Taking Cover Through Inspiration

Kangan Foyer 'reception area'

This February, I took the long flight over to Australia.  I was en route to set up an Accreditation pilot for Foyer services and deliver a key  note speech and workshop for the Foyer Foundation. The chocolate valentine's rose that greeted me from a hotel receptionist wasn't authentic, but the passion for Foyers across the country was very real.

Like many of my generation, I have a strong memory of the 1983 hit by Men at Work (an ironic title today). The song paints a picture of Australia as a place in danger of losing its spirit, from which people‘better take cover’. My travels to Australia have always been the opposite.   What I love most is not the vegemite, wine or weather; it’s the pioneering embrace of the people for vision and innovation.  There is some great practice and thinking in Australia.  Maybe one day there is a tour to be run there to share the learning.

Melbourne was my starting place to meet up with some old friends and reconnect myself into Australian culture.  The mosquito buzzword of the moment was 'trauma-informed practice'. I found myself answering questions through my morning jet lag about how Advantaged Thinking could apply.  At the back of my mind I was troubled by the sense that Advantaged Thinking is perhaps a trauma-informed idea.  It’s a reaction to a moment of trauma in my own life that I connected with experiences of people overcoming challenges through the contexts of homelessness and disadvantage. Those patrolling the boundaries of practice sometimes see Advantaged Thinking as a threat because it adds something new into the mix – the idea that the destination is not resettlement to cope with problems, but progression to build Aristotle’s Good Life.   

Kangan Foyer lounge kitchen area

By the end of my time in Melbourne, I was thinking about youth practice more like a game of golf.  Young people are trying to get round the green to make the cut. We walk with them carrying a limited set of clubs, and sometimes we even insist on taking the shots and getting in the way until everyone ends up in the bunker.  Young people will never make the cut unless they can find the right shots for each hole; and that means they need a better selection of clubs, as much as they need learning and wisdom through experience.  Advantaged Thinking is about creating more clubs, finding more practice places, and redefining the relationships so it’s young people who end up striding out on the final green to make the cut.   It’s an image that fits the importance in trauma-informed practice for building trust.  'TrustYouth', as Foyer Federation call it, should be about enabling young people to build investments of trust through a strong social contract/Foyer deal underpinned through Advantaged Thinking. Then again, the only golf I’ve ever played was crazy.

Foyer Foundation Conference saying hello

In Sydney, my conference key note started with a jokey comparison between myself and John Lennon (I've often been mistaken for him, despite the fact I am alive and can't write music).  The one thing we have in common, I suggested, is that we both have experiences of our work being overshadowed by the past. These days, I’m always the 'former director' from Foyer federation, when I’d rather be the current creator of the Inspirechilli version of 'Imagine'. Tellingly, this is exactly the problem that young people often face. Society likes to refer to young people in terms of their past – homeless, offender, care leaver, etc – rather than the person trying to overcome challenges and create opportunities in the present.  Maybe our culture sometimes lack the inspiration to look beyond the past to define the future.  I certainly think that’s true, and it’s a driver for the Inspirechilli ‘inspiration-first’ approach. The rest of my keynote honed in on lessons from the work of Corbusier and Foyers about the importance of sustaining vision and ethos through the way we design and deliver services.  That is a truth worth holding onto at a time when austerity cuts can push services to forget their identity.

Pilot Accreditation Foyer banners

I stayed an extra day after the conference to set up the Foyer Foundation’s Youth Offer accreditation pilot with 7 services from Melbourne, Wollongong, Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth. The workshop introduced participants to the new Youth Offer Foyer Framework that I’d shaped with Emma Perris for Foyer Federation. It guided them through the founding concepts built into the framework, how to use the framework to reflect on services, and the accreditation process to develop and validate the quality of Foyer practice through it.  We had agreed to bespoke the framework to fit the Australian policy, regulation and youth practice landscape, and to enable the pilot participants to become peer assessors to lead its future delivery there.  To achieve this, I’m using InspireChilli’s new online platform to enhance the accreditation experience as a learning and collaboration process. Along with online assessment tools and training resources, the system allows participants to access webinars and feedback forums, and to both find and upload all the required documentation for assessment through the platform.  It’s how I believe accreditation should work. For the moment, the pilot cohort have a long journey ahead as they begin to assess their work and get ready for validation in November. Like the UK Foyer network, they want to build the right evidence base for impact, develop the Foyer concept into new areas, and ensure that the ethos is secured for the future.

There was just enough time after the workshop to enjoy being interviewed by young people at a Foyer, and deliver a few final training sessions to organisations working to develop service philosophies and innovation practice in the homeless and care sectors.   The InspireChilli message was the same call shared at the conference: for the sector to know its 1% inspiration vision to drive the 99% of what it does; and for organisations to show leadership by focusing on the solutions they can actually create.

Travelling home, I found solace from the flight by watching a film about Bobby Fischer’s struggle to become world chess champion in the 1970s.  Just as chess, for Fischer, was a poignant search for truth, so for me is the work of the beyond profit sector.  Fischer had an impressive IQ as a chess Grandmaster. Yet, it was a different type of IQ that brought him success – the inspiration quotient to find undiscovered moves at the right time.  I believe our future IQ depends upon a different form of intelligence that is led by inspiration. At InspireChilli, we know this inspiration capital can be developed by applying specific tools and resources to how we work and live.  Why take cover from the threats around us, when we have the technology to build tomorrow right here?

You can find the slides and an audit tool for Advantaged Thinking from the conference speech and workshop at  www.inspirechilli.com  Check out the InspireChilli Courses and Offer pages, and get in contact if you want you to find out more about how to grow inspiration in your work.

For further information about the Foyer Federation's work on TrustYouth and a new Youth Offer, see www.foyer.net

Finding radiance

Seeing Foyer as an approach, rather than bricks and mortar, has been a consistent message from Foyer Federation over the years.  It is a focus that helps unpick the stereotype of ‘youth homelessness’ to reveal the more complex mix of social and personal challenges that require better offers than just a bed for the night.  More than a place to stay, Foyers were always about communities of learning to connect and find one’s place in the world. 

In my time at Foyer Federation, when I worked on the Foyer Accreditation framework, it was the staff and young people in projects I remembered more than the buildings they worked and lived in.  Yet, the buildings left their mark.  Thankfully, few were places that were unfit for young people. Most gave glimpses of design innovations to accommodate the Foyer ethos as a living community – creating a sense of space, energy, interaction and progression. A running joke over the years was to have the architects over for the night, so they could live with the good and bad they left behind. New Foyers did not always learn from the past – and while great ideas got handed down through the Accreditation framework, design errors were sometimes replicated by those who didn't listen to learn. 

The origins of Foyer as a concept comes from France.  Over the years the Federation always kept cordial relations with Paris, with a few shared visits.  Ironically, though, it was travel to USA which brought back more ideas in my work as Director of Innovation. Visits to New York and Philadelphia led to a focus on assets that drove the early development of Open Talent and Advantaged Thinking.  In those philosophies, the idea of ‘place’ came to the foreground as a form of inquiry into the type of environment where young people could best develop and harness their talents in life. It is a powerful question which is always best left open, as every age must shape its own answers.  Perhaps it is the job of Foyers to sustain this conversation at the community level, re-applying the Foyer ethos and approach over time.  Indeed, the best projects I visited were those flexible and forward thinking enough to keep redeveloping themselves in the moment. 

I was fortunate to begin my 2016 in Marseille, with a final slot on my itinerary to check out Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse (Radiant City), the modernist flagship for his vision of Unité d'habitation.  I left regretting I had not visited before. For here was a project of bricks and mortar, in which a vision of life had been cemented into the design.  The stunning sense of space and light, shops, businesses, educational facilities, and breath taking rooftop views, enshrined an approach to community living that still inspires people to live there today.  While not a Foyer for young people, anyone who knows a Foyer would have instantly recognised its principles.  Of course, history will point to how Corbusier’s vision came unstuck in some of the less well conceived housing estates designed by others in Great Britain.  But there are important things to learn when one sees, in the original building, the essential features and intent that were foolishly disregarded in the flawed projects that followed.  It is a lesson in what happens when a founding vision is lost from the bricks and mortar. Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse was a work of art.  Where is its equivalent as an offer for young people today?  What might be a future way of living that offers a solution to the shifting sands of youth housing and employment? 

Watching the sun sink into the rooftops, I felt three messages from Corbusier grip my mind: 

1. That there must be a strong guiding vision and philosophy for what we wish to create, ambitious and radical enough to shape a positive vision for future living; 

2. That the vision and philosophy of the ethos must not be compromised in its inception, or, most particularly, its replication – for once the approach enshrined into the design of bricks and mortar is taken apart and diluted, the promise of radiance disappears; 

3. That, to ensure the above, we need a collaborative development framework for our new vision and philosophy to guide how and what we do so we maximise its potential over time. 

Those messages are even more important following David Cameron’s recent promise (or not) to ‘regenerate’ UK housing estates.  The message to ‘rebuild houses that people feel they can have a real future in’ is one that Corbusier would surely recognise; though I expect he would also ask, what the vision and philosophy behind the message is.   

Whether demolishing and rebuilding estates, or seeking to sustain or redevelop Foyers, it is the bricks and mortar of inspirational thinking that is most precious. 

At InspireChilli, we take inspiration seriously.  So did Corbusier. Shouldn’t you?

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