My name is Sam Holman and some of you will know me from The Quality Company, where I am employed as a Quality Assessor. I am doing an important piece of research into people’s financial wellbeing.
I started my new role in January 2024 as a Project Research on the financial wellbeing project, which is being led by Thera Trust and Dosh, and working alongside the University of Bristol. The project we are doing is to see what money means to the people we support and what it can do for them.
I wanted to do this role as it was the best fit for me. It was a chance to try something new and different. In this role I’m going to use the skills that I have learnt from my previous roles and apply them to this role. There have been challenges but I keep telling myself “I know I can do it, I have faith in myself.”
I have appointed Gerard as a Co-Researcher and Project Manager to support me. Gerard is semi-retired and has a daughter with a learning disability. Gerard has sixteen years of experience and has been on the board of companies, project manager for Thera and now he’s working alongside me in this project, as well as at The Quality Company as a Quality Supporter, supporting me in my Quality Assessor role.
Gerard shared the internal job advert with me, and I thought “I’ll go for it, nothing ventured nothing gained!” Since being at The Quality Company I’m more open to trying new things.
The Quality Company employs people like me as Quality Assessors to visit people and ask questions about their support. It’s my job to talk to people about their support, whether it’s good, bad, indifferent, what would they like to change, how do they choose their meals, do they choose what they wear and when they go to bed. Making sure they are getting the full support that they need.
I love the people I work with, and I care about the people I’m meeting and want them to have the best support. This is how Gerard and I have noticed that some the people we support don’t get a choice in terms of spending money. For example, saving up money to go on holiday. This is why this research is important.
We have a couple of workshops coming up soon, one in Exeter and one in Tavistock. The workshops are going to be a great way to ask questions and find out how people understand money.
At the end of the project, we will deliver a summary of our findings to say what financial wellbeing means to people with a learning disability. We hope this might lead to more research in the future to increase inclusion of the perspectives of people with a learning disability in research around money, as they are often excluded from this.
Contact us if you would like to find out more about the financial inclusion project