollercoaster, or to use another metaphor, a mixed bag.

The big news is that the team is going into furlough for the month of June. Whilst this is contra to much of the world emerging from lockdown, as a social business, we’re not much of the world.

We were needed as the crisis occurred. We stuck around to support people finding their support networks whisked away overnight. This was the right thing to do.

As a result of sticking around we were able to both secure new income and devise new digital projects to sustain us. We’re going to be needed more than ever so adapting fast was the the only possible response.

We’re still a tiny organisation with so much passion, commitment, innovation and drive. As such we can’t wait to come back refreshed and rejuvenated to an emerging world where we will be able to resume face to face work. It is financially prudent to save some money to ensure we stick around.

Further to this tough decision, our job advert for a new Operational Manager goes live today. Nothing says ‘we’re here to stay’ like recruitment. What an incredible new chapter for someone as they join a social enterprise that has undergone digital transformation in two months.

And finally, at the end of June we will be recruiting not one, but two Non Executive Directors. An enterprise with new vigour and direction needs new people, passion and skills too!

And FYI, I shall not be furloughing – there’s too much to do! But I shall be having two weeks leave at the start of June.

This is not goodbye – this is see you in July!

We’re thrilled to announce that Norwich Consolidated Charities have provided Your Own Place with funding to continue our community mentoring service.

New funding means we can:

1. Continue to support all those existing mentors and mentees who are still meeting virtually at this vital time.

2. Continue with new referrals and make new face to face (socially distanced) and virtual matches.

3. Complete the transformation of our mentoring training into eMentoring Training – to be launched fully and available to third sector partners by 1st August.

4. Recruit and train new community mentors from September to meet the sadly growing need that people face.

5. Continue our flexible approach to taking referrals of mentees from all agencies and backgrounds – up to the age of 35 and in any kind of move to independence.

We can continue to make a difference to people’s lives, provide an impartial, confidential, non-judgemental and empowering force for good in our community.

Thanks to Norwich Consolidated Charities.

Floating in the sea with nothing to cling to. That’s very much how it feels. I know I have to do something, but there’s nothing to grab, no-one to ask let alone knowing what the right questions are. At night in my dreams I am metaphorically calling in the middle of the ocean with little chance of anyone answering.

When I awake, like all of us, I am bombarded anew by many of the horrors of this current situation – we are all exposed to it in different measures. My anchor is found in action. It always has been. What’s most different is the need to ‘do’ in such a vacuum of uncertainty. However, I’ve concluded that waiting isn’t going to deliver a great deal more certainty. In fact waiting is quite likely to result in our demise. So ‘doing’ is the way forward. Below are some insights into our version of re-starting and ‘doing’ during and post-Covid19.

1. If there was any certainty early on it was that a) there was no place for pride and b) we were to be physically distanced for some time.

2) To act on the first certainty meant asking for help, asking for donations and being honest about our vulnerability as a tiny social enterprise. This monumentally paid off with being one of the first out of the blocks with a crowdfunding campaign. The money it raised was modest, the attention it grabbed, less so.

3) Acting on the second certainty, meant virtual delivery was a non-negotiable and this was what we could seek income for. Within a week we forged ahead with this. Thanks to work with The Carnegie Trust on digital exclusion, we were able to do this whilst holding close the awareness of the barriers people face to getting online.

4) Not losing sight of our mission and values. This has been vital as we appraise the relationship between our mission and the route to achieving it. We have been clear in getting off the fence and remain utterly committed to face to face delivery – no one size ever fits all.

5) Listening, engaging and embracing the opportunities to be part of national networks of expertise and conversation. This enables us to consider the economic landscape, government priorities and opportunities to keep delivering on our mission – albeit in new ways.

6) Keeping a log of learning. On everything we have developed, delivered or done different in the last nine weeks, we have kept a log. This way we are able in the coming weeks to conclude strategically what we keep (and modify), what we pause, what we prioritise anew, what we ditch and what we don’t know.

7) All of this is now in a three-phase timeline. We have a Plan A through to end of August. Plan B will take us to the end of the financial year. It is my hope that in January 2021 we will have enough information to deliver a coherent Plan C for April 21-22.

All the usual caveats apply to this ‘plan’, but in truth it’s little different to any forecasting in a small business – it’s subject to change.

We talk so much now of mental health awareness it can almost feel like ‘job done’. Everyone’s an expert and yet there is so much more to be done.

In the last two months at Your Own Place we have supported people right on the edge. One extraordinary volunteer mentor was an absolute life-line to a young man desperate to be free of pain. This takes its toll on everyone. As a social business the team are managing this on top of the additional anxieties resulting from this pandemic in our personal and professional lives.

At this time I don’t know where people find the emotional energy for twitter spats, dogma, cruelty or criticism on social media.

This shortest of posts is to plead kindness. No-one know what anyone else is going through, feeling, thinking or experiencing. Their truth is unique. Sure, their actions may not always make sense to us, but we can’t control them. We can only control us, so let’s moderate our responses and put them on the ‘kindness’ setting.

Why do people suddenly care about inequality?

Maybe it’s that I exist in my fairly leftie echo chamber, maybe it’s that we’ve never had more time for virtue signalling or maybe we’ve actually woken up.

Having always worked with people experiencing more barriers than me, I’ve had many a holiday overshadowed by unanswered questions. Never happier than when ‘accidentally’ straying into the parts of town that The Rough Guide cites as ‘best avoided’, I always return from a holiday wondering about the socio-economic profile of my destination.

This curiosity is in my DNA. Latterly I’ve sought to articulate the inequalities I see without shouting, accusing and alienating. Dialogue is best.

However, over the years I’ve found myself sitting next to people at smart dinners in denial. They deny that there is true poverty locally, or that children in Norfolk are digitally excluded and can’t get online, or that people are regularly missing meals to pay the rent. If not denied, people are blamed for making ‘poor choices’.

So where has this outpouring of sympathy and even empathy, emerged from? You don’t have to travel to another continent or even another city to witness true poverty – the data of life expectancy, unemployment, homelessness and other life outcomes have always been there.

Suddenly we’re all noticing what been happening all along. And we’re responding. Whether it’s clapping for an NHS that most of our county voted to underfund, outrage at people having to rely on foodbanks or surprise that children don’t have digital devices to access their education.

Literally none of this is new or news. Knowing all of this can anyone be surprised that BAME people are twice as likely to die of Covid19?

I understand however that people are now aware, and I am grateful. This is an opportunity.

As surely as we have passed the peak of Covid19 and a slow return to the office beckons, we are faced with more decisions than ever.

I for one would not wish to be part of the government team developing the Recovery Plan. This feels like the new unknown, much as this whole situation was the new unknown just seven weeks ago.

Whilst we are presented with complex logistical challenges, interplaying with human psychology, medical advice and a tanking economy, we have the most extraordinary opportunities too. Not least to prevent rough sleeping and homelessness. These are quite clearly now choices.

Over the past six weeks we have seen an unprecedented effort to get rough sleepers off the streets and into temporary accommodation. With huge success in that simplest of measures. This notion of so-called ‘chaotic’, ‘hard to reach’ people making ‘life choices’ to sleep rough has been proven to be the ideological smokescreen it always was. This is choice and we’ve been given a choice too. To keep them safe and provide what’s needed to continue a trajectory away from rough sleeping.

I’m delighted at the number of conversations I’ve had with local housing authorities and associations genuinely committed to this way forward. We must act now not to lose this momentum and once in a generation opportunity to end the scourge that wrecks lives.

Something positive for you this week. We are thrilled to have accepted a £10,000 donation from Saffron Housing.

The vagaries of the contacts we make and the people we touch on our journey through life perplex me more by the day. At this time more than ever we find out who our friends are, who has watched us from afar without contact and who needs us.

Staying open means more to me than you can know. It means myself and the team can continue to support the people that matter most.

What we’re doing to achieve this.

1. TILS+ is going digital – still interactive and fun

2. Still taking referrals of mentees and matching them to mentors

3. Supporting existing mentors as well as mentees to get digital and on the phone and keep talking

4. Working with YOPAB (Your Own Place Advisory Board) to test new ideas – making us better!

5. Turning our mentoring training into an online (but still interactive) course

6. Re-start. Training for the business community in re-building teams, involving teams in strategy – with compassion

So we’re still here. I’m feeling terribly lucky. Whilst a furlough ‘holiday’ is quite appealing right now, most of us define ourselves, at least partially, via our professional lives. Founders probably do this more.

As we evolve (I can’t bring myself to use the word pivot until I understand what it means), I’m coming to recognise that in this crisis, certain things are advantageous about being a micro enterprise. Of course there are disadvantages too, but here are the five things it probably makes easier.

1. Communication. Whether it’s weekly briefings, zoom meetings or 1-2-1s, it’s easier to convey the messages. It remains hard to balance what people need to know, support them and avoid overload. Broadly I’m I believe in honesty and transparency for team trust and this guides most communication decisions. People are grown ups!

2. Pivoting. Yay – there it is! Seriously, new idea generation and execution is easier with fewer moving parts. In the space of six weeks we’ve gone from an idea to the launch date of a new service, with the principle of a an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) being followed.

3. Supporting your team. No one gets lost when you’re a small team. Just as I always say, no one size fits all. Some may feel connected via the WhatsApp group and others need a call or 1-2-1. It’s important to recognise it’s different for different folk. This is easier to implement when you’re mini.

4. The cash! Whilst we’re a team of six and five years ago the thought that I needed the best part of £15k a month just to pay staff would have terrified me, I’m grateful today that we’re still tiny. I feel for the medium size enterprises who need 100s of 1000s of pounds a month to pay salaries, don’t have assets and rely heavily on fundraising. Modest pots of funding will make a massive difference to us and our sustainability.

5. Working virtually. At Your Own Place we’ve always operated via the cloud. From Trello to the Google Drive, Zapier, payroll and finance software – we are 100% on the cloud. This made the transition to home working seamless, as it has always been. Many of our systems remain free and we’re costing the new ones (premium Zoom for example).

As we move into the next phase out of lockdown, I still don’t know what the future holds and whether our size will remain an advantage. For now it feels like it is.

The great leveller fallacy.

This is not an equal opportunity pandemic. If you didn’t see Emily Maitlis on Newsnight last week, it’s worth a listen.

Whilst the disease comes for everyone, our ability to survive it, self-isolate and avoid exposure to it is very unequal. Let’s look at those briefly in turn. Next week I’ll be sharing some of the experiences of people not directly impacted on, but also suffering unequal impact.

Survival: the correlation between poverty, health, obesity, other diseases and life-expectancy is well documented. These are people whose immunity is likely to be compromised and less likely to survive. In Chicago their BAME population is already massively overrepresented in the number of deaths. It will take time for us to unpick this here.

Self-isolation: if you’re in a smaller space, quite frankly things are going to be a lot worse. This includes our prisons as well as supported accommodation and the units our rough sleepers now find themselves in. We’re hearing horrifying case-studies of people in their prison cells for days, those cells without a toilet (you figure that out) and then a small unclean space when they can have time out of their cells. Enough is known about life expectancy and the health of our prison population to know that their immunity will not be robust.

Avoiding exposure: this is really hard as we can’t go out. I visited my dad (with essential shopping) last week and he was sitting in the garden. Life felt little different in his comfortable house. Those in flats, with children, in overcrowded housing and without outside space will be suffering inordinately. This isn’t about the miserableness of inadequate housing, however. It means people are more likely to go out and be exposed to the virus.

It’s not fair and chances of survival are not equal. We can only begin to speculate about the long-term impact on people with least. And that’s going to include a lot more of us now.

Aren’t humans just brilliant? How quickly we adapt to a new way of living and working. I consider myself amongst the most inflexible of the race and nearly wobbled with my daily routine.

However, I’ve maintained my 5am start. My early morning getting on top of emails, meditating, exercise and a good breakfast seem more important now than ever. Most days this is the only me-time I get. I even enjoy the small shifts in when and where I have breakfast. Where I have failed is my evening walk. Unexpected work calls mean this is most likely to be shelved.

So many of us have settled uncomplainingly into moving between a small number of rooms. Over the working day we share endless WhatsApp pictures of our cats/dogs being cute for our work colleagues, morale-boosting memes and pictures of lunch. All of this new normality amongst the most incredible upheaval around us whilst juggling totally new workstreams. We are brilliant and must remember this.

I’m not one of those on social media that’s going to pretend there haven’t been wobbles. Of course there have. And there will again. That adaptability and of course good old empathy, really help here. With no rules, there’s no solution that can’t be found.

My focus remains on generating revenue. Like others in the sector, be that private, third or fourth, we’re not making any money. Furloughing remains on the table in tandem with radical new ideas and making applications for restricted income.

On the one hand if feels like the clock is about to be turned back about four years. Everything I have done to move away from restricted income has turned 180 degrees. There is a risk again of reliance on restricted income to survive. As we enter week four these larger strategic decisions must be made. Is this viable, right for a CIC, right for our offer and right for our impact?

A huge number of unknowns remain, especially about the state of the economy when we re-emerge. It seems likely that there will be a colossal need for what we do. Will anyone have the money to turn that need into a demand for our services? Should we then turn to restricted income because it’s the right thing to do – to meet a need?

The vast goodwill of donations, generosity of time and flexibility will surely cease this summer. What then for a trading social enterprise and a CEO that had set her heart on this model?

This blog isn’t inspirational and won’t give you any answers. Many out there are showing how resilient they are, writing blogs on ‘command and control’ and how they are adapting. We are being told how to behave in a crisis by army chiefs and are all experts at managing remote teams.

How can we possibly know if we’re doing it right? This is the start of a whole new world. It’s the toughest moment in many of our lives – as humans. Not as leaders, parents, loved ones of people suffering – as the human race. We’re winging it. Those of us that fake it ‘til we make it will continue doing so. Those of us with imposter syndrome will continue having it.

No-one knows what the future holds. My brain can cope with a day, a week and maybe a month right now, but when we’ve been thrown into such unknown turmoil for an indeterminate amount of time, that’s when I start to struggle. Not emotionally as such, but cognitively. I’m good in a crisis. I’m calm, know what to do and give fairly clear instructions. I can make decisions and am lucky enough to have a team who have faith in me.

As to what next, I’ve no idea. And don’t believe anyone that says they have. The truth is a vast number of enterprises like ours won’t survive. It’s impossible not to see a future without extraordinary levels of austerity. A future blog will write of a better world where we value people more. I hope.

Right now we haven’t even peaked in Coronavirus cases. There is more unknown hardship to come. I am no different to you. I am trying to look after myself and others, to read voraciously about the support on offer, keep busy with new ideas development and make as informed decisions as I can for the best.

You might see less blogging from me. Then again, you may see more. Because I don’t have a crystal ball I don’t know. Good luck to you all. I hope very much to see you on the other side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out more at www.mentoringtraining2.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full details on how to apply can be found here.

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

[Read more…] about Have you really met Stacy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good message this Christmas perhaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should someone running a tiny enterprise be worrying about this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who have been your mentors and when?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course people love being asked questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9pm. Zzzzzzz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week from Simone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what is the Plus?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s in?

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

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

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

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

And she’s another talented artist!

#AddedValue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love travelling by taxi and train!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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