This week, around 160 people came together at our Communities 1st conference in St Albans. The room included charities, faith leaders, volunteers, public services, community groups and local organisations. One of the main discussions explored what holds communities together in unsettled times. It was thoughtful, honest and, at points, difficult. 

There was real value in bringing people with different experiences into the same room. But once the conference was over, I found myself thinking about a different question: who was missing?

I have spent most of my working life moving between the NHS, local government and the voluntary sector, and the thing that has stayed with me is the distance between how policy describes people's lives and how those lives are actually lived. Nowhere is that gap clearer at the moment than in the way we talk about getting older.

I have spent most of my working life around health and social care, volunteering, local government and the slow business of getting different parts of a place to pull together. After enough years of that, you notice a pattern in how we talk about what comes next. We are very good at describing what is hard. We produce delivery plans, targets and development programmes, and account in detail for what is broken or unaffordable. We are far less good at offering people a picture of what could be different, and a reason to be part of building it.

Before I ran a charity, I spent years working alongside patients trying to find their way through the health system. What stayed with me was how often the person in front of me had more to offer than the system was set up to notice. They had knowledge about their own lives, ideas about what would help, and a willingness to take part. Most of that went unrecorded. The forms had no box for it.

Love of ice cream! Interest in history! Respect for the voluntary sector, particularly Communities 1st, and a passion for coffee, of course, which was really why we were meeting. Just some of things, I took away from my meeting with Stella, which I felt we had in common. I found Stella to be a warm, friendly, and thoughtful person. I can also vouch that she makes an amazing cup of coffee. She has all the qualities you need for a great barista.