At Work With...Kari Gerstheimer | CEO & Founder of Access Social Care

1.Tell me a bit about yourself? (Where are you from? What you do? One peculiar fact about you?

I am based in Gloucestershire, in England. I am the CEO and Founder of Access Social Care, which is one of the last remaining specialist health and social care advice providers in England. One peculiar fact about me is that, I trained to be a yoga teacher!

2. How do you motivate yourself to give your 100% at work? What gets Kari out of bed in the mornings - especially in such a selfless environment?

I am very driven by the idea of justice and the idea that if a person has been treated in a way that is unlawful, that they should have access to recourse. Everyday across the country, there are millions of people who are not accessing the social care that they have a right to. That impacts on peoples' lives in a devastating way, whether you are a working age disabled person or an older person. Not being able to access the social care that you have the right to can affect your dignity, it can affect your quality of life, it can affect pretty much every basic need you have. And that strikes to I suppose my values because it's just not fair and it’s not right. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

?3. How did you decide to pursue the career that you are working in today? What was the pivotal moment?

It ended up happening very early on in my career. I was the first person in my family to go to university, I didn't really get great career advice. I think partly because I did the Eramus scheme, so I was out of the country for university when in third year everyone was applying for jobs and getting career guidance.

?So I wasn't aware of the spectrum of things you could do with a law degree. I was living up in Scotland and at the time the salaries to go and work in a criminal firm or a family firm etc. was about ￡9k /year and you couldn't really live on that. And I couldn't keep asking my family to keep supporting me, therefore in my mind it was either a career in prosecution or a big corporate firm.

I applied to a commercial firm, I did my traineeship. It was apparent pretty quickly that the work didn't get me out of bed in the mornings because it really wasn't about helping people. So I qualified and left! Which was quite a big decision at the time, because I had just spent 7 years training to be a solicitor. Then had a big question mark, on whether law was even the right thing for me?!

I did what many people do, and I suppose I'm quite fortunate, I went travelling. Really just to take some time and reassess what I was doing. And I started volunteering for a refugee agency and a human rights organisation in the British Columbia and I trained to be a yoga teacher. It gave me time to think, and I realised that what I wanted to do ultimately was make a difference in peoples' lives and be in service.

So when I came back home, I did a masters' in human rights law part time whilst working for a fundraising agency. That was really fortuitous actually because I got to know a wide spectrum of the charitable sector and one of the accounts I was managing was for SENSE - the deaf blind charity. The penny dropped, I supposed, that if you are going to work in the human rights field domestically then disability and social care is actually really relevant to many of those human rights abuses that happen. So I ended up taking a job as their parliamentary lead and then set up the beneficiary facing legal team at SENSE about 15 years ago.

3.1 How did Access Social Care come about?

After working for a few years at SENSE, what became apparent was it was becoming harder and harder for people to access a lawyer and that was due to problems with legal aid. Since 2010 there has been a 77% reduction in the number of cases take on by legal aid lawyers for community care.

At the same time, because of the problems with central government funding of social care, many of the disability charities that had historically made a profit from social care provision were struggling and were consequently divesting charitable activity like helpline and legal service support.

A lot of disability charities have had to cut their legal services and their information and advice services. My service at SENSE fell foul to that, and the service was made redundant. When that happened, I felt really passionately that we had to try and save this service because we were delivering a service to people who would have nowhere else to go if it stopped.

When I found out the service was being made redundant I had this idea that if lots of organisations were to put some money into a pot, then we could try and save the service. And the service could perhaps be a service for the whole disability and social care sector. I started speaking to some chief executives in the sector to see whether they might help me and I was very lucky because the CEO of MENCAP, Jan Tregelles, said well come here and help us with our information and advice service and you can pilot that idea.

And that's what I did. I took the director role at MENCAP and piloted what is now Access Social Care within MENCAP. It incubated the idea and Access Social Care span out in 2020 to become an independent charity.

3.2 How does Access Social Care work?

We have a membership model, which works like a social enterprise. Helplines and social care providing organisations pay a membership fee and Access Social Care delivers a service back to them so that their beneficiaries can access our specialist legal advice provision.

4.What are you most proud of in your career journey so far?

Definitely to save the service, when we were able to move the service to MENCAP and then again actually set Access Social Care up as an independent charity and knowing it would mean that we would be able to help thousands of people get the social care they have a right to - those were definitely career highlights.??We are growing relatively fast, we are now 40 people. For me, the conundrum is when there are millions of people, how do you increase your impact and reach people? There is a national shortage of specialist lawyers so that we can only recruit and train people at a certain speed when we know the need and demand for our service is enormous.

For this reason, the other thing that I am really proud of is Access Social Care’s chatbot, we have invented this technology product that helps us increase our impact and reach more people with some of that early legal information and support. We really hope that that tool will help people realise what their rights are and take early steps to enforce those rights. Also that this chatbot will be able to capture really important data about advice demand that we hope will help influence the system.

?4.1 Is there a potential to get government funding?

Although we are a legal organisation, and of course a core part of our work is about challenging public bodies, we would like to work more collaboratively with public bodies. The qualitative and quantitative data we hold about advice demand and problems with policy and practice needs to feed in at policy level.

At the moment because of our size and because we don’t have a dedicated policy team, we feed that information in mainly though our partner organisations. For example, we work really closely with MENCAP and the National Autistic Society who have big policy teams.

There are some areas where we think we have something really unique to say, for example, where there's that intersection to social care and access to justice. We do feed in directly on consultations and to select committees. It is definitely part of our strategy as we grow, and I hope by this time next year we will have a policy manager. The plan is really to expand that work.

5. If you could start all over again, what would you do differently?

?** long pause **

I am quite a positive person Ana. I sort of feel like that even the hard bits have contributed to where I am now and helped me appreciate where I am now. Although the two years that I spent training with commercial firm didn’t take me in the direction I wanted to go in, I think it helped me really appreciate where I am now and recognise I am in the right place for me. Would I change any of it? I'm not sure I really would actually. It was really hard doing those two years, I suppose hindsight is a brilliant thing. All of those experiences contribute to the person that you are.

As long as you’re brave enough, that's the key thing. Being courageous enough to sometimes walk away from a big salary or make that values based decision. You have to take a leap of faith sometimes, and it is really hard. I can remember finishing my masters and doing so many job applications in a completely different field. At the time it felt really hard, having qualified as a lawyer and then having to apply for jobs in another industry that felt quite junior. Sometimes you have to have take a step back to take a step forwards.

6.Lastly, what do you think is the most important attribute a leader should have in today's generation?

Definitely resilience, to work in the charitable sector at the moment you do need a lot of resilience. The cases we are seeing are tough, and I think kindness and compassion are really important. To really care about your colleagues and their well-being.??Ultimately our teams are working on really difficult subjects and in order to keep that up day by day we need to recognise that they need caring for too and there are frameworks in place to ensure this happens.

Also to be courageous, because sometimes you do have to take calculated risks and knowing when to take them is really important. Sometimes you have to do what is right, not what is easy.

Spinning out of Mencap was a really big decision personally because I had quite a senior role in quite a big organisation. It was stable. But it felt like for our beneficiaries the right thing to do was to spin out and that wasn't an easy decision. To hold the values of what you’re trying to achieve through your work at the heart of what you are trying to do, that is doing what is right…not what is easy.