Change of CEO at mermaids…

The trouble with wanting your work place to be an extension of your youth work project for vulnerable teens, is that it requires a lot of youth workers running around behind you doing all the enabling and pandering and listening and praising and bolstering and facilitating. And the primary goal of that is your being supported to achieve your personal goals, your happiness with your needs being met, your expressed satisfaction with your youth worker's care and support of you - sounding familiar yet?

It's not compatible with providing a service to anyone else, or doing anything that involves something disliked, and definitely doesn't involve having to deal with boundaries and expectations. Call ofsted and report the youth worker, she's Not Doing It Right.

@nilsmousehammer you're right it will break the system.

As has become obvious at mermaids when your staff is made up almost entirely of the very specialist of special oppressed people. Those who need hand holding and protecting through every minute of every working day that they aren't spending de-stressing in a safe space or taking their support dog for its half hour every hour pee break and walk its very hard to get any actual work done. Do so presume any superfluous jobs like fact checking, safeguarding, staff vetting, you know the not important stuff!!!! etc gets left for someone else to do. But there isn't anyone capable left.

It's the capacity thing.

The line has been lost somewhere in all this. When someone cannot do the basic requirements of their job without their mum and service dog and hand holding and lots of special arrangements and enabling and faciliting, you're getting past equality and accommodations and into someone who is not competent to do the job.

As a disabled person this significantly pisses me off, because people like me have fought and fought to be recognised as equally competent as anyone else with just basic access arrangements. This piss taking will break the system.

for me, someone who is generally not a social person and is often unsure of social situations,
This is hard to read. It reads to me like someone who should have been offered alternative support.

Interesting point above re the confusion of staff who continue to view themselves as service users rather than an employee, and who may be seeing their relationship as an employee with a line manager more as a young person expecting person centred service and therapeutic support.

I'm reminded of Challoner's response in the political party inquiry that it the fault of those who failed to take sufficient care of Challoner.

Very lol 😂

And no, it's not true that I gave this book to Susie in this years Secret Santa's.

Ooh tough choice. I like Stonemaids better though. I think it would be very representative of the mission of the charity

from the residential link above I discovered that in amongst the how to bind sessions they also did gestural painting to paint what they felt.yet the publicity shot of them smiling doesn't quite match up with the chaos of the painting in front of them.

Also when the writer of the piece went from service user to volunteer did they go through the relevant dbs checks etc or as a known person were they just trusted to be a decent person?

I think Stonemaids just edges out Mermwall as a name.

mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/my-residential-story/

From service user to volunteer.

We've all seen the advertised topless swims exclusively for TQ+ children with adults up to their 20s included. But no parents.

And when those in the real world went WTAF, this is not ok, here are a whole lot of reasons its inappropriate, and have you ever heard of safeguarding?

We were all told that it was transphobic not to think it was a lovely idea and wholly appropriate. In essence, safeguarding is transphobic.

So then Mermaids and Stonewall could merge, because Stonewall's just a trans lobbying organisation these days, and LGBA could be there for LGB people.

Lots of use of the word change there

A trans CEO would really make it obvious that Mermaids is not longer a charity supporting the families of GNC/ gender distressed children. It's just a trans focused lobbying group. Could be an own goal for them. I agree with the pp who said Susie Green got listened to because she was a middle aged mother - she was a safe face.

Yes they are definitely throwing her under the bus aren't they. "We'll be fine now Susie's gone. And with our shiny new trans CEO things will be much better."

I know - how could the office be anything other than a toxic mess of emotionally immature or narcissistic flouncers?

Ah, the Telegraph article outlines the new strategy. A woman called Susie Green did it and now she's run away. I'm trying to imagine office life at Mermaids. I imagine lots of squealing and squeaking and endless tears.

Thanks for archive Telegraph article Signalbox. So it's either the lack of safeguarding or because SG wasn't trans enough. You have to feel for those who genuinely believe it's the latter.

Michael Cashman is getting ratioed: archive.ph/AY9Qx

Archive of Telegraph article. archive.ph/o9Ygd

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/02/mermaids-boss-forced-staff-revolted-against-incapable-leadership/

The Mermaids boss was forced out amid a staff revolt including complaints that she was not transgender.

Shocked staff were hauled into an “emergency meeting” on Friday with Dr Belinda Bell, the chair of trustees, and told Ms Green was gone and her replacement “needs strong EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) experience, ideally lived experience”, with some staff believing this means being transgender.

It's just a clumsy way of saying that they'll accept PAYE or self-employed as they know there's likely to be a pitifully small number of people prepared to touch it with a barge pole. They'd still expect minimum hours / length of contract.

Not on the website: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63837761

@Happylittlechicken My car is useless, it can't even car properly, but my cat is currently giving his Arsehole as extra good clean in case his application is successful.