Nour Sidawi - Listening to Understand story

I get out and about for work. I meet people, and they tell me stories. It keeps me in touch with the realities of what people are responding to and lets me know if we’re doing our job right.

When you really listen, when you walk alongside a person, you understand the barriers they face. It’s a powerful, multi-layered, and ever-changing landscape of experiences and meaning. It’s a different kind of knowledge.

For example, we used to release people from prison on Friday afternoons - then they couldn’t do important things like meet their probation officer or sort out housing. It was only through people’s stories that things eventually changed.

Stories are powerful. They reveal so much about our environment and ourselves. But that can make it hard to listen to them. It isn’t often that people come to tell us what the government is doing right. And it means reliving grief and trauma; that’s the reality.

I’m currently reading “Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen.” It’s extraordinarily hard to read. It never leaves my mind - and those that probably should read it won’t. But if we create space to listen to stories, we also have to reflect on our failures. And for these collective traumas, the stories must be told many times, in many different words, and from many different angles, before we can make sense of them.

There are stories out there that remind me why I’m in public service - stories that nourish my soul, make me feel more connected, and, above all, offer me hope. We’re running a programme to get prisoner leavers into construction. There was someone we worked with who has rebuilt their life - they’ve even written a book! That’s a story I’d like to read.