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.