My last day in the office at the beginning of lockdown 1 was 17 March. When I left that day, I never imagined that I wouldn’t be back, other than to clear my desk. I was a partner in a successful consultancy firm, and a head of service. I had built a great team, had fantastic relationships with my colleagues and had a broad range of clients we were doing really interesting work with. But by mid-April, I realised that I had to quit. Lockdown forced me to look at what I was doing with my life and really question why I was doing it. What were the things that mattered to me, and was I going to accomplish them via the path I was on? When I realised that the answer to that question was no, I had no option but to resign. I decided to set up on my own, helping businesses and organisations get on the path to net zero and develop wider environmental, social and governance strategies. If you want to know more about the reasons behind my decision, I discussed it in some depth on the Fourword Thinking podcast. What it boils down to is that in dealing with the climate emergency, this is the crucial decade. I didn’t want to get to 2030 and have my children ask me what my contribution was, and to not have a good answer to that question.
Cut to July and I have registered my new company, Fair Futures Partnership. I am planning to lie low over the summer and sort out my website, get some marketing materials together, do some CPD, that kind of thing. Serendipity, however, has other ideas. I am browsing through Twitter and I see this tweet:
@lateralnorth
Excited to see this @KateRaworth and something #Glasgow could implement too; an idea written about by @JamieACooke here: https://lateralnorth.com/glasgow_doughnut.html… @fergusambruce @lauramchard
This piqued my interest as I am a big fan of Kate Raworth and Doughnut Economics. So I headed to Lateral North’s website and discovered After the Pandemic, a digital platform they had put together to invite ideas from people to Rethink, Reimagine and Redesign spaces and places to be greener, more vibrant and more resilient as we recover from COVID-19. I got in touch with Lateral North, or Graham, and offered my help. My particular interest was in eradicating vacant and derelict land - instead of being a blight on our communities, I wanted to find ways of seeing these sites as an opportunity to address environmental and social issues. At that point, I had the very modest idea of finding a little bit of vacant land near the SEC and using it to show how brownfield sites are integral to meeting net zero carbon targets. Maybe put a modular house on it, or something. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought it through. I had a call with Graham and one of his collaborators, Fergus Bruce, and we started throwing some ideas around. We quite quickly identified City Wharf as being an ideal location for some kind of community-focused project related to COP26. But City Wharf was in private ownership, and had planning permission for a build-to-rent development. How would we even get them to talk to us?
I did a bit of digging, reading through the documents on the Council’s planning portal. As it happened, I knew the planning consultant who submitted the application, Teri Porter. I got in touch with her and asked her if she could arrange a meeting for us with Dandara. Teri very graciously agreed, and a couple of weeks later came back to say that Dandara’s Development Director, Zoe Sharpe, was keen to speak to us. Dandara invests in its developments for the long haul and aspires to create vibrant and sustainable communities. They loved our vision of using some of their space to create a hub for culture, creativity and imagination, and so granted us access to 3,000 sq m of the land for the next 12 months.
I was honoured when Graham asked me to speak at the After the Pandemic Symposium on 13th November, which was a truly inspiring day. Through After the Pandemic, and our own networks, we already have so many wonderful ideas for what we can do with this space, this time and this opportunity. When I left my job six months ago, I had no idea what was going to happen. But what I did know is that I would live my values, be open and willing to connect with people in a meaningful way. And despite, for the most part, being confined to my house, I have made lots of new connections and refreshed existing ones. I have realised that the way I make a difference is to bring these people together, to encourage and support them and, most importantly, to not be afraid to believe in the power of my own imagination.