A special thank you to Benjamin Zephaniah, writer, musician, actor and activist, for introducing this episode.

If you’re enjoying this podcast, we’d be really grateful if you rated and reviewed it on your favourite podcatcher. Doing so helps ensure this is heard by even more supporters, and even more housing and support professionals, and that helps us in our mission to keep the work of the Lead Worker Peer Mentor service going.

Welcome to Challenging, a podcast by Shelter reflecting on the ambitious and life-changing service run with Birmingham Changing Futures Together, that helped people with multiple and complex needs out of homelessness.

This episode is going to be a little bit different because we wanted to spend some more time with Colette. You'll have met her in previous episodes, interviewing Lee and talking about the value of lived experience. Like many people you'll hear on this podcast, Colette embodies the spirit and the whole idea of the Lead Work Peer Mentor service. We wanted to give you an opportunity to get to know her better. In this episode, she'll talk more about her past before she joined Shelter, and her vision for the future.

And if any organisations and commissioners in the Birmingham area are listening, you're really gonna want to listen to this one.

Read the full social cost-benefit analysis of the Lead Worker Peer Mentor service http://shltr.org.uk/ifj