People are sometimes surprised when they hear that before I led this Foundation's day-to-day work, I spent years in social care, supporting people recovering from addiction as they tried to rebuild their lives. They assume it must have been a strange leap — from sitting with someone on one of their hardest days to sitting in meetings about strategy and evaluation criteria. In practice, it hasn't felt like a leap at all. Almost everything I use in this role, I learned in that one.
What that work actually teaches you
Social care doesn't move at the pace people expect. Recovery isn't a straight line, and it isn't quick. You learn very fast that progress is often small, uneven, and easily missed if you're looking for a dramatic turning point instead of the quiet, unglamorous work of someone simply getting through another week better than the last. You learn patience, not as a virtue you're praised for, but as a practical necessity — because impatience helps no one, least of all the person in front of you.
You also learn to be sceptical of anything that looks like help but isn't built to last. It's easy to do something that feels generous in the moment and forget about it the next day. It's much harder, and much more useful, to stay involved long enough to see whether what you did actually changed anything.
Practical over performative
The people I supported didn't need grand gestures. They needed things that worked: consistency, someone who turned up when they said they would, practical steps that fitted their actual circumstances rather than an idealised version of them. That distinction — between what looks like help and what functions as help — has stayed with me ever since.
"The people I worked with taught me that dignity isn't something you grant someone. It's something you notice was there all along."
— Georgina Rigby, Foundation Lead
Seeing the person, not the label
It's easy for people going through addiction, homelessness or crisis to become a category rather than a person — a statistic in a report, a line in a funding bid. Working in social care strips that away quickly. You sit across from someone and you see the whole of them: their humour, their frustration, their capability, their history, not just the difficulty they happen to be facing that week. That habit of looking past the label to the person underneath is something the system around people in crisis doesn't always encourage, but it's essential if the support you're offering is going to mean anything.
Bringing that lens to the Foundation
As Foundation Lead, my job is less hands-on than it used to be, but the underlying questions haven't changed. When we're deciding whether to support a cause, I'm not just looking at what a charity says it does. I'm asking whether the people running it understand the people they're serving in that same detailed, unglamorous way — whether their model is built around what actually helps, or around what looks good from a distance. That's a harder thing to assess from a spreadsheet, and it's exactly where the years I spent in social care are most useful to this role.
It also shapes how we stay involved once a partnership begins. I'm wary of support that starts and stops with a single gesture, because I've seen how little that changes for someone in the middle of rebuilding their life. What I look for, and what I try to build into every partnership I coordinate, is the same steadiness I learned to value on the other side of this work.
Why homelessness work feels personal
It's probably no accident that homelessness is the area of our work I feel most connected to. Our partnerships with CHESS Homeless and Homeless Street Angels sit close to the world I came from — people who, for all sorts of reasons, have ended up outside the systems that are supposed to catch them. Evaluating those partnerships isn't an abstract exercise for me. I know, from direct experience, how much it matters that support is practical rather than performative, and how much difference it makes when someone treats a person as a person rather than a problem to be managed. That's the standard I try to hold our own involvement to, not just the organisations we back.
I didn't come into this role with a background in fundraising or a charity sector CV. I came in with years of sitting with people at difficult points in their lives, and a strong sense of what genuinely helps versus what only appears to. That's still, in the end, the job.