I love you more than a sausage, or even a fish finger!

Writing this blog has made me reflect on my relationships with others and my past experiences which have made me who I am today. A couple of weeks ago I told my son that I loved him more than anyone in the world. He told me that he loved me more than a sausage, or even a fish finger! To him this is a very big deal – sausages and fish fingers being his two favourite foods. But in my earlier blog I was writing about how we parent and how we give unconditional love to our children. It didn’t occur to me for a moment to reflect on my own experience of parents. Those that know me know that I live with my mother now. A decision we made together last year, to offer mutual support and friendship and be there for each other but also have space to live our own lives. My relationship with my mum hasn’t always been good but that was never through her doing. She loved me unconditionally for all of my life but after I was attacked at the age of 15 I rebelled against her love and moved out of our family home. She begged me to come back and I refused which in hindsight I know made her distraught with worry. But I didn’t love myself enough to be loved by someone else.

My dad on the other hand was a different story! I didn’t know until a few years ago that my dad had mental health problems – was I aware of it as a child? I don’t think so, but who can tell. Does this mean I was pre-disposed to depression and anxiety? Quite possibly. Does it mean that I don’t have a good history of relationships with males in my life? Definitely.

My dad was and quite possibly still is a truly messed up person. Is this his fault? Almost certainly not, but it did have a profound effect on me from an early age. He treated me and my older brother completely differently – me he called his “warm fuzzy”, I got hugs and cuddles, laughter and fun. My brother wasn’t so lucky. As far as I knew I was always his golden child, I thought that he loved me unconditionally and that he would always be there for me, but sadly I was wrong. My parents divorced when I was 11 years old and at the time I remember being very matter of fact about it. If they don’t love each other, they shouldn’t be together. When I was 18 years old my dad met and married his new wife. We didn’t exactly hit it off – I thought she was a know it all and she didn’t feel like a warm person to me. But that is often said by step children isn’t it? When I got married in 2005 I was on top of the world – didn’t every girl dream of having her family around her while she pledges her love to the man she has chosen to spend her life with. I told my dad and immediately he said “I won’t give you away you know”. So matter of fact, as though I should know this without it even having to be said. When I asked him why not he said that he didn’t feel he was a good dad. This shocked me as he had always felt so wonderful to me – Warm Fuzzy – wasn’t that my relationship with him?

I started to accept it and over time I felt good about asking my mum to give me away instead. Then came my wedding day and my dad duly arrived with his wife to help us celebrate our marriage. But he sat at the back of the church and half way through the wedding meal he got up and left saying he had a long drive home. My friends and other family thought this most odd but they didn’t say too much at the time. I went away on honeymoon for 2 weeks and when I returned there was a letter on the doormat from him. My first thought was that he was writing to apologise but how wrong could I be. The letter actually told me that he had decided he didn’t like being a dad and so was cutting all ties with me. To say I was shocked would be the understatement of the year – I was devastated. I wrote back to him and begged him to come and meet with me and talk about it and he agreed. We met in a hotel bar somewhere half way between where we both lived and had a coffee together. I can recall the conversation and the setting as if it were yesterday as I had never been as disillusioned in one conversation as I was then. He told me so matter of factly that he had decided he only had enough love in his life for one person and he had decided that person was his wife. He told me it made his skin crawl when I hugged him and he felt horrible when I tried to hold his arm walking down the street. I asked him if he would care if I was run over by a bus walking out of the hotel and he said that he would be sad but that was about it. And that was that – he walked away and got in his car and I have never seen him since. If I try to contact him he ignores me – email, letters, phone calls all bounce back as he has moved house, become ex directory and changed his email address. So why am I writing about this in my blog? It isn’t to purge myself of the memory – years of therapy have already dealt with that – it is to bring us back to the question of how it happens? What happened in my poor dad’s life to make him so devoid of love for his own child that he could act in such a self destructive way? I feel so much sympathy for him because he is missing out on so much love from both me and my son and the other people in our family.


I would like to think that no person is born this way – that we are all a product of our environment. And with this in mind it brings me back to the core belief of my social enterprise roots – that everyone deserves the chance to start a fresh, be accepted for who they are in the here and now and believed in, so that they can help themselves.

How did this happen????

How did this happen?

People that know me also know that I am a really committed mother to my five year old son Leo. He will no doubt feature in this blog as his amusing observations on the world often lighten my day and sometimes really make me think. There is an aspect of running a social enterprise that supports disadvantaged people that never ceases to shock and horrify me and that is the lack of self belief and self confidence felt by people of all ages in our society today. There have been days when the stories of the people we support have made me close my office door and cry – I thought my life had been messed up until I talked to them! How did we come to this point when a bright and intelligent young person can stand before us and say in all sincerity that they are “Completely useless”? When did it happen that it was ok for someone with a learning disability to tell me at age 45 that no one had ever asked them what they want to do with their life? How does an employer sleep at night when they interview a person who has work experience and references coming out of their ears working as a kitchen assistant, and then turns them down for a  pot wash job as they “don’t have enough experience”? We know it was really because they had a criminal record.

I have seen parents stand in our reception area while their child sits in a corner looking dejected and lost, then hear the parent say to our support staff “I don’t know if you can do anything with her, she’s not good at anything”. WHY?

When I made the completely selfish decision to have a child I undertook to love my child unconditionally, to provide for him, to do whatever it took to keep him safe, teach him right from wrong and bring him up as a respectful and engaging citizen. This might sound like pie in the sky but I don’t know why it should. It isn’t about class, or wealth or opportunities – it’s about love and care and the basics of human need.

A few months ago Leo was obsessed with Buzz Lightyear – he came home from school one day and said “Buzz Lightyear says – Two Amphetamines and Beyond!!” At first I was falling about laughing at how amusing my son is but then it struck me – where on earth did he hear a word like amphetamines?? He doesn’t know where, he was four at the time. Would I have known that word when I was four? I don’t think so. It seems funny until you think it through. 

Don’t we have a duty of care to our children to allow them to be children for as long as possible? We also have a duty to encourage, love and support our children to be all they can be, regardless of ability, label or box! I hope you agree that we do too.

We all having amazing abilities – we just don’t all know what those are – but we also don’t need to be defined by our limiting factors. If I was working in any private sector firm like a supermarket or a coffee shop, no-one would tell me about the history, “condition”, “diagnosis" or general past of anyone else working there. Why should it be different when you have a disability or disadvantage? People are all people, they all want things for their present and their future, but if we don’t give them the encouragement or the opportunity they deserve they will never achieve anything. If we tell people “You have a mental illness and will never recover from it” then what hope are we giving that person? If we decide that people with disabilities and facing disadvantage need to be corralled into one place to “work” in a sheltered environment, we will never help people to find independence and self advocacy.

Open Door Policy Part 2 .......

Part two…

So what did all of this mean? On the one hand it meant that our employment support team had to ask the right questions to ensure they were providing good risk reduction but also person centred support to each and every one of the people that worked for us. On the other hand it was like a whole new world to a huge number of people that had always been treated like a category in the past. We didn’t care why you were here, we cared that you wanted to give it a shot. We had people with mental ill health, learning disabilities, homeless people, carers, people that did poorly at school, people with physical health conditions, ex-offenders and single parent families. They were all in it together; no one knew their history on the shop floor because it wasn’t relevant. Supervisors knew enough to support each person well in their job.

The effect of this way of working was profound – people were no longer treated according to their history or label, they were treated as an individual that had something to contribute. Some people worked 5 days a week, some worked 2 hours a week – it really didn’t matter. Most important of all to me was that people made friends with each other and started to support each other, even though they knew nothing about each other’s past. An ex offender was supporting someone with a learning disability and a person with a physical health condition was supporting someone that had been a carer for over 40 years. It really was amazing. Society has so many ideas of what is right and wrong nowadays – we like to say that we are protecting people but are we really? Is it not more the case that we are just scared of being caught doing something wrong? People have asked me how we made sure we did enough risk assessment to ensure we were protecting vulnerable adults – my argument to that is that we were carrying out the most valuable assessment of all, one of making sure a person was treated as an individual. Of course we had to make sure that “vulnerable people” were being protected but in working the way that we were we ensured everyone was being protected as much as they possibly could be. I was not considered a vulnerable person when I went out and was attacked by a man in Glasgow. He took away my childhood and my self esteem and made me into a frightened young person with no regard for their own life. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, we cannot wrap the world in cotton wool. We can absolutely do our best for every individual – and we have a duty to encourage people to use self advocacy and help us to help them. 

What is an Open Door policy all about?

Part One…

One of the areas of social enterprise that makes our company stand out from the crowd is our open door policy. Most social enterprises and charities want to exist to support one cause, or one client group. Think of all the big name charities and social enterprises that you know and you immediately associate them with a group of people or a single issue. This is where we differ significantly from the rest. When I was first looking to set up a social enterprise the idea was formed alongside a group of people with lived experience of mental health care services. Our first business plan was to run a social enterprise that would do training and user led research on mental health conditions. That’s all changed when we went on a visit with Social Firms UK to an enterprise in Liverpool. It was a café in a hospital site that was run by patients and ex patients and they offered us an informal tour and some Q&A time with their founders. When we presented our idea for Service User Research and Training one of them said “So you just want to make money by trading on being ill”. It was such a simple statement but it had a profound effect on me. Is that what we wanted? Did I spend my life defining myself by my mental illness and my history? Most certainly not. It was later that day and evening that my thinking completely changed. Why set up a social enterprise that was meant to help people move forward in life and then completely focus on what for some had been their most negative point. Was it not better to forget the history and the labels and to start looking at what we all want from life, what we can give, what our talents are? And from there The Healthy Hub was born. The original business, before merger with DCE and before we created Working Gardens CIC was all about customer service and the hospitality industry.

One month before we opened the doors for business we put a very vague advert in the local paper and all it said was:

Do you consider yourself disadvantaged in the workplace? Do you want support to turn your life around? If you want to know more, come to our Opportunities Open Day” and then some details of time and venue. The day arrived for the Opportunities Open Day, we hired a venue across the street from our central Lincoln building and set up some information stands about the types of jobs people could do in our business – Kitchen Assistant, Shop Assistant, Receptionist, Conference and Banqueting Assistant, Admin Support Worker etc. In our business plan we had said we hoped to support 48 people in the first year. One hour before the doors to the venue was due to open we already had 40 people queuing down the street! We had underestimated the need on a grand scale. By the end of our 8 hour Open Day we had nearly 70 people signed up to work for us. All of them considered themselves to be disadvantaged in the workplace but we weren’t asking them for huge amounts of detail as to why. We asked them a different sort of support assessment question – Why do you feel you have struggled to get or maintain a job? The answers were many and varied but the will was universal – people wanted to help themselves; they just needed a bit of support. 

Setting the scene....

So who am I?

My name is Rebecca, and I am a 37 year old single parent living and working full time in Lincoln in the East Midlands. Four years ago I set up a social enterprise called The Healthy Hub CIC (THH) which was designed to offer supported employment opportunities to anyone that considered themselves disabled or disadvantaged in the labour market in Lincolnshire. I was motivated to set up The Healthy Hub after struggling with my own employment issues after a period of mental ill health in my early twenties. I was also working with a great group of mental health volunteers to run an involvement project for a charity which was continually struggling to find money to exist and support people. Over the past four years I have worked with an amazing team of people to set up more social enterprises and to merge our social enterprise company with a national social enterprise group called Dimensions Community Enterprises CIC. Together we have supported hundreds of people to gain skills, confidence and employment. Our social enterprises are innovative and different and have a fairly unique theme running through them because they tend to trade in regular, customer facing businesses rather than seeking contracts and grant funding to exist. People don’t need a referral to come and be supported by us and they don’t need to tell us their entire life history to work in one of our enterprises. Many people have found this inspiring and empowering and we hope to be able to expand and grow our support throughout the UK in the coming months and years. Our businesses are many and varied and range from cafes and gift shops to commercial cleaning, holidays and gardening businesses. All of them provide transitional supported employment to disabled and disadvantaged local people and all of them are trading with the public on a daily basis.

A bit about me and why I got into social enterprise

From an early age I was a very independent young woman – at the age of 8 I jumped out of my dad’s boat on a sailing trip because he shouted at me for doing something wrong! I just announced “I’m not putting up with this” and I jumped out and swam to shore. From there I just became more and surer of my mind. At 13 I got my first job and I thought I was so grown up. I was working in a hotel on a holiday island in Scotland and all of my friends were in their late teens and early twenties. At the age of 15 I moved away from home and into the hotel, I was drinking too much and generally ignoring my own health and my future prospects, but above all I thought I was so grown up and so emotionally sorted. Then I was attacked. It happened in slow motion and I knew what was coming before it struck but it changed my life forever. At first I told no one, like many victims of assault I kept it to myself and tried to struggle forward with fear and an increasing sense of depression leaking into my everyday life. I started to live my life as if it no longer mattered, I would push my safety boundaries to the very edge just to see where that edge was. I never found it!

At 21 I could no longer escape my mental ill health, I was spending a terrifying amount of money on credit cards, drinking and generally abusing my body and mind and I had a full break down that resulted in me not working for some time. I was put on anti depressants for the first (but by no means last) time and was referred to a counsellor. For a few years I started to get things back together but I didn’t really deal with my issues and I continued to lurch from periods of wellness to periods of extreme self harm. At this point I was working in hotels and restaurants as a chef and then a manager. I found it increasingly hard to live a life that was not authentic and lacked a real purpose and through a series of events I left the hospitality industry behind and got a very junior job as a support worker for a great mental health charity in Edinburgh. A few years later I moved to Lincolnshire and started working as a project manager for a mental health project that was designed to give people using the mental health NHS Trust a say about service design, development and delivery. This was when I first truly came across the world of the Tick Box!! I was starting to come across so many people that truly wanted to turn their lives around, get off benefits and get back into employment or education but they didn’t fit the criteria for my project so I couldn’t work with them. I had a sharp reminder of my time in hotels when I would go off sick and then hear people joking about how people “like me” just needed to get a grip and stop whining. I was also spending at least 50% of my time as a project manager chasing funding to keep my project going. But I also met a really amazing therapist that totally understood my issues. She was trained to support victims of rape, abuse and incest and she changed my whole life. She helped me to see that I had come as close as I possibly could to thinking I would die. She helped me to work through that and to understand why I lived my life in a mess and how to move forward.

My life started to get better and become more in focus. I was at a conference in 2007 and I met a guy that started talking to me about social enterprise – the idea just blew my mind! Running a business with a social purpose would tackle all of my issues of needing something authentic whilst still allowing me to use my previous work history for a positive reason. I could be in charge of my own destiny and start a business that would truly help people to help themselves, not focus on what they couldn’t do, but would believe in and trust people to start from their own beginning. During this time, I was working with a mental health service user led group in Lincolnshire called Linking Voices and I also had a colleague in the charity I worked in that had been a bank manager in a previous work life. We got to work and started to plan our social enterprise. Many people helped us along the way, some by asking us awkward questions to truly make us think about our purpose and some by showing us what we could do really badly and so needed to avoid. We assessed our local skills, talents, work histories, local markets and business needs and within a few months we were applying for funding for a new business called The Healthy Hub CIC.

In November 2008, The Healthy Hub CIC opened its doors and found a queue of people waiting to help us to help them. We started with one year of grant funding to refurbish our building and about 40 volunteers. Over time this has grown exponentially and we now employ around 80 staff and support many more. We have had an amazing journey, touched many lives and learned many lessons but above all we are still here – stronger than ever and running a group of social enterprises that are changing people’s lives for the better. We don’t claim to know it all, we do claim to do it differently from most and we also know that the world would be a better place if more people focused on the social return rather than the same old tick boxes and meaningless stats. This blog won’t be a politic debate. It also won’t be a big headed soap box for telling everyone how to do it – how could I possibly know yet! What it will be is a series of observations on life through the eyes of a social entrepreneur who has had the most amazing journey to this point and knows that life and social enterprise will continue to get better and better as we move ahead. I may make comments on my son Leo, 5 years old with the head of a 50 year old and the apple of his mother’s eye (of course). Sometimes his outlook on life reminds me of the beauty of innocence and self belief based on unconditional love. I may also make comments on wonderful people I have met and inspiration I have taken from amazing social firms, individuals and ideas I have come across on my travels. I hope it will be funny in parts but I know it will be honest, and in a world of deception, spin and hype I hope this will be valued.