Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 16th February 2025

Today I want to pique your interest and get you thinking a bit in preparation for a bit of a Glorious Ordinary Lives campaign (our first, eek). I’m inviting you to focus on this question:

I Open My Own Front door – Do You?

This feels to me like one of the most fundamental aspects of control we have in defining a place we call home. An exercise we sometimes do at Social Care Future gatherings is to ask people what words they associate with Home and it’s always things like:

Safe

Warm

Family

Front door

Love

Control

There’s something visceral for me about the concept of shutting my front door and turning the key, knowing I’m in My Safe Space.

Just to be clear, when I say, I Open My Own Front door – Do You? I’m not concerned with just the physical act of turning a handle, I mean that I’m in control of opening my own front door. I might use some tech to open it, I might tell somebody I need them to open it, or I might get the dog to do it as my friend Angie does. If it’s my brother, I might say, ‘Come on in - it's open’. The point is that it’s ME deciding - not someone else thinking they can just come in without asking me if that’s okay.

The idea for running this campaign came from a story told to me by an organisation that experienced a safeguarding alert made against them by an outside worker coming to visit someone they support (let’s call her Jane) at home. Jane answered her own front door to the worker and the safeguarding alert was based on, and I quote, them ‘letting a vulnerable woman answer the door’. Eyes rolling emoji.

The concept of I Open My Own Front door – Do You? is rooted in some fairly decent human rights legislation, so it’s not a tough one to argue. But I’m often surprised by how many times, in both my work and home life, I meet people who tell me they don’t open their own front door - or (and this is the crux) that they work in an organisation where it's, oh, you know, just a bit more complicated than that …

‘People will just let anyone in’

‘Staff have a responsibility to keep people safe.’

‘Staff need to come and go as part of their jobs they can’t be knocking on people’s doors every time.’

‘People are busy, they don’t have time to answer their own front door.’

‘He doesn’t want to.’

‘People don’t know how to - they didn’t do it when they lived at home with Mum and Dad so they never learned.’

‘We run a residential home so it’s different for us.’

This campaign is an effort to expose and tackle this and hopefully generate some solutions.

I Open My Own Front door – Do You? is a partnership with Learning Disability England. People with learning disabilities are probably the group of people least likely to open their own front door because they often live with other people (also with learning disabilities) and very often with people they haven’t chosen to live with. And because let’s face it, we go down a rabbit hole around capacity. I’m really mindful this also applies to anyone who isn’t in full control of where and who they live with or anyone we think about as somehow (Hmmm, word alert) ‘vulnerable’. Ciaran Cameron is the face of the campaign and you’ll hear more from him in a couple of weeks, talking about his front door.

Ciaran Cameron

I want to be crystal clear about one thing – this is absolutely NOT about how to teach people to open their own front doors or to have a checklist that people need to learn and prove they understand before they are ready to open their own front doors. How we feel ok that people feel safe in their own homes is our problem. This is about reminding ourselves and the world about basic human rights and what living in a place we call home means.

So, heads up and pause for short fanfare, I have designated I Open My Own Front door – Do You? will start on Monday, 3rd of March, and run for that full week. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be pulling together some materials that you might want to use and some questions you might want to ask yourself if whether or not someone gets to open their own front door has anything to do with you in your work role …or if the idea resonates with you in any way. Let me know if you’re in!

PS. Have you heard about the upcoming workshop for Social Work Week?

Creating Gloriously Ordinary Lives - workshop. Social Work Week is all about taking time to reflect on your role as a social worker. Join Tricia Nicoll to explore what Gloriously Ordinary Lives means for you as a social worker and to pause and think.

PPS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 10 is here. I chat with James Townsend, Co-Founder and CEO of ⁠Mobilise⁠. We reflect on the importance of shifting how local councils view families, focusing on supporting them to live gloriously ordinary lives. It's about having early conversations, rethinking relationships between people with a caring role and those they support, and opening up new ways of understanding those connections.