An update after a week away

For those late to the blog or still looking avidly each day for an update, I thought I would share some news...

We secured the funding application that I mentioned in the last entry. This means that the core programme with Southampton, around which dreamwall was built, is now funded into 2010.

We also heard that we have been awarded a fully funded pilot project with Hampshire to start working with their kids in care. If that goes well we could find ourselves helping three times the number of children we do now, starting next year. That is a minor logistical issue that we will work with the team to overcome.

This is fantastic news and not a bad place to finish this story. My part goes on, so maybe more the end of a chapter than the story.

Closing one door, but opening another

Today is my last day on-site. I am at the end of my 5 week "free transfer" to dreamwall and am busy scrabbling around trying to leave everything in some semblance of order. Last week I felt sad and down as I neared the end. This was because I knew I could make a difference, but I saw my time running out. Today I am both happy and calm. I have a plan, and I love plans. More of that later.

The last few days have been fun as we swing into execution mode on some things and sustainability mode on others. In execution terms we have....

• more or less secured double the work and funding at Southampton
• we get the yea or nae on one of our new funding applications tomorrow or Monday. The grapevine says we are in good shape. That secures another programme for another year
• we have been keeping the potential new contract at Hampshire warm by being super responsive and, again, the word on the street is positive. We hear more next week
• we viewed several properties in Southampton yesterday. Having seen them in the flesh they work for us and we can imagine them buzzing with activity. This will give dreamwall several times the space they have now, a venue for kids to drop-in and a base that is near their commissioner and their clients. Oh yes, and we think it will be free, as will the fit out

On the sustainability side, we have a clear strategy. We met with the board on Tuesday and debated this new and refined strategy. They liked it, we like it and Brett and the team feel enthused and able to "see it" and then "live it". The seeing it and the living it are absolutley mission critical here. We concluded early on that only a small part was logic, but that the vast majority of the magic dust that would deliver success was about a belief in the team that it was right and that it was within them. I just had an hour with Brett working this through and the man is good to go on banging down doors and making it work. That is proper sustainability, not a report from PwC laying out a lot of bright ideas that nobody can implement.

So, that little lot is part of my plan; here is the other part... Jonathan and I have found that we can make a difference and that it makes us feel good when we do it. So, we are going to keep on making a difference. We are both joining the board. We will form a new team on that board that will meet with Brett and the gang more regularly and provide practical advice and input to him. We will have the normal governance responsibilities, but what we have proven to ourselves and to those around us, is that we bring real life business skills to the party. We do not need to be different people and to change that which we are good at. We can bring what we are good at and apply our skills to this environment.

I have learnt so much in the last few weeks. I have learnt about the public and third sectors, how they work and how they don't, but that is just facts. I have learnt about others in society and the bad things that happen. I have discovered within myself a desire to apply some social justice. I am going to go on making a difference and keep discovering. I have discovered compassion. [Reading this I also discover that I can sound like an evangelical git, but hey, it's my last day]

Finally, I have met a lot of people who do an amazing amount of good with little recognition and often little or no financial reward; they do it because they know it is right. These inspirational leaders caused me, maybe you, to look harder at myself and ask how I could make a difference. I discovered that I could and that I wanted to. So I did. And I will.

A weekend with some "looked after children"

Too tired to post last night after a weekend with some of Southampton's more troubled kids. Again, in the New Forest, but rather than young offenders, these kids were drawn from the local council's group of "looked after children" (aka kids in care). These kids are at the core of what dreamwall does. Their "corporate parent" is Southampton City Council and they are all in foster care or children's homes. There are 200 of these young people in Southampton and dreamwall has worked with most of them in the age range 10 - 16.

First some facts and figures that I find troubling and speak to why dreamwall was founded:

• There are 40,000 looked after children in England
• A looked after child is ...
• ... 10 times more likely to have special educational needs
• ... 11 times more likely to get less than 1 GCSE
• ... 4 times more likely to be unemployed on school leaving
• Finally, although 1% of all children are looked after, the prison population in England comprises 23% people who have been "looked after". Makes a bit of a mockery of the term really

Back to the weekend. Of the 15 kids I spent my time with, perhaps 2 or 3 were born with genetic problems such as Aspergers (part of the autistic spectrum) and perhaps they found their way into care because of parents' ability to cope with that. The others had no genetic problems; what the had were problems that stemmed from the environment in which they were brought up. Many had lacked care and human interaction in their early, formative years and were now unable to function as you would expect a 12 year old to.

To give you an idea, there was the kid who dearly wanted to write all the answers to a quiz we did on Saturday afternoon. He could write, but it looked like it was from an infant school child. I did not see him spell one word correctly. He was 12 and at a state secondary school where he was bullied by the other children. Another kid would speak barely at all, he was painfully shy and he could not interact with others; he was bullied too. Others were angry, others confused, others could not share, others craved attention and approval. They did not know a life that most of us took for granted. This was nurture, or lack of it, not nature. Basically, society let them down.

For a positive, I look to the difference that some people can make and how well some kids respond. Most of the older kids have been with dreamwall for a couple of years or more. Most of them were moving towards the "normal kid". Many become dreamwall's young leaders, volunteers who act as peer mentors during their weekends; they do it because dreamwall is a family to them and they want to help the younger members of their family. Some go on to become paid staff where dreamwall is a weekend job whilst they are at college. Every one of the young leaders and paid staff is in education or training, taking control of their life, moving on. The contrast with these kids versus last week's is the emotional scarring they carry with them. The scarring can be treated with a sticking plaster or it can be treated by a top-flight plastic surgeon over many years of reconstructive surgery. My guys are the latter.

High point of the weekend was hearing every single kid ask when the next dreamwall get together would be and that, for them, dreamwall was their safest environment and a family to them. Low point was me figuring out what that meant about the rest of their lives and what had gone before.

(nearing) The end of the beginning

Time flies. This is the end of week 4 on-site. I am feeling a bit sad about that as there seems much to do and much we can achieve. Time to focus very hard on making our impact sustainable and leaving a legacy.

Tomorrow we disappear to the New Forest again. This time the group of children is drawn from Southampton's most at risk looked after children (that is the official lingo). They are in foster care or care homes, having been separated from their parents for any number of reasons, none of which is good. They are emotionally very needy and I am warned that the experience will be intense in a different way from last weekend. I will let you know how that felt on Sunday evening.

We have had some fun this week doing what we do well and driving the strategy forward hard...

We used every lever at our disposal to get a meeting with Hampshire County Council. The normal response is "speak to my PA, I am sure I can see you in a couple of weeks", but we are adopting a slightly non-public sector style of suggesting we meet today, in 10 minutes, tomorrow etc. It works too! The Hampshire meeting was to learn about what they were doing with looked after children and how we could help them; essentially it is a big pool of children whom dreamwall could benefit but has not reached out to. We met a chap who spoke the same language as Brett and that, coupled with a bit of PwC style organisation and focus, meant we played a blinder. It is not a difficult sell dreamwall when your offer is high quality and you say that for every £1 they spend they get £2 of services as we also raise funding. I used the phrase BOGOF (aka "buy one get one free") which led to a few puzzled looks.

Jonathan has been single handedly trying to find dreamwall a property in Southampton. Not so tricky you say, but the goal is to get it for free! Less easy, but we are progressing. He has also arranged a developer to do it up for free.

Finally, I am on a networking mission. As well as integrating Brett and dreamwall into the widest possible community of interested parties, I am joining up the wider PwC with many of the people I have met on my travels. This is proving surprisingly easy and also good fun. Geoff Briggs is the man in charge of PwC Southampton and we met yesterday. He already has a great programme of community engagement, but has put his hand up to help further, either directly or through his network - thanks Geoff.

I have the T-shirt, in fact I have 3

I have just spent the last three days in the New Forest. When most people say that they mean "I strolled around and looked at the pretty forest". What I mean is that, with a collection of kids, I was IN it. The Dreamwall thing involves doing things that other groups do not. So, I was chest deep in bogs (3 of them), ponds (1) and rivers (1, but for 2 hours). I will never complain again of getting a bit damp playing a round of golf or going to the shops.

The idea is that you take it like a man (pardon the sexist line) with no complaining and whilst doing this different thing you enjoy the camaraderie, help each other and work together. As a leader / grown-up (little they know) this rule applies doubly to me, so, as the freezing water passed my waist and I really really wanted to shout something a little bit like "My word this is chilly", I have to smile at the boys as if this all perfectly normal and there is nothing to worry about. I really enjoyed the whole thing and the "all in together" approach is infectious. As for the T-shirts, I now have 3, all bog stained, Dreamwall badged leader T-shirts. It is like being back at school or Uni and having the first team shirt!

The photo is as we dropped the 6 lads back in Portsmouth centre yesterday evening. I spent a couple of days with these boys, aged 12-15, with the group being drawn from Portsmouth's preventing youth offending programme. This means that they have found themselves in bother a few times with the local constabulary. Before meeting them I was not sure what to expect. Some things fitted my, and I suspect many of your, stereotypes. The lads all have hoodies, they all smoke and they can all perfect the sullen, teenage gang member look and swagger. If you walked down a road and saw a few of them on a corner most would swap sides of the street. The stories they tell are of their dad who is in prison for armed robbery, their brother in prison for armed robbery, being under ASBOs, being permanently excluded from school, how many coppers chased them.

The bit that I found more surprising was what I found out when I talked to them one-on-one. The excluded lad really, really wants to get back to school. He has had anger management issues and, if I had his family past, I would too. Now he thinks he is through the worst and needs to prove he can attend half a day a week before they let him back to full school; it is going to take months before he gets back and I do not quite know why. He does not want a life of crime, he wants to get a handful of GCSEs, including maths because he knows he needs it, and move on with a better start to his life. Two other lads are doing their exams this year but also with a vocational module doing car mechanic apprenticeships. They want to get some exams and then get a job working on cars. Now I can talk spanners and oily stuff with the best of them, so that and racing cars went down well; we found some common ground. Again, this was not a couple of kids lacking ambition or thinking the world owed them something they could just take.

A few stereotypes that were painfully evident were around the environment in which, in the main, these kids existed. I do not think one of these was from a two parent, still together family. That is not to say they were ill looked after in any way because of that, nor that single parents cannot bring up a child better, it is an observation. More significantly perhaps was the attention they did (or indeed did not) get at home. The prevalence of unemployment at home. The lack of role models for them at home. The lack of ambition that was held for them at home. You should be getting a theme here... This environment converts itself into a lack of perspective on life options and a lack of aspiration. Notwithstanding this, almost all of them wanted to work harder, wanted to move on, and were not making a choice around a life of glamorous crime. They had fallen into the situation they were in, lacked some self-discipline and were easily led astray given the few boundaries established for them.

Now that seems a bit depressing. What was uplifting was seeing these kids from different gangs, who would most often fight each other rather than so much as grunt at one another, work together and laugh together over the weekend. They were just kids, they made silly jokes, they put on silly voices, they impersonated their favourite TV shows and all copied each other. So, the weekends do make a difference and, for a moment, strip away the hard guy facade and bring out the kid just like any other. The moral is you can take the kid out of Portsmouth and you can even take Portsmouth out of the kid.

When we dropped them off they were singing in the bus. Five minutes later, as they dispersed, they aged before my eyes. The slouches came back, the cigarettes were out, the sullen and mean looks were back. I watched passers-by step around them. The mask was back on and I wondered whether we had changed things at all.

It never rains, it pours

A short update as things seem to have picked-up steam. The strategic direction seems fairly well set now and we are committing this to a document that makes sense to people beyond Jonathan and me; this will involve some creative graphics and clever words...

We are also getting heavily into sourcing funding and helping Brett to rev-up his applications. This is manna from heaven for those of us who find themselves writing proposals for a living so we are trying hard to put ourselves in the shoes of a public sector body and address their needs and emotions rather than those we have. Jonathan and I are having some "creative differences" as we do this; there is an issue with putting two PwC partners in one place in that we both think we have licence to do it our way. My consultative working skills are coming on, slowly. After "creative differences" through to 9pm last night we resolved them by going out for dinner and then having a few more drinks when we got back to our cave. A slight aside... the flat is in a basement and the sitting room has no windows so is somewhat cave-like. We worked from there yesterday and were going a little mad by the end of the day.

Most interestingly, there is a very short notice opportunity to secure £200k of funding (dreamwall turns over £200k per annum currently so this is step-change stuff) to deliver just the sort of wider range of services from a new, Southampton based hub that our strategy envisages. This could be great, if only we can win it and then figure out how we deliver it. No problem there then.

Final anecdote is on communication and the use of language. At the office we talk IRRs, cash flow, ebitda, acquisitions and a lot of other impenetrable lingo. In my new world I have dropped all of that and can now string together fantastic new phrases with little meaning (what's new?) involving words like outcomes, partnerships, neighbourhood agenda, community asset transfers, cross-agency working, intervention and so on. Let me give you an example... "I think we can reduce the need for intervention and improve outcomes if we establish greater cross-agency partnerships and, by implementing some community asset transfers, we will nail the neighbourhood agenda". Brilliant. Two worlds, two languages and two quite different ways of working. Am loving this and learning lots, not just the facts, but the different influencing techniques and forming of coalitions.

And now for something completely different

This weekend was the Britcar 24 hour race at Silverstone. When I started racing with a friend last year we were working towards a 24 hour race and this is the largest one we run in the UK so it was our goal for year 2; the clash with RLP was unforeseen but has worked out fine as I am away on residentials with the Dreamwall gang for the next couple of weekends.

With 3 other guys driving, a team of gifted mechanics and a quality support team we managed to come 2nd in class (by 24 measly seconds from first place) and 17th out of 50 whilst racing in the most modestly powered of the classes. We did all this in a Lotus Elise, not renowned as the world's most reliable of cars. There was a Lotus support race at the meeting and all the drivers kept coming up to us with looks of awe (or incredulity) that we would attempt something so doomed to failure. This kind of doubt in the inate ability of our team, Chimp Tune Racing, and professional crew and drivers just goaded us on. The car was more or less standard other than big brakes, beefier suspension and uprated cooling and lights, so a big tick in the box for British engineering. As ever, we should have won and spent over half the race leading our class. A couple of electrical glitches cost us an hour and a half and then it came down to 24 seconds.

Highlights were driving through the night with more illumination than the Blackpool tower coming from the car (there is none on the track itself). To avoid being blinded and frightened by faster cars howling past at 50mph faster than we could manage we taped over the mirror, held our racing line and trusted in their judgement to get past. The best lines I heard over the radio from our manager on the pit wall were "James, you just did your best time and I can confirm you are now leading class"... this was about 11.30pm on Saturday night. When I got back in at 6am we were back a place but I had the same immortal lines a few minutes later when our competition had to pit. Now exhausted. The picture is Richard, the Chimp of Chimptune Racing himself, driving the car over the line after 24 hours. The chequered flag is at the top of the shot.

One further thought to bring us back to earth. There was a very large crash at the start and Andy Neate is critical in hospital. We all hope he gets better as soon as possible.