Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I kind of fell into it, that's the line I always use. It wasn't some predetermined goal when I was like, 10, that I want to be head of engagement and skills at Somerset House. And also, as my career started, I think I had ambitions and goals, and they've really changed and evolved because of the experiences I've had. My advice to anyone out there is don't decide what you want to do in 10 years in a set in stone kind of way, otherwise, you're going to shut off a lot of other corridors and avenues. I grew up in Central London, I grew up in northwest London, in Camden, I had museums and galleries on my doorstep, I didn't really go to them though. I went on school trips, kind of British Museum and places like that, that was kind of cool.

But there was a really significant moment in my childhood of a museum experience, and it's the one I still go back to. I was 10 years old, and I went on a sleepover to the Science Museum. It was my best friend Hannah G's 10th birthday. Hannah G, because there was like five Hannah's in my primary school class, but only one Dhikshana though, only one Dhikshana. Yeah, Hannah G's 10th birthday, we went, it was like, kind of the Science Museum had just started doing sleepovers at the Science Museum as well, so it was a new thing. We went, we slept in sleeping bags in the space gallery, under rockets. We went into the interactive galleries, like after they closed and got to play, we made astronaut ice cream, we ate terrible food. And it was amazing, it was brilliant. There was five of us that went with Hannah for her birthday, and we had an explainer looking after us called Brad. And in this picture that I have, that always sits on my desk wherever I work, it's me and Hannah G and all the other girls, and Brad and we've made a pyramid out of marshmallows and straw. I remember it all like it was yesterday, and it was the most amazing experience. When I came home, because I have a good Indian mother, I had a math tutor and she was like your math tutor is nearly here, but tell me how the sleepover was. I was like, oh, it was great, it was brilliant. When I grow up, I want to be an explainer, and she was like, what is that? And I tried to explain what an explainer was, and she was like, that's nice, let's focus on doctor, accountant, lawyer, you know, the regular stuff. In a movie, that would be a montage of flash forward, and I would have become an explainer as I did do.

But that's not how life really went. I forgot about that experience, and then carried on through school thinking about those very traditional roots, and then messed up my A levels in a really bad way. I was meant to study law because I was following the good Indian route, and kind of panicked, but my mum was very lovely and supportive, and we went through clearing and I loved history, and I'd done it for A level. I actually really did want to study history, I just couldn't get it to fly with my mom really. So yeah, I ended up studying history at university and when I went to University, I went to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, they ask you to study other subjects, so I picked up art history as well. That is when I really started to see about careers in the museum and gallery sector. I didn't really know about curators, I didn't even know what that word was when I was 18 years old. And through that I decided to do a joint honours degree in history and art history, did some internships at the Wallace Collection, volunteered at the British Museum, places like that. I thought I wanted to be a curator, but very quickly learned that being a curator meant a lot of reading and writing. I'm dyslexic, and I'm ok at it, I'm good at it, but it takes a lot of effort to be good at it. But what I do love doing, as you might have noticed, is talking. And I learned at an internship at the Wallace Collection that there was this Education team and their job was to think about the interpretation and how you make it accessible and talk a lot. So I decided that that's kind of what I wanted to do, and then I did a Master's at the Institute of Education in museum and gallery education, which gave me a lot of theory about my real practice and my real values and like how I think about my career came when I started working. And I should end that little anecdote, my first job was in a museum, paid job, was an explainer at the Science Museum. So yeah, it's a lovely roundabout story. The Hollywood film of it would tell it very differently and make it much more exciting, but yeah, that's kind of a bit about me I guess, and my career into museums and galleries.

Yeah, so Somerset House is London's working art centre. That's how we talk about ourselves. People will know us for the Christmas tree and the ice rink at Christmas, but we also do films and gigs. We have a really varied multimedia style cultural program. We also have exhibitions and events onsite as well. But what people don't know about us is that we have over 400 creatives that, I was going to say live and work, just work, they don't live there, work at Somerset House. I kind of just loved that idea of how it's an art center, but it's like breathing and living and working. That's so exciting and makes our collaborations and our, the feeling of the building really exciting as well. I was aware of it, I went past it quite a lot growing up, like on my bus, my school was in Central London, so I went past it quite a lot. But I do have a really keen memory from it.

When I was at university actually, towards the end of my degree, I really got into this artist called Rob Ryan, who's a designer, straighter, and does a lot of paper cutouts. They had an exhibition where Rob Ryan moved his design studio to Somerset House, and you could go and see him and his team working and stuff. I went along with my mom and my aunt at the time, and there was a gift shop at the end and I bought a tile from there, one of his tiles that he created, which had one of his kind of cutout prints printed onto it. I bought it and my mom was like, why are you buying a tile? I was like, oh, well, you know, it's quite cool, though, you know, you can buy a piece of art, but it cost me like 10 quid, like it's really cool. And my mom said, ok, well, where are you going to put the tile? I was like, well, one day I will have my own house and it'll go in like my son's room or something or my daughter's room. And it sits in my son's room now, which is really nice. But I just loved that accessibility. It was kind of popular culture, it’s about something right then, it wasn't so much about looking at the past or the history. It was something that you could really engage with, you saw artists working, you could buy something, not very expensive, take it home, and I just loved it. After that I did go to films and gigs with friends, but I never saw it as a place I was going to work. It's not like it was, you know, in the nicest way anyone from Somerset House listening, no offense, it wasn't like a dream place to work. But I don't think I fully understood what Somerset House was. But yeah, like as my career has gone on, I've watched it and that creative community, that collaboration that comes in how you create content and programming and events, just because all of those different people and bits to it, makes it such an exciting space to work in.

I joined Somerset House in January 2020, and I became the head at the time of learning and skills. But I also joined at a time as the world went into a pandemic. So what a year to become the head of engagement and skills. When I joined, learning implies, to me, and everyone has lots of different thoughts on this, but learning implies a school's programme, a very formal, traditional way. To the public, if they hear learning, they think of school, they think of academia. And that is right, some organisations, they have family programmes, schools programmes, you know, really varied programmes. But for me, what I saw at Somerset House was this, that really exciting community that I mentioned, the idea about developing talent and emerging creatives and young people coming through that. Our content very much focuses on the now and the future, it is contemporary, it doesn't always necessarily link to, naturally to a school's program. So I kind of, what I thought we were really doing is engaging people, exciting, making them excited about things. I just wanted to move away from that very traditional word that, you know, that's learning, that's loaded for people. Like if you're a young person that's had a difficult academic journey, then do you want to be part of something that's called learning and skills, because you're thinking, well, is it going to be like school? But would you want to be part of something that's called engagement and skills? Well, that's kind of like you are thinking of entertainment and engagement. And the skills bit is really important in that, you know, that will never change, because it's all about whether you're creating a workshop for a family audience coming in to engage with an exhibition, what you want them to go away with is a great experience, a great engagement, but you also want them to go away with a skill or idea or thought. It's the same for family audiences, as it is for the Young Producers Programme that we created, the idea is we want them to have a great time, a great experience, engage with us, be part of us. But we also want them to have the skills they need to live happy and successful lives.

We had really great ambitions when I joined in January 2020. We had an exhibition of the summer of 2020 called No Comply, which was all about skateboarding.

You'll be happy to know it's coming back this summer, so it will still happen. But alongside that, we were going to launch our first Young Producers Programme and two co-productions. So we were going to work with a group of 12 young people to design the flag that flies above Somerset House, which always links to an exhibition that's happening onsite, and also create a film with one of our resident film artists to respond to the themes of the exhibition. And it was going to be showing, over the summer we have two weeks of films being shown in our courtyard, and before the film started, we were going to have a little preview of our young producers' films. It was going to have massive reach, and it was so exciting, an exciting way to really launch the Young Producers Programme with authentic projects that are actually part of our cultural programme, they're not sitting over here on the side, they're like sentiment call. But the pandemic hit, and naturally, like everyone, we were working out how to work online, let alone taking everything digital. So we paused those projects, and we, like every other organisation, thought about our digital programme, and there was lots of things that we were doing. We've kind of just paused ourselves.

But there was one part of our programme, we used to do these kind of sessions, called the Creative Jobs Studio, which we'd invite creatives in and young people in to come, and the creators will talk about their creative journey, and then to kind of do a networking and a Q&A, and they were great. But we thought we could take that online, but how do we take that online and also kind of have reach, but make them work, and just give young people access to something when loads of young people, especially 16 upwards, were really struggling, like their exams were going to not happen, like what does the future hold, like qualification wise, experience wise and stuff. So we worked with one of our creative career industry placements, so we've been running a programme for three years called the Creative Careers Academy, where we have five placements that we recruit and induct, and they do placements within our creative community, and then we train, evolve and develop them. Her name is Hodan, and she said, well, that's a really great idea, but it needs a better name, Creative Jobs Studio or, you know, like, how does it connect to the internet and stuff. So she came up with the name Upgrade Yourself, and we launched our Upgrade Yourself Programme, which was monthly sessions, linking to creatives in our creative community, talking about the creative practice and then a live Q&A. Our onsite sessions, and across the year, we reached about 800 young people. Our online sessions from April 2020 to December 2020, reached over 80,000. So it was a success that we didn't expect, and there was something in that. There was definitely a market for young people looking for opportunities.

Then we got to June, the murder of George Floyd happened. We thought about it, like every cultural organisation, our response to that is we made a statement and we decided to write a pledge of commitments that we were going to make. And as that was happening, I was thinking, well, this really connects to the work of a department, like engagement and skills, like about diversifying workforces, making authentic experiences, exploring our history. And we knew we were going to recruit historians to come and explore our history, but I thought, wouldn't it be great to also have a group of young producers that come in, and they explore our history, like six young, you know, representative Londoners exploring that and creating something. And that's our first project, which is actually going to launch in two weeks’ time on March 16th, it is called Decentralise. It's six young black creatives, our first six young producers, and they have explored our history at Somerset House and what we are, but also how we have shown and displayed black art and culture in our history as well. And it’s this archive, it is a design website, so you can go on, there's artists they've inspired, that you can pick artworks and create your own artwork, save them, and it's absolutely brilliant. So do check that out.

And then our second set of six young producers are working with another artist's collective called Superflux. And that'll be launching around Earth Day later in April. It's going to be an online exhibition, and it's called Hope in the Heat, and it's looking at young people's thoughts about the future, with the climate emergency and what that means. And it's really exciting, and what I love about both those projects is you have one project, which is looking at our history and our past as an organisation and thinking about representation, and then you have a second project, which is looking at our future, and what does that mean for young people in the world. It's really exciting first two projects, and like I mentioned, the No Comply ones, they're coming back, so hopefully this summer, we'll be doing the flag design and the film with the exhibition. What I love about all of that is the Decentralise project links to a value of Somerset House for anti-racism, the Superflux project, Hope in that Heat links to a really important issue of our time, and then the No Comply project links to our cultural programme in a really specific way. It's showing how you can run programmes like this wherever you are in such different ways, and link it in so many different ways.

Just getting your head around so much a year ago around what lockdown means, how are you going to work, working digitally, I think there's some well-being practices that have come out of the way we work. So we cannot always have to be on site, but there's something about if you work in a museum or gallery or heritage site, it's about your site, so you kind of need to be there to be inspired and connect. But we are still finding a balance to make that work. I think there's things around thinking about how we deal with change and make decisions, the pandemic removed, kind of systemic structures that we had to like, have things signed off in such specific ways to make things happen. But the pandemic showed that you don't, you can make decisions and be responsive for your staff, for your public, whoever you need. We really shouldn't lose that, because that's made some really exciting programming and kind of things accelerate. The word I use is, I had a plan when I joined Somerset House around engagement and skills, and I thought it would take me three or four years to establish that plan. But the pandemic in many ways has accelerated this focusing of young people, for us as a team and an organisation, and that's beautiful. When I think about the work that we're doing, and the year that we've had, there have been times where it's felt not in control, like it felt in flux, not always getting it right, but then going, ok, that didn't work, why didn't that work, let's try it again, and accepting that. And that's just been really, I can say it now, in hindsight, it wasn't always great at the time. But it's been a really nice journey to be on, and kind of reflect on how that's changed how we work day to day, and that's really important.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, I am. I'm in my final year of my final term, so not for much longer. But yeah.

Yeah, definitely. So the Museums Association launched its learning and engagement manifesto in November of 2020. But there had been two years’ worth of work before that. I was a board member since 2016. My background, as you've learned through this podcast, is about learning and engagement. I think the Museums Association was making real headway to think about, you know, not just curators, but thinking about front of house and all the different departments that make a museum. And I think they were doing some good work around learning and engagement, but it kind of felt like a part of the sector that just hadn't really been talked about, or researched, or explored in a really long time. For me, it was since David Anderson's A Common Wealth, which one I studied on my Master's Course, which I'm sure you both did as well. I should say, when I joined the board, David Anderson was on the board, so that was quite a fan girl, weird, weird moment. Anyway, back to the manifesto. So yeah, I kind of just approached it with Sharon Heal, the director of the Museums Association and said, I feel like there's something that MA can do, like to really look at this and research it. So we actually met with David Anderson, because of that being the last big significant moment, we thought about where we were. So that was 2017... 2018, when we started that, and we were looking at where the world was at the time, where the sector was, what was happening, and we decided to, we needed to kind of find out how people in this part of the sector work, in learning and engagement, felt about their careers, about their work they did, as well as wider departments, and look across all the nations on that, because it's very different in whichever nation you're in. We started off by conducting some roundtables, collated all of that, and what really became evident was just a bit of lack of love for people in that part of the sector. Their work relies heavily on funding, a lot of them feel like it sits over here, it's not - I was trying to show you, it's a podcast, I can't show you that, sits to the side, it's not the center or core. And there are some really small places doing brilliant work, there's some really big places that need to do better work. It was really mixed, like what came out of it. What I said was, I really felt like what we needed was not another paper or a lot of detailed research, it kind of needed like a call to action, and that learning and engagement is not, it can be driven and led by a department, but it's not the sole responsibility of people that work in learning and engagement programmes or departments. And we all agreed on that. So that is where this idea of like a manifesto, like a call to action came about and keeping things really simple and clear. And if you look at it, that's how you'll see it, it's like clear points. I've got some case studies attached if you want examples, but it's not making you read a lot, a lot about it.

Then we just found lots of sessions beyond that, where once we started writing it to test it, so we invited different groups. I think, overall across the two year period, we spoke, heard from, I think it's over 500 people from the sector, before it was finally ready to be launched. And I think it's like, you know, one of the proudest things I'll probably ever do because it's not just about me or it's not just about my organisation, it is to support the whole sector and that's a lovely thing to have been part of. And it's been really well received, and that kind of Decentralising, I have to use the word of my young producers, like to kind of make it centralised, if that makes sense, has become really, really important. So everyone's saying it. The anecdote I always say is when you apply for a job at a museum, whatever department you apply for, you will be asked like, why this museum, why this, what object do you like, things like that. But how many of us in how many departments are asked about engaging, or audiences, or what's your role in making sure our public have a good connection to our work. And it is always in our learning and engagement teams, or our front of house teams where we are asked these questions. But actually, everyone across any department at the interview should be asked about the museum, the collection, and also engagement, because it's all our jobs to think about that.

Yeah, I think I've always thought about it for a while, because I think we kind of, museums and galleries don't always necessarily connect ourselves to the wider creative and cultural sector as much as we can. We're a stronger force as a creative and cultural sector, rather than being our independent mediums or bodies that we need to be in, that joint type approach. I've thought about it for a while, and what you're doing, especially in a learning and engagement team, you are producing content, whether it's a workshop, or a resource, or, whatever it is, you're producing content. And the job titles we have in the sector around learning and engagement are always like officer or administrator or coordinator, lots of coordinators out there, and they vary. What does that mean, a coordinator at a National Museum is so different to a coordinator in a small museum, where they're basically managing everything. And I thought about this, and I thought about my own job titles as well, and I just feel like it is a producer, it is a producer role, and that's become even more evident in the last year through the pandemic. I think about that on twofold. There's the digital side of it, because there's going to be a real importance about us all, regardless of our departments having digital skills. When the pandemic hit, everyone looked at the learning departments, engagement departments and they looked at the social media team, who all of a sudden, they realised, did more than just write tweets. And it was all about digital in that way. That's got to continue, and you are right, the job roles will change over time. But already you're seeing it, I'm seeing it in national organisations through restructures, where they're changing those learning department roles to producer roles, because that is what they're doing. It also means we'll have more transferable skills, and we can move between creative and cultural sector roles in an easier way, which means hopefully, there might be someone who, whoever ran the BBC's online learning, bite sized learning during the pandemic is phenomenal. Their production skills are needed in the museum and gallery sector, but they probably might never have thought of themselves doing that, in the same way our work around engaging people around collections and sites, could have definitely support a company like the BBC. And that brings me to the idea of digital strategies. What I love about Somerset House is our new head of digital, Eleanor. She talks about our digital strategy as a broadcast strategy, because it's how you're broadcasting your content or your ideas or your thoughts and connecting with audiences. What I love about Somerset House is we think in a bigger way than just about the mediums that we deliver things, and we think about how we connect to the creative industries. I think that's such an important thing as we move forward.

Well, I'm absolutely terrible at balancing it, I should start out with, but I think that's ok. And the reason I say that's ok, it's not because I'm saying it. I read Michelle Obama's autobiography in 2019, as I started a new role at the time for Somerset House, and she said, there is no way to balance it. But you need to find a way to feel comfortable with what you're doing. And there's no, you know, I could look to someone else and go, you're doing it like that, that's how I should do it, but that's not going to work. If Michelle Obama says she can't find a way to balance it, then I think we all just need to accept that there is no way to balance it. What I would say is that the pandemic has led to like this, it's not working from home, it's living at work. It bleeds, like everything bleeds into one another, and it's really hard. And I've definitely stayed on my emails longer than I should have at the end of the day, just to wrap stuff up, because I don't have to commute. I've definitely started earlier because I don't have to commute. But actually what I'm doing is bringing back parameters and controls for myself. I'm doing it in a really visual way, actually, I'm putting it into my calendar, like, ‘Dhikshana, out of the office’, because I'm going for a walk, but I'm writing that in. And also, I used to find it interesting, before I became a parent, people would put in like, you know, child care or pick up or whatever, and I used to think like, I don't know, it just made it sound like it wasn't about a person, but I always put - my son's called Seth, so I always put ‘Seth drop off’, ‘Seth pickup’, because it's the person that I'm going to pick up or drop off, and he's really important person, like, no offense to the director of Somerset House, he is more important than you, so he is going to have a priority. But what I should say is that I've worked in a number of places, and the reason I feel empowered to be this way, is because currently at Somerset House, there's a really lovely culture of well-being and it's coming from the top, the top down, they're displaying it, and I'm displaying it, so my team sees it. I'd say to anyone out there, if you're feeling like you're not doing it, think why you're not doing it. Are you not doing it because you don't want to, or you feel nervous? And I have worked in places where I felt like I couldn't fully be a parent, because it was seen as slacking. And I've been in places where I've been 100% supported for it as well. I think it's so important that if you have any kind of role where you can influence or lead, that you need to display it, and give ownership and power, so someone else can. How they then do it, it really is up to us as individuals to do it, you can't really blame anyone. It's really weird, you think however many years, I think I'm 15 years, 14 years into my career, you think these are such obvious things Dhikshana, but as you try and progress and build, you get bad habits, and you kind of have to unlearn them. And I think that was actually Michelle Obama that said that, not me, so let's give her the credit. Hopefully that answers your question.

I think, weirdly, I was writing a talk to do somewhere, and it was about key moments in my career, and the thing that really stands out to me is when I was given opportunity or a chance to do something, even when I wasn't clearly like completely ready or right. So my advice is to ask, to ask to do something, if there's something you want to get experienced in or what you want to do. But also for anyone in a kind of managerial position, don't just look for the person that's going to do it perfectly, like look for the person that could really benefit and support them in their next steps. I think trying to, I said at the start, at the start of this, don't narrow down your career. So, for me, I, at one point would have thought I want to be becoming a manager or a head of department was like the ultimate, but the head of a learning programme that was solely like very traditional in my head at the time, like a school's programme, a family's programme, like all of this work that I've completely love around young people, around workforce, around wider mediums beyond museums and galleries and cultural production, I just didn't even know it was a thing when I started working. I think I took a few risks and took a few jobs to get those experiences. So when you're looking for those jobs, look broadly, look widely, and if you see a job and you think, well, I can't do it, firstly, those people are saying there are going to be women, you can do it, so just apply. But what I do is look at the skills asked and the experience asked, and think well, I have these things, but I don't have this thing, and then I kind of set myself a goal, do I need to go on a training course, do I need to do something to get that experience, so I can talk about it and identify, so that when that job comes up that you really want, you can hit all of it and you feel really comfortable and confident going into it.

Finally, I think you just really look at the values of the organisation that you're applying for. I've talked briefly, I've touched upon, like working in places where I've felt really not being able to be myself or feel supported, and when I applied at Somerset House in my interviews, I asked about the culture and now you're going to say oh, well, they'll just say like, they'll just tell you what you want to hear, it's a lovely culture, we all take five hour lunch breaks and get paid bonuses every year, whatever. But you can get a real sense, you know, in an interview, like keep asking those questions, do some research, see if you can find people that work there, ask them what it's like, because you're going to spend more time at work than at home. So you should really love it. And I think I can remember the second part, my mama brain has not failed me here. The second part was what should, people that want to bring in younger voices or young people into the organisation. So young people's programmes always sit in a learning engagement kind of department. There's nothing wrong with that. But that will always kind of make it sit to the side, or if you don't center it and make it core. The way I think about it is any young kind of persons programme you're bringing or development, like training, talent development, whatever you want to call it, if you're creating that programme, if you create it from the core of your organisation and think about everything across your organisation, like where can their voices be, where can the opportunities be, where is their training and development, and you build it in, then actually, those things will affect the wider HR practices of that organisation. An example there is, recruitment around young people's programmes is really open, welcoming and supportive. So there's probably lots we can just take from our young people's programme and implement into our main recruitment practices, to make them kind of more accessible to people. It's just one example. And the model I always go to on this is the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. They have a model called the Asset Base Framework, which is all about thinking about young people's voices from the core and how you build it, and they have a beautiful visual diagram that helps you map it out. So yeah, my idea is you don't have to do everything straight up, you can just focus on one or two things, but think about how it can have impact and influence across the organisation. So yeah, that would hopefully, that would probably help people thinking about building in those programmes.

I think, weirdly, I was writing a talk to do somewhere, and it was about key moments in my career, and the thing that really stands out to me is when I was given opportunity or a chance to do something, even when I wasn't clearly like completely ready or right. So my advice is to ask, to ask to do something, if there's something you want to get experienced in or what you want to do. But also for anyone in a kind of managerial position, don't just look for the person that's going to do it perfectly, like look for the person that could really benefit and support them in their next steps. I think trying to, I said at the start, at the start of this, don't narrow down your career. So, for me, I, at one point would have thought I want to be becoming a manager or a head of department was like the ultimate, but the head of a learning programme that was solely like very traditional in my head at the time, like a school's programme, a family's programme, like all of this work that I've completely love around young people, around workforce, around wider mediums beyond museums and galleries and cultural production, I just didn't even know it was a thing when I started working. I think I took a few risks and took a few jobs to get those experiences. So when you're looking for those jobs, look broadly, look widely, and if you see a job and you think, well, I can't do it, firstly, those people are saying there are going to be women, you can do it, so just apply. But what I do is look at the skills asked and the experience asked, and think well, I have these things, but I don't have this thing, and then I kind of set myself a goal, do I need to go on a training course, do I need to do something to get that experience, so I can talk about it and identify, so that when that job comes up that you really want, you can hit all of it and you feel really comfortable and confident going into it.

Finally, I think you just really look at the values of the organisation that you're applying for. I've talked briefly, I've touched upon, like working in places where I've felt really not being able to be myself or feel supported, and when I applied at Somerset House in my interviews, I asked about the culture and now you're going to say oh, well, they'll just say like, they'll just tell you what you want to hear, it's a lovely culture, we all take five hour lunch breaks and get paid bonuses every year, whatever. But you can get a real sense, you know, in an interview, like keep asking those questions, do some research, see if you can find people that work there, ask them what it's like, because you're going to spend more time at work than at home. So you should really love it. And I think I can remember the second part, my mama brain has not failed me here. The second part was what should, people that want to bring in younger voices or young people into the organisation. So young people's programmes always sit in a learning engagement kind of department. There's nothing wrong with that. But that will always kind of make it sit to the side, or if you don't center it and make it core. The way I think about it is any young kind of persons programme you're bringing or development, like training, talent development, whatever you want to call it, if you're creating that programme, if you create it from the core of your organisation and think about everything across your organisation, like where can their voices be, where can the opportunities be, where is their training and development, and you build it in, then actually, those things will affect the wider HR practices of that organisation. An example there is, recruitment around young people's programmes is really open, welcoming and supportive. So there's probably lots we can just take from our young people's programme and implement into our main recruitment practices, to make them kind of more accessible to people. It's just one example. And the model I always go to on this is the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. They have a model called the Asset Base Framework, which is all about thinking about young people's voices from the core and how you build it, and they have a beautiful visual diagram that helps you map it out. So yeah, my idea is you don't have to do everything straight up, you can just focus on one or two things, but think about how it can have impact and influence across the organisation. So yeah, that would hopefully, that would probably help people thinking about building in those programmes.

One is, it's a good time to look at what's important to you, like your values, in your work and your personal life, and just to check that against where the world is right now and what your job is, and just sense check that. I think that the pandemic has created this way that, you know, it might be the time to move on to something else, or to ask for something at work or to create a change that just make sure that you're living your most happy and successful lives.

Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it. I've never felt so professional with a microphone. So thank you.

Twitter is my best one, @dtpering, feel free to follow me on there, and that's where I do all my kind of work and signposting. You will find me on Instagram, it's a closed account, it is closed for a reason guys, so don't go adding me on Instagram.

Cool. Thank you very much, guys.