Between roles and bridging careers

Under pressure

Family violence work begins, more often than people expect, in ordinary places. A kitchen. A car park outside a school. A GP's waiting room. A phone call made from a bathroom with the tap running.

I trained as a social worker and worked in family violence. The work means sitting with people at the point where staying has become more dangerous than leaving, and then helping them through systems that move far more slowly than the risk does. It is not a gentle field, and nobody who works in it pretends otherwise.

It is also a field that sits right beside family law. The people in a social worker's caseload and the people in a family lawyer's brief are, often enough, the same people at different points in the same story. They might tell a social worker first, in one of those ordinary places, and tell a court much later, in an affidavit someone else has drafted.

These days my title is Co-Founder and Head of Partnerships at The Profession. On paper that looks like a change of career. From the inside it has felt much more like the same job in a different building.

Bridge over troubled water

Most people picture family violence work as one-on-one, a worker and a client in a room. Some of it is. Far more of it happens between organisations. A single family might be dealing with police, a court, a housing provider, a school, a hospital and a lawyer, each holding one piece of the picture and each working to its own timeline and its own idea of what counts as urgent. A large part of the job is getting those pieces into the same room, or at least onto the same phone call, before the gaps between them become dangerous.

That work teaches you things no business course does. You learn that every organisation has its own language and its own fears, and that nothing moves until you've understood both. You learn the difference between an agency that says yes and one that follows through. You learn to hold a working relationship steady through a hard conversation, because the person who needs that relationship doesn't get to walk away from it. And you learn that the most useful person in a meeting is very often the one who wrote everything down and sent it round afterwards.

Come together

People sometimes ask how someone with a family violence background ends up co-founding a platform for the legal profession. My answer is that the legal profession is a system with a great many agencies and very few people whose job is to connect them. Law schools, associations, firms, courts, CPD providers and the businesses that serve practitioners all hold a piece of what a lawyer needs across a career, and most of them rarely talk to each other.

Partnerships work is the bridging I was trained to do, pointed at a different problem. It means understanding what each organisation actually wants rather than what its brochure says, and doing the unglamorous follow-up that turns a promising meeting into something real.

The background brings something else with it. I came to this profession already knowing what its work can weigh. Social work names vicarious trauma early and builds supervision and debriefing into the job, on the assumption that if you spend your days absorbing other people's worst experiences, those experiences will go somewhere and had better go somewhere safe. Family lawyers carry the same material, often in more detail and for longer, and that understanding shapes the partnerships I pursue and the kind of community I want The Profession to be.

Weather with you

If you work in one of the caring professions and wonder whether your skills would mean anything elsewhere, my experience is that they travel further than you'd think. Reading a room, keeping several organisations pointed in the same direction, staying calm while other people are frightened and keeping your word when it would be easier not to are not soft skills. They are the hard part of almost every job worth having.

The job title changed. The core of the work didn't. I still spend my days getting the right people into the same room, so that the person who needs them doesn't fall through the gap in between.