We Are Power Podcast
The We Are Power podcast is the podcast for your career and your life. A weekly podcast with listeners in over 60 countries worldwide where you'll hear personal life stories, top-notch industry advice, and key leadership insight from amazing role models. The podcast not only aids your personal and professional development but also delves deep into conversations around Gender Equality and Social Mobility. Each week the We Are Power Podcast will bring you a new interview from a leader within the 100,000-strong We Are Power community, hosted by Simone Roche MBE.
We Are Power Podcast
Making Small Changes with Big Impact with Alison Dunn
Ever wondered how a four-day workweek could revolutionise your workplace?
This week, we’re joined by Alison Dunn, our 2024 Levelling Up Leader and CEO of Citizens Advice Gateshead, who’s done just that.
She takes us through her incredible career journey and shares how the Northern Power Women Awards supercharged her organisation’s mission.
Alison’s passion shines through as she encourages leaders to stand up for their communities and always think about the real people behind their decisions.
Listen to learn:
- How Alison is fighting poverty and driving economic growth in Gateshead.
- The urgent need to tackle staff burnout.
- Why support services should be available to everyone, no matter their situation.
- How introducing a four-day workweek turned sceptics into believers.
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Hello and welcome to the we Are Power podcast Northern Power Women podcast for your career and your life, no matter what business you're in. Hello and welcome to the we Are Power podcast, the podcast where, every single week, I get the chance opportunity to speak to fantastic role models from in and around the North and beyond. We hear their amazing stories, their professional stories, their personal stories and we always hope that we can pass on some top tips, advice, guidance, support, life hacks, whatever it may be, to help you on your adventure, whether it be your life or your career, whatever it may be. And this week I'm really excited to introduce our 2024, this year Leveling Up Leader at the Northern Power Women Awards Alison Dunn, who is the CEO of Citizens Advice, gateshead. Welcome, alison, welcome to the pod.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, Simone. I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:And what did it feel like? Let's track back to March this year, when your name was called out in that big, massive room, all those amazing people. How did it feel?
Speaker 2:Well, to be honest, I was sat there for most of the night totally calm and relaxed, but when it actually got to this particular award, I will admit to feeling incredibly anxious. And then, when my name was read out, wow, you know their happiness for me and being able to pass me across that award and the way that they pushed me forward to make sure that you know I was seen and heard, and the way that they promoted me on the night and introduced me to people was absolutely phenomenal.
Speaker 1:I always love hearing stories like that, because it's not just about one night. We think about what happens afterwards. And I know we, we met at breakfast, didn't we? The next morning? And then I think you had you were on the train back to the northeast, weren't you? With some other trophy elders as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it was. It was. It was really really lovely experience and I think, if I may, I think that's something that you do incredibly well, because it isn't just about that one night. The build-up to it was really impressive as well Lots of opportunities to meet the other nominees, to share experiences, to hear about what other people are doing, both in person and virtually. The social media campaigns that you launched, the WhatsApp groups, the interactions before and after. I mean that is an awful lot of work for what I know as a small team. So huge credit to you for, you know, pulling all of that off and those.
Speaker 1:WhatsApp groups still live. You know they're still. You know, and it's the whole idea is that you keep that conversation going. You don't know where those connections or that community will sort of build out to um, aside from winning and taking home the beautiful trophy. Oh, where is it? By the way, where does it sit in your? Does it sit in your home or your office?
Speaker 2:we have a trophy cabinet in citizens advice gate said so you know. It sits proudly at the top of that oh, that's good to hear what.
Speaker 1:What was the highlight, other than winning, of that evening?
Speaker 2:Oh, definitely meeting the two ladies that were the sponsors of my award, who were absolutely phenomenal, really really great champions of their business, but of women as well, and the way that they, you know, pushed me forward and introduced me to people and their kindness and humility was just really something to treasure.
Speaker 1:Oh, that'd be Jenny and Zoe, wouldn't it from Asda? Oh, and they are such passionate advocates, champions, trailblazers for gender equality. So, oh, that's lovely. That's lovely to hear.
Speaker 2:My only criticism is their dresses were better than mine and you shouldn't outshine is their dresses were better than mine and and you, you shouldn't outshine, you shouldn't outshine Jenny's.
Speaker 1:Jenny's. Jenny's dress was absolutely magnificent. You have to check back on the pictures. It was beautiful. It was a gown and a half, wasn't it? It really was amazing. She looked amazing. Oh no, so you, you are a levelly up leader title. How do you plan to use, or how have you already used, this to sort of push forward those, those barriers, and and achieve those goals, both personally and within citizens advice?
Speaker 2:well. I think one of the reasons why I was chosen for the award is because, as the leader of the citizens advice, one of the things that we do is create income opportunities for the people that we serve and in the 10 or 12 years that I've been the leader of Citizens Advice, we have generated more than £90 million worth of financial gains for people in Gateshead, which is a very, very big number. Gateshead is only a town. It only has a population of 202,000. So you can imagine the difference that that sort of money makes to a small town like Gateshead. Because what we know is that when people are living on a low income, if they get additional income, they firstly spend that money on their children. So that's a really important thing in terms of securing health and well-being outcomes for children to give them a good start in life. But we also know that they spend that money in local businesses. So middle income and higher wage earners they tend to spend their money in the sort of national and even global economy. But when you're on a low income, you do tend to spend your money locally, in the local economy. So that 90 million actually gets circulated and it's actually worth much, much more than £90 million in terms of public value. So that's really important to us. And actually, you asked me how we use the levelling up title. Well, this year has been our best year ever and this year alone we generated £27.3 million. So that £90 million that was the subject of your award has gone up significantly in the last 12 months. And that's really important because, you know, 38% of all children in the northeast of England are living in poverty and in our poorest wards, 60% of our kids are living in poverty. Now, to bring that to life for you if you look across a classroom of 30 kids, at least 18 of them are going to be living in poverty. Now, to bring that to life for you if you look across a classroom of 30 kids, at least 18 of them are going to be living in poverty.
Speaker 2:What does that mean? Well, it could mean that they've not had breakfast. It could mean that their free school meal is the only meal they're getting of the day. It could mean there are a million children in England and Wales that have no bed. They might be sleeping on the floor. So you know, this income generation work that we do. It's not the only work that we do. We do all sorts of things. We do immigration, we do discrimination, we do housing, we do money advice, but actually the income generation stuff, putting real money in people's pockets that's the stuff that really gives me a buzz. And where did this passion spark from? Oh well, I have to tell you that I've been a warrior since the day that really gives me a buzz. Where did this passion spark from? Oh well, I have to tell you that I've been a warrior since the day that I was born.
Speaker 2:I think I remember in primary school and, although I wouldn't necessarily have been able to have articulated it in using these words when I was six or seven, I absolutely always knew that there were some children who were at the thin end of the wedge in comparison to me. There was a girl in my class who I would recognize now as an adult, clearly had a learning disability. There was another child from the Chinese community and we're talking about in the 70s. There weren't really many people that didn't look like me in the 70s and those two girls used to have a really rough time and I used to put myself between them and the bullies all of the time and insisted on playing with them even when nobody else wanted to. I've always been a defender of the underdog. It's just something which is inherently in my soul. Although I can't stand up for myself, I'm very good at standing up for everybody else. So it was present even in, you know, even in primary school, when I couldn't necessarily have articulated what it was about. And then, as a teenager, my mother always used to say Alison, the only thing wrong with you is your mouth, because every injustice that I felt as an adolescent was a full blown out, sort of like you know prime minister's question time type of debate.
Speaker 2:And then, as a young adult, I got a job in a firm of solicitors, despite leaving school with no qualifications. I got a job in a firm of solicitors as an office junior and I realised in that moment that the people that were working as lawyers were actually no cleverer than me, and I was furious. I was absolutely furious that nobody had shown me that that was possible for me and I thought well, alison, you can continue to draw this £27 a week YTS wage and see where it takes you, or you can actually do something about this terrible injustice that has befallen you. You know that you've been overlooked and sort of put in a pigeonhole. So I started that job in the May. In the September I enrolled in night school and got my GCSEs that I should have got at school, let's be honest Got my A-levels, went to Auburn University, persuaded my employer to give me day release and I qualified as a lawyer.
Speaker 2:And I worked as a lawyer in a high street practice where you see all sorts of shades of life, you know, do everything from housing through to criminal law, wills and probates, through to conveyancing, landlord and tenant, through to insolvency a real, real melting pot of everyday life which I really enjoyed.
Speaker 2:And although I wasn't necessarily cut from the cloth of many of the people or the firms that I worked with, I've always been a talker and I've always had confidence and I've always been incredibly hard working. So never the best at anything. But those other three values, personality, traits, whatever you want to call them have always allowed me to do probably better than I should on paper. And then, about 15 years ago, I had my third child and it was just too hard lawyering at that time. The hours were long, the pace was very fast and I decided to take a year out of work. But I got bored very quickly and then decided that I would just do something for the summer and I started to look around for what that might be, and that was the start of my career in Citizens Advice, which initially was supposed to be for one summer, two days a week.
Speaker 1:You just never know where these guns are, and I love that phrase. You know, I've always been a warrior, from primary school. You, you became that warrior and and then, equally, it's almost like before anyone you know, decades before anyone was talking about leveling up. You leveled up your own career because you went actually I'm not just going to go for the, the YTS 27 pound wage here I this is not fair. I can do that and I will do that. And you did. You cracked on in true northern fashion, right.
Speaker 2:I think, you know, in the 70s there wasn't an expectation that working class kids would do very much. And this is not a criticism of my mother, because you know she's a great mum. But I remember being out with my mum one day and little old ladies would stop and pat you on the head and say you know what's she going to do when she grows up? And I distinctly remember my mother saying, oh, she's going to be a secretary until she gets married. And I thought, oh well, I'll be a secretary and then I'll get married, because that's what my mum had done and she wanted that for me. You know she was a war baby and you know to get to secretarial college in those times was really seeing as made it and that's what she wanted for me.
Speaker 2:And I suppose that was the career that maybe I started off on when I turned up in that office junior role in that firm of solicitors. But then I realized that they weren't all privately educated in the way that I thought they were. You know, they were just ordinary people like me. And then I just thought, right, okay, this isn't, this isn't happening. We're going to do something about this, and I did. Even at 16 I knew that something different had to happen if I wanted a different life and you're not afraid to make big change.
Speaker 1:You've just introduced, or recently you've introduced, four-day working at the assistants of ice skating. How's how isday working at the systems advice case? How is that working for the team? And have you noticed that difference? Well, four-day working.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's phenomenal. And again, you know, not afraid to make big change, but I have to be honest and tell you that my chief operating officer, paul Oliver, bought this idea to me four times before I said yes, I kept saying, you know, no, no, no, that's never going to work for us. And in the end he said look, this is the last time I'm going to ask you. Can you just watch this video? And it was a video of someone who had done it. And about three minutes into this 10 minute reel, I messaged him and said why haven't you told me about this before? This is my next great idea and, yeah, we've've introduced. We're two years in now. Um, we piloted it as part of a big national campaign where there was 60 organizations supported by various academic institutions, um, and then at the end of it, we adopted it as our business as usual practice and you know I'm not going to pretend that it's been easy, but actually it's been easier than you might think and many of the things that I thought would go wrong. So I had a list of about 12 things that I anticipated might go wrong. Not one of those things went wrong. Actually, other things went wrong that we hadn't anticipated and isn't it always the way? But not the things that were on my list the way, but not the things that were on my list and we had some phenomenal results.
Speaker 2:So something as simple as occasional absence, now you know you can't stop people being ill. People are going to, unfortunately, always have long-term absence. Things go wrong in people's lives. They get cancer, they have mental health issues. The four-day week can't do anything about that. But occasional absence, where people need the odd day, went down from something like 950 occasional absence days a year to 230 odd. Wow, that's unbelievable. What a statistic. Yeah, retention went from something like 83% up to like the mid 90s. You know so and people are telling us that. You know it would take an awful lot for them to leave us now that the four day working week is in place. So it's been a really, really great experience for us and what we really wanted was, as part of the four day working week, you know our vision is to have a fair society for all with lives well lived, to have a fair society for all with lives well lived.
Speaker 2:But actually our staff have had a huge amount of trauma and upset to deal with over the last decade, we've had a cost of living crisis, we've had a pandemic, we've had prolonged austerity, we've had the consequences of Brexit. You know, and many of our staff now deal with people who are in real crisis. They're not just people who've got problems. They're people who are in crisis. They're people who are self-harming, who are suicidal, who are angry, who are aggressive, who are shouting, who are screaming, and whilst those things may not be right, shouting, screaming, stamping your feet is a form of communication and it's telling us that they aren't getting what they need and that they're in a desperate state.
Speaker 2:So we recognised that for our staff to do this five days a week was just too much. Actually, they needed time to unwind and look after themselves. So that was the initial impetus for it. You know that we felt that we could, with some tweaks to the way that we work, probably achieve just as much. But give people another day just to recover from the emotional turmoil of taking on board people's troubles, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
Speaker 1:Because there's no respite, is there. You can't just go and hide from it and think, oh gosh, I can't deal with that now. I'll put that in the to-do box for tomorrow. You've got to do with it. Then, in the moment.
Speaker 2:right yeah, and those things used to be occasional, but they're every day now. So to bring that to life for you, we have an energy helpline and it used to be the place that was a lovely place to work. You would do sort of energy comparison prices, talk to people about how to insulate their homes, help them get on the right tariff. Now there are people ringing who have got thousands of pounds worth of debt, who are forcibly having meters installed in their properties, who are subject to court action, who are experiencing suicidal ideation real, real, significant mental health problems and you wouldn't necessarily think that those sorts of problems would show up on a line like that, but it's. It's everywhere.
Speaker 1:What would be your tip to a leader or an organization out there who want to make that difference in their community? You are in it, doing it. You're a warrior, right? What are you going to say to those people out there listening who have that inner warrior but don't know how they do that? How do they really make that difference?
Speaker 2:well, first thing, they can connect with me. We can talk about how I can help them to unleash their inner warrior. But actually start with the things that you can control. If you're a leader in your organization, there will be things that you can do in your organization to help the people that work for you. So one of the things that we have noticed over the last five years as a citizens advice is that more and more people who come to us are in work right.
Speaker 2:So these aren't benefits scroungers. You know a term which I absolutely hate. These are people who the press are often sympathetic to in a way that they are not sympathetic to people who are perhaps, you know, out of work for other reasons. So they have employers right Employers that can help them to think about different ways of doing stuff. So we do a lot of work now with employers around policies, ways of working and helping employers to understand how the things that they do can have an impact on their workforce.
Speaker 2:So a simple thing that employers do, which is often considered to be a kindness In December they will often bring forward their payday so that people can get their wage a week before they normally would over the Christmas period and most people would really appreciate that. But actually, if you are receiving universal credit to top up your income your earned income that sends your benefits into crisis and actually you will receive a lesser amount next month and it may take several months for that to right itself. So that kindness for some is actually really disruptive for others. So simple things like that, talking to employers, so you know those leaders that are out there that are listening to this, that want to do something different. Have a think about the people that are closest to you in the first instance and actually what you can do to make their lives easier, and then work out from there.
Speaker 1:And what have you, other than obviously you know, over the summer period, going to be putting you lots of nominations for the 2025 awards? What have you got on the horizon? Any new plans, projects, perspectives?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, we've just actually launched seven day opening and citizens advice and gates had again the first in the country. We were the first citizens advice to adopt four-day working week and actually were the first citizens advice to be open seven days a week. So we are now you can come in to see us on a saturday and sunday, 10 or 4 and actually those services are being really well used. We have a skeleton staff but we have enough staff to see those that are being really well used. We have a skeleton staff but we have enough staff to see those that are coming through. We're also having bespoke sessions on an evening for communities of interest that might struggle to come into our service through the day. It's very busy. If you are a neurodiverse person or a family member of someone who's neurodiverse, it can be quite difficult to get into the Monday to Friday session, so we have bespoke sessions on an evening.
Speaker 2:We've done some work with the LGBTQ plus community and they tell us that they don't always feel comfortable coming in through the day. So again, we've got bespoke sessions for those communities. So we're being really, really thoughtful about accessibility for our service. We have have Recite Me on our website as well, which means that you know if you are dyslexic, for example, you can read the website in different colors. If you can have the website can speak to you, it can translate the content into different languages. So just making sure that we are as accessible as we can be, because Gateshead is a really diverse population. We have lots and lots of different ethnicities in Gateshead, so presenting everything in English and everything in the set way doesn't work for everybody. So, again, reaching out to black, asian and marginalised communities to make sure that they feel comfortable coming into our services is the focus of the next 12 months of work.
Speaker 1:Really agile, isn't it? It's really agile to kind of constantly keep thinking about that accessibility. My final question is from my previous guest, Hayley Roberts, who was our Outstanding Entrepreneur winner this year. Now, it couldn't be better task for you, but if you could solve only one problem that exists today, what would it be and how would you do it?
Speaker 2:Oh well, I'm going to go really close to home on this one. So we are real living wage accredited employer in Gateshead, but a lot of our work is funded from central government and often it can take central government two to three years to catch up the level of pay. So we're always a couple of years behind in terms of the funding that we get, even though we're a real living wage employer. So I would make all government contracts compliant with the real living wage so that voluntary sector organisations were not left funding national government projects.
Speaker 2:A bit selfish, but actually the voluntary sector is a big employer. When you put us all together as a sector, we employ hundreds of thousands of people nationally. The contribution that we make to the economy as a sector is, I believe, around 20 billion pounds. It's not just about my organization, it's about the sector as a whole and the fact that you know. I think that that type of policy would really show us that we were valued, as opposed to being an afterthought that might come two or three years down the line and what?
Speaker 1:an amazing representation of our levelling up winner, totally demonstrating why he won that award in everything that we've just spoken about over the last 20 minutes. Alison, thank you so much for joining me today. Please continue to keep being that warrior and keep you know you can never not talk too much, as your mum said.
Speaker 2:Well, Simone, it takes a warrior to know a warrior. It's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Oh, thanks, alison, and thank you all of you for listening. If you want any top tips, guidance we know that this week's tote bag moment I am a warrior that's going on the tote bag for sure. But if you want any help, please reach out to Alison. You know, at the end of the day, on our own we can go fast. Together we can go faster. Take some of this top tip, take some of this guidance, alison. I can't wait to hear the question that you're going to be passing on to next week's guest as well. But thank you so much for joining me. Please leave your reviews. Stay connected on all of our socials Facebook and LinkedIn, we are Power. Tiktok, insta and Twitter wearepower underscore net. Thank you so much for joining me. This is the we Are Power podcast of what Goes on Media Productions.
