Moving from Shared Lives Plus to Mayday Trust

With a lot of sadness, after more than 11 years, I am leaving Shared Lives Plus.

I’m excited to share that I’m going to join Mayday Trust, one of the most radical organisations helping people through tough times such as experiencing homelessness, as chief exec.

I’ve lived and breathed Shared Lives Plus for such a long time! But I have felt for a little while that I would like to take on a new challenge, and that Shared Lives Plus is very well placed to thrive with a new leader. One of the many pleasures of this job has been recruiting such an amazing team, with great managers and a strong culture. We are financially in a good place, our new Shared Lives membership offers are being welcomed by members, our Family by Family pilot is helping its first families to help other families, and we have a new £1.2m grant for Homeshare (https://lnkd.in/dqQukzzR). With our members, we’ve brought Shared Lives to thousands more people in the teeth of austerity and then the pandemic, and it remains the highest-rated form of regulated care, and a model that shows a brighter and more sustainable future for our care and support system. Along the way we’ve made friends and won allies from the grassroots through to Ministers, and have been proud to be part of partnerships like Think Local, Act Personal, the Care Provider Alliance, the Social Care Innovation Network and to have placed our members’ work and thinking at the heart of some of the key care and health policy debates.

I know that Shared Lives Plus will go from strength to strength.

I love Mayday Trust’s courage and the way the team lives their values. The system supporting people going through tough times isn’t working for people and Mayday demonstrates a different way of doing things, which focuses on people’s strengths, potential and fixing the broken system. Here is the announcement and my first blog with some first thoughts on taking on this amazing new role.