Episode 2 - Sally Zlotowitz

Welcome to our new podcast discovering community psychology. A podcast hoping to make community psychology ideas and practice more accessible. Throughout our first mini series we'll be speaking with numerous psychology professionals about their work, highlighting and celebrating variety and the impact of their positive practice influenced by community psychology ideas and values. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Jasmine and I'm a training clinical psychologist. And tonight my co-host is my name is Sam. I'm also a training clinical psychologist and we're joined tonight by a couple of folks from our community psychology group who are going to listen into our chat and at the end are going to have a chance to ask a couple of questions. And joining us tonight we have Sally who is a clinical and community psychologist and a community activist. Welcome Sally, thank you so much for joining us. Can you begin by telling us a bit about yourself and what you do? Yes, sure. Thank you for inviting me on. I feel very honored and excited for this new collective of people getting excited by community psychology. That is great to see. So yeah, I'm Sally. I'm trained as a clinical psychologist in 2007 to 2010 and then quite quickly never really practiced as a clinical psychologist and kind of immediately began a career that had clinical psychology in it but also was much more focused on community psychology. That started in an organization that I was part of kind of the beginnings of called Macuk, which is a charity based in London where I've been working ever since really or albeit with different in different roles and with other jobs alongside. So at the moment at Macuk on director of public health and prevention. But as I say, there's been lots of different parts of that journey at Macuk, I'm sure I'll come on and talk a bit more about that. And alongside I've had other types of jobs and roles. So I'm currently at an organization called Nesta as well, which is a much bigger charity. It's a kind of think tank, a research organisation and is also a funder. And it's all around the ideas of social innovation and innovation for social good is the kind of strapped line. I'm in what's called the Health Lab, which so we've been looking at all aspects of health innovation that are essentially people powered, although that area of work is coming to an end. But my role in the last couple of years has been working on a program called social movements for health. So they're my current two jobs. And then I've had other different roles along the way. And hopefully we'll kind of hear about some of those along the way in this time. And I think as well, one of the things that stands out is how many things you're involved in and breaking the mold of maybe what a clinical psychologist is expected to do or the different things that people could get involved in, which is exciting. And I'm sure hopefully we'll get on to all of those things. Yeah, sure. I guess that's my more paid work. And then like many other people here and everywhere, I'm also involved in activism in various ways which are obviously not paid work, but is definitely a part of my professional and personal identity as it is for many other people. I was going to ask if possible. As I'm super interested in the activism as well. But I was really intrigued by the work at Nesta that you described. Because that sounds so different to, I guess I'm coming at clinical psychology from that very like NHS individualised kind of model. And that sounds like such a just a move away from that. Would you mind telling us a little bit more about what that entails? Not at all. No, it's definitely is a move away from the kind of individualising therapeutic work of clinical psychology. What Nesta has been about is really how do you support and incubate for one of a better term? People who are directly affected by health inequalities to enable them to build a movement. So an movement that challenges those health inequalities. So my colleague and I have been overseeing this programme which basically we asked for people to come forward and be part of an assessment process to enable them to have a grant which would allow them to build these movements and along the way we would support them to get lots of other different types of training and capacity building and all sorts of other things that they can benefit from to really have impact as a social movement. So some of those movements are just so incredible. So it's people living with learning disabilities who are pushing for more self-advocacy or self-advocates. It's black queer men who are raising the issue of mental health inequalities in their community and building essentially a community that's not geographical or place-based but it's actually a lot of their meetings, a lot of their support, a lot of their work is done online or digitally and through apps and things like this. So very, very much a 21st century movement and events, they have a lot of events in different amazing kind of arts organisations so they've worked with the National Portrait Gallery and it's all about raising their visibility as black queer men and how they can support each other and how they can get services to support them better. There's another group in Brighton who are in the disadvantaged East area of Brighton and feel very angry at the health and educational inequalities in their community, they feel underserved by the local authority and they feel unheard in what is otherwise quite a rich and city. So they've been building their own community-led grassroots movement focusing on getting people involved locally, activities, everything from inclusive astronomy with the children and young people, to park runs getting more people active, to creating their own food cooperative which they give out free and healthy meals to their local residents and people and really trying to also get heard of a citywide level about how unfairly they feel treated essentially. They've been incredibly inspiring movement to work alongside. So it's marginalised communities who are really raising their voices to challenge whatever it is that needs challenging. The last one I'll mention actually is a professional care workers, so it's the professionalisation of care work. So it's being led by care workers who really want to see better conditions for social care workers, regulation, so some sort of professionalisation, like taking care workers on the journey that nurses actually went through however many years ago. So they are actually better paid, they have those conditions, they're not at the mercy of private companies so much. And that's being led by care workers themselves to push for those conditions. So you can start to see how, although that working in Nesta, I'm not on the front line of that work, you can start to see how as a community psychologist how that fits in because for me community psychology is all about collective action, it's all about social injustice, it's about inequalities and how we're tackling them. And my role as a psychologist is you can use your knowledge and skills and experiences of a psychologist in so many different ways on a programme like that, whether it's, you know, the more obvious ways, which are like helping the groups and the movements to think about how they're, you think about self-care, think about collective care, which are the kind of what most people think about when you think about your role as a psychologist. But also, you know, broader than that about how they might talk to services, you know, research and evidence and thinking differently about research and evidence and how you can bring in participatory methods of research where people themselves are much more involved in the reforming the research questions and then finding out what the answers are to these research questions. So yeah, lots of different ways, that's just a couple of ways, but it's for me, that's at the heart of all of my work as a psychologist. community psychologist is really how are we giving the platform over to marginalised communities and how are we a psychologist enabling others to lead where we can in movements like that? Yeah it really sounds like it and I think you said there's a phrase you use that we hear a lot I think in psychology is that working alongside it's questionable sometimes about how much working alongside we actually do and that feels like a very different kind of perspective in terms of like whose whose voice has been privileged. Exactly yeah yeah for sure and we to come back as I I was that was my curiosity brought us off. I'm glad I got a chance to talk about it. Yeah it's super interesting coming back then as well because when I jumped into could you off there to ask about that you were mentioning about activism that you see as something that is something that you do in your private that's not paid that's something that you do but that it's still very much part of your professional identities that what you said. Yeah yeah so I mean my my route into community psychology was this might come up in another question so I won't go into too much detail but my my frustration at obviously the lack of political thinking within mainstream psychology not just clinical psychology but actually all applied psychology and I talk about this sometimes in terms of like the only time during my whole so I did psychology undergraduate psychology and philosophy undergraduate psychology a level and the only time that I came across any political kind of mention was when we were doing the fature illusion when we were learning about visual how the brain processes faces and there's a picture two pictures of Margaret Thatcher where you see her the right way round and you see her the wrong way round and you kind of there's there's a kind of illusion around why she looks different upside down and it's all about how we process faces in the brain it's got nothing to do with politics actually but that was literally the only time I saw a political figure in in psychology and I had this whole of the world alongside that I was part of a from an early age and of activism and fighting for social justice whether it started as feminism moved to environmentalism and climate change and wider social justice issues as again as many people do and I was I couldn't I've never couldn't quite make out why I was interested in psychology interested in obviously bringing about social justice but they they never met or they never seemed to meet until I came across community psychology so activism has always been part of my kind of life and it once I discovered community psychology I started to realize that there's an opportunity to bring these two different fields of interest together and I suppose it training as a clinical psychologist you're trained up for the NHS and again the NHS is only political from a very top down perspective and it's not encouraged I mean again clinical psychology training there was very little training included on the structures of the NHS how the NHS operates the you know the different private companies involved in the NHS or anything that gave you a general sense of the politics and the the wider landscape of how the NHS works you had to do all about on your own in the background if you were interested in it so I felt very much kind of restricted by that by that route by that career route and I realised well you know there are things that you can do definitely and I'll come on to that within an NHS role if you are working in the NHS or or in or in a local authority there's definitely things you can do but actually I realised my passion for bringing the economic and political and social together with what I was learning about in terms of psychological distress had to be done actually or would be better done outside of formal structures and services so I was part of a there was a couple of others who back in 2014-15 when austerity was you know a really big issue in the UK before Brexit and before you know before Covid obviously and austerity was what was the issue at hand and we all knew that austerity was having a devastating impact on people and on communities and on services and we all were living that I was working with a lot of young people very excluded young people who were you know experiencing that very much first hand in lots of different ways whether it was the cutting of youth centres or you know the way that the welfare was being reformed so we realised that we had to do something as psychologists but outside the system and so we started at that point psychologists against austerity which has now become psychologists for social change and that's that form of activism where you're kind of drawing on your professional identity and your professional knowledge and experience but it's still activism is actually kind of where a lot of my time has gone over the last few years alongside but using that as a platform to work alongside other activist groups as well as using what we know as psychologists in terms of writing briefing papers contacting our MPs writing open letters sort of showing trying to show leadership on the social and economic determinants of of psychological health and well-being and so yeah that's been you know exciting work difficult and lots of meetings lots of emails as is ever in activism also an amazing way of working collectively I think with others I think that's really great that you found a way as well to kind of speak about the things that are very real issues that impact on people's lives and that lead to to distress for a lot of people and also to find a way to bring together your professional and your personal identities and the ways that you want to work because I can imagine for a lot of people if they haven't seen people that are working that way they might not think to do that or they might kind of feel apprehension about doing that but seeing it be done I think is really important so that's yeah um could you tell us a little bit about how you bring community psychology values and ideas into your practice and what facilitates that and what are some of the challenges of that yeah sure so I suppose the best example or the easiest example for me to talk about is from our work at MACUK so MACUK is all about trying to transform services and specifically espaced mental health services for the most excluded young people in London and by that we've worked by that I mean we've worked with mostly young men who are affected by violence or our care levers or in the care system often have obviously those to interlink um or they're in the criminal justice system in some way often sort of labelled as gang members and I don't we don't use that term and very much very far and very much away from trusting statutory services whether that's the LHS or the local authority uh there's both psychological barriers in terms of not trusting the people who work there and that manifests in not wanting to share their identities for example and there's geographical barriers so young people can't always get to the places that services are based for reasons of uh risk or just not being able to get there so there's lots of different ways that our mental health services are designed very badly for the most excluded young people and indeed designed badly full stop actually quite often for for multiple reasons uh you know even for example how just at a very basic level like we all know a big factor or a big effect of feeling very low in mood feeling very sad and in despair or suicidal is that you don't really want to leave your certainly your house possibly your bed you don't have motivation doesn't feel easy to get up and go and meet a new person and start talking about your problems and yet that's exactly what's expected um of people and as a sort of you know policies around referrals and thresholds and discharges in the NHS which just feel really can often feel really dehumanizing for people who are in distress I think so I think there's a lot that we've learned in Mac UK in terms of how we redesign services for the most excluded young people which are also very applicable in other ways and in other for other groups and populations. And I suppose the process through which we've been redesigning services and innovating around how you work in partnership with marginalized young young people is through the process of co production and the process of really being on the ground. And where young people are going to them meeting them where they're at. Not expecting people to come to us as professionals and not expecting them to just have a referral and see it through. And really turning that on its head and actually saying it's our job as professionals to get out to those people who might need support in a different way. Who might have a lot of this who often have the solutions so the issues that are facing them but need facilitation to allow that to happen. So our work has been about working really at the in the heart of communities, not in sort of. I think that's often a issue that gets confused in community psychology is it's not about psychology in the community alone. So it's not about just not being based, you know, being based in a sure start center or what worse sure centers or it's there's much more to it than that although I think being in the heart of the community has been a big part of our work and process. So that means also being on the streets and being with youth workers and detached youth workers who might be walking around to hold relationships with young people. It might be yet there's a whole range of ways where you are literally we've literally been on the streets in the past. And then the other part aspect of it is to really understand people and young people in the context of their communities so it's not just about them as individuals trying to get them to stop offending or to feel better about themselves or to have higher self esteem or have higher confidence as it often gets talks about. It's much more about understanding that people in the context of what is going on in our communities, there's deprivation, there's inequality, there's racism, there's discrimination, there's stop and search for these young men. There's experience after experience of being excluded potentially from education potentially from youth centers and there's obviously experiences of violence and trauma and all of these things we'd expect to obviously affect people's wellbeing and health. So yeah it's it's really understanding that formulation or that full person in context and it's also about understanding how young people are in a peer group so we'll work with the whole peer group and it's not a referral from professionals that young people come and get involved it's because another young person has invited them along so we call it a peer referral process. But that was designed by young people they said don't let don't be you know inviting in some other young person from another area that we don't know to come and get involved because we don't know them so they might be offending we don't but that's their thing we don't know who they are so we can't they can't get involved. Which sounds you know maybe it sounds exclusionary but actually that's where young people are at and in fact they were then went on to say if this is really if we really have ownership over this project and we'll bring the young people that you need to you need to meet. And we know who they are and we want we want to support them too and that's another big redesign aspect is really understanding people as the solutions and what they bring as opposed to seeing them as problems to be solved. And for me that's another real core principle of community psychology is seeing people as they have many of the answers. And it's a partnership you know we don't pretend that as a psychologist or as a youth workers or don't bring anything to the table but there's that is definitely about that sense of facilitating and so for example there's loads of incredibly talented young people who work around music or sport or. You know the arts more widely and if you give them the opportunity to you know to to get involved in music or give them the opportunity to have some resources to to buy it to design us a small or music studio in a in a place that they trust. And that's the starting point for long term relationships and conversations and that's how we kind of work in partnership with them so there might be activities alongside as a building of a relationship that's at the heart of it. And then I suppose the other aspects of how I really think about community psychology and practices how are we changing those communities and those wider determinants of psychological health so all those things that I mentioned around poverty and inequality and racism. We have to be part of changing that it's not enough for someone to feel a little bit better because we've supported them by listening or supporting them therapeutically. It's out that that is important but we must also be working on these wider determinants as we talk about in terms of activism and so at Mac UK we see it as part of our role as psychologists also be working at the policy level in partnership with young people responding to government policies meeting MPs meeting counselors getting those counselors and MPs to the projects. We've done lots and lots of different projects in partnership with the local authorities where they've wanted to talk to young people but didn't know how to create those relationships but there's got to be that's got to be really well thought out and done well otherwise it can, you know, be tricky if it sort of if young people feel like they're just not really being heard. Being tokenistically consulted they can spot it a mile off and many other groups as well you know not just young people they know when people are being takenistic about comes you know when it's consultation and not full co production and co production is designing and delivering services in partnership with those people directly affected. And that that's one part of community psychology is those ideas but that collective action and and really trying to transform and prevent further distress is again how we think about how do we put that into practice in partnership with young people. And we employ young people in lots of different roles within Mac UK and within the projects that we're part of. So that gives you I hope some of the flavor of kind of the ways that Mac UK we apply the ideas. And there's lots of different ways that you can apply those principles but fundamentally it's about working towards social justice as well as working towards collective healing or collective peer support and someone. I think as you are speaking then Sally it really struck me how involved young people are and what you do at Mac UK. If young people are engaging in this way why do you think that this way of working or designing services isn't done more widely. So the last few years of our kind of work at Mac UK we've moved strategically tried to move away from being the service delivers ourselves. We showed in a number of different communities within London that it can work these news ways of working that you can engage 150 200 young men you can make a difference to the community and hopefully their lives as sort of said told by them. It's not claiming it's perfect of course in any way you know all that it's not difficult of course and that there aren't challenges and that you know you get nobody ever. It goes on to experience any further discrimination for example you know or anything like that. But I guess we we showed that it was a really you know useful way of approaching this issue. So then we moved strategically to thinking about how do we disseminate this to statutory services we don't want to be filling a gap that actually statutory services should be doing. Because lots of charities are in that space understandably of filling gaps that services statutory services can't meet. But for us there is an equity issue and a justice issue at the heart of the fact that if you need an extra charity to be supporting marginalized young people's. house. there's something wrong in the system. And so for us, it's about changing the system as well. And we've been, I suppose, struggling and trying to get to the root of that very question around how do we embed this practice into other services and whether that, again, local authority, mostly we've been trying with, and also actually with other community and voluntary sector organisations who are bigger than us and provide services on a bigger scale, especially in social children's homes and children's social care. And it's tough, you know, because there's a set of system incentives that say, you need to have done, it's not about how good the relationship is for your, it's about, you know, how are you meeting a legal requirement? You know, are you, the indicators of what's a good service might not match what we would see as indicators of a good service. And so you're against this competing agenda. And it's not that their indicators aren't there for a reason, they've developed over time, especially in sort of social care, you know, it's important that certain legal things are happening. But you can see where their gaps are and you can start when, so we've been working as embedded teams within other organisations as a way of seeing if we can support them from the inside out, so to speak, to change their practice. And it, yeah, so it's about changing the system levers and the system incentives, as well as changing individual practitioners practice, both of which take time. So we've also, you know, tried other strategies, teaching on doctoral training courses for training clinical psychologists, writing obviously papers and reports on how the ways of working, again, trying to go further, even further upstream to policy and a lot of, and a lot of our work in the sort of between 2011 after the what we're called the riots of 2011 to like 2015, a lot of our work was really about influencing the home office to how they would, they started a program called ending gang in youth violence and we were really involved in trying to influence at that level what was happening in terms of how they were suggesting, you know, the strategy for what they what they thought needs to happen to end youth violence. And we really made a great case for the impact of, you know, mental health, for example, and they took the government did take that and it's we're in a lot of policy documents making the case about how, you know, underserved these groups of young people are in terms of their well-being and mental health. But that's easy for them to say compared to, you know, really tackling some of the root causes of that in terms of poverty and inequality and, you know, we were dealing with Theresa May as the home, you know, the home office secretary. I'm not thinking the right phrase anyway. And, you know, so there's a lot of that lots of, there's a million miles from between us. So a lot of the time you're working to try and create strategically the best arguments you can for the shifting towards co-production, for shifting towards redesigning services and, and then sneaking in kind of subversing this idea of, you know, also changing, you know, transformation of communities, trying to get that in alongside, because recognizing that that's a really important part of young people's experiences. And I think it's come in more and more now through the kind of trauma-informed narrative. And I think there's been a collective movement towards talking about obviously adverse childhood experiences and talking about trauma-informed practice. We don't say trauma-informed practice, although that's what we have been doing. We talk about psychologically-informed practice, because then we can talk about community psychology. I worry about trauma-informed practice, ends up back into quite clinical one-to-one therapeutic practices. So we really try and broaden that, and we haven't yet come up with a way of describing that better. I don't think we need to do, we need to do a bit of communication. Work, sorry. Yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but I think there are more and more examples that people can create on a small scale within statutory services to show that it's possible. When I was working for a local authority and I was involved in an early intervention, kind of again, it's very use of the word gang, so working with sort of nine to twelve-year-old young men, sorry, young men, young boys, who were often the siblings of young men who were already involved in gangs. Again, I questioned the use of the word gangs, just I say it because you know it makes it it's clear, but I wouldn't use it normally. So yeah, and I guess the work that we were doing was kind of group work and or individual work with the family, as a psych, this was as a clinical psychologist, as a with the family, the parents, and with the child, and then group work with the children. And that was that was great, you know, but there was a lot more that could be done, and one of the things me and a trainee who was on placement with me at the time, we started work. One of the mums, I hope this is a useful example of like ways, I'm telling this story, it's ways of that you can find ways in to community psychology, even when you're in a kind of more statutory setting. So one of the mums, her had started her own foundation on the back of, on the back of something happening to one of her sons, and was trying to do community-based work, working across post-codes, that were, you know, where young people were in conflict with each other, and she was trying to reach the parents. And of the other post parents from the other post-code, and she just, as a psychologist, it was, it was just clear to me that she had so much energy and so much, so many skills to bring, and as well as the motivation and lived experience that was crucial to understanding other parents, for example, and what they might be going through or experiencing. And so part of our work also incorporated supporting her to set up the foundation to get some funding to help her think about who she might want to connect with in the community, to help her with networking, and just any other ways that we could think of, that we could support her to get this kind of community foundation off the, the ground, where she was already, it was already going, but supporting it. And so just finding those, and then just, you know, finding that as a way of saying, well actually this is a good use of my time, because there's possible she's going to prevent things happening in the future. And actually working in local authorities, I think you've got even more opportunities to do that kind of community-based thinking. It's just about making the case and starting to do it, sneaking it in, and then it becoming more and more of a thing if you can. I really liked what you said about kind of recognising that people have the answers, and in that example that you gave just then as well, recognising that the lady, all it needed was kind of support, but she otherwise was doing what she needed to do for herself, which is really good. I know that you are also interested in the environment and the economy and different things like that. Does community psychology interact with that? Do you carry over any of your values to that work, or does it inform your work in psychology? Oh yeah, gosh, talk about this for a long time. Yeah, it absolutely does. I mean, obviously you can't have ecological justice and climate justice without social justice in terms of the global south, and actually as well as within this country, but a lot of community psychologists are interested in international issues. They're not just based in the UK doing work with marginalised communities here, but might be working in the global south. I went off, and again, this is something I always, if you can, get an opportunity to do this. I went on sabbatical and worked in South Africa for a while where they do amazing, critical community psychology work, and then there's Yeah, lots of other people. places, lots of different other different African countries and also in South America, where in South America there's the origins of community psychology and liberation psychology, so it's kind of more how they work. Anyway, I haven't actually been to do in South America, but a few few people I know have. And so going and learning from those other countries is incredibly important. In terms of the UK, I think, so I've recently become really interested in something that's called community wealth building, which comes from economists and kind of lefty economists and progressive economists. But and for me, this is really an important area and I could also talk about collective trauma and collective healing, but I'll come back to that. And just for me, like the area of where the economy meets our psychology is really interesting. And to date, that's mostly been done by behavioral economists or where it's, but I think I won't go into that, but where there's this meeting of like where people are trying to do things differently at a local level with how you can build community well. And community wealth building is a model from the United States that's also being applied now in the UK. It's famously been tried by Preston local authority. It's also happening in my own borough of Hackney, in Newham, in North Airshire, in Scotland. And it's basically the local authorities taking, taking despite the kind of whatever happening at a national economic level, they're saying, how do we use all of the power and systems that we have and a control over, so to speak, how do we use those that power differently so that wealth is not extracted from our communities, but it actually remains and is inclusive, and is inclusively spread throughout our communities. So for example, a lot of people, their jobs are dependent on a corporation that's based in a certain area, and that they're often holds, often they have no, you know, people don't have any, so very good conditions in those jobs, they don't have any sort of control over those jobs. There's always this fear that the corporation or the business can move out of an area and that they then all those jobs are lost, so you're almost at a held hostage by these kind of businesses. And of course, I don't want businesses are important in terms of providing jobs, but there's other ways of doing it. And so then the other thing about those big corporations and businesses, the big businesses who have power over is that they extract that labour, and they extract the profits, and they tax evade, and then it goes, their headquarters are in another country and they make a lot of money, you know, there's some obvious ones whose names, I won't say, but I'm sure you can all think of. And you know, they, so the labour is provided by a local community, but they don't see the benefits of that, and they have no ownership of that, and they're actually constantly worried about their jobs, especially if their precarious work. So local authorities now are starting to view themselves as anchor institutions, so they are organised, anchor institutions are organisations that are based in a local community or in a place, a city, and aren't going to be leaving, and they might provide some jobs or do provide jobs. So public service institutions are the obvious ones, so yeah, local authorities, NHS hospitals, and also things like universities, they're not going to get up and leave anytime soon, but how could they change those, that what they have own control over to make sure that wealth stays locally and to give people local jobs? So this is where I think it gets interesting in terms of the overlap with community psychology, so they might, for example, in the famous example from the US, they said, okay, we are procuring for our, say, the social care homes that we run. We're procuring laundry services from a big corporation. Actually, what if we help set up, what if we help local people set up their own laundry cooperative, which they had ownership of control over, and then they supply our laundry services, that's one example, so there's now a famous laundry cooperative in the US, in this city, Cleveland, to where they were providing this service. Anyway, my point is that cooperatives, for example, where people have democratic ownership over their organization, is a really interesting participatory experience for people, and more secure, and they have power and decision making, and community psychology, that's many of those principles are the same, and there's a way, the problem with community wealth building, as I say at the moment, it's not a problem, but it's, and he's working on is, how do you talk about this in ways that mean people see it as also a part of a health initiative, see it as part of a well-being initiative, see it as all of these things which you can do, and I've only touched on a little bit of all the different ways that community wealth building works, but cooperatives could be a psychological health intervention, you know, because of all the reasons that I just said, they give people power, ownership, security, they help people work together more closely, they create connections in the community, they network people together, they create more cohesive organizations, and all of those things are going to be good for people, so where we need as community psychologists to start linking in some of these ideas together, how do we talk about collective well-being, how do we talk about community well-being, which also connects to creating a more just and equitable economic system, and at the moment a lot of that is being led by economists, and actually psychologists have a lot to say about this kind of stuff, and economists are, you know, need to make a stronger case around health and well-being, because I think that speaks to people a lot more, and the other thing just to bring it back to climate change is that the other aspect of community wealth building is that to procurement, for example, and again, I'm just using procurement as one example of the principle of community wealth building, but say you're procuring your laundry service from local, from a local cooperative, there's no travel involved, there's emissions are cut down, and people are more local people are more likely to not be using these kind of bulk processes and actually be more aware of their sustainability, and that's true in the food sector as well, so they started to think about local people providing food and food cooperatives, and again, so you cut down, you're growing growing projects, so local food growing, then supplied to the local authority, for example, by an employment by local people, so it kind of builds in multiple different solutions, and so the other aim of community wealth building is that it's very much got climate change thinking designed into the principles as well, there's loads I could say about this, that was a very long explanation, I think it makes perfect sense, and it's really interesting, it kind of links in really well to one of the things I was thinking, because especially where everything that's happened this year and thinking about COVID, and just the impact of that economically and for communities, and the longer we go on in regional lockdowns, and the economic inequality, that's just naturally going to arise from that, how do you think community psychology can kind of help us in post-COVID future, if that exists post-COVID future? Hopefully exists in some form, I mean I definitely, so yeah I think it's a really good question, I definitely think so I've been working a bit with Hackney Council about that on their strategies around the well-being strategies at a burrow level, and there's other, so that's another way that psychologists can get involved is actually, you know, looking at local authority strategies, looking at commissioning strategies, how are people, how are commissioners thinking about their population level well-being and mental health, and that's going on all over the country at the moment because people are in, you know, people are worried about the community level. the rising distress. And so being a, I mean, this is where sort of you might do this, more as a clinical psychologist than a just a straightforward community psychologist. So colleagues in Manchester, for example, might not work so much on the mental health aspects, because they're really interested in the economy stuff. So there's people in Manchester, for example, who are creating, working with others to create collective action around something called steady state economy or the degrowth economy. So they're putting forward proposals for Manchester to become a degrowth economy in the COVID recovery, which means not growing economically. Anyway, but another way, if you're a clinical psychologist or a, or aspiring clinical psychologist that you could see if there's ways that you can get involved with a kind of strategy level for the borough around mental health and well-being. But I think one, one thing that's going to be clear is we can't, we won't be able to work with people, there's going to be huge recession, you know, people are going to be unemployed, a lot of uncertainty, all normal reactions to adverse circumstances, certainly not worthy of being named disorders. But that we won't be able to treat people individually. So we're going to have to look at community responses and community level responses. And if that's already happening, that doesn't need psychologists. That happens naturally, but I think there's ways that psychologists can play a role. And myself and a few others are part of a British psychological society group working on this called community resilience and community action in response to COVID-19, what role for psychology. So we're trying to answer this exact question. And because obviously things like mutual aid groups which have happened, you know, there, there, that's how people are, that's how it doesn't need professional intervention. But then there are ways that as a well as a citizen you can get involved obviously. But as a psychologist you can support that, whether that again is more the kind of supporting people who are going through really hard times or reassuring people who are supporting other people, or whether it's, you know, helping people work through any conflicts in a group or all of the different ways that you can bring your skills to group settings and to community settings. And I think so there's so there's that aspect of it. There's a kind of more informal ways that psychologists can get involved. And then there's the more formal services that I think need to draw much more on intersectional decolonized ways of supporting people. And learning from other communities, other groups on how to do that, on how to provide support that is culturally appropriate. And yeah, much more kind of grounded in people's experiences of inequality and injustice, including the impacts of COVID. And they're in the unequal impacts of that. Because for many people COVID is political, it's health, it's about health, it's about politics, it's about identity, it's about finances and economics, it's everything. And a sort of one-to-one therapy approach is not going to provide the right support. And we need to think much more broadly in terms of how formal services offer support and what role psychologists might play in that. Or if psychologists at all, sometimes, whether we always the question we're asking. Are we even, are we needed right now? Exactly. Or how, yeah, if we needed and how we needed. And going to the community to ask and working with the community to ask that. Yeah, amazing. I might, because we've only got a couple of minutes left. So we've got 500 million questions in the chat, which we'll never get through. Folks were like typing away the whole time. So I don't know, the fairest way to do it is I might just randomly pick one if everybody's okay with that. What have you learned along the way that you would pass on to those who were just beginning in terms of embedding community psychology values into practice? Oh, that is a good question. Feel like I could. Yeah, sit down with that for a while. I think what I've learned is don't wait to be asked to do some community psychology practice. It's likely you'll have to forge your own way, but join with others. You're not, you're rarely on your own as you all are. You've joined together to give each other that census solidarity that you need, because you are going to be a little bit disruptive. Or that's the intention. When you take concessional justice and equity and prevention and the non-medicalisation, if you're a clinical psychologist of psychological health, and when you take on thinking about the economy and politics, you're in contested spaces all the time. And you need a need that support and of like-minded people. Some people, if you might need to move out of the NHS, I feel sad about that because the NHS, if you're clinical psychologists and apologies to those, if I'm speaking too much about clinical psychology, but if you're sad because the NHS pays us to train, and it's a very privileged position to be in. So I found it hard to leave the NHS on those grounds, because I think it's our duty to support it. But then I also think my, along with other people's aim is to try and change the NHS slightly from the outside, but you can, you can most definitely do it from the inside as well. I think it's about trying to find those opportunities. We have a principal at Mac UK that everything is an opportunity. And if there's a, it shows incredible initiative and leadership. If you're working in a service and you start to think about it in a more strategic way about why people are ending up in that service, whatever service it is, and thinking about it more upstream. So how can we prevent this from, from people ending up in this service? And what do we need to know in order to make that happen? And how could we try that out on a very small scale? And how can we involve the people, if it is about services? How can we involve the people who are in those services in thinking about those upstream issues? So I think it's, having the confidence to think it's a, it's a leadership position. It's not, you shouldn't be on the back for actually, your leaders should be thinking of these issues. And having the confidence to, to try out some initiatives. I also say, I also think that once you start to do that, it starts to feel, you start to feel like, you know, your, those values become a part of who you are personally and professionally, if they're not already. And so you'll start to feel great about your work. And, and then that motivates you to keep going until work hard, because you end up having to do, you know, extra work, but it's such a rewarding way of working to really feel like you're sharing power and you're not, you've not, it's not about power over others as much as possible. Again, it's not perfect, but that you want to work like that and you'll find the ways that allow it to happen. And I'm working in partnership with others, you know, and not just other psychologists, but going out and increasing who you come into contact with, through getting involved in stuff locally, activism or whatever it is that you care about and finding different voices, because they will help you as well, find alternative ways in, into different ways of working, yeah. Amazing. I think, I think it's just something you've said there. I think it's something that I'll take away from the conversation is that idea of it as a leadership role. That's such an important thing. I know they've really started to stress that on our course, but it's when you think about the properties and the reality of what the job looks like. It really is. It's not a, it's not such as a term we draw around. It is a leadership role and, and it's interesting to hear the ways that you can take up that leadership position that's outside of the NHS or beyond the NHS or just beyond the systems that are currently in place and and use opportunities and use people around you to, to stand up in that way and to take a step forward and to take some action. That's really quite inspiring. Good. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked what you said, what you said as well about respecting what's already there. Yeah, just kind of building on the strengths that the community's already have. Yeah, there's lots to think about that you've said. I wish we could ask you so many more questions, so. No, that's okay. I would just add one more thing about humility and just. Just to add this at the end because I think it's important to say it's like, whatever we do, we have to do with humility because psychology has caused harm and. I don't want to underplay that, you know, we have in many ways from the beginnings of the, of the, you know, eugenics movement and. Right through to now and the way that we, you know, still is a part of institutionalising people, like we cause harm and so we have to go in with humility as well and be ready to be wrong. And to be ready to apologise, get it wrong because I've had to do that a lot as well. Yeah, thank you so much, Sally. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you very much. Thank you for this amazing initiative. Thank you for listening to our podcast. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. We are discovering community psychology. We're also over on Twitter at discovering community psychology and we'd love to hear from you if you have any ideas or thoughts on today's or any of our other episodes. So please do get in touch.