EC1 New Deal For Communities

My interview at Renaisi, who are a regeneration social enterprise based in Hackney who managed the EC1 New Deal for Communities funding, was one of the nicest I have ever had and I have been interviewed a lot. I find the restrictive equal opps type of questioning most favoured by councils dull and numbing. They have their set questions and never stray. Kevin, who was one of the Directors at Renaisi at the time, asked questions that made you feel you had shown yourself at your very best. He was probably a bit of a flirt, but the outcome was that I felt the most interesting person in the world imaginable.

This sensation did not last long. I remember going straight to the pub afterwards for a stiff drink and texting my daughter with words to the effect that I could not possibly be offered a job in such an environment awash with beautiful young people.

About 3 weeks later I got a phone call at work. They needed an Employment and Enterprise Programme Manager at short notice in one of their outpost projects. I started the next Monday.

I hadn’t really got a clue what I was expected to do, but as so often happens to me, I settle in, find my feet and really begin to enjoy myself. EC1 New Deal was one of 39 partnerships across the UK who received £50 million over 10 years to turn a local neighbourhood around. I arrived half way through the programme and they were under-spending and felt to be underperforming. I was part of a team charged with changing the image and pulling together partnerships and projects in double quick time to get the money out the door.

The whole experience took me back to Tower Hamlets Housing Action Trust. Like THHAT they had money so we were all on very good salaries, operated from swanky offices with all mod cons and actually had a prize for which operative could produce the most receipts in a month. I had to commission and monitor projects ranging from a £20k one year scheme to 3 year multi agency schemes worth £400k. At any one time I would be working on between 14-21 projects. I also produced a revised employment and enterprise strategy.

I initiated the revival of Whitecross Street Market as a food market while another colleague master minded the infrastructure. I wrote the bid and initially managed the outreach, advice and guidance project that is still going as Connect https://hazeldurbridge.com/help-doorstop Both these projects won Regeneration and Renewal national awards.

At first I was managed by Peter Smith. He still does contract management around London. I am not sure this is how he would best like to be remembered, but he had a mantra about diversity in teams, diversity of age, ethnicity, gender and faith and was scrupulously fair in his dealings. We all dressed fairly casually. He came to work every day immaculate in a suit. How he managed us all in that first year I don’t know, because I have never worked before or since with such an extraordinary group of talented, mega opinionated experts.

I also wanted to mention Robin of Keystone. He owned Keystone Employment Agency at Kings Cross at the time. It is now a hotel. Basically the guy is a millionaire I met at some event and we put together what we felt was a bid for a sustainable EC1 employment agency, but we never got it to jump through all the hoops and get accepted. There was a consultant advisor who didn’t like the business plan, even though she said to me that she had done something similar herself. It was a lost opportunity as Robin had the business acumen to do great things. Very few of those EC1 projects survived beyond the funding period. St Luke’s community centre did quite well out of hosting us in our dying years and is now thriving in its newly refurbished state.

After the first year there was a restructure. Peter went. New people came in and my life there changed. A new tier of management were brought in that few of the programme managers flourished with. I guess sometimes in office politics managers sometimes make themselves big by making others small.

My new manager was kind, but not particularly effective and left after a few months with stress. I did manage to get a 4 week leave period agreed at this time as many colleagues went abroad for family reasons. This allowed me to borrow my brother’s RV in the states and spend a month driving round the canyons in Arizona and Utah, visiting Vegas etc. Awesome.

I needed something to sustain me in what was to follow. I tried cannily I thought to align myself with the rising star and request him to be my new manager. Big mistake. In the end there was no avoiding him as he became the big boss, but he was younger, starting out, and if you didn’t do things his way you were rubbish. Over the next 12 months he took away all my autonomy, all my most interesting pieces of work and then berated me for not being good enough. It was crushing and dispiriting. He reduced me to tears in supervision several times and seemed proud of it.

EC1 was downsizing anyway, but it was time to go.

EC1 also taught me the value of PR. I was not the communications lead on the programme, but I learnt the importance of branding there, of good news stories, of relentless control over what goes out.

Renaisi threw fabulous Christmas parties. All but one of the Directors I knew then have left. They were all excellent at the work life balance which is precisely why they are not there anymore. My oppressor is not there any more either.