As a Community Interest Company, our North East London community is at the heart of everything we do and we need a smart, committed team to ensure that we listen to them, learn from them and support them effectively. We’re very proud of the culture we have created amongst the team. We may be a small team here at Care City, but our experiences, expertise and ambitions are really quite diverse – and the one thing we all have in common is a desire to develop ourselves and support others to do the same.

In the last couple of months alone team members have started an Apprenticeship, received a well earned promotion and been accepted onto a University degree. Over the next few weeks we’ll introduce you to the talented individuals that make up our happy Care City team. Julie Atkins, our Project Lead starts us off…

Cartoonist, saxophonist, executive coach and clown. What do all these things have in common? Julie Atkins, who at 61 believes you are never too old to start learning new stuff!

Julie joined the Care City team two and half years ago and has been working part time with us as a Project Lead, alongside managing a part time role at NELFT as a Self Care Facilitator. In fact it’s probably unfair to “label” Julie as a Project Lead, as although she is very busy managing our frailty research and enablement champion projects, there are many other strings to her bow, including Chair of our Community Board, heading up our co-design work and facilitating virtual intergenerational coffee mornings on behalf of the Downshall Intergenerational Group.

But when retirement would have been on the horizon for many, Julie has just enrolled on an 18 month Improvement Leadership Apprenticeship with NELFT and is excited about the prospect of developing her Quality Improvement knowledge and being able to share her learnings across Care City. 

When asked why she wanted to delay her retirement and embark on an apprenticeship after 43 years working full time, her answer is very simple “I absolutely love quality improvement having been involved with QI in NELFT. I’m interested in how you support change and ensuring everyone’s voices are heard. I just LOVE learning”. This is unsurprising, as Julie regularly regales us with her latest hobbies, which have seen her performing as a clown at Jackson Lane Community Centre in Highgate and could soon see her entertaining her local Ramsgate audience with her new saxophony skills!

Julie is keen to apply her apprenticeships learning and QI training skills to our Project Management methods. As Julie states quite beautifully “We need to be very clear as to the actions we take within our projects and ensure a methodical approach to managing projects. There is still more we can do to improve our organisational processes and work without taking away our love and laughter”

Julie has a history of putting what she has learnt into practice. Running the NELFT Expert Patients Programme, a course for people with long term health conditions to teach them skills to become better self managers has stood her in good stead for co producing the Self Management Training programme for HCA’s, commissioned by UCLPartners.

So what is Julie’s secret to squeezing so much into her day? Well Julie has been making the most of her time working from home during the pandemic. She no longer has a three hour daily commute to the city, so uses that time to ensure she balances both work life and personal interests, although she is keen to point out that whilst she no longer has to walk to the train station to start her journey to work, she does still rise at 5:30 and takes a long walk along Ramsgate seafront to start her day, to breathe in fresh air and start her day with a smile. The sea air is obviously very good for you Julie!