Origins

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make"

Jane Goodall 

I first studied Zoology at the University of Sheffield and many of my contemporaries (class of '83) went straight into PhDs and from there into academic institutions. I went to live in a tent on a camp site in Devon to volunteer in a small zoo (which no longer exists) in order to get experience of working with real live animals rather than just the theory of them. 

From there I went to a mud hut on the banks of a tropical river in The Gambia to work for the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project.

Two years later, having become convinced that the outcomes would be better if the people of the place were both architects and implementers of conservation initiatives, I stopped being an interloper and came home. Just over 10 years of work with UK environmental charities followed: complete with miscellaneous adventures starring White Faced Whistling Ducks and Whooper Swans amongst other members of the cast. 

Towards the end of 1997 I made my first attempt at self-employment. In short, gentle reader, I crashed and burned that time but learnt a lot. Now I needed a job. Luckily there was an interesting range of vacancies around and I was offered interviews for some of them. Not all the interviews went well.

One particular instance involved a panel considering whether they wanted to employ me as an NVQ Management Lecturer (for levels 3-5) where part of the role would involve visiting employers and persuading them to purchase courses for their staff. 

With serious faces the panel asked "how would you get employers to sign up?" I replied "first I'd ask questions to find out what they needed to see whether any of our courses would meet their needs". 

With puzzled faces the panel interrupted "but you are there to persuade them". When I declared I believed there was no point selling someone something they didn't need as ultimately it would damage our reputation and limit future opportunities to build relationships the panel was aghast "you'll never hit targets like that". They decided I clearly did not know what I was doing, I came to the same conclusion about them and we parted.

In August 1998 a perfect storm of Windfall Tax, Tony Blair's New Labour Government and an ambitious New Deal programme run by Sefton Council for Voluntary Services came to my rescue. I spent the next six years with a fabulous team doing good things, the right way, to support long term unemployed people to take steps they wanted to take towards learning and work. Together we won a bunch of awards, a few of which were for innovation, and my passion for capturing data to track impact and change redoubled.

Since 2004 I have been paddling my own canoe, as my Dad would have said, and in 2005 settled on values as the missing piece in my personal puzzle of how best to appreciate what people said they needed and wanted.

Now I plan to take all that I have learned of values and real life into an exploration of the theory of it all. Who knows where it may all end....