The Alternative UK Podcast 1: Hilary Cottam's Radical Help

Welcome to The Alternative UK Podcast - an occasional conversation with key thinkers for a better future. 

Today’s guest is social entrepreneur Hilary Cottam, who uses a design approach to solving the world’s problems – and as such, was named Designer of the Year in 2005 for her work in schools, health services and prisons. For the past ten years Hilary has been working with her team at Participle, to re-imagine social services as relational welfare.

This is an approach which puts relationship, rather than management, at the heart of interractions between vulnerable people and the state. Today we are celebrating the publication of Hilary’s new book Radical Help (available here on Amazon). It documents the incredible success she has had in turning people’s lives around using this idea of relational welfare. Alternative UK's co-initiator Indra Adnan interviewed Hilary in her office in Peckham, London.

Backgrounder: See this piece on Hilary's book by Melissa Benn in The New Statesman.

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