Strategy made simple - guest Christina Poulton

Jenn Wilson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the Irregular Humans Podcast with me, Jen Wilson. My guest today is Christina Poulton. Hi, Christina!

Christina Poulton (she/her): Hiya, you're right.

Jenn Wilson: I'm good! And, Christina, is, someone who works with non-profit making organisations, and

Jenn Wilson: does that in ways that are a little bit left field, and a little bit different, and not what people expect. And I love it that Christina and I were talking before the podcast about whether or not Christina is an irregular person, because a lot of my guests are, like, queer, or neurodivergent, or…

Jenn Wilson: you know, have an irregularity inherent in them in some way. And Christina, you're someone who does things differently, and who shakes up the status quo, so I really do think you're someone who's irregular. Tell us a bit about the work that you do, and why you do it the way you do it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): So, part of the week I'm parenting, and then part of the week I work with nonprofits, so things like charities and community groups, and I focus on making their work easier to manage and easier to fund.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But pretty much all the organizations I work with, and I've chosen it like this as well, are really small organizations, so it's, like, one or two people who are, like, wearing all the hats and spinning all the plates and doing all the jobs.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And they're kind of making everything happen, mostly through, like, sheer determination to change the world. And…

Christina Poulton (she/her): it's usually people who have, like, seen a need in their community, or they've had something happen in their lives, and the support hasn't been there, so they wanted to set that up. So, they're incredibly passionate about what they do, and they're brilliant at the delivery, but

Christina Poulton (she/her): You know, there's no part of school curriculum that teaches you how to run a charity, or, you know, those kind of things, like how you do fundraising, like, all that kind of stuff.

Jenn Wilson: Like, there is information out there.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But it's usually…

Christina Poulton (she/her): written for people who are already in that world, and I think a lot of people find it quite intimidating, a lot of it's really expensive.

Christina Poulton (she/her): So my whole thing is, like, jargon busting and, like, translating it. So, you know, like, here's all of the new fundraising legislation, that's what this actually means if you are one person running a tiny organization.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because this is probably an irregularity, I really love all that stuff.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like…

Christina Poulton (she/her): I love, like, getting really into, like, the clauses in, like, a governing document for a company, and, like, all of the… yeah, like, when all the new data protection stuff came out, like, I volunteered on behalf of a group of organizations to, like, go real deep into it and, like, work out what does that actually mean you need to do

Christina Poulton (she/her): On a day-to-day basis in your organization.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so I'm kind of making the most of the fact that I genuinely enjoy the stuff that most people find really boring and don't like.

Jenn Wilson: So, so, I mean, I've… I also have worked in… you know, I come from a non-profit background, and I still work with a lot of non… well, I… I still run a non-profit alongside my,

Jenn Wilson: commercial business, an arts one, and work a lot. I've been on boards and that sort of thing. And it is so hard, I think, for those people who are really passionate about the thing that they set up.

Jenn Wilson: To do, the purpose that they're driven by, and the thing that… the change they want to make in the world.

Jenn Wilson: to get involved in all that red tape and bureaucracy, and… you know, I even yesterday, had someone contact me who's an artist, who wanted to apply for a fund.

Jenn Wilson: And I could… I read it and went, well, it's really obvious to me that it's a stretch for them to be…

Jenn Wilson: fitting that fund, but there'd be some people out there who would go, yeah, sure, here's, you know, pay me this much money and I'll write you a fundraising bid, knowing full well that that person's never gonna actually get that funding, because it's not really a good fit.

Jenn Wilson: So… Right.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I get proper soapboxy about that. One of my values, which came out of my New Year's revolution that I did with you last year, is I won't take your money if I can't help you.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And yeah, I've had several people where I've been working with them on that kind of stuff, and they've shown me bids that got turned down, and yeah, that fundraiser should never have

Christina Poulton (she/her): Taken that work on, because the information they needed just wasn't there.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so I'm quite, like.

Christina Poulton (she/her): transparent, if people say, like, yeah, here's my idea for an organization or something, like, obviously I'll do it nicely, but if I let this just isn't viable, then I will say, because I don't want to waste people's money and people's time.

Jenn Wilson: Absolutely. But the other thing that you do is, like you said, you dive into all those details that a lot of people don't want to get into, and make it simpler for people, don't you? Tell us about sticky note strategy and all of that stuff.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah. So, I mean, I suppose, you know, I've been saying about people where that is a barrier, like, all the language is a barrier, and for a lot of people it is, and I do, you know, in the past, I've done, like, access support work, where if people are dyslexic or whatever, then a funding application can be a huge barrier.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But it's absolutely also people that, you know, could…

Christina Poulton (she/her): get their heads around it if they had the time to do it, but, you know, nobody running a small non-profit has any spare time. Yeah, so…

Christina Poulton (she/her): I do a lot of… Yeah, turning it into something manageable. So, sticky note strategy is…

Christina Poulton (she/her): all of the stuff that people tell you you should have in, like, non-profit jargon. So, theory of change, case for support, evaluation framework, blah blah blah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But what I've done is created a whole series of, like, activities that people do using sticky notes, and it's, like, asking… it's giving them the structure and asking the right questions.

Jenn Wilson: Bye.

Christina Poulton (she/her): the right things, and they basically chuck everything in their brain, because it's all in there, it's just, you know, pulling out the right things in the right way. They chuck everything in their brain onto sticky notes.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And then there's kind of activities about prioritizing things and, you know, deciding which ones you want. And you can literally, like, one of the reasons I love them is you can literally build sentences from them if you've got the right component there.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And then they just take photos of their sticky notes and send it to me, and then I write it up into… they get, like, a one-page visual strategic plan for their organization, rather than, like, a big, long, miserable business plan of all the things you think you should write.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah…

Jenn Wilson: That's so… it's so valuable, cutting through all that nonsense, and… well, it's not nonsense, it is… I mean, I'm saying nonsense, because it feels like nonsense if you're… if you're not in it, or you're wrestling with it, and you're… or your brain's not the kind of brain that can take that stuff on. Yeah. And…

Jenn Wilson: to get to the stuff that you really want to do. And it's necessary, isn't it? Because the funding bodies and strategic agencies that nonprofits want to get funds from have to be accountable, so they have to ask all of those questions.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah.

Jenn Wilson: But…

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, because…

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, carry on.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I was going to say the fundamentals of it absolutely make sense.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because it's like…

Christina Poulton (she/her): you know, I'm saying all this, you know, theory of change, blah blah blah, but it's basically, what are you there for as an organization? What's the change you're trying to make in the world?

Christina Poulton (she/her): And therefore, what do you deliver, and how do you do that, and how do you show that you're doing that so that you can get, you know, whether it's from grants or individuals or whatever, so you can get the money to make that happen.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, the actual…

Christina Poulton (she/her): bits that sit underneath all of the jargon are really sound. And I actually, when I put loads of stuff together, and I'd done it in charities I'd run before.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And then when I looked at Theory of Change, I was like, oh, I've done that, I just never called it that, because it was, like, this kind of, you know, funny, wafty thing for places with big fundraising teams.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, yeah.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, I find that also when I'm working with academics, an activist in residence with,

Jenn Wilson: the Sexualities and Sexual Harm Research Group at Leeds Beckett University, and they are brilliant people doing brilliant things, but sometimes they speak to each other in academic language.

Jenn Wilson: And I'm like, what, what, what, why are you talking about hegemony and, things like that, when actually what you're saying is something really quite accessible and ordinary, it's just that you've dressed it up in really complex language.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do a whole, like, I'm obsessed with it, because, like, you know, like, writing a vision statement and all that kind of stuff, a lot of them, like, you could just slap it on any organization, and it…

Christina Poulton (she/her): you know, sound the same. I ban the… like, I literally say you can't use the words empower, catalyze, you know, all of those kind of ones that everybody says, like, convene. Like, what does it mean? What are you actually doing?

Jenn Wilson: Yes, yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): One of the prompts I do is, if you were, like, chatting to somebody on the bus, and they were like, oh, what does your organization do? You're not going to say, oh, well, we convene people to develop their learning outcomes and catalyze the blah blah blah. You're going to be like, oh, we teach this, or we help people learn how to do that.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so it's those kind of prompt questions of if someone was taking part in your stuff, and they were WhatsApping someone to say how great it was and how much they were enjoying it, what would they say?

Jenn Wilson: Mmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And again, it's all, you know, underpinned by, like, non-profit theory and marketing. That's, you know, voice of customer and all that.

Jenn Wilson: Bye.

Christina Poulton (she/her): It's also about how do you talk about what you're doing in a really clear way, so that people understand it, and that includes funders as well. Like, they're not necessarily going to know all of the dark and all of the acronyms.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember a lot of the work that I've done with arts organisations around access.

Jenn Wilson: Changing the accessibility of the way you talk about things, or making a building more physically accessible.

Jenn Wilson: isn't just about helping people who use wheelchairs get in the building, is it? It's actually making it more accessible for a whole bunch of people, and it's not dumbing down, you know, it's actually opening up, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I do a thing in the, funding bid training where, if I'm doing it that's art-specific.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I read out a piece of, like, a description from a marketing thing about a project, and I'm like, okay, put your hand up, you know when you walk into that room, what would you actually see? And you don't know from that language, because it's so, like…

Christina Poulton (she/her): It's… it's like artists talking to artists.

Jenn Wilson: Yes.

Jenn Wilson: I'm gonna confess now, and I don't know if I really want to put this on my own podcast, but it's a very long time ago, a very long time ago, I made a solo show I was performing about Joan of Arc.

Jenn Wilson: My original marketing copy, thank goodness for the person who talked me down word by word from this, was, Joan emerges iconoclastic from the smoky, incandescent glow of the fires of time.

Jenn Wilson: And I just had loved writing all these beautiful words, like some kind of piece of poetry. Anyway, the marketing person taught me down to, Joan emerges from the fires of time, which was like, oh yeah, actually, that… I don't need all of those lovely, superfluous lyrical words in my marketing copy.

Jenn Wilson: it's not helpful, it's not actually, reaching any of the people that I want to reach with this work. Yeah, but I think that's what is really hard, like, it applies to artists, and it applies to, you know, people are running a charity.

Christina Poulton (she/her): That they've set up for something that's happened in their lives.

Christina Poulton (she/her): You're so close to it, and you're part of it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And that's where having that person, like you had, that marketing person, to be like.

Christina Poulton (she/her): actually, is really, like, I literally look at some people's websites, and I don't know what their organization does.

Christina Poulton (she/her): at the whole website. I get…

Christina Poulton (she/her): concepts, but what do you actually do? Like, what is it for, and what does that make happen?

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. And as well as that, I'm gonna get into this. I was thinking we might save it for the bonus episode, but actually, it's a thing that a lot of people will know you for, but I love that it cuts through all that nonsense as well. It's the boring fund.

Jenn Wilson: So, the Boring Fund, a lot of people, if you've heard of Christina before, you've seen Christina on this podcast, will have heard of The Boring Fund, which was a bit of inspiration from you to say, there is so much funding out there for all of the amazing, you know.

Jenn Wilson: detailed things that people do, but there's very little funding out there for the boring stuff. Tell us a bit more about it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so the Boring Fund started as a joke.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And then I accidentally became a funder.

Jenn Wilson: So.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so it's…

Christina Poulton (she/her): it's relatively straightforward, like, lots of funders are really happy to fund the thing. Like, my example is, you know, funders will… are all up for funding, you know, food parcels for families who are struggling.

Jenn Wilson: Like, that makes sense, people can see the benefits of it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But trying to convince them to fund the boring but essential stuff to make that happen.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, you can't do that. One of the applicants of the Boring Fund applied for shelving for their food bank.

Jenn Wilson: Yep.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because you can't, you know, you can't make food parcels on the floor.

Christina Poulton (she/her): it's harder to convince a funder to pay for shelving for the food parcels, for the families, or insurance for the organization, which again, like, they have to have it. Yep.

Jenn Wilson: Or accountant's fee.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yes!

Jenn Wilson: Cool.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, funders will look at your website, they want you to have an annual report, they want you to have insurance, they want you to have training for your staff.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But they don't want to pay for any of those things a lot of the time.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so The Boring Funders kind of does what it says on the tin kind of name. It was designed, someone said it was, like, a joke wrapped up in a provocation that actually gets money to organizations.

Jenn Wilson: Mmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because it's, yeah, it's kind of all of those things. It's kind of saying, like, this is what should be part of funding, but also does it.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so I started it on Instagram, just as a, like, I was gonna make a donation myself to one organization, and I was like, you… it's gonna be the easiest funding application ever, you just, like, like this post and comment boring.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And, like, my, kids' toys were the funders who were deciding, like, in the video, like, it was just… it was, like, properly silly. And then a couple of people contacted me and said, how do I donate to the Boring Fund?

Christina Poulton (she/her): I was like, I hadn't thought of that. And then it just kind of spiralled, and then we've ended up with just doing the last bits of it, but there's,

Christina Poulton (she/her): just under 40 grants going out to… most of them are tiny organizations. And yeah, paying for a storage cupboard for a whole year, paying for accountancy, all of those kind of things.

Jenn Wilson: The grants are just, like, a couple of hundred quid sort of thing.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yes, yeah, I mean, that's the thing that slightly breaks my heart about it, is that so many people applied, and so many people were so excited about it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): For 200 quid?

Christina Poulton (she/her): You know, and in funding, I know, you know.

Christina Poulton (she/her): it's relative, but in funding terms, that's tiny. And it just shows you how, for so many people.

Christina Poulton (she/her): That kind of funding is so inaccessible.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): It's because they didn't have to lie about what they were applying for, and the application was ridiculously simple.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): People were like, this is my only chance to get this. And it's, you know, there are other ways to do it, but they obviously feel so…

Christina Poulton (she/her): challenging.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Compared to the boring fund, because you're allowed to ask for boring things.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, so, and you literally just go, I want £200 to pay for this, and then you put them all in a hat, don't you, kind of?

Jenn Wilson: There's no who's the best.

Jenn Wilson: application, it's just, are they eligible? Stick them in a hat, pull out the ones that I've got funding for.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah, yeah, because the people who can write the best bids aren't necessarily the people delivering the best thing.

Jenn Wilson: No, absolutely.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And it's… it's stupid making people write a rig long thing about why they need insurance. Like, if you don't know why insurance is important, you can Google it.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. Now, and what I love about this, and it is so inherently irregular, is it is that this joke, this cutting across the nonsense that I said, called it nonsense before, that's necessary for the big funders, and just going, right, let's get money to the people that need it quickly. You've just gone ahead and done that.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, I mean, I discovered, like, there's a whole world of, different forms of funding, because all the current funding structures are all, you know, based on

Christina Poulton (she/her): Victorian men with mustaches who liked helping the poor, like, it's all really old-school philanthropy nonsense.

Jenn Wilson: Yes, I suppose the older charitable trusts, and also some of the national institutions, Arts Council England and stuff, are built from historic organisations with all of that sort of…

Jenn Wilson: patronage. Yeah, and it's not.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah, all that thing of, like, helping the deserving poor and all that. Yeah, so the platform that we use for the Boring Fund is a mutual aid funding platform.

Christina Poulton (she/her): So there's other, you know, anyone can set something up on there, and it's all transparent, so you can see money going in and money going out. So other people have used it for, like, there's one where there's a borough in London, and anyone who lives in that postcode can just request money for, you know, essentials, like they… they need fridge or whatever.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And so it's, yeah, it's kind of bypassing all of those structures and those power dynamics.

Jenn Wilson: That's fantastic, because, yeah, I think that,

Jenn Wilson: One of the things I find when I'm working with purpose-driven entrepreneurs, they may or may not be running a social enterprise or a non-profit.

Jenn Wilson: some of them are trying to make a profit, you know, because actually there's nothing wrong with making money, as well as making meaning in the world. Is that mindset that comes with having worked a lot in the voluntary sector, and it's taken me a long time to even begin unravelling and unlearning it. I haven't fully unlearned it for myself.

Jenn Wilson: Of scarcity, of asking the man, you know, of cap in hand, please will someone help me, is a mindset that is required, almost, to work in…

Jenn Wilson: In that… that… in that area of work, and actually spend a lot of time with my clients trying to help them unlearn that, and learn that…

Jenn Wilson: we are all as entitled as each other to success. You know, that there is no…

Jenn Wilson: need to be a worthy and penniless artist or, you know, or purpose-driven person. You don't have to be poor in order to do good work.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, and that not everything has to be free.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah. There's a lot of the organisations I work with, the assumption is every single thing they offer has to be free.

Jenn Wilson: Mmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Therefore, they're entirely reliant on grant funding. And actually, the organisations that are doing well at the moment, or doing really interesting things, are about different models of funding things. And that, you know, like the mutual aid model, like community-driven funding things.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And you can absolutely, you know, like, I love pay-it-forward things as a format, because if you're offering stuff for free, there will absolutely be people that access that who can pay and should be paying.

Jenn Wilson: Yep.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, and it's kind of… it's what I've tried to do, you know, I'm effectively a commercial organization, in that, you know, this is my job, but…

Christina Poulton (she/her): I have, like, free how-to guides, and I've got, like, really low-cost training, and we have, like, free guest workshops and stuff. But where it's…

Christina Poulton (she/her): My time one-to-one.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I make sure I am paid properly for that time.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because, you know, it's, like, years of expertise squished into that hour. It's the value of it that, yeah, that they're paying for.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And it's still, yeah, and I have all that unlearning stuff of, you know, every time I've ever put my day rate up, I've been like, waiting for people to email me and shout to whatever, and nobody has shock news.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And it's that thing of, you know, there will be other people out there who are not as good as you, who are charting more than you, because they've just got to be, yeah, the confidence or the audacity or whatever to say, this is what I'm worth.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I… Yeah, my friend did, they did a call-out for marketing, freelance, or…

Christina Poulton (she/her): And they had, like, tons and tons of people sending their stuff, and she was like, all of the men were charging more than the women, just, like, pretty much across the board.

Jenn Wilson: Wow.

Christina Poulton (she/her): if you look at the stats on the kind of freelancers, like, I can't remember off the top of my head, it's something like… I'll check it, the show notes. It's something like, men charge, like.

Christina Poulton (she/her): For every £100 women charge, men charge £150.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, the difference is huge.

Jenn Wilson: Amazing.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because it's that, yeah, you know, you're socialized as a woman to be like.

Jenn Wilson: Absolutely, and it is… it's those deeply learned cultural expectations that we… that we don't ask for more, because we have taught… been taught, and allowed ourselves to be taught that that's how it is.

Jenn Wilson: It's very, very hard to resist that. That's what I love about your work, is it does cut right across that. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to ask about, Christina, because a lot of the people on… on this Irregular Humans podcast are kind of… it's that thing of being the change you want to see in the world.

Jenn Wilson: If we step outside of, like, just the work that you do for a moment, and talk about… like…

Jenn Wilson: your work-life balance, and what else goes on in your life, because I know that you've got young children, is that right? Yes. Tell us a bit about your… about the rest of your life, and why working like this fits for you, how it all fits together.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah. So one of the things someone commented on, one of the boring fun posts that I loved, was, like the Be The Change thing, was be the scalable, replicable version of the change you want to see in the world.

Jenn Wilson: Yes.

Christina Poulton (she/her): So whatever that change is, like, share how you do that, and then people can replicate that. They can, you know, do it in their own way, or, you know, make it bigger, or whatever.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, and I love that thing of, like, everything you do…

Christina Poulton (she/her): A can have an impact on the kind of immediate people, or the environment, or whatever the reason you're doing it, but also other people.

Christina Poulton (she/her): So, yeah, so there's lots of things about the, kind of, the way that I work, but also, I mean, my, kind of, personal life stuff, I'm, like, full-on hippy-dippy. Like, I'm vegan, and I don't buy new clothes, all that kind of stuff.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And I don't go around, like, you know, forcing people to be vegan. But stuff like not buying new clothes.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I, like, I do like personal shopping for people on Vintage, if they need.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, the youth.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I'm like, get, like, okay, tell me some things you like, and I find them some stuff and get them set up on there. And there's now, like, you know, quite a few of my friends now buy loads of their stuff secondhand when they never did before.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And I like that kind of ripple effect, when you're feeling like, well, there's, you know, oil tankers exist, so what's the point in any of this?

Jenn Wilson: Mmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): It's like, well, actually, if you kind of share how you do those things.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, so I think that kind of training mindset that I have for my work, I kind of do…

Jenn Wilson: Totally that, you know, that little thing of, well, you know, have you tried using vintage, and this is how easy it is, and showing people how to do it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah.

Jenn Wilson: the real difference between them deciding to go and buy fast fashion, or…

Jenn Wilson: or not doing that, and doing a little… their tiny little bit, and it all adds up, doesn't it?

Jenn Wilson: You know, and then the other thing is, like you said, veganism. You know, that's, I often confess that, you know, ethically, I absolutely cannot argue with veganism. My personal circumstances, living… I'm a neurodivergent person, lone parenting a neurodivergent child.

Jenn Wilson: I'm not… I'm time poor, and I am, you know, and I have… there are sensory things about food and stuff.

Jenn Wilson: Which means that we are vegetarian, and occasionally I eat the odd bit of fish if I feel like that's what's necessary to get by. But I can't justify that, except to say that the…

Jenn Wilson: that are… we all make the compromises where we want to… where we choose to make them in a way that's sustainable, as you said, you know, in a way that's replicable. It's like, I'll do as much as I can

Jenn Wilson: And that means that I can keep going and doing the other good things that I do. Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Exactly. This is why I've been kicked out of lots of vegan Facebook groups.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And, like, you can spend… I don't know if you remember, there was a whole thing about 5-pound notes having something non-vegan in them.

Jenn Wilson: Oh, yes, I vaguely do remember that.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I was like, you can spend your whole life crying about £5 notes, or you can go make the world a better place.

Jenn Wilson: Yes.

Christina Poulton (she/her): You can choose where you put that energy, and there's no such thing as the vegan police. You know, anything you do towards that is better. And obviously, you know, fundamentally, we all need to do all of it and tear everything down and start again.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But until that happens, till the revolution, but yeah, I mean, it's the same with, like, the work-life balance stuff.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I've found that really, really hard to do, and I've had to do it, because I have two chaos toddlers.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And because we adopted, there's a whole process of making sure that they are set up and attached and comfortable. And I absolutely… that had to be more… like, work has always been really important to me, but…

Christina Poulton (she/her): since they came home, that has to be the number one thing, because I've always wanted to adopt, and I've always wanted to be a parent, and…

Christina Poulton (she/her): you know, I know the kind of massive privilege in being like, well, I'll just rearrange my work around it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): A lot of people that aren't able to do that.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But because there was the opportunity to do that, I absolutely wanted to.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And I've always kind of had a thing, like, I always had that thing of, like, the harder you work, the more valuable you are, and I had, you know, all of that.

Jenn Wilson: All that work ethic,

Christina Poulton (she/her): Oh, God, yeah, you know, I'm the full-on, like.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, millennial, oldest child, like, all of the catalysts for that mindset, I've got all of them.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And… yeah, and I used to work ridiculous hours all the time, and that was my identity. And I remember, and I'm being honest about this, because I feel awful about it, I remember being in organizations where people had kids, and would leave early, or even just leave on time, and I'd be like, slack.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because it was so… I was so in that mindset of you work harder, and that makes you better.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And I've had, yeah, I've had to really, really work with that, and one of the good things was I worked in a charity where, it was three women that, that, like, we were, like, a shared leadership thing. It was me and two other incredible women, who

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, sort of pioneered a lot of that stuff for me, because they were quite unapologetic about it.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And just being in that environment that was a…

Christina Poulton (she/her): Organization led by women, and, you know, it was our organization, so we could make the rules for it.

Jenn Wilson: And I have this epiphany of, like, well, 9 to 5 is literally invented by the patriarchy.

Christina Poulton (she/her): and by the Industrial Revolution, or whatever, when women stayed at home. Like, it makes no sense. It bears no relation to school hours, like, nothing. It's nonsense.

Jenn Wilson: Yep.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, and we did… it kind of…

Christina Poulton (she/her): You know, all that thing about it is all interconnected, of, like,

Christina Poulton (she/her): environment and society and all of that kind of stuff. Like, we did a whole thing about

Christina Poulton (she/her): How would we have to fundamentally change how we worked to make sure that,

Christina Poulton (she/her): to make the organization as environmentally sustainable as possible. So things like traveling to and from work on public transport.

Jenn Wilson: Hmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And one of my colleagues was like, well, I would have to leave early, so we can't do it. And we were like, well, why don't we just do it and see what happens?

Jenn Wilson: And we had a month of doing whatever was needed.

Christina Poulton (she/her): To make the most environmentally sustainable choice, because that takes more time.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Actually, that fits with a lot of the stuff about what's needed if you want

Christina Poulton (she/her): People to be able to parent and not be on the verge of a breakdown all the time.

Jenn Wilson: Yep.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, that having to be out of the door by this minute.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, there's days, like, in general now, our kids are so settled, but there are still days, on my littlest particularly, if I just walk out the door, like, it's bad times.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And I have to give him the time, calm him down, make sure he's okay, before I go and do some work. And I can't do that. Like, my old stuff, I would do, like, day rate consultancy and go and run things in person, and…

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, I did that.

Christina Poulton (she/her): I think once at the start of the two years when I started working again, and it took, like, five people in childcare, and it was so stressful. Like, they were brilliant away days when I had lovely time, but it just wasn't worth the cost to…

Christina Poulton (she/her): My peace of mind and my family.

Jenn Wilson: So, yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But part-time is quite mentally… I have to make myself be okay with it.

Jenn Wilson: Yep.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Because I'm still training myself into that, so myself, it's okay to work 20 hours or whatever.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, but that… absolutely that, modelling that balance, and modelling those boundaries, and showing yourself

Jenn Wilson: and everyone else, that it's possible to do amazing things, and to succeed on all kinds of levels without following the conventional 9-to-5 patterns, or the doing it the way you're supposed to do it.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yes.

Jenn Wilson: so powerful.

Christina Poulton (she/her): We were talk… you were saying, before we were recording about doing less but better.

Jenn Wilson: Mmm.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And I am obsessed with that.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But yeah, I think it's that, like, because I've…

Christina Poulton (she/her): that thing of you don't, realize something until it affects you. Like, until I was pushing a buggy around, I didn't realize how rubbish pavements are, and how few drop curves there are where you need them, and all of that.

Christina Poulton (she/her): But yeah, just from the way I've had to do stuff.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Like, when I'm supporting… I've got, like, a board and governance toolkit thing.

Christina Poulton (she/her): To help people sort out their board of trustees or directors, and one of the things in there is, like, make board meetings work for your organization. And if everyone has kids, like, have your board meeting at SoftPay. Like, you don't have to pretend to be men in suits shuffling paper in a boardroom.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. If it works, have that meeting in the pub, in the play, in the soft play place, in the wherever it may, yeah, or online, how quickly we all changed to being able to do things online when COVID happened.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yay.

Jenn Wilson: Just before COVID,

Jenn Wilson: I spent a day traveling from Yorkshire to Birmingham for a two-hour meeting, because the other people that wanted to be in the… that we were meeting were coming from the southwest of England, and so Birmingham was a two and a half hour journey for all of us.

Jenn Wilson: And now there's no way we would do that. We would have just jumped on a Zoom call, and instead, we took… all took a huge day out of our time, all that travel, and all that petrol, and all of that waste.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah.

Jenn Wilson: For a meeting that could easily have happened online, it's nuts how quickly we can change things if we just question and decide to do it differently.

Jenn Wilson: Yeah.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Ugh.

Christina Poulton (she/her): Break or remake the system?

Jenn Wilson: Absolutely. Christina, you are an inspiration for this kind of working. It's really wonderful hearing you talk about it, and about the impact that

Jenn Wilson: that the kinds of work and the ways of working that you, do and that you champion for others makes such a big, big impact. Thank you so much for sharing. If people are looking for you online, where can they find you and find out more about what you do?

Christina Poulton (she/her): So I have to jump ship from…

Christina Poulton (she/her): Twitter, for obvious reasons, so I was very used to doing. So I'm Instagram, I'm Christina Potten Creative, and I do, like, 90-second training on Reels and stuff like that.

Christina Poulton (she/her): And then my website, which again is ChristinaPoltoncreative.co.uk, I've got free how-to guides for lots of the stuff around, like, setting up a non-profit and running a non-profit, and all my instant access training and everything.

Jenn Wilson: Great. So, everybody, go and find Christina Poulton. That's P-O-U-L-T-O-N, if you're listening and not looking at show notes. Christina Poulton Creative, and, enjoy the inspiration. Apply, apply if… are you running the Boring Fund again? Is it keeping going, the Boring Fund?

Christina Poulton (she/her): I'm not… it's a one-off project, but I'm open sourcing all the stuff, so I'm, like, sharing all the processes.

Jenn Wilson: Set up your own boring fund, that's the answer, isn't it?

Christina Poulton (she/her): Yeah, yeah.

Jenn Wilson: Brilliant.

Christina Poulton (she/her): People are set in other countries, people are setting them up, so…

Jenn Wilson: Excellent, fantastic. Christina, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Bye now.