It was the night before Christmas

Jan 2, 2013

My last working day before the holiday.  Nine of us sat around the table.  Five have worked together for a year or more.  Two have come on board since the summer. Two are new to the group.  It feels risky.  Neil and Carol have brought Pertemps on board, but at what cost?  They could bring huge resources.  But can they really get the disenfranchised into sustainable employment at the end of our “personal and leadership development programme”.  Rezi had already heard such scepticism from her focus group.  And would Pertemps properly buy into the ethos of “Real Deal”, particularly in its spiritual foundations?

I fired a number of papers at Carmen in the last few days before the meeting.  Then in my opening remarks, I pointed to our three key words: hope, forgiveness and inclusion.  I noted how atheists and theists are agreed on one thing – there is no hope without God.  Bertrand Russell is famous for saying “We must build our lives on the foundation of unyielding despair”.  The implication for our new Community Interest Company, however, would be that – like Alcoholics Anonymous – it would be essentially theistic in its approach to therapy.  We were, I said, challenging the very foundations of secular society.

Not only did the two from Pertemps like the ethos, but “we recognise that we have a particular brand image, and that the way we approach this project will have to be completely different from the normal way we do business”.  By the end of the morning, six of us had signed papers to become a new company.