This week the 3Pillars team once again migrated from all corners of the UK and descended upon Nottingham for our Christmas get together. The first day of our festive celebration was - as you might expect - Italian food, crazy golf and an evening spent flexing our competitive streaks playing shuffleboard at Nottingham's finest Roxy Ball Room.
However, at 3Pillars we never miss a chance to put our heads together on the occasions we find ourselves all in one place. So for day two we headed to Nottingham Rugby Club to do just that, and although Christmas is well and truly over, it was feeling extra festive due to the absence of heating and the sub-zero temperatures both outside and in.
Swaddled in every layer we could get our hands on and clutching hot drinks we spent the morning huddled around Mark Kitson (of Mark Kitson Consulting) to, in his words, "cut through the complexity and noise in order to develop healthy growth".
We turned 2024 upside down and inside out.
We went through 2025 with a fine tooth comb.
We skinned monitoring and evaluation this way and that.
We did a deep dive into our limitations and our challenges.
And we wrestled with encapsulating our abiding strengths.
In a rare moment of silence whilst we contemplated how to define the raw determination and tenacity of 3Pillars - Mark indeed cut through the complexity and the noise and hit the nail on the head: "Guerilla tactics and irrational optimism."
Fitting, we felt, for a team with military experience running through it's veins. And accurate - after all, last year we found a way to bring a serving prisoner along with us on our 24 mile hike in the Yorkshire Dales.
In the world of criminal justice, which is filled with endless red tape and glass ceilings, the strength of 3Pillars lies in our compact, dynamic team. In our optimism despite the odds, in our unfaultering can-do attitude and our unconventional yet aspirational approach to driving change.
At 3Pillars it's not 'can we do it?', 'it's 'how are we going to do it?'
As Larry, one of our lived experience coaches put it, before he met 3Pillars back in 2018, "[He'd] never seen a mountain before, let alone walked up it! [He's] done things [he's] never done before in [his] life because of Mike."
And on that note, Larry had an announcement. In November he had accompanied Pickle and Tweedy to deliver a talk at Nottingham Trent University - he'd never set foot on a student campus before - and for the following weeks he said he just couldn't get the place out of his head.
Next month Larry starts a degree in Health and Social Care management. The first step in Larry's plan to set up a safe half way house for people reintegrating back into society. First a mountain, now a degree, talk about smashing glass ceilings Larry!
Happy New year one and all from the 3Pillars team!
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