Community: how a table changed a culture

A conversation with Martin Houghton-Brown from St John’s Ambulance

I’ve got a couple of podcasts coming that really try to give colour to the book that I’ve written. In Fortitude I talk about how true resilience, fortitude, is found through a combination of control, identity and community. Today’s podcast illustrates the themes of identity and community beautifully. It’s a wonderful discussion that I think has got an immense amount of richness to it. I chat to the boss of St John’s Ambulance Martin Houghton-Brown (Martin on Twitter). I was struck with the power of the lessons about connection and identity – we often find ourselves throwing these terms around casually but Martin’s testimony brings it vividly to life.

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Daisley (00:00)
This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat, it’s a podcast about work, psychology and life. Thank you so much for listening, this is Bruce Daisley. Over the next couple of episodes, I’m going to be sharing some of the stuff that’s think relevant to the moment we’re in, that also has helped inform the book that I’ve got coming out on the 25th of August. So the book I’ve got coming out is called Fortitude. It’s really about the myth of resilience. I found myself writing this book because like all of us, I was hearing the word resilience everywhere, I was hearing

Companies offer resilience training, schools offer resilience training. And there seemed to be something strange about this because the people who I had seen who’d had this resilience training said to me, I’m not feeling any different or I’ve seen kids at school get resilience training and not feel any different. So there seemed to be something strange about the fact that the resilience training wasn’t working. And then in addition to that,

I was just really struck by the fact that we do see resilience everywhere around us. it seems to be like there’s something illusory in the way that we’re talking about it in the productized training that’s offered to organizations. And yet we seem to be missing something that’s right before our very eyes. And so I’m going to share a couple of the examples that have really been informative of the stuff that’s gone into the book. If you are interested in the book,

The book’s had incredible reviews, comments from Gary Lineker, from Oliver Berkman, from Nadia Hussain, just like some incredible comments. Stephen Bartlett has written something really lovely about it. And you can see all of those comments in the show notes. If you are interested, for the next couple of weeks, I’m giving away a free workplace culture course for anyone who pre-orders the book. So that ends.

On about the 8th of July, I think the date is for that. So if you are interested, you want to see that course, then if you pre-order the book in the link in the show notes below, and you can order that from your local High Street, you can order that from an audio book, whatever you want, you’ll get that course for free. So today’s episode specifically really delves into a discussion which I think illustrates some of the points. And it’s a conversation with Martin Houghton Brown.

Martin runs St. John’s Ambulance, but he’s got a storied career. He started off as a teacher. He then was the boss of a charity called Missing People. And what you’re really going to get from this is the one of the truthful parts of the true version of resilience that we can access is really strongly accessed by connection.

But the thing you’re to find most interesting today is the story of the kitchen table. And I think the kitchen table both exists literally as a kitchen table in Martin’s example here. He found it. The kitchen table was the focal point for connection and community, but also it’s the metaphorical kitchen table. If you’re thinking about your team or your organization and you want to make your team stronger and more connected, what’s your kitchen table? What’s the thing that’s going to

hold people together and draw them together. So hopefully that will be much clearer when you get into the discussion. I shan’t give it much of a preamble because the conversation now is so rich and unwinding. There’s going to be another episode really in the lead up to the Fortitude book release that’s going to draw on some of these themes a bit further. So if you are interested in Fortitude, a book about how we get ideas of resilience incorrectly, like I say, the link is in the show notes.

Otherwise, here’s my discussion with Martin Houghton Brown.

Martin, thank you so much for taking the time to chat to me. I wonder if you could kick off by just introducing who you are and what you do.

Martin Houghton Brown (03:40)
Okay, right, Martin Houghton Brown. I’m Chief Exec of St John Ambulance, that famous branded charity that’s had quite a feature in the last couple of years.

Bruce Daisley (03:52)
When we chatted before, we had such a brilliant discussion about various aspects of where you’d got to, and it just struck me as really real relevant. But your journey has been a really interesting one. You started as a teacher, right? Firstly, what made you go into teaching and how did you get from teaching into running your first nonprofit?

Martin Houghton Brown (04:10)
Yeah, I I I I mean, I think I really enjoyed working with young people from when I was a young person. I think I started out kind of youth groups and stuff like that, really feeling like they made a difference in my life and wanted to give back a bit. I was a cadet, I was in a church youth club and all of that. And I was a bit kind of all at sea when it came to my A levels, didn’t do that well. and I had a great English language teacher who just said

Go to college, go to uni, get a degree. And she pointed me towards teaching. I thought, you know, maybe I could be a teacher, but when you’re 18, you don’t really think you can be a teacher, you’re too young. Anyway, I I did go into teaching and did a four-year degree, which I loved. taught in a variety of schools. I remember teaching in a school in Birmingham, which was the first time someone offered to stab me. and I I remember vividly he said, you know what?

What will you do if I stab you? And and I said, I said, Well, I’ll die, but they’ll just replace me ’cause there are loads of other teachers. And he held his fist out and said, Safe and I fift fist bumped him and and that was it. I lived to tell the tell the tale.

Bruce Daisley (05:17)
What do you do in that situation? What do you do in that situation?

Martin Houghton Brown (05:19)
report him. I didn’t, no. I didn’t. I, you know, because quite frankly, the environment he was living in was, you know, that was life. That was normal life. And I and I wasn’t gonna change his life in, you know, the six weeks I was being a teaching practice student there. but it did make me realize that there are young people who just in their thousands don’t have the same opportunities that people like me grow up with.

And and and it he was a good kid. You know, he wasn’t a bad kid. He wasn’t trying to be bad. and and the more I did that kind of work, the more I wanted to work with those kind of young people. And I started out to teaching as a full time teacher, and it just wasn’t amazing for me, partially because I saw those kids in the classroom who were so disengaged, so disconnected, and I wanted to invest all of my time into them.

But the truth is, the only parents who come to parents’ evenings are the parents of the really smart kids who are going to do well anyway. And so there was a bit of a sort of falling out really between me and the head teacher who wanted to focus on the parents’ evening parents, and I wanted to focus on the kids whose parents were never going turn up. And and the consequence was I went into to youth work and there I found young people who were not engaging with school at all, who weren’t really interested in learning. but

were fascinating people. you know, and there’s a there’s a bit of me kind of thinking back on it all that that says, actually, you know, i in in every kid who’s dealing drugs, you’ve got, you know, a real entrepreneur, you’ve got a bit, you know, maybe a bit of pharmacy, a bit of bit of sales in there, you know, in every kid who’s taking and driving away without consent, you’ve got, you know, someone who just likes, you know, who with a blue light on top could be saving lives. And and and there’s a bit about how you think about young people that

became a real driver for the decisions I made about my career as as life went on.

Bruce Daisley (07:07)
And so you went from teaching to youth work, what you quit teaching and you went to youth work?

Martin Houghton Brown (07:13)
Yeah, twenty-three thousand to nine thousand. It was not the most lucrative decision I’ve ever made. but it was the most satisfying. and and it just it got me into communities seeing young people who were cast out from their communities, and who were really grateful for someone who was taking an interest in them.

Bruce Daisley (07:32)
What sort of youth work were you

Martin Houghton Brown (07:33)
So mainly sort of

rural youth work so going into communities trying to gather those young people together and then some really specialist work around young people in trouble with drugs, in trouble with being victims of sexual abuse. and i in effect I I sort of actively looked for the kids who were the most messed up and said how can I help? And I worked with them to find them the right specialist support. And there are they’re there

Now adults that I’m still in touch with who were in a real mess, you know, prison and drug drug and gang affiliation, who are now you know, living great lives with their families, contributing to society. And for me, that’s my kind of if you like, that’s my plumb line. if you can start out in life and and help someone to just shift a couple of degrees to a true north and find their true north, then

then that’s a worthwhile contribution.

Bruce Daisley (08:28)
What are the things you do? you know, if someone’s errands like that and you get them onto a more stable path, are there a couple of obvious things that sit at the heart of that?

Martin Houghton Brown (08:38)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, the the the first is all about relationship. It’s putting someone into a community of relationships that’s going to create for them a safe space where they can fail and fail and fail and still find people around them who are going to support. Because for most if you take most of the government programs, they’re designed to give you a one shot. Here you go, here’s your three week program. If you’re not fixed at the end of it, it’s your fault. You’re written off.

whereas actually all of us in our journey through life fail and fail and fail. And if you’re in a really dark place where substances control your your everyday actions or your memories from your abuse mean that you make bad choices around relationships, then what you really need is people are gonna stick with you on that long journey. And for most people that’s a three or four year journey just to get to the kind of

base layer of a stable life, let alone anything aspirational like get a job or a family.

Bruce Daisley (09:33)
So connections, connections, connections. Is it just putting them with like-minded people who have got the same life experience?

Martin Houghton Brown (09:40)
No, I think I think it’s actually about connecting them to people with a much broader sense of life. So people with different experiences, including, of course, you do believe in the role of specialist support. So I think, you know, finding the experts who really understand how to get into the, you know, what does it mean to live with trauma? What does it mean to live with a a history of disconnection where your family haven’t connected you? I remember working with a young person whose parent visited them in rehab and

and and the parent came away and I s I saw the parents they were leaving and I that’s fantastic. It’s the first time they’d connected in a year. I said, you know, did you bring them a Christmas present? I did, I did. What do you bring them? What did any loving parent bring them? I brought them a gram of wheat. And I’m like but if that’s your starting point, if that’s where you begin from, how do you find that? And so it’s that combination of putting people into a context where actually they’re meeting people they wouldn’t ordinarily meet, finding stable relationships.

As well as some specialists who really understand how to get under the skin of these things.

Bruce Daisley (10:36)
It really struck me. I’m not sure if you went from there to working at Missing People, but when we were talking about the fact that you ran the charity Missing People, you mentioned that there was one thing that all the people who went missing had in common, that they weren’t connected into a wider support group. They often felt a little bit isolated and that led them to fled. And so there seems to be some commonality in that. So fill in the gaps for a minute. Did you go from youth work to Missing People?

Martin Houghton Brown (11:04)
I I I I went via the Children’s Society where they were looking for someone to lead on talking to the government about kids on the streets. And I wasn’t really a policy wonk. I hadn’t got any background in working with parliamentarians or whitehall or anything like that, but I did have a passion for for young people. So I worked there and did some quite extensive research about what young people do when they run away, why they run away.

And what was really clear about young people who run away from home is that they run away because their support network doesn’t exist. So many of us have run away from home. You know, that lots and lots of people have got story of the time they ran away from home. but characteristically, they’d run to a mate’s house where you know mum would make them tea and say, Well, do you want to stay the night? I’ll call your mum, it’s all right. Or they’d run to Auntie Mabel’s, because she’s always friendly and she’ll always take me in, or Nan or Grandad. And and and

That’s a picture of resilience. But actually, these kids, the kids who run away and stay away and place themselves at risk because they don’t know how else to survive, they don’t know where to run. They don’t feel safe. They don’t feel that from their experience of life, they’re somewhere safe to run. And so, you know, a hundred thousand kids running away from home every year, the ones who are at the greatest risk are the ones that don’t know where to run. And so they’re

finding other ways of surviving and and that’s where the harm starts. So yeah, for for me it’s it’s all about creating a safety net for those young people that is about relationships. And and actually when I moved on did missing people and then later on I did to DePaul we had a scheme called Nightstop which still runs with an amazing scheme where you train people to use their spare room to take a young person off the streets. In effect they become Auntie Mabel.

And so that when a kid runs away, they can be placed into a safe space whilst they work out what’s going to happen next, some specialists can get involved and help them to configure a safe route out of having run away from home. So sometimes you have to manufacture that network if it doesn’t exist naturally.

Bruce Daisley (13:06)
I guess you specialize in that at the children’s society and then went to basically run missing people.

Martin Houghton Brown (13:11)
Yeah, I had a great boss at the Children’s Society, Kathy, who just said said she put the job description for the CEO of Missing People on my desk and she’d written across it report for duty. and she she had just continuously believed in me because most policy advisors in in the policy world are sort of PPEs from Oxford or Cambridge, and you know, I was definitely not that. And again she believed in me. And I I took a punt. I was a young man and you know.

eminently not qualified to be a chief exec, but but went for it. And and I think, you know, my passion for what missing people, which had the young runaways helpline as a core part of its service delivery, could do. But I’ll tell you the other thing that I found when I got to missing people was that opened my eyes to the whole world of families of the missing. So you know if someone you love goes missing, an adult or a child, you’re left with this ambiguous loss where you can’t really process their

Not being there because you’re constantly hoping that today’s the day when they come home. And whether that’s five years or 10 years or 15 years or 25 years, that still sense you can’t bury them because they might still be alive. And those families that survived the best in those very difficult circumstances were the families that had very close supportive relationships around them, and the families that

didn’t. I saw marriages break up, I saw people themselves become victims of harm as a result of their isolation. And one of the things that we began to do was actually connect these families because in that case, having someone who understood your circumstances and situation was really helpful to say, so it’s like that for you too. and that kind of therapeutic side of missing people’s family services was a really important part of what we were doing. as well as the kind of

We we introduced a piece of law which didn’t exist, which was the the seven year law that that everyone thought existed but didn’t, which meant that if your loved one went missing and they didn’t come home and they were presumed dead, you could get a certificate of presumption of death, which I’m super proud of because not everyone gets a law to to, you know, say that’s part of your legacy. So

Bruce Daisley (15:19)
I thought that was the law, when the Manic Street Preachers guy went missing, I presumed seven years was like the trigger point.

Martin Houghton Brown (15:25)
Yeah, well, Richie, Richie’s story actually was one of those stories that helped us to get the law changed because his sister came forward and talked about their experience as a family not having that law. So when we were changing the law and lobbying parliament, she was that his story and and her testimony about how difficult that was for her and her mum was a really important part of making that legislation a real act of parliament. And so now that is the law.

DePall, my previous charity, we run homeless hostels. So in between missing people and here I worked at DePaul and we ran youth services for young people who are homeless, particularly those young people who are right at the margins and more difficult to work with, so they needed extra support. And the traditional hostel kind of model is you’ve got an office at the front where the staff work and then the the kids’ bedrooms and and you know upstairs and

And then the kids might come down. And I was really struck once where I was in this office with one of the staff, and this kid came into the office. He said, you know, c can c can I get some help for this? And the staff member was on his computer facing away from the door, and he turned around with his head over his shoulder and he looked at the kid and he said, Can’t you see I’m working? And I and I and I said to him after the kid had gone, I said, What what what is your work? And he said,

Well, I’m a youth worker supporting these young people. right. And and I thought this is all wrong. And actually the environment was conducive to that kind of isolation and disconnection. So we worked on creating a different type of hostel and we remodeled. Our first hostel was actually up in Whitley Bay, and we remodeled it and we knocked it about so that we could put

A really big open plan kitchen at the heart of the hostel. And we knocked down the office to make that happen. We still had little counseling rooms and things, but actually we had a this big table. And we made the workers work on laptops with the young people around them. And actually the hostel looked really nice and it felt really warm and welcoming. And I was criticized by one professional who said, Look, I think this is just too nice an environment, and these kids are gonna wanna stay longer.

And then they won’t get back out into the world. And actually, the evidence was that they stayed a shorter period of time because they recovered more quickly from their trauma. They made faster progress in their journey back to employment and into relationships. And and I think that’s because we put the kitchen at the heart of it. We made the practice around the kitchen table. And that was all about saying it’s about connection, it’s about connecting these young people.

with other young people, with practitioners. Don’t all go to your rooms and spend your life in your rooms in isolation. Come and get around the table together, cook together, eat together, connect together, work together, and find and discover relationships that will help you. and well, the evidence spoke for itself. It worked.

Bruce Daisley (18:12)
It’s astonishing, isn’t it? Because if you run a thread between all of the stories that you’ve said, that these people who disappear because they don’t feel connection, the people who survive this family trauma of someone disappearing is the ones who feel more connected. And even just the simple architecture of creating a homeless shelter where the first intention is we need to make people feel connected to each other. And the fact that all of these things have just so

indelibly got connection as the central thread of them. It just seems astonishing that we so easily overlook it.

Martin Houghton Brown (18:47)
Absolutely right. And it’s it’s been very evident here at St. John because we’ve got a fabric here in this organization that goes back 150 years. So the the first St. John associations were down the mines. So they had mining communities where essentially the the mine owner would ask for a St. John association to be created, and they built a community of people who learned these first aid skills.

So that if you broke your leg down the mine, they could rescue you safely, get you up to the surface, and get you to get some treatment. And because of that history, St. John operates what they now call a unit model, where essentially, if you want to be a volunteer at St. John, you get joined into a local unit. So I’m a first aid volunteer and I go to the Brighton unit. And it’s basically a little family of people. And one of the things that I’ve noticed about

Particularly li St. John lifers, who, you know, started as six and now they’re like 66 or 76 and they’re still volunteering, is that St. John really is their family. And that many of them have stories that demonstrate that actually without St. John, they might not have found a place to belong. And I look at other volunteering organizations who have said, we’re really struggling to hold volunteers, to keep volunteers, to motivate volunteers.

And I think why is St. John’s still successful? 150 years, you know, tens of thousands of volunteers still actively serving their communities. And I think it’s because we’ve held on to this model. And a lot of organizations have disaggregated that model, particularly with the help of technology. So, well, we don’t need to do that anymore. Way too expensive to bring people together. We can just, we can just send them the training online, we can give them the information online.

And I and one of the things we’re discussing about our training is learning first aid is quite kinesthetic. I mean, you know, you need a resussiani and you need to get your your your your your the palm of your hand on the center of her chest and pump up and down. It’s very physical and connected. And so you have to do it physically. And they’re trying to find technology that will enable you to do it differently. But I’m saying actually I think there’s something really deep about coming to learn, connecting with other people, putting a real person into the recovery position.

and and so all of our volunteer training is face to face, it is kinesthetic, it is about connecting with people. And and I think that’s part of the resilience of this organization that it’s it was able to scale up to respond to COVID because it’s actually this network of communities, it’s this network of families of people. And and all you were doing was asking those networks to say,

Hey, could could you help your community? When we were asking vaccinators to to come forward and we were involved in a quarter of all vaccinations, the question was, you know, will you as a community vaccinate your community? And I think that’s why it was so hugely successful, so rapid in its scaling up, because it was fundamentally rooted in these groups of people who already knew each other.

Bruce Daisley (21:46)
That’s so interesting. What was the impact of COVID on your organization? Were some people left remote and were others, I guess some of them were in person? Was there a different experience?

Martin Houghton Brown (21:58)
Yeah, it was it was a real challenge. And I think, you know, one of the things that if I could do it again and I really don’t ever want to do it again, I would do differently. So you know, we we face catastrophic financial crisis because our training business that trains people in workplace first aid generates the vast majority of our income and that pays for our volunteer activity by and large, and and especially our youth activity.

And that dried up overnight. So we were we were losing 1.6 million pounds a week, which is you know pretty scary stuff. and we managed to, you know, put people on furlough, we managed to redeploy the vast majority of our resource to help the NHS with our ambulance crews, with our people being retrained to go into hospitals, and then eventually the VACS program. But there were a whole cohort of people who were older, who were caring for someone, who themselves were clinically vulnerable.

Who couldn’t do any of that stuff. And they felt really isolated. And actually, they I’d say they still feel quite isolated because they don’t have that shared lived experience of being out on the front line. They weren’t part of that kind of heroic campaign. And I don’t think we did enough to help them to stay connected. and and there was some we, you know, we tried some digital stuff. But the interesting thing was, particularly people who were working online during the day.

Offering them an online evening get together really didn’t appeal. And I don’t know about you, but I got fed up with Zoom quizzes after about week three. Absolutely. And so, you know, I think I think there’s something about that sense of isolation really contributed to people having a low sense of belonging to the organization, belonging with their their colleagues and their peers, and their well-being suffered. and you could just see it, and and there’s some quite

sad stories really about how people feel about that even today.

Bruce Daisley (23:48)
And I guess that’s got the same spirit of disconnection through it as well. Is there any lessons that you learned? like you said, are you effectively saying from your experience, you know, that that Zoom quizzes comment being an illustration, that there’s kind of no substitute for face to face?

Martin Houghton Brown (24:03)
So we have we’ve got 10,000 young people in our organization under age 18. And we we hold a big competition each year. You know, it’s a bit old-fashioned, but we do competitions still here. And for the first time since COVID, we did it this year. And we asked every young person in the competition, these were the 50 top 50 from around the country, we said to them, what lessons have you learned from hybrid education? and learning online in particular. And

To a child, they said, it’s awful, my education suffered, I would never want to do it. If we’ve got to do online learning, it should be supplemental, it should be additional, but it shouldn’t be my core activity. Every single one of those children, young people, aged 15 to 17, said, It’s been a disaster for me, my mental health suffered, my learning suffered. And I think they summarised for all of us, actually, the the truth of this.

And I don’t underestimate the power of being able to work from home or the power of being able to work in a sort of safer environment or an environment where you can be more flexible around caring for others or being cared for. But I do think that there’s something profound about connecting, collaborating and creating in person that the digital environment cannot replicate.

Bruce Daisley (25:18)
So interesting what you say. I looked at these, one of the world’s leading experts into the wellbeing of teenagers is Professor Jean Twenge. She teaches, I think at Stanford. And she did a really interesting piece of analysis looking at the lockdown and the impact on teenagers. look, we’ve got to remember that the lockdown had a million different stages to it. if you remember that first weird…

flush where people said, you can’t leave your home and like the weird experience of that. But what she found, she was expecting when she delved into the data from that first three months, she was expecting she was going to see mental health problems off the scale. maybe because we then subsequently heard those things happen. But what she found was teenagers who found themselves having an evening meal with their families, their wellbeing went through the roof.

In fact, the difference was that those who said that they were having an evening meal as a family together, their well-being improved. Those families who still weren’t and said, look, know, the 50 % of workers who still needed to carry on going out, they showed no benefit. And look, it’s a perfect illustration. She was confounded by the data. She was expecting, she was preparing all of her reasons why well-being had suffered. And she said, like, she sort of went back and checked it. And it’s another reminder.

of all of the themes that you’ve brought out. When we feel connected to other people, when we feel of kin with people around us, it’s astonishingly emboldening. It sort of gives us that strength. it’s just like, you know, for me, it’s the metaphorical kitchen table at the heart of the shelter. know, you give people a place to gather and to talk and often literally to break bread. And there seems to be some magic that takes place.

Martin Houghton Brown (27:01)
Yeah, I I I I genuinely think that’s true. And I and it’s interesting I haven’t got the analysis on how many of our young people ha whose parents are in public service. But as you say, that you know, a lot of our young people probably do have parents who are in public service in healthcare and teaching and and our organization attracts those kind of people. And as you say, they you know, many of them were still working, were not, you know, were were were were going out in those early days. but I but I think

That you know the quest many of us are on to try and create inclusive workplaces. actually, why why are people excluded in society? It’s because they’re not connected. And I think you know, how do you learn about people who are different to you? You spend time with them, you eat with them, you connect with them, and and and I think.

you know, one of the challenges for all of us building safe working environments is to try and try and say, let’s bring people together, to learn together, to connect together. And the one thing that’s really thrived and grown in our organization is we launched a whole new set of people networks, and people can’t get enough of them. They want to connect, they want to be together, they want to find new ways of connecting, particularly around their lived experience of being excluded. and our young people.

Have come out of the pandemic really determined to make St. John a bigger part of their lives, to say, right, I’m actually now I know what I’ve missed. I want to be part of this organization in a bigger way. I want to bring more people into the organization to help them to connect too. So I th I th I I think it’s it’s it’s just imp you know, it’s just the essence of humanity that we live together, we eat together, and we connect.

Bruce Daisley (28:41)
Could

you tell a little bit more about those resource groups, those connections of where people felt were excluded? What are they specifically?

Martin Houghton Brown (28:48)
So

we’ve we’ve centered them around mostly around those issues that do disconnect people. So women in the workplace and leadership, LGBTQ groups, cultural difference, so both around faith and ethnicity, and disability. And what what those groups are saying is that they never knew that there were so many people in St. John who had that shared experience.

And and they are working across their groups, networking across their groups to talk to each other about how their experiences are similar and different, and how they can together bring St. John into a more enlightened state about their experience. and I mean the women’s group is so energetic and lively, and there’s quite a lot of empathy taking place there. So quite a lot of people talking about.

At some of their really challenging relationships, particularly in the workplace, where they’ve experienced prejudice, where they’ve experienced isolation. And I think that kind of both that sense of camaraderie, but also that sense of being able to share their stories, not just with each other, but with the other networks. And they recently did a joint video for the whole organization. And everyone who’s seen that video in the organization, who’s not in those networks, has almost got a sense of kind of jealousy about.

I want to be in one of those. That looks fantastic. How do I get one of those? And of course, you know, with the whole agenda around allyship, that’s being really encouraged too. So that you know, it’s working as a way, but I think it’s probably I think it’s the beginning of something rather than the end of something. It’s not it it’s it’s it’s about shaping a a way of working, which actually is part of the wider agenda for the charity because we’re

Working on an organ organizational redesign that attempts to create networks across the organization to get things done rather than directorates. and it’s shaking people up a bit. We’re trying to create this sort of organizational redesign where instead of divisions that do that, divide people, or directorates which tell people what to do, we’re creating a a network architecture where people are working.

i effectively in communities across the organization to get things done, to develop plans, to create. and it’s made people quite insecure actually because they’re saying, well what what so if if my network’s not going to tell me what to do or my network’s not going to create boundaries so that I don’t stray outside of my world, what does it do? And what we’re saying is well it it it’s a it’s a place to belong. its primary purpose is to give you a a sense to s a place to celebrate a a a

A place to reflect, a place to learn. But actually, what we want for you is to feel like you belong in St. John. And so your network is there to help you belong and help you to connect with others who are going to get your job done. Because most of the people who are going to help you to get your job done don’t belong in your what used to be called a director or division. They belong elsewhere in the organization. And it’s quite challenging because

People are beginning to have to communicate and relate to people outside of their little safe spaces. And and it’s kind of uncertain because it’s a bit more organic, it’s definitely less directive, it’s less numbers driven. And don’t get me wrong, you know, I you know, I’ve got look after the numbers, of course I have. You know, the charity’s gonna be sustainable and we want to have a bigger impact. But but as we as we’re in this process of unpacking the old way of

Hierarchical working and moving into this more networked model of working, we’re finding problem solving much, much easier. People are able to come together much more readily. There’s far less ego invested in it because it’s there there’s no competition because you’re you’re not coming from your directorate. And it’s we’re by no means there. We’re starting that journey. But but it’s partially rooted in this belief that.

work now more than ever needs to be a safe place. And particularly with hybrid and you know, sometimes you’re in the office, sometimes you’re at home, and and how do you connect? Your connections need to be incredibly meaningful. and we’re in a a stressful world, lots of pressures, particularly economically, on people who are relying on St. John for their their employment. And and so as a workplace, I think we’ve got a real duty of care to create.

safe spaces that people can work in and and and communicate in and and communities that are really creative, really collaborative, and where it becomes a joyous place to be. And so you’re you’re here not because we pay you the best, because that’s never going to happen, or because we’re necessarily the most famous brand in the world. But you’re here because it’s a joyous place to work and you find your value

as you connect with other people and deliver your best work.

Bruce Daisley (33:35)
It’s really interesting because what you talk about there is sort of the themes of personal identity and collective community. And some people see them in opposition to each other. see that, you know, workers feeling their personal identity or, you know, seeking company and companionship with people who share their identity feels in some way oppositional to the company’s culture, you know, like younger workers organizing or different.

ethnicity groups or genders organizing. Some people see that as a conflict. It’s like, no, no, our culture should be all encompassing. I chatted to a few people last year who told me that their responsibility was building community inside organizations. And actually, it was really interesting because I asked them, what’s the first action you take? And what they described actually was not building collective monoculture community, but actually allowing individual identities to

achieve expression. was like a really interesting juxtaposition. you know, I’ve ended up, I’ve just written a book about resilience and two of the three pillars about resilience are about personal identity and collective community. it’s just, firstly, it’s really interesting how connection and community sits at the heart of everything you say, but also that you don’t see personal identity in opposition to these things, but merely as sort of a contributor towards.

Martin Houghton Brown (34:53)
Maybe that you know, that’s a bit about my personal journey. So I didn’t come out as a gay man until I was thirty-five. And I I’m married, I had three kids. my early youth work was all connected to the church. And the church rejected me in quite a powerful way. and so I I was left quite rudderless in terms of my sense of vocation because I thought my

Calling, if you like, was to serve the church. And I and I I my identity, my individual identity, which was, you know, is one of those immutable things that despite quite a lot of effort on my part, I couldn’t change. and now with the benefit of hindsight, wouldn’t want to change. But but actually I didn’t disconnect, I went and found community.

where I could find a place where I could contribute. And so rather than isolating myself or indeed losing myself in the gay scene, you know, kind of say, right, that’s it. I’m, you know, I’m now not married any longer. I’m no now, you know, not in the church any longer. I am now you know, going to be out and Soho every night. I didn’t I didn’t do that. I I went and found a place where my my skills, my

Capacity for love and kindness still had meaning and value. And and I, you know, obviously it you know, working in the charity world, that’s a great place to find that. and but I I I think my experience is that these two aren’t oppositional, that that being a gay man, being independently and you know, fiercely proud of being gay, and now remarried to a man very happily.

three grown-up kids who love my husband as much as they love me, is is just as powerful as my sense of being part of a broader community. And actually, you know, I I wouldn’t say no to leading an LGBT organisation, but I don’t feel that that’s what I need to do to be able to contribute to to be connected. I just need to be in community. But my story still counts, my story is still important, my story still gives

a a you know a a helping hand to people who for whom they’re really worried and anxious about their identity and what that means for them. So I think I think I think we need both. I think we need people to be able to tell their individual story, but we need people to feel that they can connect into those wider communities and find their place where their their gifts and talents can be best used.

Bruce Daisley (37:14)
There was some breathtaking research really that speaks to like the power of identity during the HIV AIDS really crisis. And it found that people who were HIV positive, gay men who were HIV positive, who didn’t acknowledge their sexuality to the people around them, generally exhibited greater descent, faster descent into illness than those who didn’t. It was like this.

There’s horrible research to look at because you can’t help but be vividly presented with the humanity behind each of the data points. But basically people who were hiding their sexuality, it seemed to have this remarkable impact that it sort of reduced their wellbeing. It reduced their capacity to deal with this horrific affliction that they had. just, you know, really goes to the point of of identity that you’ve spoken about there.

Martin Houghton Brown (38:09)
Yeah, and that was my experience, Bruce. I you know, I I descended to a very, very dark place in terms of my own mental health. And and I had a real choice, I think, about whether I came out and accepted who who I was or or I didn’t. But it it felt like a choice between life and death because my experience of suppressing my sexuality, of denying my sexuality and trying to cure it, did lead me to a place where I actually

The choice around life and death was quite clear. I you know, death felt like a better option than living. And I think that that sense of isolating yourself from your identity and not being able to acknowledge it is profoundly harmful. And it’s but it’s very, very difficult when you don’t see a way out. And I think I’m just deeply grateful. Again, you know, I think of my very close friends.

Who intervened, even though they didn’t actually theologically agree with where I ended up, they did see that connecting me to other people who could who I could talk to, who I could begin to have a journey of conversations around what does it mean for me, was part of my recovery and and and brought me to a place where actually, you know, I found profound happiness. you know. not just connecting with other gay people who who share my story, but also with the wider community and you know, occasionally using my story as a as a as a way of explaining that you can live, love and learn with other people, expressing your individuality, but also sharing the diversity of other people’s stories too. Wow.

Bruce Daisley (39:49)
Quite an incredible conversation. Look, you know, and for me, sort of, it’s such a potent link of all the things that you’ve described really, of sort of the sustenance we get from feeling connected and seen for who we truly are. Just give us a shout out to like your organization or, you know, how people could help or get involved.

Martin Houghton Brown (40:08)
Yeah, so St. John ambulance SJA.org.uk, come and see what we’re doing. Come and volunteer for us. You know, if you wherever you are, you know, I’ve got PWC partners who drive ambulances, and I’ve got lunchtime supervisors who are hospital volunteers, you know, or youth workers, a whole range of ways. of course, always welcome a donation, especially the the seven figure ones. They’re really helpful. and and and and and and and just

notice our people if you’re out and about and you notice our people they’re a bit like wallpaper that you know when you think about it you’ll see them everywhere if you go back and go back on your video and look at the Jubilee celebrations you’ll see little people in green all over your screen. If you see them in real life, go and say hello and thank you for your service because they’re all volunteers and they’re wonderful, wonderful people. And so yeah and and I think you know just to say to people actually the power of volunteering if you’ve never volunteered in your life

Go and give it a go. You know, be a vaccination volunteer for for six months. We’re recruiting at the moment and you know go and jab a few people in the winter campaign we’ve got coming up and I I promise you you’ll come away feeling a million dollars.

Bruce Daisley (41:11)
There’s an amazing bit of, just to back that up, there’s an amazing stat that the organization Parkrun that runs these sort of five and 10 K runs in parks, and they measured the wellbeing of people who did the runs and people who volunteered and the uplift in the happiness of people who volunteered to basically just, you know, set up ticker tape and, and, you know, run clipboards. The happiness uplift was higher from the volunteers than it was from the people who did the actual.

Martin Houghton Brown (41:40)
Totally, totally. I believe it. I yeah, I look I’ve drunk the Kool Aid, I’m there.

Bruce Daisley (41:45)
Amazing. What an honor. What a lovely chat. I absolutely adored it. Thank you so much.

Martin Houghton Brown
Hi. Thank you, Bruce. Lovely to meet you and to spend time with you.

Bruce Daisley
I love that conversation, just goes everywhere and it’s so incredibly rich. I never really knew half of the areas it was going to go to before we even started it. So thank you to Martin. If you are interested in St. John’s Ambulance, either volunteering or giving them a donation, you’ll see links right at the top of the show notes below. And as Martin says, St. John’s Ambulance and volunteering for St. John’s Ambulance can be one the most rich and rewarding things you’ll also see in the show notes.

the research that mentioned about parkrun about the people who volunteer at parkrun seem to see a greater health uplift than the people who even run in it. So hope you’ll enjoy that. And thank you so much for all the comments and feedback I get. Feel free to link into me and I look forward to chatting to you next time.