Profile

With a passion for social justice, and working to ensure communities are engaged and heard Mike is a guy with a strong personality, with his feet on the ground, who doesn’t mince his words. He has no problem speaking truth to power and explaining and showing them what they are doing wrong. 

He’s a firm believer in ensuring Community services and their staff are well resourced, and at that community services should be of high quality, service user-led, and impactful.

He believes all people have limitless potential, and with the right attitude, support, and tools, they can make a difference.

Having worked in the sector for over 25 years, he has seen first hand the good, bad and ugly of the social supports system that let him down as a teenager.

He has observed many examples of excellent and meaningful work by many providers and inspiring individuals. However, having witnessed inadequate training of community sector students, delusional decision-makers, detached boards, clueless managers, arrogant and lazy or de-motivated staff, teams divided by unchecked egos.  Wasteful productivity by those who spend time in endless meetings debating theories not based on reality has inspired him to establish this new Coaching and Consultancy service.

This is with a view to that his experiences, lessons and working with other team members will assist organisations and their people to make a real difference where it matters.

His Journey so far

Mike is Originally from the West Coast of Scotland, moving to Australia in 2006 and despite his deficiency of academic experience and dyslexia, he has had 25, successful years.  He has had a diverse career journey within the community sector specialising in community engagement and managing, developing and training social sector staff, volunteers and students from all walks of life.

His early years were scared with lived experience of trauma having witnessed significant violence in all its forms, and on many occasions, which resulted in family break ups, Loss of life for loved ones, and incarceration for others.

Naively turning to the church for support where he became an active member, he envisaged becoming a pastor. This dream was short-lived when they publicly excommunicated him because of his sexuality at the early age of 17. 

This was followed by periods of housing instability, homelessness, failed relationships and being exposed to a mental health system which caused more damage than good.

Despite the adversity, Mike went on to become a Team Leader and Trainer for five years at Scotland’s largest Citizens Advice Bureau which had an annual turnover of 89, 000 clients and 120 volunteer staff.   He also served as a member of the Board of Directors for Glasgow’s LGBT centre for two years.

Michael went onto work with various services within the social care sector where he engaged with a diverse range of people, as a senior support worker.

Then Michael moved to Fife, and after a short period as a home career for Fife social worker Department, he went on to become the Resource and Advice manager for Levenmouth homeless Trust.  Here he had responsibility for the development of two Resource and Housing Advice Centres, Needle Exchange Services, implementation of Home Point Standards, and developing service user involvement. This work eventually led to the merge of voluntary and statutory sector services in joint management of projects in tackling homelessness now known as Homes 4 good Resource centres. He then completed his diploma in management.

In addition to this, he served as a special constable for Fife constabulary for five years at Levenmouth Police Station working with first responder teams.

Next, he was a community development officer for Dundee Volunteer Action and overseeing the establishment of their Turnaround project in Charleston Dundee. There he worked with residents securing funding and aided them to set up several community groups and projects such as the Charleston Community health troopers, Charlie’s angles, Charleston befriending scheme, Citizen Advice bureau outreach service,  and resourcing the implementing the Fair share program panel which had over a million pounds in funding for the area.

From there, he moved to Sydney in 2006 to join the Factory Community Centre, the team as the HCP community development worker for Redfern / Waterloo and has been the Executive officer there since 2010 achieving many excellent outcomes for the community through building a strong team of community sector professionals.

He has served on several community service boards, Ministerial advisor committees, facilitated training and spoken at numerous events.

Want to know more? he loves a good yarn over a coffee or beer!