Welcome to inclusion bites, your sanctuary for bold conversations that spark change. I'm Joanne Lockwood, your guide on this journey of exploration into the heart of inclusion, belonging and societal transformation. Ever wondered what it truly takes to create a world where everyone not only belongs, but thrives? You're not alone. Join me as we uncover the unseen, challenge the status quo, and share stories that resonate deep within. Ready to dive in? Whether you're sipping your morning coffee or winding down after a long day, let's connect, reflect and inspire action together. Don't forget, you can be part of the conversation too. Reach out to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk to share your insights or to join me on the show.

So just your earbuds and settle in. It's time to ignite the spark of inclusion with inclusion bites. And today is episode 108 with the title from resilience to inspiration. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Paris Bartholomew. Paris is a speaker, writer, lecturer and trainer. And when I asked Paris to describe her superpower, she said empathy, love, compassion and resilience. Hello, Paris, welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne. Thank you so much for having me on the show, really, it's such a pleasure to be here.

It's an honour for me. I've read some of the background of the show notes and I'm so looking forward to this conversation. So, yeah, welcome, Paris, from resilience to inspiration. Tell me more about yourself.

Well, I suppose it's worth mentioning that I am a lived, experienced speaker. So what that means is that I spent the majority of my childhood within the british care system. I went into care at the age of six and after multiple placements, we're talking twelve placements over a 1314 year period. I left local authority care at the age of 18 with my own flat, my own independence, my life ahead of me, but maybe not in a very solid place, maybe not in a very comfortable, loving place. And I suppose for me it was about building identity, building resilience, learning how to interact with people and building trust with other humans. Things that I think a lot of people develop from a very young age. But just due to the many moves that I had during my childhood, it just made for a very unstable, traumatic time growing up.

I'm just doing the maths here. So, six to 1812 placements, you're effectively moving every year.

Yeah, there were some placements that were three to six months long and there were others that were just over a year. My longest placement was just under two years and that was a large group home in onestead in east London. But the majority of my time, as you say, was very much, very short periods of time in foster families, group homes, independent living projects, you name it.

I've stayed in hotels longer than some of those placements. It's bad enough moving home where you have to pack and unpack and become familiar with not only where you're living, but the surroundings, the people around you. It really is destabilising, isn't it, that kind of nomadic lifestyle?

Absolutely. Very unstable. And I suppose when you're thinking about your childhood years and the things that you need to navigate naturally, like learning how to trust, learning how to build bonds and learning how to give and receive love, these are just things that I unfortunately was never able to develop over the years as a child. So it was about navigating some of that as an adult.

Can I ask how you entered the care system in the first place at the age of six? How did that come about?

Absolutely. Unfortunately, my birth mum was convicted of several accounts of abuse so severe that it did end up in the local press. I was hospitalised for a couple of weeks for assessments, tests and then released into an assessment centre, which, without revealing my age, which back in the 70s, was a very, very different system to what we're looking at now. So an assessment centre back then was full of children who had varying levels of behavioural and emotional problems? Yeah, it was a very traumatic time. It was a very uncertain time. But one thing I would say is that when you're a child, you know no different. You only know your reality. So as traumatic as it was, I just got on with it because it was all I knew.

So the person who was there to protect you, there to nurture you, there to be an example to you, was the person causing you the pain and the distress. So when you were moving into the care system, you didn't come from a position of learnt love, if you like, learnt. You must have been very wary about people and contact authority figures. That's been really difficult for you as a young child.

It was difficult. And I remember at the age of six, when I entered care, I remember being quite distrustful generally and wary, but at the same time loving my mum, regardless of the fact that she did all these horrible things. I knew when she went into prison that she had done something wrong. And I think the difference between myself and I do believe that this is some of where the resilience came in, is that other adults that I have met as part of my work, that were in the care system often blamed themselves for going into care. I didn't do that. I knew because of the conviction that it was very much something that was done to me that was wrong, something that was punishable and something that was extremely traumatic. But what's interesting about trauma is that you don't fully experience it until you learn what it is. And at 6710, I didn't know what it was, and I think it wasn't till I got to around 1112.

When I'm socialising with friends at school, when I'm going to friends homes for dinner, that's when you'll begin to realise that your life is very different to the average child in your school.

So you must have been kind of considered a bit of an outsider, maybe mixing with people who are, in quotes, stable family homes. Was there any distrust of you or did people embrace you fully, if you like?

Yeah, that's a good question, actually, because I think that people saw my life as actually quite advantageous in some ways. When you're a child, all you're thinking about is, oh, mum won't let me do this, or dad won't let me do that, or I want this and I want that. And I think a lot of my friends looked at my life and saw some of the things that we would probably define as being quite know. I got pocket money every week, some of my friends didn't, some of my friends didn't have money to sort of buy things that they wanted to buy. In one of the large group homes, we used to have clothing allowance, and I don't know if you're old enough to remember a shop called CNA, but that was my regular allowance shop, and we'd go there with our allowance and I could choose what I wanted. And again, in some of the areas that I lived, which were very working class, quite a lot of poverty, quite a lot of socioeconomic factors that made for very poverish circumstances. I went to school with children that couldn't afford new clothes. So as superficial as those things might be, if we think about the hierarchy of what we need as individuals, we need security, we need love, we need protection.

I didn't have all of those things, but I did have some of the things that other children would look at, and so I was accepted in most of the arenas that I was in.

Do you have siblings? Were you with anybody?

I do. I have two sisters, but unfortunately we weren't placed together. I'm the oldest of three girls and both of my siblings went into care at different times. So my youngest sister who's eleven years younger than me, was entering the system at the time when I was leaving the system. So a lots of kind of separateness, but I was lucky enough to always know where they were and I was a confident child regardless of what was going on around the age of sort of 1213 14. I was an outgoing child, I was a talkative child and I very much wanted to represent myself and I would camp outside social services office and say, I'm not moving until you tell me where my sister is. That was very demanding and not easy. It wasn't easy for some of the families that I lived with.

Didn't work out because I wasn't the sort of child that was able to assimilate well into a family because I just didn't have the things that I needed to understand how to give and receive love.

How did that manifest? Was it frustration, anger, disruptive behaviour, that kind of things? Was it?

It was some of that. Some of it was over compliance. So it was extremes. I remember, for example, I lived in a white family in the area near Margate, Seaside town. I was the only black child in the school. I was the only child in that family. And it was very difficult because I knew nothing about my heritage. I didn't understand the fact that I was black.

Yes. I knew I was different. Yes. Obviously, it was obvious to me that I was different in many ways, but because my cultural needs were not being met, it was very difficult for me to then look positively at what it meant to be a black child. And that made me angry. And that anger did manifest as bad behaviour, as aggressive behaviour, yeah.

If you were the only black child in a school and it was in a foster family, they would have had very little experience of racism. Or as you say, your cultural needs, your nourishment as a young black girl, if you like, and what you needed growing up, you needed role models, you needed someone who could bounce off of and respect and look up to. And you had none of that. We're living in a white environment.

Yeah, absolutely. You've hit the nail on the head around the lack of role models because that was something that I found a bit later on was very helpful in the formation of my identity and understanding culturally, racially, ethnically, what I was about. I think what was really difficult for those particular foster parents, as you've said, they didn't understand racism. They didn't understand and it was difficult for them because they weren't armed with what they needed to protect me. The school did what they could, but again, when you're in an environment where they've never had to put these things in place before, and now you've come along, it's very much a case of, well, what do we do here? How do we navigate this?

Yeah.

And I certainly didn't have the answers at that age.

It's hard for me to create a link to your lived experience because it is so detached from my reality. And I can feel the way you're talking about describing it. It must have been really, you were ten years old and some twelve years old or younger. So did you exit the care system at 18 with a good education, with the tools for life, or you lacked some of that?

I was lucky enough to, as I said earlier, have the confidence and strength, maybe courage even, to be quite demanding about what I wanted. And when I got to the age of 15, I said to my social worker, I've had enough, I've had enough. We are nine placements in. I am tired, I am fed up, and I want something different for myself. And the only option that I can see at this point is independence and freedom. Can I have a flat? Can I just get on with my life? And my social worker said, you're 15, of course you can't have a flat, but what I can do is meet you halfway. She said, I really want you to just give this foster system a chance one more time. So at 15, I had my final foster placement, which again, didn't really work out.

It was with a black family, it was a single parent family, a lovely woman who I'm still in contact with, actually. And it didn't work out because I was hell bent on independence and freedom, just like most 15 year olds, actually, I don't think I was very different in that respect. So I then moved into a Bernardo's semi independent living project. It was just before my 16th birthday and I was able to have my own room. A member of staff, a residential social worker, would come in on in the evenings at around 06:00 p.m. And they would be there till six in the morning just in case anybody needed them. And there were around, I think, eight or nine rooms. Everybody had their own room and we had a small allowance every week and we had to pay rent.

And it was a taste of freedom for me. I was at college, I was doing performing arts. I knew where I wanted to go in my life. And this taste of freedom really gave me a little bit of an insight into what I wanted for myself. And I grabbed it with both hands, I paid my rent on time. I went to college, I finished my course and then I went into another placement at the age of 17 before getting my flat at 18. And by the time I got my flat, I felt a little lost, a little confused. But I'd had two to three years of so called adultness.

I'd had an opportunity to find my feet. So by the time I got my flat at 18, I was ready. I was ready for that independence. And I say I'm lucky because I know a lot of young people are not ready at that age.

Yeah, I think we called this episode resilience. And to inspiration, your lived experience over those years from the age of six taught you that necessity of resilience, having to cope with meeting different families, different schools, a lack of stability in your life. Yes, you rebelled. Yes, you were probably angry, yes, you were frustrated, but it gave you those life skills, if you like, to be able to stand in your own 2ft. And when you were ready, you were ready.

Yeah, I was ready. I remember I had this lovely little brown philofax that I bought from wh Smiths. I got it out of my pocket money and I was probably not even 15 at the time. And I had these lists that were all colour coded and they were all about what I wanted for myself. It was like a plan, it was almost like a life plan. And it was about where I wanted to be. And as much as I was angry, as much as I was hurt, as much as I felt quite sorry for myself in some ways, I also had hope. And I never lost that little bit of hope that my life would get better as long as I was in the driving seat, because I, for many years, felt that there was very little control over where I went, when I went and who I went with.

That sense of control was really important for me because it just meant that I could begin building my identity, building all the things that I felt that was lacking.

Statistically, people who are careleavers tend not to succeed in life, enter maybe the prison system or homelessness or joblessness or. How did you break that cycle of the contextual expectation of who you are? Because you must have had challenges where you were seeking employment or whatever it may be, where you had that lived experience, people maybe would have had some prejudice against you. A mistrust maybe?

Absolutely. And I learned from a very early age that there were times to tell the truth and there were times where you maybe needed to be creative with the truth. And I didn't always say that I was care experience. Sometimes I didn't need to. But sometimes I was able to use that to my advantage. So when I applied to do my first degree and there was an element of social work within the degree, it was a combined degree of social work teaching. I used my care experience because they said, well, you need to be 21 to come onto this course. And I was 19 going on 20.

And I said, okay, I'm not 21, but I can explain to you how I have got more experience than your average 21 year old. My life experience up until this point is probably a bit more than the average 21 year old. And I was very open about my care experience at that interview for my degree. And I got onto that course and I was the youngest person on the course and qualified with a first degree and then went on to do a master's in psychology, philosophy combined. And I enjoyed learning. I enjoyed education. When I was a child, books were my escape. Books were my way of escaping the reality of my existence.

I used books as a way of forgetting the traumatic environment that I was in and almost transporting myself into the characters in the books. And for that reason, learning was fun because I enjoyed reading and I enjoyed acquiring knowledge. And I was a curious child.

You mentioned at the beginning about your queerness. We start to form our identity at the age of six or seven, don't we? So, right, the age you were going through, the trauma with your mother, you had started to kind of discover who you are, think about who you are. And this would have been without ageing you. This would have been the. It wasn't an easy time to be queer in the, in the care system and without role models and being with white families. As a black woman, how did you find that queerness came out, or was it suppressed until you were 18?

I did not see myself as queer until I was well into my twenty s. I was so busy navigating the real basic aspects of being a child. Puberty, adolescence, friends, socialising, all of that kind of. And then the care experience of the moves, the many, many moves and the adaptation that that meant. Some of the families I lived with were very religious, so I was navigating this religious environment that said, men and women get together and then they have a child. And I never questioned any of that because I was so busy questioning my sheer existence. I didn't navigate sexuality. I dated boys, I enjoyed the company of young men and didn't question any of that until I was well into my twenty s.

And I remember there was a show called the Vanessa show, and me and a couple of friends, we applied to get on this show. And I'll never forget, the episode was all about gay marriage. And this was in the 80s when, as you said, queerness was so unacceptable. And Vanessa had this show all about gay marriage. And I remember one of my friends who was in the audience at the time stood up and said, it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And I just turned round and looked at them and went, what did you just say? I was absolutely horrified that I had a friend that had that view and at no point had we had any conversations about sexuality, dating, relationship. It was just assumed in my mind that people respected and loved each other and that it was all about who you was and not about who you slept with. And it shocked me to the core.

And it probably was around that time that I started exploring my relationships with women. And I remember writing a short piece entitled all the good things about being in care, all the good things about not having a mum and dad that loved me and kind of raised me. And one of those things on that list was the fact that coming out was easy. I didn't need to worry about how people were going to see me. I didn't need to worry about a mum or a dad that loved me, that expected me to be a certain way. There were no expectations put on me. I was able to be who I wanted to be.

Do you still have contact with your sisters? Are you kind of close?

And very close. Like I said, I was that naughty, mouthy, confident, slightly passive aggressive individual that would camp outside social services and say, look, I'm not moving. Where's my sister? We have. Have such a close relationship and I'm so grateful that they are a part of my life. I've got nieces, I've got nephews. I don't have any of my own children, so I love being an auntie. I love having my nephew over during the summer holidays and then at the end saying off, you know, when my nephew Thomas was a baby, it was just brilliant. He'd start crying, I'll just hand him straight.

Know. My relationship with my sisters means the world to me and I honestly don't know what I would do if I didn't have them in my life.

Do you forgive your mum?

Absolutely. I had to for my own mental health, for my own strength. It took a long time. I was angry when she came out of prison, the contact that we had was so sporadic. She would just turn up out of the blue sometimes and I often wouldn't know when she would be there and when she wouldn't. And that upset me. I would visit her and there would be times when she would just open the front door, say, what do you want? And close the front door. I mean, it was very, very difficult, but what I had to do, and this is the run up to forgiving her, I had to accept that she wasn't going to be the person I wanted her to be.

And I honestly believe that part of that resilience that I've got is about accepting my life for what it was, accepting the things that I could control and the things that I can't. And I couldn't control my childhood and I can't control the past, but what I can control is my responses to those things. And my response to my mum was anger. I had it out with her, I did. And she was unable to say sorry. She was unable to accept what she did, regardless of her prison sentence. And it took a while, but I had to say, well, you know what? She won't. And that's going to have to be fine.

It's going to have to be just fine. So I did forgive her for myself, not for her.

So you've kind of taken the power back, if you like.

Definitely taken the power back, taken back the control and really put myself in the driving seat of my life bit by bit.

So, talking about your life. So you, 18, independent, in a flat, carving your own way in the world, looking after your sisters from a distance and as much as you can, keeping in touch, doing your degree, doing your masters, then where, what did you go on to next?

My younger sister was having quite a difficult time, so I applied to be a foster carer. At the age of 20, I was granted short term foster carer status. My youngest sister came to live with me. She lived with me for two years. I was able to get a two bedroom flat so that I could accommodate her. And the trauma that she experienced at the hands of my mum had such a detrimental effect on her that I had to make a decision as to whether or not I could provide what she needed, emotionally, physically, socially. I made the decision that she would be better placed in a permanent family as long as it was a family that she would be able to stay and not have what I had moving around constantly. So she left me after a year and a half and moved into a permanent family.

So I was a foster carer for a short while. I moved to Birmingham, carried on studying, carried on working, started doing some teaching, came back to London. I live in Essex, on the London Essex border now and I was working for a school for a while. I was a secondary school teacher before moving into training and development, and I really embraced the whole aspect of care as well as having this personal experience. I knew that I had the skills to support and to care for other people. So I did loads of work with different charities, lots of voluntary work, and that gave me the experience I needed to go on and become self employed as a trainer, developing my own training skills and providing training to professional teachers, youth workers, psychologists. And so now I combine teaching and training and speaking.

So I noticed in the show notes you mentioned that you did some work with Samaritans and crisis. What sort of trauma were you dealing with day in, day out? Because it's not all suicide ideation. There are other crisis that people go through as well.

Aren't there much crisis in terms of things like, gosh, during the Lockwood, when I was at Samaritans, a lot of the volunteers were older people, retired people. So you can imagine during the COVID outbreak, a lot of them were off. So I was covering four to six shifts a week at Samaritans during the Lockwood period. I enjoyed it because it was an opportunity to come out of the house. I had a letter from Samaritans that said, you're allowed out, you're out, you're supporting. I was going to branch. I was on the telephone, I was doing four hour shifts. And these were people that were in domestic violence, relationships, in lockdown, with partners that were abusive.

These were students that were in lockdown at universities miles away from home. These were people who were in prison, who were calling Samaritans for support because they weren't allowed outside of their cells. It was such a traumatic time for many, many people, and I'm just happy that I was able to provide that little bit of support. As you said, majority of the people that called us during that time did not have suicide idealation. These were people that were lonely, that were stressed, that were really having a difficult time.

How did you manage to stay detached and objective? Because you're doing that many shifts with the people that are calling in and you're involved with, it must be really hard not to become evolved emotionally and connected with them. I appreciate you don't know who they are, they don't know who you are. You still must absorb some of that pain.

Yeah, I learned some what's called somatic practises, things like Tai Chi, things like going for lovely long walks and being very mindful when I'm walking. I learned meditation. These are things that have kept me healthy, kept me well. I'd finish a shift and I'd literally go for a walk. I'd walk for 45 minutes, I'd absorb the atmosphere. And during lockdown, walking was lovely because the streets were just silent, there was nobody around, there was hardly any cars on the road, the air quality was better. It was just really nice to just go for lovely long walks. And we had a lovely summer.

In 2020, I'd go jogging and I'd use that time to really just detach, if for want of a better word, from some of the stuff that I'd heard, and really look after myself. Self care and self love is something else that I've learned to do over the years. I've learned to really take time out for me. And in 2007, I was diagnosed with PTSD and I had some sessions of a therapy called EMDR. I don't know if you've heard of it. Eye movement, desensitisation, reprocessing. I found that very helpful. It helped me with childhood trauma, it helped me unpack and unpick some of the stuff that I had lived with and held onto, and also talking therapies.

I say to everybody, regardless of your childhood, regardless of your background, everybody should spend time working on their mind, developing their mind. And I found therapy really helpful for that.

Yeah, the world's moved on a lot since you were six, and I was guessing I would have been 13 or 14 when you were six, I guess, without saying my age. The world's moved on a lot since the. But it's still not great for many people. I notice you're working in a professional speaker, you're a trainer, and you work in communities and support people. What are the challenges that you see in the world at the moment? I guess from a London, UK queer.

Black woman perspective, I think some of the key challenges at the moment are professionals being able to have the right training, the right support and the right ability almost to be themselves and be secure and protected within the workforce. Around inclusion, around diversity. Diversity and the inclusion are real buzzwords at the moment, but I think that companies are still ticking boxes to an extent, and I think that there is still a lot more work that needs to be done about sort of how we actually practically, really kind of take seriously the idea that we need to be moving towards a culture of inclusion. We need to be thinking about trauma informed practise that is inclusive, completely inclusive. And people like myself, with lived experience, people like yourself with lived experience of diversity. These are where the people that companies should be calling on to come in and support what they're trying to do. I think the key issues at the moment are things around diversity, things around understanding the talents of people who are on the spectrum, for example, what support mechanisms should be in place for those people. But recognising the amazing talents that we all bring, and that's what diversity is.

Diversity is that acceptance that we're different, but we're special and we've all got something that we bring and it's about being able to really see the talents that we've got. I think health and well being in general and mental health is just massive at the moment with more and more people being diagnosed.

But I've noticed, if you like a backsliding into old practises during lockdown, during COVID everybody was throwing money at mental health, mental wealth, these well being initiatives. But there seems to be, I don't know if it's the financial crisis, if we're one of those, but if you want to call it cost of living. Companies are not investing anymore in these well being or EDI programmes. We're seeing EDI teams being laid off, training, budgets, awareness budgets, initiatives being cut back. People have been forced back into the office, which for many people who have hidden disabilities or accessibility needs, they were able to thrive in their remote home or local cafe, wherever they were working. Now, all those things we learned, because I remember we all cared, we've now learnt we can do this from home. And it's almost like people are now forgetting again, saying, well, we have to go to the office. To me, it's crazy that we're not being person centric and looking at individuals best needs to alive with the company.

And you must see a lot of that, a lot of that challenge from the work you do.

Absolutely. I'm seeing that daily. And as you say, it's absurd, because we should have learned, surely we should have learned from this. When people are stressed, they take time off work. Time off work is costing the company a hell of a lot more than allowing somebody to work from home. It makes no sense that companies are not, for example, rolling out things like mental health first aid, to have a mental health first aida within your company that can spot the early signs of vicarious trauma, burnout, stress in terms of pressure before it turns into depression and idolation. And these are all things that are going to cost or are costing the NHS and companies billions of pounds.

Do you think there's a pushback from, just use the nebulous term, people with privilege say it like that. However you want to describe those people, feeling that we're bending of a backwards wokism, if you like, or giving people the opportunities that they never had. Hang on a minute. I've had to work hard. Surely they can get off their backside and work hard and succeed anyway. Why do I need to give my time and effort or money to help them? There's a lot of pushback, isn't there?

There is a lot of pushback. And I'm lucky because as a black female and I present myself at companies and we're talking about things like equality and we're talking about things like inclusion. Sometimes there can be a sense that people sometimes want to just say what they think you want to hear, but maybe it's my psychology degree. I don't know if it's my background or just a natural aptitude. I have the ability of allowing or getting people to open up and be quite open and honest and frank about their difficulties in this area, because I go in with a very non judgmental approach, and I say to companies, this is not about saying, you're doing this wrong. This is not about pointing a finger and saying, white privilege this and white privilege that. It's about acknowledging that, yes, people are privileged, but they don't always ask for that privilege. In the same way that I didn't ask to be black, female and queer.

Without asking. Didn't they?

Without asking. Exactly. It's a gift that I've acquired. And so in the same way that you've acquired that gift, it's about looking at, well, what do we do with these gifts? And people are open and honest, and they say, we have very few people from XYZ group in our company. It's not our fault we've not recruited those people. And if they're not able to do the job that we want them to do, then why would we recruit them? Comments like that kind of makes you sort of very aware of the fact that there's so much more that can be done, but there is that push. There is that push, and there is a sense of, we've done enough. Why should we be doing more?

We live in this echo chamber, though, don't we? You and I and many others in the same sort of field as us in this echo chamber, where we talk about this stuff all the time. For us, it feels so obvious. But if you're not in the HR Edi Dni space, then a lot of these conversations are alien, and people are so scared of getting it wrong, saying the wrong thing they don't understand. They'd rather flick the football on than watch a documentary on making the world a better place. Sometimes, yeah. How do we persuade people to show an interest without our big stick? Because never work. It's how do we create that attraction to finding out?

I think you've already answered that question in some ways, Joanne, because I think that, as you've mentioned, one of the things that makes it difficult for a lot of these individuals is fear. Fear of getting it wrong, fear of saying it wrong. And I think the more people like you and I go in and say, well, look, we're not here to point a finger. We're not here to judge you getting it wrong. We want you to make mistakes, because actually, that's how you learn. But let's look at what we can do to support you moving this forward. And I think the answer is collaborating with the people that know, the people that have experienced it, like you and I, the people that have that lived experience of inequality. We're the best people to go in and say, well, actually, these are the things that you're doing, but there's a lot more that can be done.

There needs to be a culture of inclusion. Those difficult conversations don't need to be had once in three years, because you're looking at updating your policy and procedures. Those are conversations that can be had every other team meeting. Put it on the agenda and let's create a space where all of your workers who are from those diverse groups or not, can input and say, well, have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? Open up discussions, give people an opportunity to share their ideas, anonymously, even. But people need to break down that fear barrier. And it is fear. It really is fear.

I was just thinking, as you're saying, that no child ever learnt to walk without falling over. So you need to learn what falling over feels like in order to know not to do it, or especially maybe on concrete or something like that. So you see many little children, they're running off and then they tumble and fall over.

Yeah.

You have to learn that your legs only move so fast and you've got balance and you've got rhythm and all these things. One day, if you just learned to walk without those, you'd never know the fear of failure or the fear of getting it wrong. So you have to learn. We learn by making mistakes and we learn how to correct. I think we need to create these safe spaces, don't we, where people can, with respect, obviously make mistakes, learn, be able to talk to each other to understand lived experience and why it matters. And if you start hearing stories, and I'm a great believer in the power of stories because as a species growing up in caves, growing up in our prehistory, if you like, the only way we had to remember was stories, which we handed down painted pictures on cave walls or whatever it was, or etched in tablets to form rudimentary language. But the stories are our historical communication. And I visited Iceland some 10, 15, 20 years ago, and they love their sagas, and it's all about the ancient icelandic people telling these sagas.

And there are very well known and remembered storytellers or saga talents that are books and publishing. So, yeah, I'm a great believer that we need to have these conversations, we need to talk to each other, we need to share this and hand it down to generations so that each generation doesn't start from scratch. They build on the lessons of the past.

Absolutely. And storytelling is amazing because it allows people to share parts of themselves. It allows people to really connect and engage. And it is all about connections because we don't do these things in isolation. And as you've said, storytelling is nothing new about it. This is something that has happened for centuries. But I think that a sense of community is somewhat lost, and storytelling is something that brings communities together.

On that note, you're writing a book. Does I see that you're writing a book where you've written a book and you're waiting to have it published.

Correct.

What's the book about? What inspired you?

My life story inspired me to write the book. The title of this podcast is pretty much the theme of the book. It's not the title of the book, but it certainly is the theme. And you mentioned it earlier, lots and lots of care. Experienced people are in prison. They are homeless. They are using drugs and alcohol. They are trying to recover and live with mental health issues and mental illness.

And I want people to understand that you can have adverse childhood experiences, traumatic childhoods, and still lead productive, successful, happy lives. Your childhood trauma hasn't got to be the story that you tell yourself day in, day out as an adult. It can be the backdrop, and it can be the springboard which catapults you into amazing things. That's kind of what I'm trying to do with the book. It is about me, it is about my life. It is about the many moves, but it's also about the inspiration that I try to share as a person that has lived that experience but also come through the other end. And I like to think come through the other end in a fairly successful way. I'm looking for publishers.

I finished writing it in October last year and so I've just been trying to get it out there and find a publisher that's going to take me on.

Not thought about self publishing or do you want.

I have thought, I have thought about it but I would love to go for a publisher because it's my first major piece of publishing. I'd like a bit of a handhold. I'd like somebody to come along and say do you know what, this needs changing, that might need a little bit of padding out. I'm quite happy to do that. I'm not precious about it because it's a learning process.

Well I wish you luck with getting it published because I really want to read it, I really want to hear your life and I think it'd be even more amazing to get the audio version and you narrating it so I can actually hear your words telling your story. That would be so powerful to hear those words.

Great idea. Love an audiobook.

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. So what do you do right now? So you say you're speaking, you're training, so you're working with organisations and some charity work still?

I'm doing some charity work still. So you mentioned crisis. That's my personal kind of passion. I've been with crisis for 19 years and I only do the Christmas so I do the Christmas and new year. We run a day centre in east London and we have the hotels in the Docklands area of east London that I am a part of. But at the moment a lot of my time is around speaking engagements and training. I'm an associate trainer for fostering network so I do quite a lot of consultancy work for them. I do some speaking work with Bernardo's NSPCC and some other corporates and so I'm looking at really developing that a bit more and sort of continuing supporting through Samaritans.

I'm only doing one samaritan shift a fortnight these days but it's enough and I'm at college doing british sign language so that's exciting. I love learning so I've always wanted to be fluent in sign language so I'm on my level two at the moment navigating that, which is great, that's brilliant.

I've got some friends who have cochlear implants and they sign and lip read. Yeah and it's a fascinating. Currently I haven't got the drive to do it. Maybe Monday, maybe Monday, but it's interesting to hear that you're still engaging with the fostering system and the care system to feed back your lived experience. And to the people I know who've been through care, who, black or brown, had so many experiences of being fostered with white families and losing their cultural identity and their heritage and things like this, I'd like to think we've evolved. Has the care system evolved a lot since then?

Very much so. The 1989 Children act was one of the first pieces of legislation to specifically mention cultural heritage and the fact that when a child is placed with foster carers, it's not that the foster carers have to specifically be from exactly the same culture or culture experience or race as the child, but they have to have links in those communities, they have to have the ability to actively engage that child in identity work. They have to be able to give that child continual cultural support and collaborate with other community groups and organisations that can provide that. For example, I remember one, a foster carer that shaved all my hair off because they tried to wash it with this soap and it just turned into a matty mess, so they just shaved it off with the clippers. And I was called a boy for ages and I just remember the trauma of turning up to school and everyone just laughing and just saying, you've turned into a boy. And for me at that, I was about eight or nine at the time, I was so traumatised by it. And so it's just really. Foster care is understanding that children have cultural needs, children have identity needs, and it's great that you've got a spare bedroom and you've got all this love to give, but you also need to be able to meet that child's cultural and identity needs as well.

Yeah, you'd better enrich their experience with all their dimensions as well.

Absolutely. And it needs to be therapeutic and it needs to be supportive and it needs to be educational. It's about ticking all of those boxes and being with the fostering network has just given me that ability to be part of that screening process for foster carers, so that when I'm training them, I can give specific feedback to say, well, look, this person seems like they really know what they're saying and they're willing to learn.

Yeah. Regretfully, there'll always be demand for fostering and the care system because of someone's family situation, whether it's not just domestic violence or abuse, also tragedy and trauma in people's lives.

Absolutely.

And I guess if we also look at the impact of people who are maybe migrating to this country, we see lots of unaccompanied young people who are arriving on our shores with no means of support, parents or family around, escaping from war or other tragedies from their home country. So I guess that makes it even more complex when we've got language challenges as well as identity challenges and coming from war zones and escaping, well, potential death or situations where you are fleeing for your lives, aren't you?

Yeah. Horrific violence, horrific family and cultural events and events that in some countries being meted out in the name of religion and politics and all the rest of it and tradition. You're right, there is a massive need for more carers that can respond to those needs, that can respond to what those children need. And you mentioned earlier about cuts being made. And that's the concern. That's the worry, because actually what we need to be doing is pumping more money in those directions so that people that haven't got all of the skills to support those types of people can develop those skills because the resources are there for them to be able to develop those skills.

Fascinating. Paris. Wow. Absolutely blown away by our conversation. And I feel privileged to have met you several times in person, and I'm sure we'll meet many times again in the future. But you have certainly opened my eyes and my heart and all of me to your lived experience. And I've got a greater understanding of care and the potential. And it doesn't have to be the end of anyone's life.

It's just the beginning.

Absolutely.

I'm sure others listening today will want to get in contact with you. What's the best way of getting hold of you, finding you, tracking you down?

So I do have a website. I have a website that's specifically dedicated to my training, and you can find that@survivegrowinspire.com. That's survivegrowinspire. And I also have my speaking website, which is parisbatholomew.com. Of course, I'm on all the usual platforms, LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok even. But it would be great if you want to connect with me and open up a conversation, because I'm all about storytelling and conversations, as you said, that is definitely the way forward.

I love your email address. It's Paris, not the city. And I thought that was great. Paris, not the city, not the hotel.

Not the hotel, definitely not the city, definitely not the person. Absolutely.

Paris, the Bartolomew.

That's the one. That's the one. So yes, email at ParisNotTheCity@gmail.com. It's been such a pleasure having a conversation with you, Joanne. It's just been really nice just talking about inclusion from my perspective and reflecting on some of those experiences that I've had as well. Thank you so much for having me.

Absolute pleasure. As we bring this conversation to a close, I want to express my deepest gratitude to you, our listener, for lending your ear and heart to the cause of inclusion. Today's discussion struck a chord. Consider subscribing to inclusion bites and become part of our ever growing community, driving real change. Share this journey with friends, family and colleagues. Let's amplify the voices that matter. Got thoughts, stories, or a vision to share? I'm all ears. Reach out to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk.

and let's make your voice heard. Until next time, this is Joanne Lockwood signing off with a promise to return with more enriching narratives that challenge, inspire, and unite us all. Here's to fostering a more inclusive world, one episode at a time. Catch you on the next bite.