I build systems that work for the people inside them, especially the people most often left out.

The career record

Thirty one years, in order.

Before 2006. Where it started, from underneath

Residential social work with highly traumatised children and young people, in children's homes, young offender institutions and educational settings. Long term support for two young women with complex chronic neurological and physical conditions in supported living in Islington. Work in a contact centre, supervising contact in child protection cases. This is where I learned what a system feels like from underneath, and it is the reason I have never been able to write a policy that ignores the room it lands in.

2006 to 2008. Service Manager and Senior Children's Rights Officer, Action for Children

Founded and managed the first children's rights and participation service of its kind. Advocacy for young people in court, complaints handled to stage three and the ombudsman, six staff and the budgets. Trustee of Children's Rights Officers and Advocates over the same period.

2007. Step Inside Their Shoes

A national youth consultation on gun, knife and gang crime. The idea was mine and I wrote the consultation paper. It became the largest consultation of its kind to that date. The charity carried it to national government, where it fed into the legislation and the action plan that followed, and it became the launch piece for their rebrand from NCH to Action for Children, the biggest transition in the organisation's history. I have a letter from Gordon Brown about it. When they took it to Downing Street I had been hit by a car, and I was in hospital and then a wheelchair for two years.

2008 to 2010. Challenge and Support Manager, London Borough of Camden

Then I went and delivered the policy myself. Camden's first Challenge and Support service, implementing the Youth Taskforce Action Plan and the Youth Crime Action Plan with eight to eighteen year olds and their families, redesigned alongside central government. Idea, to legislation, to delivery, in four years. It is the reason I do not design anything I would not have to run.

2010. Youth Participation Consultant, London Borough of Wandsworth

Youth participation policy and delivery across housing, sport and leisure, asylum seekers, care leavers, children's services, parks, disabled children, arts, facilities, community planning and teenage pregnancy.

2010 to 2011. Director, Three Corners Trust

All financial and contractual negotiation, budgeting, fundraising and bids, and a five year business plan written and delivered. In Clerkenwell, funding raised from Sport England, EC1 New Deal for Communities, Islington, London Basketball and Nike to build a multi use basketball pitch with free coaching and career routes.

2012 to 2013. Trustee, then consultant, Each One Teach One Charitable Trust

Founding board of the umbrella charity set up by Ben Drew, known as Plan B, to tackle the root causes behind the August 2011 London riots. I then came back as its consultant to design and run the youth advisory board and the youth projects underneath it, so that the young people the charity was arguing about were the ones setting its direction.

Alongside it. Ambassador, Centrepoint

The national youth homelessness charity. Speaking and advocacy on what happens to young people when housing, care and education all withdraw at the same time.

2013 to 2021. Founder and Director, Maisie Poppins Ltd, Hackney

Outstanding and multi award winning home childcare and forest school, which grew into a holistic nursery and preschool in London Fields. Over thirty staff and up to seventy two children a day, including throughout the pandemic as a keyworker setting. Led on learning and development, ethos, pedagogy and curriculum. Sold in November 2021.

What that setting did differently

The first childminding setting in the UK to be certified by the Living Wage Foundation, and the first to run forest school, weekly in London Fields park, after which the borough asked it to train other local nurseries and childminders. Eight apprenticeships offered in 2020 alone, two of them supporting professionals with additional needs, on an apprenticeship model and policy co-created with the London Borough of Hackney which the council has kept. Menus rebuilt with parents around the cultures and ethnicities of the children in the room. Men actively welcomed into a workforce that rarely has them. Assistants paid well above the apprentice rate, five weeks of annual leave, paid sick leave, permanent contracts and the London Living Wage, and staff who then stayed for years.

And the parts that were never on an inspection form

An annual charity fundraiser, alternating a local cause and an international one. A Mother's Day breakfast and a Father's Day breakfast. An Easter egg hunt, a bonfire night party, a summer picnic at Coram's Fields, an alumni reunion, and a photo book made for every family every year. Intergenerational arts projects between our preschoolers and people in the community living with terminal illness, made together inside the hospice. And one struggling childminder mentored at a time, rolling, unpaid, for years.

The part that was hard

Gentrification moved us twice in a single year, with all the children, while a third move was already coming. I took it to Westminster Briefing in 2016 and said it out loud, because it was not happening only to us and nobody was counting it.

2021 to now. Yasmin A Darling Consultancy Ltd

Holistic education consultant and changemaker, specialising in autism, early years, and equality, equity and agency. Working systemically to shift inequality in its many guises.

Alongside it. Founder and Director, Neuroverse Community CIC

Community learning, drama and LAMDA, and wellbeing provision for disabled and neurodivergent young people and their parent carers. Run voluntarily and unpaid throughout.

Standing and service

Lineage

What I am building next

What is structural gets read as personal, and then the person is asked to fix it.

People like me are failed, and then told the failure is theirs. What is structural gets read as a character flaw. What is traumatic gets read as a trait. What is systemic gets treated one person at a time, in a room, as though the room were where any of it started.

I am completing my clinical training, and I intend to qualify. I do not intend to practise the way I have been taught. When I qualify I will build an ethical practice for people and families like mine, one that starts from what actually happened to them, and to the systems around them, rather than from what is assumed to be wrong inside them.

That is the same argument as everything else on this site, moved indoors. It is why the work is called systemic.