When we want to make social and environmental change, our culture, institutions and education encourage us to assume people need more information, skills, resources etc before they can act.

Anthony Morrow and his team at one of Scotland’s largest housing associations take the opposite approach. They support tenants and local communities by believing that people are already capable, recognising and focusing on their existing strengths.

From my conversation with Anthony Morrow you will:

• Learn about Asset Based Community Development and how using this approach Anthony and his team have prevented homelessness and transformed lives, while saving money for Sanctuary Group and for society.
• Hear why housing is fundamental to sustainability, not just because people need stable homes to thrive, but also because of the connections between housing, health, climate and more.

In the second segment of the show, I’m joined by co-host Morag Watson and guest listener Ruchir Shah to draw out key insights from my conversation with Anthony, including:

• How this strength based approach can be applied in other contexts.
• The importance of upstream prevention and the difficulty of attributing results to specific projects and funders.
• The relationship between stories and data when trying to engage people and get support from managers, colleagues – and politicians.

I’m Osbert Lancaster, specialist facilitator and host of the Thrivable Scotland podcast.

Connect:

• Main Guest: Anthony Morrow
• Guest Listener: Ruchir Shah
• Co-host: Morag Watson
• Host: Osbert Lancaster

Learn More:

• Sanctuary Scotland
• ABCD Training and Resources - Cormac Russell and Nurture Development
• Scottish Violence Reduction Unit
• Shumela Ahmed - Resilience Learning Partnership
• Gary Stevenson: Refugee Riots – Salience and Storytelling

From the Thrivable Scotland Bookshop:

• The Power of Mattering by Zach Mercurio

Be part of the Thrivable Scotland community:

• Subscribe to my Notes for a Thrivable Scotland
• Join our upcoming events
• Share your feedback pod@thrivablescotland.com

It's almost impossible to thrive if you don't have a steady home.

You can see the push in Scotland to invest in more social housing to upstream prevention of homelessness.

But I still think there is a step to take to stop talking about housing just as a housing thing.

Housing is health, housing is justice, housing is the climate.

I'm Osbert Lancaster and this is Thriveable Scotland.

I'm so glad you're joining me to meet people across Scotland who are doing the work that's needed so people and the rest of nature can thrive now and into the future.

In this, our very first episode, I meet up with Anthony Morrow for a walk in Pollock country park near Priest Hill in Glasgow, where Anthony manages community work for a large housing association.

What's interesting is how he personalises it.

It really puts a lot of colour onto a lot of theory that is discussed across voluntary organisations.

I think the underlying thing across those stories and across what he's been working on, that again we don't speak about very much, is trust.

Housing may not seem the obvious topic for this podcast, but as Anthony says, you can't thrive without housing.

Not only that, as you'll discover, Anthony takes a very distinct approach to his work, which, as my co hosts Ruchir Shah and Morag Watson discuss in the second segment, has powerful lessons and insights for everyone working for social and environmental changes.

I'm Anthony Morrow, so I manage the community work for Sanctuary in Scotland.

We've got around about 11,000 homes across the whole of the country, primarily high density stock in Glasgow, Cumbernaul, Dundee, Aberdeen and Satellite Bits around as well.

We are one of the preferred developers for Scottish government.

We're building a lot of new houses, so the scale in Scotland is massive.

But we're also part of Sanctuary Group, one of the biggest housing associations and housing providers in the UK.

They've got something like 125,000 homes across the UK, 14,000 odd staff.

The scale of it is massive and I didn't really realize that whenever I got into it.

I always say to people, now I'm in housing, I love it and I cannot imagine not working in housing in some way.

I think it has real untapped potential for societal impact.

But it was a mistake.

I didn't mean to end up in housing.

I just had the opportunity to go and work back on the front line again in a community.

The last 10 years has been a whirlwind trying to get me head around housing as a sector whilst also trying to develop practice in terms of community work.

Bringing in things from different sectors as well.

So it's been great.

Like, I absolutely love it.

Now I manage a team of community development officers, but I still do work within community myself, but I manage people across Scotland now.

So I've got a team of nine at the moment, which I think is kind of not testament to me or what I've done, but testament to people starting to believe that this work matters.

Whenever I started in Sanctuary as a community worker, it felt very separate from the housing, housing management, helping people bringing in the rent, manage their tenancy.

Mine felt like a nice to do but not essential.

I spent the last 10 years trying to prove that this work is essential.

And actually the better we do this, the easier everything else gets.

Because my belief is that if we can help people thrive, if we can help people, and you know, by people I mean individuals as well as the wider community of which we are part.

Yeah, a happy, healthy community full of happy, healthy people pay their rent, you know.

But more and more I'm having conversations with people that if we prioritize people's health and happiness, the rent follows.

But if you prioritize the rent, health and happiness doesn't follow.

I can feel that makes sense.

But why unpack it?

What's the flowchart, why that works?

I take a couple of steps back then.

The approach to community development work that I believe in is asset based community development.

Fundamentally at its core, asset based community development is about believing that people are capable, recognising their strengths and focusing on those rather than focusing on need, rather than the deficit based approach, which I think community development work was responsible for doing over a long time and actually is a top down medical model, medical approach.

When I first heard the term asset based community development, I assumed that meant about physical assets, buildings, community development around community owned spaces and stuff.

But obviously it's not.

It's a different approach.

To what?

Different meaning of asset?

Yes.

Believing that everybody is an asset to the place where they are and to each other.

And so I now work with them very, very closely.

A guy called Cormac Russell who is the main person whenever ABCD comes up.

That's short.

Asset based community.

Yep.

I.

Look, I saw Cormac talk about something and it was a bit of a light bulb moment for me because I was doing work in Priest Hill and I remember in the interview being told, you know, it ranks here on the simd and still.

Like they still are.

Yeah, you know, like I genuinely love Priestel.

Priesthood is my favorite part of Glasgow.

Yeah, I saw Cormac talk.

And what he said was, if you tell a child every day of their life as they're growing up that they're not going to amount to anything, then they believe it.

And what Asset Based Community Development does is it flips that you tell people that they are capable, notice what they are capable of and you tell them.

Yep, it's unapologetically positive.

Yeah.

People can mistake it for being a bit too woolly and airy fairy.

It's absolutely not.

But, you know, I'm not daft enough to think that there aren't challenges in this community.

But if we define people solely by their challenges, then we limit their agency.

Yeah.

That's not on us to do.

Yeah.

So focusing on the problems, or it's like moaning about that rather than saying, okay, well, how do we fix it?

Exactly.

What's working?

How do we find more of it?

Yeah, exactly.

Focusing on what's strong, what's wrong.

Yeah.

Within a few weeks I'd realized that there was all of this incredible stuff happening.

So I felt like a responsibility to help support what was already going on.

So I spent two or three years working as a community development officer there.

Worked alongside a colleague, a guy called Kieran Renshaw, who was also interested in abcd.

So we kind of hit it off and we were working together and doing really good stuff.

And that's not just me saying that we were being told by community.

So the main focus for us was very simple stuff.

Simple but not easy.

Like, the more often we could get people together, the better.

So we didn't ever really have any predetermined plans of like, we need to be running X number of groups or Y number of sessions.

It was just like, how can we create space where people who care about something can get together and then act on that?

And so one of the questions that we used to ask people was, what do you care about?

And if I can find somebody else who cares about that, are you willing to work with them?

So what sort of things do people care about?

What sort of things do they start working on?

So there was a community breakfast.

We were told a number of times that people in Priesthood used to have spaces where they could get together with neighbors, not necessarily do anything in terms of action, but connect with each other.

So we decided that was something we would try and focus on.

We met three or four ladies who were keen to do it.

And what we did as sanctuary was pay for a bit of food.

So the initial plan was to do that for nine weeks just to see how it goes.

And that was nine years ago and it still runs every week now.

It's very different from that first iteration.

But actually, one of the ladies who we got involved in it is now an employee on my team, so she's now a community development worker.

She does the job now that I did back then.

That's great.

And all the offshoots of that have been amazing.

There's homework clubs, breakfast clubs, boxing clubs, all of this associational life that people can now get involved in, that really.

Just brings it alive.

That's real lives, real people doing stuff that matters to them and making it easier for them.

And making it easier for them to sort it themselves as well.

Absolutely believing that they can.

Yeah.

I believe that my role here is not to be the cavalry to come in and save people.

People are fully capable of that, but they've sometimes never been told it.

In Priesthill, people had either been explicitly told or it being applied to them, that they weren't capable of doing anything themselves, that they needed outside help to do that.

My experience of meeting people there just wasn't that a lot of very capable people who were doing incredible stuff in spite of challenges.

Yeah.

You know, So I took us down a side route of asking for examples.

But you were following a thread which I've now forgotten what it was about.

Your approach.

You're starting off explaining APCD as a prelim into what you're doing and why it's changing things.

Yeah.

Abcd.

It's a very inclusive by design, you know, by its very nature.

It is about believing everyone's capable.

And our job is to welcome people in from the outside and support them to do whatever it is they want.

However, sitting in the housing office, you overhear conversations about particular people in the community who were struggling.

And I started to notice that there was people who weren't getting involved in anything in their community.

But we're also struggling.

That for me, was kind of interesting because that cohort of people across the whole of Scotland or the UK or the world are often termed hard to reach, which I fundamentally disagree with.

In the context of housing, we call people hard to reach, but we've got their home address, you know, so there's.

I kind of flip it around, like, they aren't hard to reach, we are hard to access to them, you know.

Yeah.

So there was this group of people and I became fixated on that and wanting to understand the why behind it.

And another thing just by chance happened.

So I went to an event around community justice because one of the things I wanted to do was I felt housing operated in a silo and I wanted to start connecting housing to all of these other sectors.

I came from the conservation sector and we never interacted with housing.

But being in housing, there's so much we could do.

So I went to a community justice event in Alwa and had the privilege of hearing the Shamila Ahmed talk.

So Shamila is the managing director of Resilience Learning Partnership and she's an amazing public speaker, but she was talking about adverse childhood experiences or ACEs and trauma and the impact that trauma can have.

And that was another one of these moments where I was like, oh, that's maybe part of something that I don't understand, you know, because part of the conversation around trauma isn't that people won't get involved, it's that they feel that they can't.

No matter what we were doing, it wasn't inclusive enough because we weren't reaching out to these people.

So we started bringing together Trauma Informed Practice and abcd.

And that really has been the task over the last six years, trying to marry those two.

What felt at the time like different threads.

But the more that I do it, the more I feel like they are really almost one in the same.

So the Trauma Informed Practice and the Asset based Community Development, one and the same thing.

It's quite noisy by the motorway, isn't it?

We'll turn back and head back away from the motorway.

So the other sort of thread you're trying to bring in is the day to day management and operations of the housing association, is that right?

I've always been interested in people's behavior and somebody who has experienced adversity in childhood or trauma at some point in their life, it can have an effect on them physiologically but also psychologically, and it can manifest in particular behaviors or particular responses to things.

Now I think that you need to align that with abcd because if you don't, it has a potential to just be used as labeling, to be like, oh, that person's experienced that, therefore that's why their behavior is difficult.

And then you kind of negate any strengths or abilities.

So what we try to do is go, that has happened in that person's life.

It means that they respond in particular ways.

They still have gifts, skills, aspirations and something to offer everybody that lives where they live.

So that trauma Informed approach allows you to think about how we approach them, how we engage them, how we talk to them, how we involve them, maybe a bit differently, but you're still seeing that there's those Strengths and they have.

And those things that they can bring to their lives and other people's lives.

Absolutely.

They've either been told explicitly by somebody in a suit or somebody in a service that this has happened and this is the way your life is going to be.

Maybe it's how they hear it.

So what we found was really powerful is just having that conversation with people.

And, you know, you do have to have some quite difficult conversations.

And we hear things that can be hard sometimes, but once we start talking to them about, despite all that, you're still here and despite all that, here are the things that you are already doing and capable of.

It's almost like you see a weight lifted from people's shoulders because they've just never been told that before.

And so for us, what that turns into in housing, like, so my team, half of us do.

Half of us do general community work.

So working in a place with anybody that lives there, not just sanctuary tenants.

The other half do directed person to person, tenancy, sustainment work.

The reason I bring that up is because we're often working with people at the lowest ebb in their life, at the highest risk of homelessness.

They feel hopeless.

What we learn day in, day out is that if you can help people find a bit of hope, they're capable of amazing things.

Whereas a previous practice or different practices can persecute people for not having hope.

I'm keen on focusing on the positive and not dwelling on the problems.

But I'm curious, how do you mean that persecuted people not having hope?

So if you meet somebody who is about to lose their home, usually the response to that is just to double down and tell them to pay their rent more often or to threaten them.

More letters, more red ink?

Yeah.

Like literally, people used to get, you know, people would feel like they were incapable of doing anything.

They had no hope.

And they get a letter saying, we're just going to remove a little bit more of your hope here.

And lo and behold, it didn't work.

There was a point for me where we were doing all of the stuff I was learning about trauma, the difference that it can make, helping people understand what their path in life had been.

It feels really daft looking back, but the question that I just started asking was, we have been trying this in the same way for as long as I can remember, but now we have chronic homelessness, housing shortage, staff that are burning out, we've got tenants that are unhappy and the rent's still not being paid.

Is it not time to try something different?

I Was really lucky that my boss was like, yeah, go on, give it a go.

That was an explicit conversation you had.

It was this idea of this kind of tenancy sustainment approach that was a strengths based approach.

Instead, in the early days, people were a little bit like, oh, it's a little bit airy fairy, you're just going to be nice to people.

And that kind of dismisses the fact that there's a lot of work that goes into building relationships with people.

And that comes back to the community development approach.

I was trying to tackle housing issues with a community development lens.

Putting the people front and centre.

Fundamentally in whatever system you are working in, be it housing recovery, criminal justice, conservation sector, wherever there are people involved, the people are always the anomaly in these systems.

If you can understand the system as much as possible and there's people in housing who have forgotten more than I'll ever know.

But if you don't understand people and you can't identify with people and support people, then the system doesn't work.

Yeah.

It was about taking a more human approach and recognizing there are certain things that have to happen if your rent isn't being paid.

If sanctuary gets no rent, the sanctuary ceases to exist.

Yeah.

But what we have found is that by supporting people and putting them first, the rent starts to follow.

So we get both things.

Yeah.

By focusing on helping people thrive, do all the good stuff in life, the things that systems want from them.

Okay.

So that people are happier, they're healthier, but how does that translate into them having the wherewithal to pay the rent?

If I talk you through a process, bearing in mind this is an example, everybody is different.

That has to be caveat.

Essentially we would get a referral from somebody.

It's a referral comes from anywhere.

They can self refer, family members, housing officers, whatever.

Who has recognized that they're at risk of losing their home.

Now that could be for a multitude of different reasons.

Usually rent arrears are a part of that, but rent areas very rarely exist.

Just in and of themselves.

There's other things going on for people.

So what we will then do is start getting involved.

And the overriding message is your rent has to be paid either by you or by the benefits that you're entitled to.

And if that doesn't happen, you'll be homeless.

However, we recognize that you haven't had the perfect life and then just woken up and decided to stop paying your rent.

Yeah.

So what else is going on here?

And so we'll work with them quite intensely to help Understand what has led them to this point, try and unpick some of the things that might be happening in somebody's life and address that whilst the rent gets worked on in the background.

Do they have an arrangement?

Can they pay a little bit every month, rather than being expected to pay a big whack at once?

And so that work will be ongoing and that's where one of my team will be involved.

So that goes well.

The rent arrears are being addressed.

That kind of gets the housing association pressure off that person.

So we alleviate pressure in somebody's life very quickly.

And what we tend to find is then once that disappears, we can start focusing on other things.

And a lot of the work around understanding trauma and its impact is helping people recognise what impact it's had on their life.

We often talk about helping people repair their relationship with themselves.

We work with partner organizations, helping people recognize that they have to love themselves first and then you can start connecting with other people.

I think that step has jumped quite a bit in community work.

The presumption is that we'll get people together and stuff will happen.

And it does sometimes.

In fact.

It does, very often, yeah.

That misses the people who don't feel capable of doing that.

So we focused and found that once you start addressing these difficulties or helping people address them themselves, other pieces start falling in place.

We've had people in the depths of despair who are now helping other people because they've been able to address this stuff.

They turn a difficult experience into wisdom for other people.

That, for me, is when you start seeing people thrive, when they can look at the darkest moments in their life and take strength from it and share that strength with somebody who's going through the same thing.

You said earlier on, that initially some colleagues were quite resistant or skeptical.

And I can imagine, like, when you start talking about, we need to help our tenants learn to love themselves, it doesn't sound like a normal approach to running any business, any NGO or whatever.

I'm curious about how was the process by which you worked with colleagues and how did they get involved, come on board, whatever?

They recognised themselves that something wasn't working.

But people were so caught up in the day to day and the demands of having to perform well that they didn't really have the time to think about anything else.

And for me, it was just simply like, I didn't know housing, so I was able to ask questions that were probably just.

It felt a bit daft to some people, but if I couldn't get an actual answer, if the Final answer to however many questions I asked about something was, that's just the way it's always been done.

That wasn't enough for us.

I had to kind of try and pick that apart.

So it wasn't that people were skeptical.

It's like they were just, you know, if you're part of this system, you kind of get wrapped up in it.

So once we kind of started talking about it, I just found allies, other people who wanted to do something different.

And what was really interesting is when we started doing this work, a lot of the feedback we got from very experienced housing officers and very experienced housing managers from not just sanctuary, but other housing associations was, this is the way that housing used to be really interesting.

They prioritized relationships.

They prioritized knowing their tenants and ensuring that their tenants were happy and healthy and had this space and ability to do that.

But the pressure of the system and the way that the system was being made to deliver because of all of these different constraints and compliance and whatnot, funding, it turned people who got into it because they cared, being rendered incapable of caring.

And so what we started to do was a parallel track.

We were doing this work with tenants, but I realized quickly that unless we also prioritize the happiness and health of staff, yeah, we had to turn that lens internal.

So I've been doing a lot of work around staff well being over the past four years or so.

And one of the main things that I try to talk about more often now is, is rather than this, them and us within a housing system, it was often tenants and staff.

I wondered whether to widen that lens a bit more and recognise that we are part of the same system.

We've just got different rules in it.

Staff are happy and healthy.

Happy, healthy staff perform better.

Psychological safety is one of the best indicators for good performance.

But we never prioritize that.

We prioritize performance.

So KPIs, KPIs, KPIs, KPI's.

So what we've been driving at instead is trying to make sure the staff feels psychologically safe and happy, like they thrive in work because a thriving set of colleagues is better equipped to help people in hard times.

I guess maybe the system's evolved and changed to allow people to make it easier to do the right thing, essentially.

But I guess at the beginning it was more risky.

Allies had to take risks to go against the system to do the right thing.

How does that play out?

The evolution of the internal part of the organization?

To begin, I was so loggy because my boss is the director, she's called Pat Cahill.

Pat is amazing.

Pat has worked in housing for years and years.

I wasn't being critical of the people in the system.

I was being critical of what the system had done to these people.

What I really did was go out and speak to housing officers and try to reconnect to me.

Like, why did you get into doing this?

What made you want to work in housing in the first place?

I've never met anybody who works in housing who didn't get into it because they cared and they wanted to help people.

So then we could stand alongside each other and be like, what is it about this system that has stopped you?

Caring.

Yeah.

Has rendered you incapable of caring.

Why is a job that you got into because you wanted to make a difference stripped you of all your empathy?

And what can we do about that?

Rather than criticizing people because they were struggling.

Yep.

And that punishment is passed on.

I do see it more readily now, trying to bring a little bit of love back into this stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was about recognizing we are humans and we're all trying to do our best.

So why are we passing this hurt on to each other?

And explicitly having that conversation, it kind of felt like pushing an open door because people were on their knees.

There was nowhere else to go.

They really wanted to make a difference, but they didn't know where to turn.

And so I've been so lucky.

Like, the staff I work with are incredible.

And they have all of these gifts, skills and aspirations as individuals as well.

They're not just housing officers.

They are people.

And what I've found is that they've been, like, the biggest supporters of it.

And I always try to be at pains to point out is that, like, the focus can be on the difference that the role and my team makes, but we are just one constituent part of it.

Without the housing officers and housing management and everybody else, it would fall flat on its face.

I've been trying to apply asset based community development, working with staff, with tenants, with the wider community, kind of how I manage my team.

My conversations with my team very rarely focus on performance.

I'm more interested in how they're doing as people because I trust them to do a good job, because I've been through a process and recruited them.

If I've recruited you do a job that I can't do, it's been created by me, but I can't do it, why would I then tell you how to do it?

So I give people the space and time to do that and allow them to make mistakes, allow them to try new things.

But again, that space has been cleared for me to do that by my boss.

The whole senior management team's been amazing.

So how does that amazingness.

Senior management team, what's that?

How does that manifest?

And I guess also sort of.

Why?

Because it's like, here's so many horror stories of people in middle management trying to do the right thing, feeling ground down by the system.

No one's listening.

So what was it that enabled them to go, let's give it a try, and then to support it, what was going on?

So one of the main things that we do is try to alleviate some of the pressure on housing stuff.

So I had to think, I've got to position this as something that is beneficial for everybody.

I can't.

Just because I think it's the right thing to do doesn't mean that other people will buy in.

Like, I fundamentally believe this is the right way, but it has to have a benefit.

It needs to make sense for them.

And what we saw, the people that were being talked about, that were isolated from community and also, you know, having difficulties in their tendencies.

That's kind of small number of individuals, households, they take up almost the majority of the time.

Yeah.

If we can relieve some of that pressure and you can get on with the other stuff, are you willing to give away a chance?

Yeah.

That was all that I ever asked of people, if can we give it a go?

Yeah.

Because if we don't, then we can just carry on doing what we're doing.

Well, you're literally not just promising to create space in the future.

You're actually taking some work off their desks right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we worked with the tenancies at the highest risk of failure.

The majority of time and money in housing is spent on chasing rent arrears, dealing with antisocial behavior, trying to get non engagers to engage and condition a property.

What we said is we would work with the people where this was happening and we would treat that as a symptom of something else.

Like not paying your rent is a symptom of a deeper malaise that is going on in somebody's life or an indicator that something else has happened somewhere.

If people aren't engaging.

We had to kind of let go of the ego a wee bit and be like, that's not about us, that's about them.

Yeah.

Housing officers were incredibly empathetic, knew the system inside out, but tenants wouldn't engage with them.

So we just had to stop and be like, this is not about you now, this is about what you represent and the harm that they might have experienced in the past from what you represent.

And so the work is with that individual.

So we started working with those individuals.

So we alleviated a massive amount of time that was taken on some of these more complex cases and we said, we will work with them.

Housing officers probably have a patch size.

Housing's divided up into patches.

So in a community they'll have 175, between 175, 250 units, homes, you know, so.

But my team, the ones that do the tenancy sustainment stuff, have a caseload, working caseload of anything between 30 to 50 because there's a recognition that it's going to need dedicated time and we have to work at the speed that that person is willing to work with us at.

We are never punitive.

So if somebody disconnects from us or they do something that we don't like, we don't just accept, you know, violent behavior or anything like that, but we have to work through it and recognize that that's a human response and it's because of something that's happened to them that we might never ever find out about.

So back to the senior management, they saw the logic, they took the risk and it's starting to show dividends.

They kept on supporting it.

Was it as simple as that?

Was there more going on there?

There's kind of imagining below the surface what's happening there.

Yeah.

So I mean it, it has been simple in many ways because we haven't really deviated from that initial thing that it was about like, let's try and take a strengths based approach to this and accepting that some people just need a bit more help than others because of where they're at in life.

I went up to my boss and said, I've got this idea for a roll.

I explained it to her, kind of kicked it backwards and forwards because this all came from ideological stance that as a housing provider we shouldn't be making people homeless, we shouldn't be carrying out evictions.

Some funding became available from Scottish government.

It was opened up across the whole of the country to housing associations for eviction prevention work.

It was this crazy bit of time and it all just fell at the same time.

Yeah.

Pat had said to us, yeah, you can do it, but the reality is we don't have any money.

So if you can find some money, I'm willing to help you do it.

I trusted Pat.

I'd worked with her for probably five years at this point, and actually she's backed it up ever since.

What Pat said was, go and cause some chaos because some chaos needs to happen because things aren't working.

So we got that money from Scottish government, so we got three years of funding and I had to make the business case.

You obviously have to do the business, but as well, it has to make financial sense, has to stack up.

So there was a report done by Shelter Scotland about six years ago now.

They put the Conservative estimate of a cost of an eviction in Scotland at 14,952 pound.

So the funding I'd applied for was 45 grand a year for three years for this one roll.

Yep.

On the face of it, I'm putting this simplistically.

If we can stop three evictions, the rule starts paying for itself, you know, so it wasn't difficult maths to do.

Yeah.

What we saw, this is the first time this has been tried and to my knowledge, it's still the only roll that's been trying this in Scotland.

There's different bits and pieces of it and I've spoken to more housing associations now and people are picking up on it and I'm working with other folk on it, but we were making it up as we went along.

But just by doing this, taking this approach to supporting people who were struggling the most, we saw such a big difference that we had the chance to create the role through.

Through mainstream sanctuary operational budgets six months later.

And Pat said yes.

Right.

So it was already starting to stack up, what we are now trying to do.

At the beginning, we were thinking crisis point intervention, people who are at risk of homelessness.

What we've learned is that the earlier we can catch this stuff, the easier it is to sort out and prevent.

And I still haven't found the answer to this.

There's a push from Scottish government to do more upstream prevention work, which is the right thing to do.

The further upstream you get, the harder it is to claim that homelessness would have happened because you just don't know.

Yeah.

So there's a question around attribution that I don't think we've come to terms with yet.

I certainly don't have the answer.

So we can't claim that 15 grand because we've helped somebody for an hour to sort something out.

You don't know they would have became homeless.

So there's a.

You've reduced the risk.

You can tick some boxes and say, we've addressed these risk factors or something, but.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that 15 grand is a Very conservative estimate.

It was like loss of rent, direct staff time.

So cleaning the property and getting it fit for the next person, that's where we start really having more critical conversations that I don't think are explicitly being had yet as to where these different systems fit together.

So what I mean by that is like we do upstream prevention as far as possible to stop somebody eventually becoming homeless.

That doesn't only have an impact for us in housing, it has an impact on the homelessness sector.

Yep.

People start presenting at hospitals less, they use AE less.

We know it has an impact on alcohol, drug and recovery services.

We know it has an impact on criminal justice.

But the way that the funding is directed, these are all separately done.

But upstream prevention in housing has a knock on effect for other systems.

But I don't think we have a common language or a way to think about that just yet and attribute it properly.

But I think that's a positive conversation that we can have because we're talking about what we can do.

I think that my thought on that is like there's conversations to be had going up that.

Not levels of seniority, exactly, but like going up that levels of where the budget sits and where the responsibility rests and saying, okay, well, you know, like I imagine the police have sort of similar.

I mean violence, Violence Reduction Unit is probably similar sort of example.

Exactly.

And in fact, their Navigators project, I'd looked at that and I just lifted that because I was like, right, that works in violence.

There's got to be something like that in housing.

So that was where the rule started.

There's evidence across all different sectors that prevention works and actually bring it almost full circle to what I was talking about at the beginning.

Like community is the front line of that, not services.

And for me that's where the real hope sits.

Communities generate health.

The health system deals with it when people are ill. Yeah.

So real prevention work is investment in community.

You mentioned very early on that half your team work tenants who are facing real difficulty, the other half are working on more typical out in the community type stuff.

Stuff.

Is that the link?

That is the link entirely, yeah.

And that's a link that I've only really made fairly.

So, no, tell a lie.

I did have that link, but it's starting to kind of firm up in my head how I explain it.

But the whole idea, again, if we talk about in terms of health stuff, if you are working with a tenant and you get them to a point where everything is addressed in their life and you kind of imaginative leap year that you're working with them in this vacuum.

You get them to the perfect point, but then you put them back into a community where they got ill in the first place and you haven't done anything to address that, then it will come back up.

This is like this twin track of recognizing we have to work at an individual level for some people, and to be equitable, some need more help than others or different approaches.

But unless we fix or are part of fixing alongside community, the wider environment, then we will end up back where we were to begin with.

The team members of mine that do the general community work, their goal is to try and help a community thrive.

Because it's that sense, like a rising tide lifts all boats.

A community where everyone is thriving.

We'll have individuals that thrive, pay their rent.

Individuals that pay their rent don't cause problems for the housing association in terms of time and money.

I know it sounds idealistic, but it makes perfect sense to me, I suppose,.

In terms of moving this approach further upstream.

How does the wider team that's working in the community fit into that?

You said they work with anybody, not just tenants.

Is there something there about how do they.

Are other organizations doing similar things or collaborating?

How do you bring more energy and more resources, or is more energy, more resources needed to do more?

I don't know.

So you prioritize the energy and resources that are already there within that community.

You do as much as you can with that, because then any extra resources you want to bring in or need to bring in can be targeted and used appropriately.

One of the analogies I use for this is whenever you go to do your big shop, you have a look in your cupboards to see what you need first.

You don't just go and buy loads of random stuff and come back and go, oh, I've got 10 tins of tomatoes already.

I think guilty of doing community work and investing in communities is people who aren't part of that decide what is needed there and spend money on it.

Now, that money always makes a difference.

But targeted better and more precisely, but.

Targeted in response to what people who live there want and need.

Exactly.

I think this is one of the mistakes people can make about abcd.

What ideally you want as much as possible done by the community.

Our role is we don't want to displace anything the community can do for themselves, but there are things that the community can't do for themselves, that services should be doing.

So the bin collection, we're not going to be asking the community to crowdfund A bin lorry.

The council should be doing that.

But then those funds can be directed to these things that you want the council to do, because community are doing as much as they can for themselves already.

I think sometimes you hear about lots of great community projects happening in more deprived areas and then you think about perhaps some of the more affluent areas, like massive middle class housing estates, but there's no heart to them, there's no actual community.

How do we create community wherever we are?

And I'm sure there's stuff to be learnt from work that you're doing.

It's not just about.

This isn't just about areas with high levels of multiple deprivation.

We never talk about deprivation because that is very much a negative framing of that place.

Now I think community work is good for everywhere and it doesn't have to be formal community work.

I have a team, but generally there's one community worker in a place where there's 6,000 people, so we can't know everybody.

And one of the best things, when you hear of something that's happened that we had nothing to do with because that is an indicator of a thriving community and that happens more and more these days than it did whenever I was first there.

I think this approach is good for everyone.

It doesn't have to be formalized through a service like us.

Taking an asset based approach is good.

More people are marginalized by existing systems.

They are told that they're constantly reminded of it.

One of my stuff said once, if somebody's got a bad life, you don't need to tell them that because they think about it every morning they wake up and every night when they go to sleep.

They don't need reminders of it all the time.

So what's next?

Is it just more of the same or is there a step change you can see or what happens next?

So we had a breakthrough about three months ago.

We'd had that money from Scottish government to fund one of the posts.

Then we used operational budget to fund another one.

So in the last four years, the team has grown from just me and Kieran to a team of nine.

Now people are starting to believe in it.

And recently all my team has been made permanent.

So we are now part of the operational setup of how sanctuary does.

And that must be a huge psychological affirmation for everybody.

Like, we're part of the team, we're not just this adjunct.

Yeah, nice to have and go back.

To working with really experienced housing officers and housing managers who were like, this is amazing.

It makes the biggest difference to us.

But if you're still not part of the main kind of budget, there is always that kind of worry.

Yep.

But now we're not brilliant.

We are business as usual.

Yep.

This is what we do.

So that was a big step.

So for me, the main goal for me was always to just try and improve the housing sector.

So I always say to folk when they ask, what's your end goal here, Anthony?

It's just to humanize housing.

I mean, that's for everybody that is in that system.

We are all in this system.

We just happen to have different roles in it.

But if we think more critically and stand in solidarity with each other, we have a much bigger chance of changing it.

Yeah.

The goal is to talk to more people about it, find out what people are doing that we're not doing, learn from other people, and start connecting this to other sectors.

I think housing is a real untapped resource.

So I was curious to come back to that.

So why?

How?

Yeah, totally.

Part of the question you wanted to kick back and forth through this podcast series is about thriving.

Can you thrive without a stable home?

I believe the answer is no.

I'd be amazed if anybody disagreed.

But housing is very rarely part of these conversations about thriving.

It's been wrapped up into this capitalist thing.

It is something that you own or somebody else owns rather than a building block for thriving.

Like, you need a home for a good life, but having a home doesn't guarantee a good life.

Y the hard work starts when somebody is in a house.

Whereas I think that the housing sector was guilty of seeing itself as an end point, if you put us in the mix at the beginning and bring us to the table, part of it is on us to take responsibility and go to these different tables and talk about the potential in housing, because it affects everything.

It's almost impossible to thrive if you don't have a steady home.

And you can see the political push in Scotland to invest in more social housing to upstream prevention of homelessness.

There is a political will in recognition of that.

But I still think there is a step to take to stop talking about housing just as a housing thing.

Housing is health.

Housing is justice.

Housing is everything.

It impacts the climate, it impacts.

How do those conversations with other sectors unfold for them?

This idea that housing should be part of much more from the beginning, not just housing in terms of insulation levels, but actually good homes.

How does that fit into conversations about climate change, about social justice, about flood prevention, all the other stuff that's going.

On, I think in terms of the climate stuff.

There's quite a lot of stuff going around at the minute about heat source air pumps and sustainable housing.

So I think that is a part of that conversation.

But if you know people, again, sometimes I have to check myself, but I do believe it.

So I'm gonna keep saying it.

That, like, if people's housing situation is sorted and their life is steady, they have the capacity to be worried about bigger issues.

If you don't know where you're sleeping that night, or you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's impossible to care about that.

If we want people to be able to care and invest in that, we have to care and invest in them.

And I think that starts with housing.

Yeah.

I think this takes us back to something we talked about.

Can't remember if it was like an email exchange or a call, but I couldn't track it down.

But the really great phrase you said about mattering remind me of that.

I read a book by Zach Mercurial, the Power of Mattering.

I talked earlier on about ABCD and Trauma Informed Practice, how I think they fit really well together.

But I think mattering is the bridge that connects them.

One of the things in Zach Mercurial's book says for people to feel like what they do matters, they first have to feel like they matter.

Yep.

For me, I was like, that is so important.

Yeah.

Because if you don't feel like you matter, you don't feel like you can make a difference.

And that's what my team do.

They help people realize that they matter and they have power over things.

They might not have power over everything right now, but you matter.

What you do matters.

And it doesn't only matter to you, it matters to the other people beside you.

I love that.

I'm glad we've tracked that down.

So going back to.

I was wondering if that would lead me onto this.

I'm not quite sure what the connection is, but it's one of the things.

And I was exploring this idea of thriving as a different way of thinking about how do we deal with and respond to the climate crisis, the nature crisis, the rise of the far right, and all of that stuff.

What the hell do we do in this situation?

I think Matron connects to that.

Mostly.

If we talk about the rise of the far right, what they have been adept at doing is telling people who feel like they haven't mattered for so long, they've made them feel like if they rise up, they've given them a chance to matter through violence and A chance to matter through hating others.

So I think we don't have a strong enough narrative.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, you know, Gary Stevenson, the economist guy, he talks about how, without giving them any kudos whatsoever, but the far right, in many ways have to be applauded for how opportunistic they've been in seeing this and acting on it.

Yeah.

We should be rightly critical of them for what they do, but they've made people feel like they matter.

Yep.

People have turned up and violently protested, and they get on the news and they get a sense of identity, and all of a sudden, that identity becomes them and they feel like they matter.

Yeah.

And so what we're talking about now in work with my team is if we can help people feel like they matter to each other, and in spaces where different diverse groups of people are getting together and they matter to each other, you then don't need to address the far right.

But we have to look at what they've done, understand what need they have fulfilled for people, and figure out how we can fulfill that in a better way.

We need each other to thrive like you thrive in community.

I've learned so much from the recovery community.

So people who are in recovery from addiction.

Yep.

Some of the most inspirational people that I've ever met in the most inspirational places I've ever been, and what I usually say to my staff when they start, if they haven't been involved in that kind of background, will go to a recovery meeting.

And I'll say to them, our job is to make everywhere feel like this, because whenever somebody walks into a recovery meeting, nobody looks at them and judges them by what they have done.

They're welcomed with open arms, they're shown love, and they made it feel like they matter.

And recovery happens because of other people.

You know, you suffer in isolation, you recover in community.

Addressing environment or climate change or nature has been seen as giving up luxury, giving up quality of life, environment, movement.

Maybe it's a little bit now, but in the future it'll be great.

It'll be great.

I think that's one thing I really want to explore with this podcast series, is what are the ways in which people are working for the future and the present at the same time fixing things right now, which make people's lives better, and doing that in a way which sets us up for a better future as well, rather than them being alternatives, which is what we often seem to be presented with.

And what you're doing is a great example of that.

As you know, I came from Environmental conservation sector.

And I was always did community engagement or trying to get people interested in the things that you wanted them to be interested in.

Yeah.

And when I moved into the job that I'm in now and the team that I manage now, it like really quickly it was kind of like the scales fell from my eyes.

It wasn't that people didn't care about the environmental agenda.

It's just their immediate needs were so much more pressing.

And actually, you know, one of the best things that I can do because I still care about that stuff is help people address the immediate issues.

Yep.

And then bring in more adept, more skillful people whose passion and skills are around that climate change agenda to then have those conversations.

Because somebody is a point where they are capable of having it.

If you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to care what the water levels are going to be like in 10 years time.

Yeah.

Even if it's going to submerge your house.

I think dealing with the here and now is actually critical if we're going to try and do some future work as well.

Why are we not in more rooms together talking about this stuff?

Because housing is important in dealing with the here and now as well as doing the building stuff for the future.

Yep.

If we can clear that space, then can we bring others in?

And that's the bit, I think, you know, come back to your question.

How does Scotland thrive?

I think there just needs to be much better purposeful, cross sector working and a belief that it's okay to get things wrong because we stop focusing on performance all of the time.

I think we are still measuring social stuff by fairly capitalist ideals that we have to get it right, it has to be successful.

But who defines that?

You know, what does success look like?

How would you envisage the work in the now as well as the work in the future looking?

You've put a nice label on it.

Asset based community development.

This is a thread that's gone through my work for years.

It's like actually just shut up and listen.

Just listen to what people care about, what matters to them, what they're trying to do.

Most people, most organisations want a decent life.

They want to do good things in the world.

We don't often have those conversations and people start off with, well, I want to get my thing into this conversation rather than saying, well, let's just talk, let's just listen.

Understand what we care about.

And at some point some common ground will emerge.

I think that pressure for immediate results for Performance prevents people from slowing down enough to actually listen and find common ground to build trust.

So then you get.

There's lack of trust, then you get this in more and more performance stuff laid on top.

We are so focused on output.

I'm going to sound like I'm constantly on about community development, but I think community development does offer you an opportunity to critically look at that differently.

Because if you focus on the process and what the process throws up and learn through that process rather than the output, that's just a better place to be.

The number of times that we've been involved in projects and things like that where, you know, initially the idea was to, let's, for example, say, start a community lunch club.

And the community lunch club runs for five weeks and then stops.

There's so much learning in that five weeks that if you only focus on the fact that it was unsuccessful, you just lose all that.

You're looking at the wrong stuff.

The power is always in the process of these things, but it takes courageous leadership.

Yeah.

To stand up and do that.

And so we're not worried about the final.

Well, not worried because you have to do think things have to happen.

You know, it's the learning along the way.

It's the learning along the way.

And I think also the acknowledgement that actually the process isn't just important, it's essential, but it's like actually trusting the process.

Yeah.

And say, look, we don't know what the results of this will be.

Yeah.

We know this process works.

We know it's done really great stuff elsewhere in different contexts and let's try it.

We think it'll do these sorts of things.

It might be something completely different, but it's worth trying it and we trust the process.

And that was what Pat did for me.

Yeah.

You know, she was just like, yeah, okay, you know what you're talking about in terms of community work, I'll trust you.

Let's give it a go.

And actually, quite a lot of the stuff that I've talked about so far was like, happy byproduct of me wanting to stop people being evicted.

If I'd only focused on that, people have still been evicted.

So by my own immediate parameters that I set, it would have been a failure.

But it's quite clearly not because we've improved staff retention, we've reduced rent arrears, we've got better engagement, I've got.

Other housing associations are doing the same work.

I've learned so much.

And evictions have gone.

Evictions have gone down.

Good.

Okay.

Yeah, of course it has made a difference.

But you do need somebody up that chain to give you that trust.

So I get that from Pat.

So like I said earlier, I try to pass that to my team.

I'm not going to tell you exactly what you should do.

I've told you where I hope that we're going to get to.

I'll trust you to do it.

If you need us to help, I'm happy to step in and provide guidance.

So if I think I can.

But go with your gut.

You asked earlier about what I thought we needed to create a thrivable Scotland.

I jumped quite rapidly up to politicians, media problem.

I think that's true.

But also I'm not at all sure that change will actually come from trying to target those groups.

It will come from us getting on and doing what we believe is right.

Yeah.

And what we know works and spreading that, whether that's within the organization, whether that's to other organizations.

You're trying to bring that into more housing associations and so on, spreading that across sectors.

Like you're talking about, the more more people are doing that, more that comes joined up and starts shifting the way we normally do things, rather than trying to fix the rules and regulations and structures first and then waiting, because it's never going to happen.

You can do tons of work around policies and procedures and legislation, but even if they're perfect, the people within them are still the anomalies.

I need to know the limitations of what I can achieve, and I'll go 100% at that.

But look for opportunities where I can talk about it, or if other people are doing things that are interesting.

Where I think I can learn from it, I will go and actively learn that.

I think the best thing we can do is go and learn from where you think good practice is happening and never presume that your practice is the best practice.

Best practice is the enemy of improvement.

All of this stuff came from me seeing that Navigators project by the Violence Reduction Unit and being like, that's amazing.

There's got to be a way to do that in this sector.

And I've also learned it from lots of other ones as well.

So I think the best thing we can do is believe that we don't have the answer.

Going back to whenever I first started in Priesthill, the one thing that I resolved to do early on was not believe anything I was told about that place and go and find out about it for myself and then go and ask questions that I thought they wouldn't have been asked before.

And so the conversation with me from the very start in priesthood was different.

I was told nobody has ever asked us this before.

So I think meaningful work doesn't have to be huge projects.

You can start to build hope from these little like every interaction that you have can be a hopeful one if you approach it like that.

And that's something tangible that we can all do now.

There's no silver bullet.

There's consistent iterative work that you can keep improving on.

That will only happen through collaboration.

You know, you don't stimulate change by closing doors and holding onto your ideas.

So we've now heard from Anthony.

What I wanted to do was to pull out some of the insights and lessons from his experience and explore how those are relevant in other contexts.

What does this mean and how can we apply these ideas elsewhere?

Joining me today, our long term collaborator and co host on this podcast, Morag Watson and Ruchir Shah, who is joining us as our guest listener for today.

Ruchir, would you like to tell us who you are and what you do?

My background is very much in the third sector and wider civil society and at the moment I'm working with a nature charity, but very much coming from that wider voluntary sector background.

Morag, say hello and introduce yourself.

My background is the NGO sector, very much on the environmental and climate change side of stuff.

But Elizabeth and I have worked together for a long time on change change leadership, change strategy and how you support people to help things thrive.

Great, let's get stuck in.

So Ruchia, what really jumped out at you from what you heard from Anthony?

Anthony touches on some really interesting issues that affect many organizations in the third sector.

What's interesting about the way this has been presented is how he personalizes it.

It's his journey.

It really puts a lot of color onto a lot of theory that is discussed across voluntary organizations.

Morag, what jumped out for you?

Yeah, listening to him, he is very clearly a force for good in the world.

But what it reminded me of is the time I was actually working in education and sustainability education and so many parall between what he was saying about the people in the housing sector who'd gotten into it because they cared about people.

And I was working a lot with teachers, all of whom have gotten into teaching because they cared about children's futures and so on.

But again, that being crushed by the system of there's so much admin to do that, that care and compassion and your reason for doing it in the first place gets kind of lost.

And the other thing that really came through for me was that the whole emphasis on making people feel like they matter.

And again, this was something I worked with a lot at the start of my career in education, where young people most likely to disengage from education and fall out of it were the ones who felt like they didn't matter and didn't have value.

How could we apply some of the things Anthony's talking about, and how might one bring them into one's work for positive social and environmental change if you're working in a very different sector?

One of the things that really struck me about what he said was when he mentioned how his manager kind of just said, yes, go for it.

He was going to try a completely new, different approach, something that the organization hadn't done before.

And the manager was like, yes, go for it.

It made me realize that there's a lot of power that sits within particular individuals.

Well, many individuals within the professional system, that is housing or whatever the sector you're working in.

And with that responsibility comes quite a lot of opportunity for making a big difference by doing something really small, which could be simply saying, someday, yes, go for it.

And that can then have a huge impact on a whole bunch of people down the line, which would not have been anticipated or written into plans or anything like that.

So that was quite an interesting thing for me.

That touches as well on the flip side of that, where Anthony talks about going to conferences and other events and meeting people and talking to people about their experience, where a lot of people working in the system, working in organizations, feeling rather trapped by that and wanting to do the right thing, wanting to be more human, but feeling they're sort of constrained by their work.

Yeah.

I just wonder if there's sort of an invitation there almost by Anthony, if that's the situation one finds oneself in, is saying, how could I do something differently?

Do I need to ask permission?

Do I need to get support from my manager or from my colleagues?

Do I just try it?

I do think people are part of different communities simultaneously.

You're part of your work community.

So the people that you work with, you're part of your community at home, you're part of the community.

In your neighborhood, you're maybe part of online communities.

And I think each of these provides different impetuses for you to kind of apply your thinking and to inspire yourself and to build your confidence.

Being able to kind of, like, cross learn from one community you're involved in to another is part, I believe, of some of the secret that Anthony has highlighted.

He's been able to draw on that he learned from another part of the sector.

I think he mentioned the Violence Reduction Unit and some of the conversations he'd been having there.

He learned from other spheres that he doesn't normally work in and brought them into this one.

That kind of lateral approach, I think, is one which came through quite powerfully.

Borag, you were going to come in.

Yeah, I was going to pick up on something I'm going to say, if Ruchir agrees with me on this one, the trying the new and different approaches is something that you can do within your own space, right up until it requires time and money and my experience very much, and having worked in big NGOs and on projects like this, that's the point at which you need the top cover from a senior manager to open up that space.

And that permissioning and listening to Anthony Pat sounds like an absolute legend.

I've never met her, but I would very much like to, you know, having that courage in that leadership senior position, to permission a member of staff to take a risk, to do something a bit different, is a role that really shouldn't be underestimated.

Perhaps even more important than the money, because the money then ultimately flows, is being able to visualize, being able to positively frame what it is you're seeking.

And when you make that picture really, really compelling and clear that everybody buys into it, the money then comes, and also you get other people on board as well.

So I think one of the things I think Anthony was quite successful in doing is he painted a really powerful picture of what success would look like to his.

His bosses, to the people that he wanted to.

To work with.

And they, they were inspired and they, they supported him and, and he in turn, inspired other people, and they, in turn, will have inspired a whole bunch of others.

And that's how these, these kind of things spread.

So I think this kind of positive visualization, positive framing is.

Is quite an important thing for unlocking both resources in terms of people's confidence and ability to contribute, as well as resources in terms of money and investment that's much needed in these kind of initiatives.

I guess the question for me is, can we be doing more of this across every sector?

Because we need to make really significant changes in how we're operating and what we're doing and what we're delivering, if we're to create the conditions for people in nature to thrive.

When we were chatting before we turned the recording on Morag, one of the things which struck you was the importance of finding allies.

Do you want to touch on that for a bit?

Yeah, absolutely.

Having come from an environmental, climate change campaigning, NGO background, it was very much something that we would do.

We're going out, arguments, persuading people why this was important, why they should get on board.

And you know, what Anthony was talking about there is seeking out allies and collaborators and listening to what was important to them.

Not going out as the sort of trying to recruit them to what he was doing, but listening to where they were at, what they cared about, and that crossover.

And again, I know, Osbert, this is an approach you and I have talked about over the years, of how much more successful it is to find common ground rather than to try and convert people to your point of view.

And that important of listening and understanding people, understanding who you're working with, where they're coming from, their experience, their priorities, was really, really something that came through so clearly in what he was saying.

One thing that I found quite striking was, you know, when it comes to knowing where you put your efforts, or indeed where funders invest their resources, you need to, they will quite often seek much more clarity on what the impact is going to be.

And one of the things Anthony picked on is how hard it is in these kind of settings to attribute the difference that has been made to your particular intervention.

In this case, you know, the work that he was doing with various tenants to support them, he was at pains to emphasize that it's very hard for him to be able to prove that it was his particular intervention that made all the difference.

There was a whole bunch of other things, other factors in play, and it's that what we call the attribution problem.

But quite often, when it comes to unlocking funding and resources and investment in communities and investment in NGOs, they specifically are seeking attribution to their money, rather than looking at some kind of collective difference that's been made.

And this is quite a difficult problem.

I don't think we've kind of solved it yet in the sector.

I mean, it does imply that if we collaborate more between sectors and between organizations, then that speaks much stronger to impact.

But the way in which our system of resourcing this kind of work is currently built very much does seem to try and hive off attribution to specific intervention and specific organizations.

Given that challenge of attribution, if you're in that situation of trying to show how your work is making a difference, you're struggling to do that.

Whether that's something Anthony has contributed or whether that's something from our own experience, how do we deal with the attribution problem in a positive way?

So, thinking about Anthony's experience and ones that I've had in my own career, very much recognize the attribution problem.

And I think there's a thing that a lot of people who step into this space and do this kind of work is maybe not an adjective they think of applying to themselves, but it's very entrepreneurial.

So when you listen to Anthony talking about how he secured money from the Scottish government, you had to be entrepreneurial between, okay, if I stop three evictions, that covers the cost of this, so we can measure it on that metric.

Whereas his wider story, there's a much wider benefit that comes not just the stopping of the evictions.

And it's certainly something that I found in my career that you often have to choose one very clear metric that is not the whole value of the project, but it is the one that you can demonstrate and prove.

I think, for me as well, storytelling, I mean, just this example, this very podcast with Anthony telling his story and describing his journey, I mean, that is what kind of paints the picture for us, and that's what kind of gives us a sense of what it's really about, and it connects with us.

And I think that is powerful.

I mean, if you think about how both myself and Morak have had experience working with politicians, and if you think about what motivates politicians, it is those stories.

It's those personal stories of people in their constituencies and so on.

And then, yes, of course, when it comes to kind of formalizing everything, when it goes through the machinery, that's when all the data and the evidence has to be collated and proving impact and everything else comes off the back of that.

But in order to get the conversation started, it's usually really compelling, powerful stories of change.

And I think that's what Anthony's demonstrating here today.

Yeah, that's a really helpful reminder.

So just to capture some of the key things that we can take from this is the importance of really listening to where people are at, what their needs are, what they're trying to do, and then really only then saying, is there some common ground?

Can we help you?

Because what we're doing there, we're actually helping people tell their stories, because everyone has a story to tell.

And I think listening is about opening up and helping them have their stories, not just looking for data that you can then jump on and say, oh, you're trying to do X. I've got a program for you.

And I think this is a really powerful reminder that the data and the stories are both maybe two sides of the same coin.

They're both useful, but it is the story that opens the door to the conversations and the resources, and it's the data that maybe will enable you to justify it.

But unless you get people going, that sounds interesting, that sounds exciting, tell me more.

They're never going to want to hear about the data, however compelling that is.

Is it also about the stories we tell ourselves?

I'm thinking about what Anthony was doing here, and also from our own experiences, let's say we're thinking about ourselves as part of a thriving sustainability community.

For example, is part of that about the identity it builds when we tell ourselves stories about to ourselves building our own identity?

We're part of this positive thing that's developing.

And one of the things Anthony mentioned is that everyone is searching for identity.

And he mentioned that some people are drawn towards some kind of more extreme causes.

And maybe stories that we tell ourselves is what helps us fill our void.

You could even think of the sustainability community in itself as a storytelling machine.

We're telling ourselves stories about why we're doing what we're doing and why it's important, and that builds us a stronger sense of belonging as well, which is quite a powerful motivator.

Yeah, I was going to come in with a yes.

And on top of what you've both said, again, thinking what Anthony said about bringing love back into his work, and that's not something we talk about.

I think the underlying thing across those stories and across what he's been working on, that, again, we don't speak about very much, is trust.

It was very clear that as Anthony is connecting with his colleagues and his allies and the collaborators, listening to their stories and really engaging with where they're from, that's what built trust, by being able to tell the story of what he wanted to do to Pat.

You know, Pat trusted that Anthony was going to do something good.

And again, when you listen to how he manages his staff, that word trust does come up in that context.

And again, it's not said in the interview, but very much the subtext of it for me is the people that Anthony is working with who are in quite difficult circumstances, they don't trust the system.

But one of the things that Anthony and his team are able to do with them is start to build up that trust.

So it isn't just about the story, albeit they are incredibly important because they do connect with us at a deep values, heartfelt level.

But one of the reasons we connect that way is to build that trust.

And the really lovely phrase that Anthony ended with, which I thought was a really important one, is we suffer in isolation, but we thrive and succeed in community, in groups.

And again, why in the group?

Because there's trust there.

Because you can support each other and do more.

That was a real key takeaway for me.

And there you have it.

This is the very first episode of our Thriveable Scotland podcast.

Technically it's a bit rough around the edges, but despite that, I hope you found Anthony's experience as interesting as we have.

So big thank you from me and Morag, to Anthony for the conversation and to Rujia for being a great guest listener.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections reflections on the show and any questions you may have either on the overall concept or this particular conversation.

Do email me.

It'll help us develop the show and we'll maybe pick up any questions in a future episode.

Simply email podthrivablescotland.com you'll find links to books and other resources that we talked about in the show notes and finally, Thriveable Scotland is more than just this place podcast.

Check out the website thriveablescotland.com for my newsletter and events where you can join me and others who are building resilience, regenerating natural systems and healing society.

Let's explore what works in the polycrisis together.

Yeah, we seem to be coming to the edge of the country park here.

Turn around and head back in.

Come on, Lexi.