#5 - Sam Rose  -  Helping cancer survivors through creative writing. 

In today’s episode with Sam Rose, we talk about how creative writing can help cancer survivors. 

Key points from this discussion:

• Her own experiences with cancer and how writing has helped. 
• The need in cancer survivorship for support at the right time. 
• What the wider community could consider when supporting cancer survivors.

Sam Rose is a second-year PhD student at Teesside University, where she also gained her MA Creative Writing in 2017. She is researching the relationship between creative writing and cancer survivorship issues, with her main research focus being her own experiences as a three-time cancer survivor. 

Sam’s poetry and prose has been published in over 60 literary magazines and anthologies. She is the editor of Peeking Cat Literary and has contributed articles to several cancer and chronic illness websites. Her memoir “Gut Feelings: Coping With Cancer and Living With Lynch Syndrome” was released in January 2021.

Key Resources:

Sam on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/writersam/ 

Sam on Twitter - https://twitter.com/writersamr 

Sam on Instagram -  https://www.instagram.com/writersamr 

ESRC - Economic & Social Research Council - https://esrc.ukri.org/ 

NINE Doctoral Training Partnership Website / ABC (Accelerating Business Collaboration)- https://www.ninedtp.ac.uk/

Inspiration North Website - www.inspirationnorth.com

#4 - Katie Aitken-McDermott  - Doing social good makes business sense.

In today’s episode with Katie Aitken-McDermott, we talk about how doing social good makes business sense.

Key points from this discussion:

• How the pandemic accelerated the number of CICs being set up, with 20% of the CICs in the region being set up in 2020. 
• The importance of storytelling for social enterprises to create a sense of community and belonging. 
• And the many great examples in the region to learn from. 

Katie moved to the northeast in her early 20s and lives in Northumberland. She’s a mum, a researcher and director of a new social enterprise. She’s worked in the region for almost 25 years with charities, universities and for a local authority.

Katie works at the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University and her PhD research focuses on social enterprise. It asks two questions. What is a social enterprise? And how do people start and run different social enterprises? The first question is a bit of a rabbit hole, but it’s important to ask. To answer the second question, she’s visited different social enterprises in our region and really listened to people.     

Her research should help support more people to start and run social enterprises. There are lessons for other businesses as well. 

Key Resources:

Katie on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katieaitkenmcd

ESRC - Economic & Social Research Council - https://esrc.ukri.org/ 

NINE Doctoral Training Partnership Website / ABC (Accelerating Business Collaboration)- https://www.ninedtp.ac.uk/

Inspiration North Website - www.inspirationnorth.com

#3 John Moriarty - How workplaces shape social identity and influence mental health. 

In today’s episode with John Moriarty, we talk about how workplaces shape social identity and influence mental health.

Key points from this discussion:

• The concept of a job role coming from theatre and an actor’s role.
• How Covid has been an accelerant rather than a game changer. 
• And the opportunity for businesses to offer work that fulfils rather than a means to pay bills. 

John Moriarty is a sociology lecturer and researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, based at the Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation. The focus of his research is on workplaces and how the world of work shapes social identity and influences workers’ mental health. 

His most recent writings deal with perceptions of retirement, organisational strategies to protect mental health and the impact of COVID-19 on those at the frontline of health and social service delivery. 

John is currently working on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust to develop online mental health literacy training with the AWARE charity and with Northern Ireland-based businesses.

Key Resources:

John on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JohnJMor 

ESRC - Economic & Social Research Council - https://esrc.ukri.org/ 

NINE Doctoral Training Partnership Website / ABC (Accelerating Business Collaboration)- https://www.ninedtp.ac.uk/

Inspiration North Website - www.inspirationnorth.com

#2 Helen Wareham - Child development and the future workforce. 

In today’s episode with Helen Wareham, we talk about how the better start a child has, the more opportunities and the better outcomes when leaving school.

Key points from this discussion:

• The importance of routines and parent/child interactions in positive child outcomes. 
• Upward movement in education giving an upward movement in child development. 
• The opportunities for business support in such development with a better workforce in the future. 

Helen has been working from home in Weardale since March 2020 sharing an office with her wife, 2 dogs, and occasionally their cat. 

She is a Research Associate at Newcastle University working on a European funded project looking at social inequality and its effects on child development. The project makes use of data in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, which has followed households since children were born, to try and understand the mechanisms behind different child outcomes. 

Ultimately Helen likes playing with numbers, making pretty graphs, and trying to work with people and data to make practical, evidence-based changes.

Key Resources:

Helen on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-wareham-887215181/ 

ESRC - Economic & Social Research Council - https://esrc.ukri.org/ 

NINE Doctoral Training Partnership Website / ABC (Accelerating Business Collaboration)- https://www.ninedtp.ac.uk/

Inspiration North Website - www.inspirationnorth.com

#1 Rachael Singleton

In today’s episode with Rachael Singleton, we talk about blending psychology and the natural environment; how we can better sustain the immense value our beaches offer to their visitors.

Key points from this discussion:

• Looking to make tourism more sustainable. 
• The six key values that people derive from the beach and nature. 
• And how psychology and human behaviour needs to be part of sustainability.

On average, 625 pieces of litter can be found for every 100 metres of Northern Irish beach (KNIB, 2019), with 80% of this litter originating from land – further impacting the aquatic environment. Rachael’s project aims to tackle this 80% by exploring behavioural drivers that lead to ‘littering’, including personal experience, needs and values (Moreno, Lofthouse & Lilley, 2011). She will then use the insight to design an  intervention to reduce this negative littering behaviour.

It is important to her that what she learns from existing research, from theory and from her own research process contributes to the ‘real world’ by bringing new insight and new ways of managing our beaches in particular and our natural environment in general.

She is doing this by bringing together User Centered Design (a ‘design’ approach) and  behaviour change theory – the COM-B Behaviour Change framework.

Rachael’s research reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of human behaviour in the natural environment and is ‘positioned’ at the point where psychology, tourism and the environment meet.

Rachael currently works as a Behavioural Scientist in the Northern Ireland Innovation Lab where she uses psychology to tackle wider societal problems including debt, poverty and COVID transmission. She has a psychology degree, an English MA and is pursuing a PhD at Ulster University that combines psychology and the natural environment in trying to understand how we can better sustain the immense value our beaches offer to their visitors.

Key Resources:

Rachael on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachael-singleton-300690166/ 

Northern Ireland Innovation Lab website - https://www.finance-ni.gov.uk/articles/introduction-innovation-lab

ESRC - Economic & Social Research Council - https://esrc.ukri.org/ 

NINE Doctoral Training Partnership Website / ABC (Accelerating Business Collaboration)- https://www.ninedtp.ac.uk/

Inspiration North Website - www.inspirationnorth.com