From a Cheese Warehouse
to
Nearity
Every era, every system
I started my administration career working in a cheese warehouse, surrounded by paper files and mice! That’s where I started from, paper files to spreadsheets, handwritten contacts to CRM, fax to email, I've lived every era of how admin works and I have thrived on the challenge. Every new system that's come along has been about adaptation. AI is just the latest one.
During all that change and my years across the NHS, education, and the charity sector, I developed a very clear understanding of how organisations work and how often they don't.
The gap not always spoken about
One thing has stayed consistent throughout all of it; the people designing the processes are rarely the people living with them.
That gap is where things go wrong. Not because of bad intentions, but because the view from the roof of an organisation is genuinely different from the view at the front door. I’ve never been able to accept that and move on.
Both sides of the desk
I've seen it from both sides. As a professional I've worked in rooms where decisions get made about people who aren't in the room. And as a resident, service user and consumer, I've been on the receiving end of systems that don't account for real life and won cases against organisations, because I understood how to document, evidence and present a case in a way their own records couldn't match.
That's the lens I bring to every piece of work. I start on the ground, not in the boardroom. I go to where the work actually happens, map where it breaks down in reality rather than on paper, and work with organisations to fix it in a way that's practical, evidenced and built to last.
The academic bit and what that looks like in practice
My studies in Psychosocial Community Work added another layer to that understanding. It gave me a framework for what I'd already been seeing in practice for years, that people don't experience systems in isolation. They bring their whole lives, their history, their trust or lack of it, into every interaction with an organisation. That shapes everything, from whether someone fills in a form to whether they ever come back.
That approach is grounded in real, evidenced experience. I've redesigned admin workflows in NHS settings, introduced staff development pathways that got adopted at organisational level, and conducted peer research that contributed to the closure and full redesign of a grant fund that had been running for 125 years because the data showed it wasn't reaching people fairly.
That's what Nearity is here to do
What matters to me is that in each case, I raised difficult things and the relationships didn't break down. If anything they got stronger. The organisations I've worked with have valued being challenged, because it was done with honesty and straight talking, not to score points or make noise, but because getting it right actually matters to me.
That's what Nearity is here to do.