Changing for good

The New Year is a time when optimists turn to a fresh page, vowing to take up new challenges or give up bad habits in the hope their lives will be changed for the better. We've all done it and some of us have even succeeded.

This year I needed no resolutions, as I had a fresh start already planned with a new job. Last year I was a member of the Guide Dogs change programme team, helping to develop and implement sweeping changes to the organisation with the sole aim of getting more blind and partially sighted people out and about on their own terms. As a member of a team dedicated to change, with no links to any particular directorate, it was easy to keep a clear head and work towards the goals of the programme. Now I am poacher turned gamekeeper as I have just started as Guide Dogs Head of Communications and Campaigns – a team created as part of the changes.

I am excited by the prospect of seeing the two sides of the coin – helping to create the vision and then making that vision a reality – but we all know excitement includes a healthy dose of fear!

So far, two weeks in, the signs are good. Making communications and campaigns part of the same team is eminently sensible as the two are interdependent. Working on the principle that two heads are better than one, combining expertise in this way should ensure that we are even more successful at removing the barriers which stop blind and partially sighted people from getting about. For instance, your neighbour parking on the kerb may be a minor inconvenience to you, but means a blind person taking their life into their hands as they step into the road to get round it. I am confident my team will be successful in increasing the understanding of these issues and making people aware there are problems they can solve.

Creating awareness and implementing the changes will make life easier for even more blind and partially sighted people. Only today I was reading an email from a new Guide Dog owner who this time last year was stuck at home with her parents with no prospect of a job. She contacted us and has now qualified with her new guide dog, moved to London and starts her new job this month – what a turnaround! It is one of the privileges of this role to hear stories like that and even more of a privilege to share those stories and use them to inspire even more people to help. Perhaps she made a new year’s resolution – if so I hope it inspires all you optimists to stick with yours and make your life, or the lives of others, better.