Grow Places

GP 08: The Human Spirit: Impacting Homelessness Beyond Only Shelter with Rob Neale of St Mungo's

• Grow Places • Season 1 • Episode 8

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What if you could contribute to solving one of society's most pressing issues - homelessness? Our guest today is Rob Neale from St Mungo's, one of the UK's largest homelessness charities. He's here to share his journey from studying physics and human rights law, to becoming a pivotal figure in fundraising through corporate partnerships. 

Hang tight as Rob throws light on the multifaceted nature of homelessness. It's not just about providing shelter, but also addressing a diverse range of needs - from dealing with rent arrears and trauma, to substance abuse and mental health issues. Hear firsthand accounts of the complexities involved in tackling homelessness, the importance of building trust and the resilience and strength of the human spirit.

In our final act, Rob shares insights on securing partnerships for projects not funded by the government. You'll learn about the tact and empathy required while assisting people sleeping rough, and the enriching experience of volunteering for a charity. Get ready to be inspired and moved by this profound conversation. Remember, even the smallest act of kindness can leave a lasting impact and imbue your life with a sense of purpose.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the People Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, tom Larsen.

Speaker 2:

So, Rob, thank you very much for joining us today. How are you doing?

Speaker 3:

I'm not doing too bad, tom. Thank you for coming here today. It's been a lovely slog and set up the other equipment for the interview.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, yeah, I know I've got as light as I can in the set up, but it still is a fair amount of kit. This is as light as it gets.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, this is a light as it gets, but we've got it in the end. I just expected somebody to rock up with their phone recording and just like let's do this, oh yeah.

Speaker 2:

I've got all the gear and no idea. It's definitely one of those podcasts at the moment.

Speaker 3:

It's so good that everyone needs to start somewhere, and I know you've been busy. You're doing a few more, so I'm not even the first one.

Speaker 2:

No, no, not at all, not at all. So, no, it's all good and, yeah, really great for you to have us here. Really, we've known each other for quite some time now, back to the days of the Standout Foundation and working together really closely there, and you personally, and obviously St Mungos, do some amazing and impactful work. So I'm really grateful for you taking the time just to speak to us today and tell us a little bit more about St Mungos and also you personally, about why you do what you do. So maybe initially we could kind of start at the top and, like you know, why do you kind of do what you do? And maybe give us a bit of an intro to St Mungos as well. Cool.

Speaker 3:

That's no problem at all, I mean. So yeah, it's hard to think that four years ago, three years ago, we were working together on the Standout Foundation partnership, I think that's. I mean, I've been here for six years, coming up to seven now, so it wasn't long since I'd started that we started working together, and that kind of goes into the why I do what I do and where I do it. So I'm not sure if this will be on the introductory kind of sheets or anything like that. So, just for the context of the people who might be listening, I am an account manager at St Mungos. I work in the partnerships team. My job is to work with companies of all different sizes, shapes, to kind of figure out how we can leverage their support to better help the people who are sleeping or homeless or at risk of homelessness, and I can take many different shapes and forms. I'll go into that maybe in a little bit more detail as to what, who and why. St Mungos is, just as a top line for a lot of people who, again, might not know about us. We're one of the largest homelessness charities in the country. We stand alongside others, like shelter and like Centrepoint. Everyone's got their own specialization in niche. If you were to ask me in a short space what St Mungos is, it is literally just trying to get people as quickly off the streets into specialist accommodation, providing a complete recovery journey and helping them to rebuild their lives. That's the kind of gist of it. Again, I'm happy to dig into that a little bit more For me personally why I got into this.

Speaker 3:

I studied. Well, first I studied, I would be completely honest. First I studied physics at university and really didn't enjoy it. I loved physics at A level when it was a little bit more kind of like, you know, you'd watch something on BBC which is like the stars in the sky and you're just like wow, stars. That was all fun and games. And then when you get to university, it was like, oh, there's a lot more number crunching involved and this isn't as amazing imaginative for me anymore. So I struggled with that, dropped out of physics. Then I went on to study law at Aberystwyth University in Wales. I went on to go into a post-grad, which is human rights law and that's kind of where all of this kicked off.

Speaker 3:

So I started to get more of an interest into third sector organisations and how they support people just across asylum and immigration. My master's dissertation was actually on that, looking at how we treat people who are seeking asylum in this country I'll say that for another podcast and just trying to think about how I might help with that and there was an organisation that needed some funds raised for it Like they were a great organisation. It was like legal support for people who needed just helping hand. You know, had limited language and support needs and they just, yeah, cash strapped, I think, is the advice I'd say to put it like so many wonderful organisations that do incredible work, they just didn't get the funding to do their jobs. So I started fundraising for them and that kind of indirectly led to me jumping from any kind of semblance of that into fundraising.

Speaker 3:

I came to London because this is where most of the fundraising jobs are.

Speaker 3:

It's got better over the last few years and started out in events and raising, which is looking at how you know just like it was.

Speaker 3:

It was for a cancer charity that worked with families and relatives of very young children and adults who had very serious cancer diagnosis and my first job there was to put on a family fund day, which sounds like you know, kind of like quite an easy thing to kind of do.

Speaker 3:

But it was already a motion when I joined and you know I was very conscious the fact that all these people in these very difficult circumstances have traveled from all across the country just to connect with like-minded individuals and, kind of like, allow some steam and have a nice space for their children, where their children aren't. They're not different from the other kids in any way. They were just, like you know, seeing what was going on. They were enjoying themselves there and just providing that and, you know, seeing the impact of that on people and working with the at the time a corporate partner, to deliver that, I just really enjoyed it and that kind of like set me up. So here I stand now, six, seven years on from that, seven, eight years on from that, and, yeah, I haven't looked back really.

Speaker 2:

So that's the gist of it. No, it's amazing and I didn't realize. You, you know, studied human rights at the start of your career and it kind of all stems from there. But it's really good to understand that because, as you say, you can see a real thread that runs through everything you do and really drives you on a personal level. And that must feel good now to you know, to be in that fundraising position where you can kind of make a difference and have some real impact really with those partnerships.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it feels fantastic. The best part is about our jobs. A lot of the time is it has its difficulties to. Every job is going its own challenges and sometimes, like instability is always tricky to move around. And you know, there's always wider context to our homelessness work and I just do a small slice of it with fundraising and the corporate partnerships that we work with. But it is really fulfilling to see things take root and grow and see that we are having an impact.

Speaker 3:

And I would say, like the people that we have the pleasure to work and meet with in companies of all different stripes Again like they can be some of the most wonderful, like how, like warm hearted, caring people and they want to make a difference. They just don't necessarily know how, or maybe they do know how and have the resources, but just not in the context of homelessness. And I always bear in mind like it's almost like a truism for me. So the reason I got into cancer and health care is my first kind of charity, steps later into homelessness is because it was like it was a personal kind of connection for me, Because I grew up in like a cancer state. My mum benefit from the right to buy your own house. After, like you know, we grew up in a cancer state. Eventually she's bought a house on another cancer state and it is wonderful, Like you know, the the community is really warm.

Speaker 3:

But you know there's no getting around the fact that there was some definite kind of issues with, you know, buying groceries and things like that.

Speaker 3:

And you know other kids, you know, with their new uniforms always a bit of a challenge for my mum and she was a single parent so it was always quite challenging for her to manage that. So I always kind of knew growing up what the benefits were of having like a strong safety net for certain things. We all that there you go, it's back on screen so having a strong, safe, social safety net for things like access to health care, to access to housing, housing, to access to food. I had three school meals Like if we didn't have those I don't know what you would have done. So I always in my mind the kind of like thread has been you know we want to set people up to succeed but you've got to provide a strong safety net to prevent the worst damage occurring to people who some people are more vulnerable than others. And, yeah, just being part of that work at someone goes is real privilege. We work with some incredible people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and just on that point then, because you know, some mongos sort of stated mission statement is got two pillars really One which is about, you know, ending homelessness and broader sense, and the second is being about rebuilding lives, and what you're describing there kind of ties into that, doesn't it? You know you talk about a net, you talk about a system that kind of goes around these things, and you know I worked together through the standard foundation. That was more in the kind of rebuilding lives category, wasn't it? You know, with your recovery college and I think you know maybe you could give people an understanding about the breadth of the work and maybe the challenge that goes into this, because it's not a kind of one size fits all or a kind of targeted approach. That's needed really, is it?

Speaker 3:

And that's the tricky thing to a lot of people misunderstand about our work is, you know, they just think there is a single solution for homelessness. But I won't do it here now to some degree, just because you know my presentations that I do to partners and show to people is when you start breaking it down. Homelessness is incredibly complex and you need a really comprehensive, solutions-based approach to really kind of address people in the way that they need support, like not just kind of throwing things at the wall and just hoping that they stick. You know SEMMUNG has got 50 years of expertise. Other organizations again have got like like decades and decades of knowledge in their specific areas. So there's a lot of partnership work that goes on.

Speaker 3:

I guess, in terms of SEMMUNG's impact, one thing is quite important to say again for the scale. A lot of people don't understand the scale of the work that we do. So just over the last year SEMMUNG has worked with just under 25,000 people. I think it's like 24,900 or so people and we work with just over just under 2,900 people every single night. So that's people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. So we're talking large numbers of people, largely based in London, but also region in Bristol, reading, oxford, brighton, various regions where we kind of we know that there's a need for us to go into to support with whatever is missing from the rehabilitation support services there. And yeah, just to kind of give a potted understanding for a lot of our listeners, it is complex, needs a lot of the time.

Speaker 3:

You get people who are exposed to homelessness because of you know they just couldn't make rent that month and they are. They find themselves homelessness because of that and other people. It's something that's been building up for a while. It could be that you know they experienced trauma or abuse as children which means that, like later on, even if they have overcome that trauma to some degree, it can mean that if they encounter further stressors or trigger factors can bring all that back Mental health needs, substance abuse needs. We work extensively with the prison system.

Speaker 3:

We look at people. We work with people who are seeking refuge, women who are fleeing abuse and persecution, so like there's all different needs and again, this is a very short hand form of kind of summary, but you've really got to make sure that your support is tailored because at the end of the day you don't have just one chance to support a person like we don't give up on people. They might go through our program multiple times before it's successful, but it's easiest and best if you get that succeed the first time, if that person doesn't return to the streets, because it can take a lot of trust and faith to begin that journey in the first place. And trust and faith can be in short supply, you know, for people who have been rough sleeping for a long time, where they might have been moved on consistently.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I know everyone's got a job to do and that goes for people working in local boroughs and areas where their instructions or their knowledge might be to move a person on. But you know we try and take that opportunity to engage with the person and offer them a solution to leave the streets behind, to come into our services where we have capacity to do so, and then kind of offer them a lifeline and a roadmap to actually recovering and becoming independent Again. That's the ultimate objective. We don't want people to stay on our services long term. I've got more detail to share perhaps on the employment side of things.

Speaker 3:

But I also need to take a breath.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, no. Well, you know, in everything that you do you know you're talking about trust there and maybe we'll come on to that in a second, but you and the people at some of those, you've got a you know real good understanding about people and seeing people that they're most vulnerable and often that's you know, when, when phrase is like people's true colors, you know you can kind of see a lot of things about people when they're in those types of positions. And so, in summary, what are some of the key things that come to mind when you think about what you've learned about people in general from doing the work that you do?

Speaker 3:

That's a good question, I mean, I think it's. It's one of those things where, like you know, you only get to know a person truly when they're like under stress or, like you know, when you're under stress yourself and you ask them for support. I suppose, like over the years I've had the pleasure to visit a lot of the same kind of services to a lot of volunteering. I've volunteered extensively at our recovery college, which is our learning and education platform, to kind of deliver some digital classes. Their mind was specifically on presentations and confidence building, because, again, this is getting off the point. But when it came to delivering these classes, you know you're almost. You're almost like sneaking in the personal development side of things. That sounds really sly, but like the idea there is like, okay, cool, it's about delivering a presentation confidently to X number of people. That's something a lot of us don't have to do. What does that equip you to do? It equips you to go into a interview panel where there's multiple people talking to you. That's a weird and strange environment. It always is like a lot of people, no matter how senior and professional you are. When you sit down in front of an interview panel it's like a bit of a shock to the system. So, like, it's going to be very tricky and it's looking at opportunities like that. Okay, what can this teach? So it isn't just about presentation. It's talking confidently to your friends about what your passions and hobbies are and finding value in what you like and being prepared to talk about it and communicate these ideas. So it's almost like, okay, the crux is confidence building. Sorry is a presentation, but it builds all these skills and your self confidence and belief over a period of time and gets you to socialize with the other clients and with the other clients and the people who have taken part in that class where you might not have had that interaction with a lot of people.

Speaker 3:

Again, like we said before, building that relationship of trust can take time and you know when you meet people who are asleep, they are in survival mode. They're in a place where they don't necessarily know what tomorrow is going to bring. A lot of people have been rough sleeping for a while. Well, have a crude knowledge of how to survive on the streets. Now they'll take pride in that and they'll have formed social connections as well. So they will. They will feel strongly in position to deal with what is coming their way. They don't necessarily know what that is and, in terms of looking forward to the future, that isn't something that everyone's in a position to do and particularly, like you know, on the streets. People are exposed to horrific levels of violence from, you know, from people who are sleeping rough themselves or from the public. So it's quite you know, people don't necessarily want to be found either.

Speaker 3:

So when we're talking about finding people at the first instance on the streets, when you find that person, you don't know what situation they're going to be in You've got to be very careful and you've got to be very thoughtful about how you approach it. We've got some absolutely incredible they're basically angels is the best way I can put it like in our outreach teams. We go out morning and night looking for people who are asleep, and we have volunteers who do the same thing and they, their job, is to make that connection to Very gently. Firstly, it's just spotting them, making sure that we can actually find them effectively because burr is a big and our teams aren't huge and Approaching that cautiously and just assertively and saying to them like, look, what can we do to help you, what does your journey look like? And building that up with them. First, I think it's just getting them into Accommodation, emergency accommodation, and then triaging assessing their needs, connecting them with Some what a person that we call a caseworker is responsible for overall journey through San Diego services, and connecting them with things Like the recovery college I just mentioned before, in classes that will support and rebuild their lives. Finally trying to get them to move into independent accommodations.

Speaker 3:

So, in terms of where we find people and their needs, I always just say, like, imagine yourself at your worst day and you know how much help you needed, and then imagine that being even worse. Well, like you know a lot of the things we take for granted in terms of stability. You know if something bad goes wrong, it's usually one thing in isolation. You know, imagine multiple things going wrong or not even having the stability for a full back position. Like you know, you might not have strong friends and family connections where you can be like, oh, can I stay on your couch for a week or two. You might not have any money in the bank which says, oh, I could have to worry about lunch tomorrow because even if I get tipped out my house, I can still afford food in a hotel and that your job is in stable and that may be like.

Speaker 3:

You know, you've got Existing mental health needs and you know, we know mental health Issues in the country have been exacerbated, particularly over the last few years, so maybe more people know what I'm talking about when I say this. I've encountered it many times in my life. Where you know where these things are all lining up, at the same time it becomes very, very difficult to surmount them and that's where that helping hand, that support system, that safety net needs to come in. So that's my answer.

Speaker 2:

No, no, but you know it's amazing what you and I say, particularly the frontline people here do, and it's an incredibly skilled and, you know, sensitive role that they have to take, isn't it? And a lot of empathy needs to be shown and and and to build that trust. And you know a lot of our listeners here are working or interested in the built environment and you could say that there's a there's a disconnect within the boot environment between the industry and maybe the communities in which some of these projects happen, and sometimes there's an element of a lack of Trust or or need to kind of get closer to one another. So what do you think you've learned, then, about maybe, about trust as a theme and some of the kind of practical steps, maybe to kind of building that, that that maybe are applicable to, to listeners and to a to other kind of areas of life, really?

Speaker 3:

I mean there's a few ways tackle that question. I say like just on a personal level. I'd say firstly, like in terms of, yeah, if you look at like the journey our clients go through, I think there are some valuable lessons there about you know, being you know, kind of like not giving up on people but also being ready to reach out for help yourself, being very important, key steps that we don't always feel ourselves equipped to do. So a little bit of a case of you know, we've realized for a lot of people. You know we grow up with these biases, like the ideas about homelessness that we encounter when I give a presentation all the time, you know people don't feel necessarily equipped or that they can say this in a public space, but when I've spoken to people one-on-one, there's a lot of misunderstandings about homelessness, what leads people to become homeless, how responsible they are for themselves, what the solutions are and, in a similar way, when you're looking at integrating Homelessness support services into a local community, it can be very easily, it can be very easy to see resistance to that, I think and you know, fair enough as well, because, like for the community's perspective, it can be that you don't know how, what that looks like, what shape that can be. You can read horror stories online, and online's always the worst place to find information. At the top of that, particularly when things are there's strong feelings around them, because it can be very easy. Like you know, one bad example case today can kind of balloon into this is the one that pops the top every time you search. This is the bad story, so to speak.

Speaker 3:

But you know, our teams work really carefully with local communities and with the GLA and the government to try and make sure that we Off these support services and let's say, even beyond that, frankly, like if we, if we do see ourselves as a society where we do offer Support to one another, we see that as important. You know, I think some forbearance needs to be baked in to some degree. It can't just be a oh yeah, I really think this support is great, but as long as it doesn't impact me or is close to me or affect me in any way. You know, you do see that consistently across, like third sector work in general or even things like, you know, councillor housing and different things like that, different social initiatives.

Speaker 3:

You need to take a wider view and say like a what is? What is the role of my smaller community within that? How do we work with these organizations? How are we fine with that? How am I personally fine with it? Do I need to challenge my own perceptions and negative Narratives?

Speaker 3:

I realise that there are difficulties there, but at the end of the day, you know, if you see it as a community, then we have to confront this and you know London's a very built-up city, like we just feel like we're living on top of each other, which does exacerbate this to some degree. I think we do need to probably look a little bit more about how we. I mean, obviously there's been various pledges and things like that in the news even recently that we, how we, tackle house building and property. You know we do need to build more houses. We do need to alleviate some of these issues and problems. You may be less central on London could be a way of looking at it, but I'll leave that to the policy team to kind of push that point a little bit more.

Speaker 2:

No, thanks, rob.

Speaker 2:

And you know we had Heather Macy from Marketech Aware on this podcast a few weeks ago and she talked about, you know, every one of us is only ever kind of three steps from homelessness and that builds, you know, a huge amount of kind of you know should build a huge amount of empathy with people, shouldn't it?

Speaker 2:

In terms of being able to relate to people who are going through that at any point in time, and and just just sort of taking the opportunity really to do what we can, you know, in the roles that we've got, and, and, you know, try to make some impact where we can and, as you say, that's that may be something, you know, very, very immediate, like, you know, some of the great people who volunteer for you, who are on the streets, or it might just be about doing something within your sphere of influence to to try and make a positive difference, and hopefully some of that is going to start to happen. But it also takes takes sort of organizations and people to to approach some of these discussions that historically, you know, haven't really been part of core business, to talk about and and and to try and work in partnership in the way that you do is a really good way to approach. That, isn't it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean, we do find the great deal of success with our partners. So we do raise a large sum of money every year. I mean Setmango's total income as an organisation is £180 million and fundraising we make up a good chunk of that. But overall our specific niche is to find partners who can support projects that might not be funded by government projects or other sources of income. So we take a slice out of that set. Okay, well, what do we need to find funding for? Specifically Things like the Recovery College, which are all funded by voluntary sources. We try and find projects like that and just say, okay, how do we best support this? And then line up partnerships to support that in time, in kind, and what that looks at is, yeah, is that a fund financial nation? Like a strict financial nation? Some organisations are happy to do that and keep it at that level of relationship. Others want to get more involved with that specific project. Others want to see work across the board, like they might fund, say, for example, our education or employment team work, but want to see outreach or what our accommodation services look like and get their volunteers involved in turn as well.

Speaker 3:

We do have a wonderful volunteering programme ourselves as well, so we have a wonderful volunteering coordinator. So I repeat myself, but it's the only word I can really think of to describe Ellie she works really hard to find opportunities in our services where meaningful volunteering can take place. So what does that look like? That's you know. It could be repainting, repairing a garden or inside a service. It can be cooking meals for our clients at special occasions. It can be teaching skills in our classes, our digital online classes. It can be, over winter, wrapping up presents, delivering them to our services. Just a little thing to say that you know somebody is thinking of you. It's all these little bits across the year that kind of add up and allow us to.

Speaker 3:

We need to deliver some great value for the overall charity and I'd say like, in part, I would like to think that you know we'll have more scope in the near future to look at maybe project partnerships that do tie a more strategic element to our work.

Speaker 3:

So addressing some of these problems, like with outreach, if there's less emergency accommodation, you know, helping to look at spaces which a partner might be designing or working on and saying what can we do to integrate some mongo support and services into that a little bit more readily, I think everyone at the organization is ready to do it. It's always a matter of capacity Because we you know teams here do work really hard and they are run quite lean. But yeah, we have some fantastic success stories and it's just a matter of, like, key people across organizations putting in the time and having the scope to really explore those. Is this done as part of a person's job or is it a person's dedicated role to look at this? You know, do they have the freedom and the time to put effort into it? Because we will match that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, absolutely, and that's a great, you know great commitment from some mongos, and it's basically really just about taking action, isn't it? And trying to do something. You know, in some small part, that can can make a difference. And you know, on a personal level I know from experience, you know you take a massive amount out of that as well. It gives you a sense of purpose, sense of meaning and sense of contribution, which is really good on a personal level as well.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, I think a lot of people get a lot of like the feedback we get from volunteering days is lovely.

Speaker 3:

I think you know people might have done volunteering days before and the tricky thing is always and this is not going to labor too long on this but for charities, a lot of the time volunteering can be quite tricky because you don't have a huge array of services and it's often it's somebody's home or somewhere personal where you don't want people to necessarily go. You know we do have opportunities where somebody can go into, like a garden or shared space where we do some horticultural training through our putting down routes program. Get to see that first hand, get to get involved in that making that space better for our clients, and the feedback we get is wonderful. People enjoy it. They like to get to feel connected and understand our work. They can act as advocates in their own right, and so I've done this and, yeah, you develop that empathy for a difficult and complex situation. But you also start to ask what can we do ourselves a bit more than this? And so, yeah, it's a, it's always, it's a journey, I think for every term of these things.

Speaker 3:

Yeah which one did you? Was it like a cooking day for you, or was it?

Speaker 2:

well some time ago now. So, yeah, I have done, have done that. But also, you know our present wrapping that we would do Christmas and stuff was always, you know, a great event and you know you see a massive turn out of people from from all different levels of the industry. You know you get very senior people coming down to spend their time wrapping presents when otherwise you probably couldn't get a meeting with people like that for months and it just shows, you know, people really do want to kind of, you know, make an impact if they can, I think, and it's just providing some enabling some of that impact to happen, I think, through ventures like the Sunnett Foundation or the Grow Foundation, as we've got now On this podcast, we have a final tradition which is where the previous guests ask questions for the next guest. So I'll ask you to write one down for the following guest as well, okay, after this. So our previous guests asks what is your most surprising skill which relates to your work?

Speaker 3:

Wow, they really waited in hard bed. So who was it? Who did this last podcast? I want to send them an email. Exactly, exactly. That's a great question, I guess for me rarely. Like you know, I guess growing up as a kid I always struggled with empathy myself, like I was the kid who would always like sit down with leg over X and just ignore other humans, like literally that's who I was, and I struggled with that for what I wouldn't say struggle.

Speaker 3:

I was happy in my own way and then I think it was only truly in my like 20s, empathy rarely started to kick in a little bit more. And I say like, once you get that skill, once you start to understand other people's motivations and you know you start to one last time, when you start to like, really connect with people, I think that's like one of the one. It's it's probably the greatest thing in life, quite frankly, because it just adds so much color to your, to your feelings, and opening yourself up like that. But I would say like also like in terms of the work that we do. It does help.

Speaker 3:

You kind of want to go the extra mile and think about what more that you can do and kind of like, hopefully, when you're talking to people, it comes across and they go okay, cool. Well, you're not just reading this from like, just like a long list of like bullet points, but they actually believe in this to some degree at least, where they can say, okay, cool. Well, they might not be an expert, but they are a representative of experts and they can talk confidently about all the different ways that I can get involved and if you can get that across the people, I think, and you can build that understanding and that awareness, I mean that's the, that's the best part about my role and that's where I think that skill came in and I'm glad I got it, because it wasn't always a given. It's harder to develop empathy than people think it is sometimes.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yeah, yeah, I like to test to that as well, and you know it's an ever-evolving skill, isn't it that you kind of learn and hopefully through life we can all become a bit wiser and and kind of a bit more empathetic, really.

Speaker 3:

Particularly when somebody steps on the back of your shoes when you're going through the London underground tubes, exactly, or like you know, just like barges onto the tube and it's already full, or like you know things. Things like that test your empathy. Just remember, they're probably having a bad day themselves. Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah exactly.

Speaker 2:

Well, rob, that's a great answer and it's a great way to end the podcast, thank you. So thank you very much for your time and for all the work you do personally and the Somongos. Do you know it's, it's amazing and it's helping so many people and we're to everyone out there to try and support Somongos and other organizations where you can.

Speaker 1:

Thank you very much. Thanks, rob. Thanks, we have a team to say thank you, no worries, no worries. Thank you for listening to the People Grow Places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.