Dan's life, his family, and his identity have all been shaped by Great Yarmouth. Lloyds Bank Foundation backs Dan to support and empower people in Great Yarmouth to come together, to rethink and redesign how things work locally.
Dan’s roots in Great Yarmouth run deep. Born in a central part of the town, Dan lived with his grandmother in Cobholm, in sight of the river. Now in one of the more rural parishes, he’s raising his children in the place he’s lived all his life.
His life, his family, and his identity have all been shaped by Great Yarmouth - and the people who live in it. And in every job he’s had, he’s tried to bring people together to shape Great Yarmouth.
In 2020, Dan started as one of Lloyds Bank Foundation’s Local Systems Leads. His job is to support and empower people in Great Yarmouth to come together to rethink and redesign how things work locally.
“We can’t just sit and wait for government to sort things out. That’s a knight on a horse that just isn’t coming over that hill,” Dan says. “For Great Yarmouth to be in a good place, people need to recognise and solve the problems that we face using the resources that we've all got. Often, we have the solutions already, we might just need some help to realise it.”
Dan’s focus has been on homelessness. Many people and organisations in Great Yarmouth do great work on homelessness, but they’ve often done so in silos and in vacuums.
“Through the early conversations, people told me they knew there were blockages in the system, but that those blockages were not always easy to navigate,” says Dan. “We also heard that services are often designed with the best intentions, but sometimes without fully capturing the human experience behind homelessness. We wanted people’s stories to help shape better connected solutions, so that services complement one another rather than duplicate or work in isolation.”
“My role has been to build bridges between people and help them make the best use of the resources they’ve got, building skills and capacity across the board by adopting a system-wide approach.”
By building trusted connections across an alliance of organisations dedicated to ending homelessness, Dan has also supported the development of a Lived Experience Collective, and continues to work alongside the group to make sure people who are or have been homeless have greater agency, and that their experiences are listened to and acted on across the system. They in turn are using their agency to increase resilience and wellbeing for others by campaigning to improve local housing services, so they genuinely work for the people who need them most.
Dan’s view of the future is optimistic: “Here in Great Yarmouth, we’re often defined by challenge from the outside, but what I see every day is resilience, care, determination and a huge amount of local strength.”
