I bang on about the importance of lived experience a lot. I mean, a lot! No amount of academic research into economic hardship can hold a candle to the expertise in the hands of people who have ever had to ask where their next meal is coming from. That’s why I’ve always built paid roles for peer workers into all the projects I’ve developed since I left The Big Issue in 2007. They speak the right language. Sometimes literally.
Often, the challenge is helping people find the confidence. We don’t ask them to be role models but once in post, their very presence changes the perception of what we’re there to do. People believe in the possibility that maybe we can help and that they could help themselves.
I’ve never thought it applies to me. Yes, I was once a kid in a single-parent household, in a now-flattened council flat on a dodgy estate in South London. We struggled enough financially to warrant a stand-off with the junior school choir mistress who insisted on white shirts and not the grey my mother had bought.
As I write, I realise I do actually blog about this experience a fair bit. Even that choir teacher appeared in a LinkedIn post last year. For Whom the Phone Rings, describes other ritual humiliations she saved for the poor kid in the grey shirt.
INNOVATE
Last December I won funding from Innovate UK to develop a new programme for people in financial hardship. It was funding specifically for leaders from groups not well-represented among their peers. It’ wa’s for outsiders like me. But as I ticked the boxes, it felt like, well, a box-ticking exercise.
It requires spending some time role modelling. I’m not even sure what that means. Do I fill a room and presume to know to be better than the people there? Did growing up poorer, or gay, make me a better leader? I don’t buy it. I think it provides people with labels and distractions like ‘you would say that because…’ and excuses not to get on board with my agenda.
What’s different, for me, though, is what I choose to lead on. Over the years, I have consciously cultivated a sense of righteous indignation. Channelling a deep-seated resentment of that treatment at school or homophobic comments at work into things that level the playing field for everyone suffering social injustice.
It’s why the Innovate funding has been invested in an app that helps those on low incomes to prepare better for older age and retirement, and also to swerve diabetes.
INSIGHT
Did I mention righteous indignation? Men on the lowest incomes have a life expectancy ten years shorter than their wealthier counterparts. For women, it’ i’s eight.
In this case my experience gives me an edge as an innovator. As a leader, it is a motivator. The app identifies the things that make a difference in people’s life expectancy. Its first job is to get this information to people who seem to feel persistently left in the dark. But I understand how people I grew up with defer to authorities like GPs or feel everything is hopeless and, therefore, pointless. Where policy-makers and service providers dismiss people as lacking aspiration, (as if they choose to die younger), the app will arm them with knowledge. Simple steps, quick wins, nudge theory and a sense of getting one over on the world all feature.
Try the Planning for Older Age quiz here.
WHAT WOULD BORIS DO?
In his book-long charge-sheet, How They Broke Britain, James O’Brien describes how public schools like Eton still churns out future ‘leaders of the empire’. With no empire, too many set their sights instead on Downing Street without any discernible qualifications other than feeling it is their right.
Far from just ticking boxes, this round of Innovate UK funding is creating a level playing field. Perhaps the goal is to show what’s possible. Maybe it’s not about being a role model. It’s just about representation. Giving kids in council housing today a sense that they could run a big business tomorrow. Even if they have to overcome more barriers along the way.
On one reality TV programme, I remember host Katherine Ryan giving a contestant a pep talk. Her efforts were good but not what she’d hoped for. She seemed ready to give up. Ryan said something like: ‘No. Don’t do that. Ask yourself: ‘What would Boris Johnson do?’
It’s a stupid example but when I’m wrestling with imposter syndrome, that’s the talk I give myself.
As it is for our peer workers, the challenge is about confidence. Maybe some visibility could raise the aspirations of future leaders who don’t currently think they fit the mould. We need to believe in the possibility that what we bring is something different. Not to an empire, but to the real, inequitable work.
Image: Bored Photography / Shutterstock
