My 50th year in seven days: part 1

Seven days to go to my 50th birthday.  This time next week I will be 50 and  I'm not a millionaire yet.  Well not in monetary terms, so if that was one of my life goals by 50, unless I win the lottery, it looks like I will have to re-profile this target.  To be honest, aspiring to be a millionaire wasn't something I ever gave any serious thought to until I left the public sector.  Whatever goals I did have, I  re-evaluated when I decided to change my income strategy from employee to entrepreneur at age 49.  

Over the last 43 days, I've attempted to give you an insight into who I am, what I think and my life. This morning I decided to check my Twitter analytics to see how many people are actually reading my blog.  I suspected that the number was going to be low as I've only had four comments in all this time.   

However, I kidded myself into believing that I had readers and not comment leavers.  The cold harsh reality is that in total only eight people have clicked the links to my blog page in the last 43 days.  Crushing I know.  

I feel like an astronaut sucked into a wormhole and marooned light years away from Earth on a distant planet  who is writing their memoirs.  Each day making an entry knowing that they will never be read but still hoping that one day a ship containing humans will venture this far out into space and stumble across them.  (Sob sob the futility is soul destroying ...) Anyway I've decided to use my final seven days in my challenge to tell the remainder of my story.  Not the birth to present-day story, but the story that has made the 50th year of my life the most pivotal year to date.

So in the best deep voice of the guy who does the trailers for blockbuster movies...

"It was a time of change, a time to chuck out everything that had gone before ...” Not really but you get the picture.

My story in seven parts – enjoy:

Part 1

I worked in local government for all of my working life since graduating university (this excludes holiday jobs and a short foray into banking before deciding to further my education and get a degree).

There's a lot said about the public sector, and much of it bad; however there are many people working in the public sector who all want to contribute, to give something back to help, that forego the opportunity to work in the private sector (where they would earn considerably more money) just so they can help.

Despite a number of different job titles, my work focused on regeneration, changing places, trying to restart communities, trying to make a difference.   

We were about improvement.  It's laughable that currently so much is being said about working directly with people when 13 years ago we developed what we called a community advocacy program to do just that.  It cost £2 million of public money and put an army of people into the community as well as training community members to be peer advocates. 

Their task: to work with people to remove the barriers that prevented them living a full productive life and making their contribution to the community.  It was based on the premise that it is difficult, if  not impossible to sort your life out if you are worried about other things that aren't right in your world like: your children getting into trouble at school for bad behaviour or your partner hasn't worked in years and so they are either drunk and abusing you or worrying  you so much that you can't even think.

 

Our programs were designed to make a difference and to be quite honest they would have.  However it takes time to rebuild broken lives and the people in power wanted election timetabled results, so they scrapped it and moved on to funding a new and better scheme which they were able to promote just in time for the voters to think they had created new hope and new solutions.  

Year after year, project after project the pattern was repeated, I was getting more and more frustrated.  My staff were getting more and more frustrated, I was putting in long hours and I could not see the results of my efforts.  Many times I thought there must be a better way to have more of a lasting impact than this and being constantly unappreciated. 

To be continued tomorrow 

Take pity on me and leave a comment please...