When I founded Motherwell Cheshire like any other founder I did it to address a gap that I identified within Mental Health Services.
Over the years I have had to learn to become a “leader” which is still a label that I struggle with. For many years I was a “manager” a name that I was comfortable with, I did what It said on the tin, I managed a team.
The name leader to me has far more ethical responsibilities and is a role that I take very seriously. I see my role is not just to lead the Motherwell Cheshire team, far from it, they have the skills and the knowledge to that themselves. What I see my role is, is to change the unfairness that individuals face when facing mental health issues, at times this goes beyond mental health issues as its other inequalities that lead to people suffering from mental health issues.
I am new to this charity leader game and learning all the time, one area I am fine tuning is the political game! I am quite a political person, but try to keep this out of my role at the charity, but I must admit I am finding this increasingly difficult. The decisions that I see being made at times make me despair!
I see endless surveys, strategies and initiatives by statutory services all geared up to supposedly help those that need it most. Yet in my experience they do everything but do that. The barriers put into place to prevent people accessing services always amazes me and by now they really shouldn’t. I have to sit in meetings listening to the grand ideas by people who feel they are superior as they work for statutory services and not a charity. Ideas that I know will never work or I know isn’t working, as families are telling us isn’t working.
But the question for me at the moment is how much so I say? I am not a campaigner nor an activist, at this moment in time I haven’t got the energy to be. But what I do pride myself on is representing individuals in situations that are unable to attend and this is where my dilemma presents itself.
In meetings do I speak up and disagree with what is being said and run the risk of being known as a “trouble maker” someone who rocks the boat and possibly run the risk of not getting future funding from said service or do I be a yes person and become someone they will trust with their funding and work in way that they feel is fit.
This does all sound very petty and very black and white, but it is how I see it, and at times I have reason to believe that is how it is.
So what have I decided to do about it! I am learning how is best to communicate in the meetings, I know I can get frustrated easily with what I hear – and this can quite quickly turn into anger for me, which them makes me look like a dis functional, highly strung individual.
However what I have decided is that I wont be funded by a service that wants quantity and not quality. So to a certain extent I can say how it is as their funding wont impact us as its not needed anyway! At this stage in my life as a leader I cant change the way statutory services work, but my long term plan is to show best practices, not just from our charity but from the many great charities that are around, that have the services users at the heart of what they do, we may not have strategies and endless planning meetings to back these up these services but what we do have is passion that helps us achieve what we do.
This blog has been more of a therapeutic output for me, to help me make sense as to where I sit with it all at the moment, I am sure it will change over time – watch this space!