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Posted By Liam Russell,
25 March 2022
Updated: 25 March 2022
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Veronika Susedkova to talk about leadership, strong peer networks, and her work as the Regional Women Centred Advisor and Trainer at WomenCentre. Veronika is a Clore Social Fellow from the 2020 Emerging Leader Women and Girls’ Programme.
Can you give us some background information about your role and your organisation?
I work for WomenCentre, we’re a regional organisation providing services to women in Kirklees, Calderdale and Bradford in West Yorkshire. WomenCentre is also part of a project called Connecting Opportunities that works with new migrants to develop their skills and opportunities to find work, as well as to improve their English, and become more embedded in local communities.
I have the role of regional advisor and specifically focus on women-centred ways of working. So rather than doing a frontline delivery, which is what our organisation mostly does, I work with women on the project and our project partners to use our six principles of women-centred ways of working in all that we do. When the pandemic happened, we adapted those principles into digital and remote or blended ways of working. This includes asking women we work with questions such as: ‘How long should online sessions be?’ ‘What time?’ ‘What topics should we cover?’ ‘How structured should sessions be?’ After going through those questions and more, we came up with a very practical toolkit on how to set up online service delivery so that it supports women migrants. Part of that means acknowledging that there is always support that has to take place face-to-face, but it’s also about finding a blended model that meets the needs of the women we work with.
You mentioned an ethos of women-centred working, can you expand a little bit on that term and what it looks like?
Starting with enabling women’s access to services, one of the key questions we get asked is about digital poverty and inequity of access to technology. To approach this issue in a woman-centred way, we ask women we work with what they need and then structure the support and funding around those needs. For example, providing childcare during online appointments or covering travel to attend in-person appointments. Luckily our funders are flexible enough to allow us, as the people working and volunteering on the ground who understand how the services work, to move the budget provision around so that we can practically buy things that women need.
It also means being a bit more understanding about the challenges that women are facing at home, and that there are often barriers beyond their control that are preventing them from accessing services. For example, a family might only have one computer, and a child might need it to complete their homework, which might prevent their mother from logging into her group session. Or, for instance, a woman might share that she doesn't have time to engage with the programme right now because of other responsibilities and commitments. So, it is our job to listen to these experiences and work around them. Instead of simply moving on, we would listen to women and pause the programme, sending them regular updates until they’re ready to re-engage with us.
There must be some incredible insights from such an approach! As a result, are you noticing a marked difference to your work and the lives of the women you work with?
Yes, we are. We also want others to benefit from these insights and work in more women-centred ways. Our most recent report, launched in July 2021, highlights digital ways of women-centred working, and is based on lived experiences and contributions from women migrants we have worked with. We focus on some of the challenges the pandemic and policy responses present for women migrants by adapting and developing women centred working with women migrants for digital spaces. We would really like for organisations to use this report and the additional resources as tools to enhance their support and improve the lives of women migrants.
What great leadership! Could you share a little bit about your experience on the Clore Social Women and Girls’ Emerging Leader programme?
The programme was centred around feminist leadership principles - it was something our cohort learned together and can now use a common language for. We may have already been applying some of the principles, but weren’t able to articulate them as such. On the programme, we supported one another in a safe space (which we co-held and co-created) - that made us be braver and gave us confidence and the language to call things out that we didn’t agree with.
Another major impact of the programme was the power of peers. Perhaps that aspect was more enhanced within our 2020 cohort because it was among the first Clore Social programmes that had to pivot to run fully online due to the pandemic. It felt great to be part of that transformation, although it would have been so nice to have come together in person! We were able to get to know each other and build a network that we came back to throughout the programme.
Having a group of skilled women with such a breadth of experience who are able to apply a feminist perspective, outside of my usual amazing network of women, has been really helpful. Together, we looked at how we can support one another on an ongoing basis, not just as friends but also as women leaders offering our skills within the sector and beyond.
Having that peer group and knowing we’re not alone is incredibly powerful. We also hear this from the women we work with; having a group of women with similar experiences, hearing their challenges or how they’ve navigated the system, and understanding that they aren’t on their own is priceless.
What does good leadership look like in that case?
Good leadership is feminist leadership. There is a lot to that, but for me it’s about examining what power we hold in the system and how we use that power; it’s about self-awareness and recognising one’s strength as well as areas for improvement, and appreciating the same in others, and also trying to find effective ways to communicate with others. Power and communication could also be connected to lived experience. And there’s also allyship, which can be indispensable.
We hope to run our next Women & Girls Emerging Leader programme in 2022-2023. To find out more about the programme, and register for updates, please click here.
You can find Veronika on Twitter @VeroSusedkova and on LinkedIn.
You can find WomenCentre on Twitter @WomenCentreCK, Facebook and LinkedIn.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
05 November 2021
Updated: 13 May 2021
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Kylie Havelock, a 2020 Clore Social Emerging Leader Fellow. We talked about career transition, authentic leadership, and her work as the Head of Product at Citizens Advice.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about your role and some of the projects you’re working on?
I’m the Head of Product at Citizens Advice, which is a senior digital leadership role. Like many third sector organisations, we’re modernising our services to match people’s expectations in the internet-era. Citizens Advice was established over 80 years ago, and until 10 years ago most people would come to get advice in person or over the phone. But, with the advent of the Internet, people are now able to access the information they need directly through online channels. So, my job is to support that transition and make sure that we're investing efficiently and strategically in digital transformation. When I started in my role two years ago, we were in a real growth phase. Since then, I've been supporting lots of product and platform teams to deliver new services, replace old services, and really start to embed digital in the organisation as a whole.
Because of the services that we provide, we’re an organisation that always becomes more critical during periods of national crises, and COVID is no exception. During the past year, it has been a huge endeavor to keep pace with the rapidly evolving pandemic; creating and updating our content in line with changes in government policy and the latest advice. We’re also constantly checking for the changing issues that people are facing. For example, this year there has been a huge uplift in the number of people applying for Universal Credit or enquiring about their employment rights due to furlough or redundancy. The data that we gather through our frontline adviser-led services and our website reflect the trends of what's going on in society at any given time. Through this process, we’re trying to make sure that the technology enables us to reach people where they are - particularly underrepresented groups. The work that my teams are doing isn’t just about the website or administrative systems, it’s about fundamentally enabling the processes that connect people with the help that they need.
Can you share a little bit about your career trajectory, and how you transitioned into the sector?
I moved into the charity sector when I joined Citizens Advice two years ago. Before that shift, I had worked in various government roles in the U.K and Canada, and while I loved working in the public sector, I felt further away from the front line than I wanted to be. When you're in a big central or federal government department, you can feel many steps removed from the day to day reality of the people you’re serving. However, I also knew that I wanted to retain a role that had a big reach, which is why I started to search for a job in the charity sector that operates on a national scale. I was really fortunate to find a position at Citizens Advice which helps millions of people every year through face to face, phone, webchat, and online services.
At the time, I was really keen to build a network of colleagues, friends and acquaintances in the sector, and went in search of a community. That’s how I came across Clore Social and the Emerging Leader Programme, which was an opportunity to grow my leadership experience and learn from others.
Since graduating from your Clore Social Fellowship in 2020, which elements of the course have stuck with you the most?
The first thing that comes to mind is the ongoing support and sense of community that I get from my cohort. We’re still in touch regularly, and it's been such a joy to get to know that group of people who I admire greatly. Even if it’s just having a phone call to have a chat about something, it can be so useful to speak to someone who’s outside of your organisation and has a new perspective.
The second thing has been seeing how much of a turning point the course has been for people in terms of setting goals and seeing them through. So many of my cohort have progressed within their organisations or gone on to new roles, and it’s been really impressive to see. On the day that we graduated from the programme, I set myself the goal to become a trustee of another charity so I could lend my time and experience to helping people in a different way. Since then, I've achieved that, and I got a lot of support from my cohort along the way. I don’t think it would have happened without them.
Can you tell us a little more about your trustee position and what that experience has been like?
After I set that goal for myself, I attended a free webinar hosted by Getting On Board, which encourages young and underrepresented groups to become trustees. That gave me the tools to start looking for a role that matched my skills and values. I eventually joined the board of Local Welcome whose mission is to design global digital infrastructure and shared rituals for community leaders. Initially, this translated to helping refugees feel part of a community by getting a group of people together to cook and eat meals together. During the pandemic, they haven’t been able to host meals in person, but they’ve been able to pivot towards some other initiatives that foster community and are locally based. That sense of place has become so important, especially during the pandemic. I think that the past year has made a lot of people, myself included, realise how disconnected we have become as a society from where we live. The team at Local Welcome have blogged about their inclusive trustee recruitment process, which was a pleasure to be part of and I’d recommend as an example for other charities to learn from.
One of the themes we’re focusing on this year at Clore Social is authentic leadership. Would you be able to share some reflections on authentic leadership and what it means to you?
Authentic leadership is incredibly important. I've been very fortunate, especially in recent years, to work for organisations that I've felt comfortable to be myself at work. Around the same that the time that I moved from the private sector to the public sector, I began to be public about being gay at work, which I’ve embraced as a really formative experience and have been part of many brilliant LGBT networks. Citizens Advice is probably the most inclusive place I've ever worked, which aligns with our mission and is also reflected in the people who come to work with us. Our new Chief Executive is an excellent role model for the kind of empathetic, authentic leadership that I would like to emulate myself.
Since the Emerging Leader Programme, I’ve also been more open about my leadership style with my team. In the past, that type of communication could make me feel vulnerable, but I’ve learned from the people I lead that being explicit about my core values and what’s important to me is a more authentic way to lead.
You can find Kylie on Twitter @kyliehavelock and on LinkedIn.
You can find Citizens Advice on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
You can find Local Welcome on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
09 July 2021
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Nic Kidston to talk about what good leadership looks like, her career journey, and her work as the Deputy CEO and Head of Programs at Peer Power Youth and a Trustee of Clore Social leadership. Nic is a 2016 Clore Social Emerging Leader Fellow.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about your role and your organisation?
I’m the Deputy CEO and Head of Programs at Peer Power Youth, an empathy led youth charity working in health, justice, and social care. Our vision is of a world where empathy led services and systems support all children, teenagers and young adults to achieve their dreams and lead their best lives. We work with incredible individuals and young people with lived experience of trauma and adversity to support them to heal, find power in their stories, and develop the skills to influence youth services and become future leaders. We also work to influence system change, and have an embedded co-production approach throughout everything that we do. That means that our young partners, which is what we call the young people that we work with, are very much part of our team and have a voice in all of our processes and service delivery design.
In addition to my role with Peer Power Youth, I’m also a trustee at Clore Social Leadership, which is a really exciting opportunity to use my experience as a fellow and a senior leader in the social sector to influence the direction of the organisation.
What projects are you currently working on?
At the moment, we’re working on a really exciting project with the Youth Justice Board, where we’re investigating participation across youth justice services alongside our young partners. We’ll be launching a research report soon, as well as a series of resources to support embedded youth participation into the services themselves. We’re also working with the NHS on health and justice work and violence reduction programmes, where we go into secure settings and engage with the young people there to create a culture where their voices can be heard, respected, and responded to.
During COVID lockdowns, young people in secure settings often felt even more isolated and disconnected from their support systems. So, during the pandemic, some of our young partners who have been through the criminal justice system reached out to them to provide some emotional connection and empathy from the perspective of a peer who has been through the system as opposed to an older professional. Behind all of our projects, there’s a driving force of empathy and an understanding that the young people that we work with often have been through serious trauma, and that trauma needs to be acknowledged as a part of their healing process.
What does good leadership look like to you?
For me, good leadership is about getting the best from the people around you and the collective impact that you can create together. I believe that the best leaders grow other leaders, which is something that really solidified for me during my Clore Social Fellowship. The peer support, tools and techniques were really a rocket booster for me in terms of using my personal values to create impact. In my current role, I always find myself coming back to the concept of generous leadership: how can I harness the strengths of young partners and give them the support they need to create change? It’s almost like talent spotting, and identifying the skills and different ways of thinking that people bring to the table. Because of that, a crucial part of good leadership is making sure that there are really diverse voices in the room and ensuring that everyone is in a supportive space where they feel comfortable to contribute.
Similarly, good leadership is also about keeping your team united and focused on common goals, vision, and values without being the person at the front with all the answers. One of my key passions is for connecting individuals to larger change by taking small ideas, piloting them, trying them out, and building on them. That might involve working collaboratively in partnership with other organisations to create impact across the social sector and beyond.
Tell us about your leadership journey; have you always held those core leadership values, or did you discover and develop them over time?
I suppose I’ve always held those core values, but there’s something empowering about the journey of owning them. The Clore Social Fellowship gave me the permission to really delve into my values and examine what I’m good at, and what I needed. I also found the leadership framework of knowing yourself, being yourself, and looking after yourself really meaningful. Before starting my position with Peer Power Youth, I took a break from work to spend time with my family, and before the programme, I don’t think that I would have been able to give myself permission to take time out. During coaching and through self reflection I realised that it was the right time to make that decision.
When I started thinking about where to go next, I used those values and core skills to guide my job search, and when the opportunity with Peer Power Youth came up it felt like a perfect match. At the same time, the opportunity to become a Clore Social trustee opened up, and I saw an opportunity to really make a difference in terms of expanding digital training and making leadership opportunities available to everyone.
What are you looking forward to?
We’ve had a crazy year, and despite that the social sector has been able to achieve some remarkable things and has made huge strides in digital transformation, collaboration, and focusing on personal wellbeing. In the short term, I’m looking forward to meeting inspiring colleagues and young partners face to face. I feel like we’re at a really pivotal moment in the social sector where we have to take big steps to make change happen, and one of the ways to do that is through united, strong leadership across the sector.
You can find Nic on Twitter @nicston and on LinkedIn.
You can find Peer Power Youth on Twitter @Peer_PowerUK and Facebook.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
18 June 2021
Updated: 16 June 2021
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Phil Barron to talk about building a charity from the ground up, collaboration, and his work as the CEO of Young Westminster Foundation. Phil is a 2020 Clore Social Experienced Leader Fellow.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about your role and your organisation?
I was recruited as the founding CEO of Young Westminster Foundation in 2017. We’re part of a network of young people's foundation's, otherwise known as YPF’s, that respond to the severe cuts in funding for youth services and youth clubs. The Young Westminster Foundation acts as an infrastructure for the local area, supporting small charities, youth clubs, churches, and anyone who works with children. We leverage funding from corporations and major funders to give grants to our member organisations. Our main funding priorities are addressing serious youth violence, supporting young people's emotional well being and mental health, and combating youth unemployment.
In addition, we also advocate for youth sector workers as a way to maintain access to these services in the future. From a leadership perspective, we broker partnerships between the charity sector, local authorities, and statutory services. In a sense, we act as the linchpin in the middle, which can be quite a challenging but rewarding position to be in.
Can you share a little more about the process of getting the Foundation up and running?
I was the Foundation's first employee, so when I started it was just me and my laptop. I enjoyed the challenge and creativity of putting together the strategy and developing our membership offer. That being said, it was equally as scary as exciting. As a leader, I also had the opportunity to build the team from the ground up. For me, leadership, it's about being able to be adaptive and empower people instinctively, depending on their experience and skillset.
Since then, we’ve grown to over 100 member organisations, working with children, young people in the borough of Westminster. During the pandemic, our main challenge has been growing as an organisation without working face to face. As a young organisation, team development, team training, and good communication have been crucial to supporting growth.
What projects are you currently working on?
Because we’re quite a small, new organisation, we were able to be very agile to respond quickly to the needs of young people during the pandemic. Digital leadership is more important than ever for our organisations and youth workers to be able to reach young people. At the Foundation and through our partner youth hubs, we’re employing young people to help drive that digital leadership and empowering young people to use the skills that they know best. One of our most significant projects over the last 12 months is called Digital Futures, where we’ve partnered with Westminster city council and fundraised to secure 800 laptops for children and young people in 48 schools.
We’ve also launched a report called Our City, Our Future, which was the culmination of 18 months of research, where we worked with a group of young peer researchers to undertake a needs analysis for young people in the borough. What was clear in that report is that young people want to be more active changemakers. However, they often feel that they aren’t listened to, so that’s something we are responding to.
One of the things Clore Social is focusing on this year is the collaboration, can you share any lessons that you’ve learned?
As you’ve picked up on, collaboration is key to everything we do. In the organisation, we often talk about a ‘community of interest,’ where we bring people together who share a common interest of creating better opportunities for young people in Westminster. There has been a bit of historical mistrust between the third sector and the private sector, but that has changed a lot in recent years. For us, that shared purpose of supporting young people in the borough lies at the heart of all collaboration that we do between organisations.
Another key lesson is to approach the people that you’re working with as individuals who are working towards a common goal rather than organisations protecting their own interests. During the pandemic, I think that we’ve actually seen private businesses recognise the adverse impacts of the pandemic on young people more than ever before. Many of the businesses that we work with have increased their investment over the last year, which has been fantastic, but there's still a lot of work to do. In terms of working with other charities, funding challenges have also made collaboration more crucial than ever before, because you can’t be sustainable while working in silos.
You graduated from the Experience Leader programme in 2020. What parts of the programme have really stuck with you since then?
I found the action learning sets and coaching really powerful, because they helped me adopt a coaching style in my own leadership. For me, the programme solidified my confidence and gave me the space to reflect on some of the more difficult aspects of my role. As a CEO, it can also be easy to internalise things with limited objective external support. The Experienced Leader programme gave me access to a network of other leaders that I hope to see a bit more after the pandemic.
You can find Phil on Twitter @FylipoB and on LinkedIn.
You can find the Young Westminster Foundation on Twitter @YoungWestminstr and Linkedin.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
28 May 2021
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Oliver Standing to talk about collaboration, systems leadership, and his work as the Director of Collective Voice. Oliver is a 2019 Clore Social Emerging Leader Fellow.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about yourself and your organisation?
I’m the director of Collective Voice, which is the National Alliance of drug and alcohol treatment and recovery charities. We advocate for drug and alcohol treatment and support, and its transformational power that enables people to recover and reconnect with their families and communities.
The majority of the work we do is outward facing policy and advocacy work, so we advocate with civil servants, MPs, and ministers. This means putting in written submissions to government policy consultations, speaking at roundtable events and at conferences to advocate for the needs of people who use drugs and alcohol. Our other goal is to support the drug and alcohol sector itself so that it focuses on collaboration and good practice sharing. We run events and work on projects to bring people together and create shared positions and approaches to topics that people may hold very passionate positions on! To do this, we try to use a systems leadership approach which identifies a common core that we all agree on but leaves space around the perimeter for people to do their own work on issues of particular interest.
What current projects are you working on?
At the moment, we’re running a number of working groups that bring together national providers of drug and alcohol treatment with colleagues from the NHS, public health commissioners from local government, Public Health England, and people with lived experience to focus on a specific issue. One, for example, is looking at benzodiazepine use, which is a family of drugs that present a particular set of challenges and are often used alongside opiates and alcohol. We’re investigating if there is more we could do to support people who use benzos, develop good practice and ultimately reduce the harms that those drugs cause.
In June, the government is due to release an incredibly important independent review of drugs by Professor Dame Carol Black. As the national alliance of drug and alcohol treatment charities, we’re working with other national alliances and people with lived experience to prepare our response to the report and help shape how we believe the system should work and how we can work together. So, we’ll be making the case for what we need from the government, how we want to interact with Public Health England, and how we can be more ambitious to help more people in meaningful ways.
It sounds like you’re in a really crucial position in terms of pulling all of those partners together. Could you share a bit of wisdom about fostering a culture of collaboration?
If you’re an alliance structure, then by definition you’re working on bringing people together and looking for the overlaps in the work that different organisations are doing. In that sense, your role is to generate a safe space for collaboration, peer support, and discussion. I’ve found that collaboration is about relationship building on the one hand, and about a clarity of shared purpose on the other. As individuals, we can model that behavior by being open minded and bringing people in to talk about successes and difficulties. We can also be generous with our time and resources. If you want to collaborate with people, you have to understand them in their role as leaders, clinicians, or commissioners, but also as human beings. That really comes from spending time with people and listening in meaningful, reflective spaces. In my experience, a lot of what makes collaboration work is characterised as ‘soft’ skills or process, but without those relationships to glue everything together, the ‘harder’ things like governance structures or position statements tend to fall apart.
You graduated from the Emerging Leader Programme in 2019. Which elements of the course have stuck with you the most?
When you think of professional development, you perhaps think of pursuing a qualification, and when you think of personal development you think of something more human and emotional. While I attended the Clore Social course in a professional capacity, a lot of the learning was quite personal, and I really benefited from the reflective elements of the programme. I graduated with a greater understanding of my strengths and weaknesses as a leader and a greater sense of purpose, or at least a greater ability to try and develop a sense of purpose. For me the sumtotal of that was greater confidence in myself as a leader but also a human being within the social sector.
The course was also a doorway into the concept of systems leadership, which really resonated with me as a more realistic approach to leadership (this article lays out some of those key principles). Being a leader within one's own system is about working with other leaders and constantly balancing a commitment to one’s own organisation (and one’self) with a commitment to the wider system. It’s about stepping forward at points, but stepping back at others, and being honest about what we know and what we don’t know. I learned that it’s possible to reconcile a desire to be a confident and effective leader with an ability to say, “I don't know, I don't have the answer.” Unlocking other viewpoints is absolutely critical to this approach.
What are you excited to see in the next couple of years?
At the moment, it feels like on almost every level--as family members, as citizens, as professionals--we've interacted with the world through the lens of the pandemic. I suppose like any disruptor, it has shaken things up and caused some real challenges and inadvertently catalysed some positive change along the way.
As an example, during the pandemic, a lot of people have not been able to physically attend drug and alcohol treatment services and get support from a clinician or a counselor, which forced a move towards digital delivery of interventions through Zoom or on the phone. In many ways this has been a welcome change because it increases the convenience of receiving services and opens services up to more people, and I’m excited to see this expand in the years to come. There are lots of people who don't want to walk through the door of a treatment center because they don’t have time, or there's not sufficient motivation, or they feel it would be stigmatising. So, if you can be supported at home in your nice warm flat on a rainy afternoon, talking to someone over a cup of tea, you might be more likely to reach out and make a positive change in your life, which is brilliant. However, the new technology is not without its limitations, and for some people the face to face support is essential, and some service providers are finding it very difficult to connect with some people remotely. So, in the next few years I’m excited to see the sector hold on to the best bits of the progress we’ve made with digital services, without losing sight of the need for traditional support as well. We must move towards a broader, person-centred view of care and support which meets people where they are with just the right intervention and approach to catalyse change.
You can find Oliver on Twitter @OliverStanding and on LinkedIn.
You can find Collective Voice on Twitter @collect_voice and Linkedin.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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