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Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers. This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What now?”.
Hosted by Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, The Wobbly Middle features interviews with famed city superwomen, dazzling entrepreneurs and revolutionary midwives and doctors who reveal what they’ve learnt through their own wobbly middle experiences.
[00:00:07] Patsy Day: Welcome to The Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women reinventing their careers with Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day.
[00:00:21] Susannah de Jager: Hi, Pats.
[00:00:22] Patsy Day: Hi, Susannah.
[00:00:23] Susannah de Jager: How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:24] Patsy Day: I've been on a new sabbatical since the US elections. Which hasn't been a hardship since I have a stack of wonderful books from my November birthday. One I love is Elizabeth Stroud's latest called Tell Me Everything. In this one, two of Stroud's most famous characters, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, meet. In one of their final conversations, Oliver laughs and says to Lucy, "What's the point to this story?", "People", Lucy says quietly. "People and the lives they lead. That's the point." And Susannah, it just struck me that what we really care about are not the big noisy news stories, but people's stories and that's why I'm so interested in speaking to our next guest, Emily. How's your wobbly middle?
[00:01:09] Susannah de Jager: Pats, I really couldn't agree more. Emily is doing something with such huge social value, and it's a product of her learning about what's important to her through her lifetime to date and this week, for me, I've been really reflecting on my children and how they're growing up and observing them and myself and what it is we think we know about ourselves and how important self awareness is to our happiness as we grow So how can we shape what we do to harmonise with who we really are and not who we think we should be?
[00:01:44] Patsy Day: Today's guest is Dr. Emily Connally. Emily has a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford via graduating with honours at Harvard and a research stint at MIT.
In layman's terms, Emily has researched stuttering and the brain system to identify speech and motor pathways, how the brain learns and recovers from injury, as well as memory and the ageing brain. She's won scholarships and awards, but I get the impression she's not the most conventional of academics. Returning to academia after an extended maternity leave, Emily was told that unless she was interested in pharmaceuticals, there was no funding. Of course, COVID was about to change the world.
Locally, at the school gate, Emily understood what this would mean for a lot of families on the breadline. She started to organise. By the time the country went into lockdown, her food bank was up and running. Now, four years later, the Cherwell Collective is a thriving community organisation with a one million national lottery grant and a mission to empower the community to reduce waste and lower our carbon footprint. Hi Emily, thanks for being here today.
[00:02:53] Emily Connally: You're very welcome, thanks for having me.
[00:02:55] Patsy Day: Listeners can probably tell you're not from around these parts. Let's go back to New Mexico, where you were born.
[00:03:00] Emily Connally:
I was born in a place called Española, and I grew up in the Chihuahuan desert, which is very special. I have two brothers and two sisters and quite a wide sort of extended family. We lived in a very rural part of New Mexico where there was not very much municipal infrastructure of any kind. We call it dirt poor, but actually, technically it was water poor because we did have a lot of dirt, but we had to go, into the mountains to get water and bring it back down into the desert for, daily living.
So it's quite different than the abundance of water and greenery here and I lived there for some time until my mother's parents started to become older and then we moved to Texas, to rural Texas when I was maybe 11 and, that was quite a cultural shock because New Mexico is a very tricultural state, there's a lot of Native Americans, there's a lot of Hispanic Americans and it's a very integrated place and Texas is extremely segregated and very Anglo dominant.
[00:03:59] Patsy Day: You actually moved to Breckenridge in Texas, which I believe is named after a Confederate Army General. A...
[00:04:06] Emily Connally: Yeah.
[00:04:06] Patsy Day: ...small town, about 5000 people and there was once a stop on the railway, but not from 1969. To set the scene, it's quite a small town.
[00:04:16] Emily Connally: It is and actually it's the only town in the entire county, it's a very large county. So very rural space. So first we lived in a place called Cisco, which is equally rural and in a dry county, which means they can't sell any alcohol because of the religious control over the policies there. So, we were living in Cisco, but I was forced out of the closet by some students and my basketball coach told me I couldn't be on the basketball team anymore because they were afraid I would influence other girls to, well I'm bisexual, but to become non heterosexual. So I was kicked off of the basketball team, which I had been in for a long time. So that's when we moved to Breckenridge, but actually what we did was just get permission for me to attend school there.
[00:04:59] Patsy Day: And school, you say, you just worked very hard to stay out of trouble.
[00:05:04] Emily Connally: I did. That was the only way to stay out of trouble and also to not get pregnant because that's what a woman's role is there is basically just to have as many babies as you can for. So I worked really hard. I was very athletic, interested in athletics, also interested in music and theater and I just filled my time with whatever I could to kind of avoid the realities of not really enjoying the social opportunities that were there for me.
[00:05:27] Patsy Day: Your father had an amazing brain and, he was a mathematician and early computer science guy and your mum's a teacher. But you say there was a school counsellor that identified your talent.
[00:05:40] Emily Connally: Yeah, well, he was actually my chemistry teacher, but he was also a coach and yes, so once I had taken all of the sort of requisite courses, he encouraged me to create my own courses to study what I wanted to and to really push myself and when I was applying to colleges, I had interest in being a medical doctor and so I had set up this sort of program to go to Rice University and thereafter to Baylor Medical School on a free, basically my college would be paid for because I had agreed to work as a doctor in rural areas and he really discouraged me from doing that because Harvard had sent me an application and he said, you need to just at least apply and see if you like it and he really tried to get me to think about, taking the maximum opportunity. So he said, if you get into Harvard, you can always go to Harvard and then transfer into Rice, but transferring from Rice into Harvard would not be possible and I did get in and so, I went there and he actually ended up paying the application fee so that I would apply.
Yeah, he was incredible.
[00:06:41] Patsy Day: Prep for Harvard. I mean, it's a different world. Tell us about how he prepped you to get there.
[00:06:47] Emily Connally: Yeah, So, I know I don't sound like I'm around here right now, but I really didn't sound like I was from around here then. So I had a very thick Southern accent combined with a bit of a Hispanic accent and he would give me elocution lessons, so that I could not, first of all, not use slang, so that I would understand what the accent in Boston was and he really wanted to make sure that no one, I guess, judged me or undervalued me because of my very strong rural accent.
[00:07:19] Susannah de Jager: So that's a really interesting concept to be introduced to at quite a young age. Just thinking about that idea of you're going to move to a different environment and you have to learn how to assimilate and adjust is quite an adult concept. Do you think about it in that way now?
[00:07:40] Emily Connally: I mean, yes, I always thought it was a great gift that he had given me to try to prepare me in that way and also to prepare me for the reality of how I would be received by others, because I have to say, I am not someone who's necessarily particularly aware of or concerned about how I am perceived by others, but he was again, trying to make sure that I maximised my opportunities in life and he thought that if I showed up there using the words that were part of our just normal vernacular and that accent that doors would be shut and people would just assume I was an idiot because I sounded so rural.
[00:08:15] Susannah de Jager: Do yourself a disservice.
[00:08:16] Emily Connally: Actually, when you attend Harvard, they have like cultural training and diversity training and I think that also prepared me for that a little bit. It was a massive culture shock getting there, but at least I had someone who was thinking about trying to make sure I could make friends, trying to make sure I would be on some sort of equal footing and not automatically at such a disadvantage, because I definitely didn't have the course. I had several, sort of remedial courses
[00:08:41] Patsy Day: And your life at Harvard, did you thrive?
[00:08:43] Emily Connally: I think so. I think, once you're in at Harvard, they make sure you thrive. Right, so there are so many supports in place to make sure that people don't really fall through the cracks and so it was a big culture shock in the beginning, I didn't thrive in the beginning, it took me a little while to find my feet, but once I sort of got past the imposter syndrome a little bit and found a good social group, I was in a singing group there and found this great job at a hospital. Then I started to realise this was a place where you could really think and you had time to just really contemplate things and I hadn't really had that sort of space or that encouragement to really just like deep dive into stuff and I found that very, very, very rewarding, especially when I got into research classes and stuff.
[00:09:29] Susannah de Jager: You've hit the nail on the head there on something that I was thinking as you were talking, which is that should be what these institutions of higher education can provide and yet we know that for you, that wasn't always the case. I wonder if you might speak a little bit about your time at Arizona and how that contrasted with what we've just heard you describe.
[00:09:49] Emily Connally: In the States especially there are two types of institutions. So one is like Harvard, where they're training thinkers. They're training you in how to be skeptical about information, how to document your observations and how to assess yourself, actually and be extremely self critical and it's really about developing that intellectual inquiry and then there are other types of institutions that are effectively just degree factories, where it is about taking the boxes and not being self critical and I don't think it's about a journey of truth. It's really around making sure that everybody has a job and it's a much more sort of industrial approach to education. I am not a particularly good fit for those types of places I think that there's no way to learn without failing. During my work at University of Arizona, I discovered that a big mistake had been made in research that had supported a long term body of work and I suggested that a retraction should be issued and that I couldn't complete my work because I was basing it on something that had been a big mistake and those mistakes happen, like that original work had been done before computers, right? One or two math errors. If those mistakes happen and people shouldn't be so terrified of losing their jobs that they don't report the truth because scientific inquiry is about actually testing theories and trying to get to the truth. But that is not the approach that is taken at a degree pumping out factory. So, that wasn't the sort of place where I was going to thrive and I had been the golden child there until that moment and after that moment, every little step that I took out of line, and there were many of those because that is my personality, amounted to eventually my being told that I wasn't fit to get a degree.
[00:11:35] Susannah de Jager: I'm sorry, that sounds miserable and there's nothing quite like when you've been quite anointed, having that pulled away.
[00:11:42] Emily Connally: A crumbling ivory tower, but that's all right.
[00:11:44] Susannah de Jager: Yo
[00:11:44] Patsy Day: u've always been an activist and at Arizona you were president of the union and while academically it may have been challenging there, you also pushed through some pretty incredible things, didn't you?
[00:11:57] Emily Connally: Yes, that was an incredible experience and we centralised what we call a graduate enrichment program. What this meant was that we secured funds so that students could learn from other students and share skills broadly across the university and these are things like Spanish for professionals, statistical analyses, so that experts in one department would be paid to teach other graduate students in another department and share their expertise more broadly in order to upskill and the other big sort of win was preventative health care. So, Arizona is a party
school and there's a big binge drinking problem at party schools and it's dangerous. There's also problems with sexual assault at party schools and they're dangerous and so part of the preventative health care that we really pushed through was making sure that alcohol poisoning, sexual health checks, skin cancer checks and all these kind of preventative health checks were covered by the medical insurance and didn't require a co pay, so that any student could go to school. come in or just bring their friend in and drop them off and not feel like there would be some financial consequence of whatever their decisions had been and when I first ran for student politics there, that was my goal was the preventative health care and it took four years to get that sort of stuff through.
There were about forty thousand students or something there at the time who benefited from that and so that's a small town worth of people who could have safer lives. So yeah, I think that was a huge, huge victory for the people who care about people more than they care about money.
[00:13:29] Patsy Day: We haven't actually spoken about your area of expertise. It's interesting you went to Harvard to study biochemistry, but it was actually your singing and your love of singing that changed your direction for you.
[00:13:43] Emily Connally: Yes, I had this incredible job at Youville Rehabilitation Center, which is a hospital combined with an assisted living and an incredible mentor there, Joanne and the job when I applied for it was basically to sing with people in the evenings, as they were waiting for dinner in a community setting and these were individuals who had Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease, often pretty advanced dementia. And it was this amazing thing that would happen because there's this thing called sundowning that happens in dementia where right at the end of the day the symptoms get much, much, much worse sort of very quickly and people become very confused and sometimes aggressive and we would start singing these old timey songs and then all of a sudden the people would calm down and remember the words and be active and lucid and participating and engaged. People who had been non verbal right before, and if anyone's ever seen the movie Cocoon, like, you see this miracle happening in front of you where someone who is so ill all of a sudden is alive again and so I just became very curious about what does that happen? How is this possible? And I went to my tutor, and I explained what was happening, and they said, oh, you need to get into psychology and they introduced me to Mark Baxter, who was one of the psychology professors there at the time and who remains a very good friend of mine and mentor, still today and he got me into Daniel Schachter's lab to study memory, and that did really change, kind of everything. It gave me this focus, it gave me these specific questions I now wanted to dive into and did start this real love of how the brain is organised and the amazing things the brain is capable of doing.
[00:15:24] Susannah de Jager: So you're discovering memory in the brain and then you're beginning to think about memory mapping. From Arizona, you come to the University of Oxford and you're awarded your doctorate, and your research project was on the neurobiological underpinnings of development stuttering and you've previously explained to me what happens in the brain which causes someone to stutter and a by product is actually something of a superpower. Do you mind explaining that here?
[00:15:57] Emily Connally: That's one of my favorite things that I found actually. A lot of what my work in stammering was trying to really understand the profile of the stammering brain, because if you think about different people having different rough profiles that their brain structure takes on, then that means that they have a different set of, capacities. right? So, I was really looking at identifying what might cause this thing that people perceive as a weakness, the stammer and then what strengths there might also be. So, I did what's called a neuropsychological battery, test battery, of individuals who stammer to identify potential strengths and the strength that I identified in them is something called implicit sequence learning and that basically means they can pick up on patterns and motor movement much better than you or I can. So how we train this is we have more or less if you think about teaching yourself how to play piano but it's on a keyboard and it's a random sequence of numbers and it's one that they can't possibly understand what the actual sequence is, but over time they become faster and faster at that sequence and they become much faster at that sequence over time, much more quickly than people who do not stammer. So after I had that finding, one of the individuals who was part of my research group, read the report. and he was interested in that because he's a member of the military and so I talked to him about how there's potential for the military to use this because these would be individuals who could be codebreakers quicker and this implicit learning is actually incredibly important and can be utilised and so I've since then done, a few different talks with different branches of the military around this strength that people who stammer seem to have and I think that approach is actually important in all levels of inquiry. So it's an old, old way of thinking about psychology when you call it this sort of multi trait, multi method approach where you look at a very broad picture because you're not just thinking about what causes this problem, but you're thinking about how is that profile, that map of that brain stronger and what areas it might need work because you can then also use those strengths to potentially get around, what are areas where the behaviours are causing problems in an individual's life? And that's the basic of sort of neuro training after stroke and on all sorts of injuries and stuff.
[00:18:16] Susannah de Jager: So it's really interesting to hear you talk about this because I've come across this concept recently, and if I'm understanding you correctly, it's what you're describing, the Americans call this twice exceptional.
It's like you go through strength rather than focused on weakness and that it's an American approach, whereas in the UK, there's a lot more focus on the weakness without necessarily identifying and leaning into the strength, which intuitively sounds a bit more of a sort of it's damage limitation rather than optimisation.
[00:18:43] Emily Connally: I mean, there are differences in, so, you know, NHS, for example, that is, it's a preventative healthcare system. So what they're going to want to do is prevent further damage because they want to prevent further cost. If you take a transformational approach or a rewiring approach right, that actually takes time, it takes investment, it takes further lines of inquiry, you have to test at each sort of intervention whether that using that strength is appropriate. But those sort of approaches are how we know things like how to route robotics to control arms and stuff like that are those strength based approaches where you think about using the other parts of the brain that are still intact to repair the damaged part.
Emily, this has been fascinating and I could talk to you for hours about this, but I'm really keen to hear about what you're doing now and how you're applying your extraordinary academic background and the skills you developed in that domain to something completely different and what you're doing now.
Yeah so, to be fair, when it started, I was more like avoiding going back into the academic domain because I just didn't feel like that was the right place for me anymore, especially the opportunities that were going to be there during COVID, but right now, I'm managing Cherwell Collective, and Cherwell Collective is an umbrella not for profit that supports communities and that means individuals, organisations, partnerships, even local authorities, to become empowered to build some climate resilience through creating better and more sustainable infrastructure, and specifically infrastructure that supports a circular economy. So reducing waste, changing the way we consume things and connecting people to one another, and connecting people to nature and like I said in the beginning, I was more just not going back to academia after a long term maternity leave because my options in academia were going to be limited to pharmaceutical work.
[00:20:32] Patsy Day: And we're talking pharmaceuticals because this is 2019, 2020, which is the start of COVID.
[00:20:40] Emily Connally: Yes, exactly. So basic science funds were rerouted to exploration of vaccine efficacy, basically, and vaccine risks.
[00:20:48] Susannah de Jager: At that time, I live in a part of Kidlington where there are quite a few estate homes. In fact, it's an old estate, and there are a lot of families that have three, four, five, six kids and when I wasn't going back to work during COVID, I kind of had this need to do something So I just thought about how can I help and what can I do? And I did grow my own food and had been, oh gosh, what do they call those homesteading moms or something, one of those homesteading moms, I
Stay at home mum is what we would call it in the UK.
[00:21:16] Emily Connally: Yeah, but it's more like the stay at home moms who like grow their own food, make their kids clothes, yes, exactly, I was one those!
[00:21:22] Susannah de Jager: You're the original tradwife, Emily.
[00:21:25] Emily Connally: it wasn't because that was my culture, it was just because I had so much time in the day that I had to fill it with something, right, and So, prior to the closures, I was becoming concerned about what was actually going to happen because we were going to have to close and I was very concerned about what would happen to families who receive free school meals in particular and those who have multiple children, that all of a sudden a family who, doesn't have the funds in the first place, needs to come up with food for when there's no food in the shops because of the shortages, because everyone is panic buying and so I wasn't really aware at the time of how bad the food surplus problem was. I was more aware of electronic surplus and in the medical industry, there's a lot of waste issues caused by the fact that you can't reuse items because people think it's not sterile or whatever. So I knew there was a big waste problem in general in society because I was quite climate literate, but I wasn't quite aware of like the food surplus problem.
But basically, I organised a few moms and we were talking about our concerns about these individuals and we all agreed to do a meal share plan and we were all moms who grew our own food and had, we knew we would have the supplies to help and we each agreed to make enough for the families that we knew would need it the most in our school, it was about 12 families. So I made this Google form, sent it out for those 12 families, but they ended up sending it to other people. So like on a Friday, we had 12 families, it was about 60 people total that we could feed and we had a rota for all of us to feed them and then by the next Monday there were 300 families signed up, and they were all over the country, and so then I started thinking, oh, this is a bigger problem than I can handle by myself. I need to, you know, reach out and so I started reaching out to places like FairShare and the food surplus units, food banks, food banks cap, who's allowed to come. So like our food bank in Kidlington only allowed 12 families at the time. They've increased capacity. So now they allow 18. So Kidlington has about anywhere from 13,000 to 20,000 residents, depending on whether you consider the surrounding villages, residents, so only 18 families are allowed to access the food structure at a time.
So the food bank couldn't help me, but Melvina, who runs the food bank helped me figure out how we could provide other services and that's how Cherwell Larder started. Basically, I went to Food Hub, which was basically just a big distribution unit with two volunteers and each of them had a van and I said I have 300 families. I might have had more like 200 at that time, and I said I need food for them and she said, well, what are your credentials? And I said, I don't have any credentials, you know, I just have these families that have signed up and they need food and she said, oh, well, you have an honest face and they just filled the vans up and then we had, there was a household in Bicester that they had deep clean to, sort of sort it into parcels and we had cleared out our garage to sort them into parcels and that was basically how Cherwell Larder started and everything was done above board, people would come and they could pick up their own, and there were specific time slots when they could come and drivers would come and I would just leave the gates open and they would have a place where they could come and pick it up and then they would leave and then the next driver would come and it was all done properly and safely and yeah, saving a lot of surplus as it turns out. I mean, all of that food was surplus that, you know, we didn't have to buy food to feed people and we fed hundreds of people. At our highest, we were delivering to 650 households a week using only surplus, right? That was eye opening as well, realising just the extent of the food surplus problem.
[00:24:41] Patsy Day: I was interested to see how we carry skills over from our one career to the next and previously you've described to me how the network started to form because you were trying to reduce the virus moving from different areas, even different areas within Kidlington and it occurred to me that you began to map your network and build the food bank in the same way that you mapped to brain.
[00:25:07] Emily Connally: It is a very similar approach, so it's the nearest neighbor approach actually. So, the idea is that the likelihood that people in a specific geographical area would have been exposed to the virus is quite high because they will have been exposed to the same shops, the same air, right, because they're all moving around together even if they're just walking their dogs in the same park. So, when we started having volunteers drop out, I reached out to recipients of the deliveries and said, can you help me deliver? And then we assigned people from those neighborhoods so that people would basically be leaving that geographical area. coming to the depot to get food and then going back to that geographical area so that we wouldn't have, say, someone from Kidlington potentially taking the virus over to Banbury and this actually ended up working really well because 75 percent of our households ended up staying the full 10 days in isolation and we really did keep the spread quite low, relative to other areas and Cherwell District in particular in supporting us and supporting that sort of approach to topping up food kept the outbreaks quite low.
[00:26:11] Patsy Day: When we've spoken to other women on the podcast, ideas have started as one thing and they've iterated over time and this seems to a point where you iterate it to more of a peer to peer model.
[00:26:24] Emily Connally: In the beginning, it was a peer to peer model as well, because it was moms basically feeding other moms kids. But then it quickly became a anybody who can help scramble, and then, as people returned to normal and people started going back to work quite soon.
So then, we returned back to that kind of peer to peer model where it was about neighbors helping the nearest neighbor and there is a real benefit to that. So it's not just in, this idea that it takes a village to feed a child It's really also in that you're then forming bonds with someone you'll see again, and you're becoming more connected to that space and COVID in particular isolated people quite severely.
So there was these benefits to that, that I didn't see until, I mean, I'm talking about transferable skills, so I didn't really realise those kind of benefits to that model approach until I started looking at feedback from our users and I would always get feedback from the users just because I wanted to make sure we were like looking after people properly. But as it turns out, that feedback allowed us to really understand why Cherwell Collective was successful and had a very different sort of impact than a food bank, and that peer to peer support is quite critical to that actually because it encourages social connection and reduces isolation.
[00:27:41] Patsy Day: Another thing about the feedback. Was that you applied your analytic mind to it and when you ask people, what do you want? They said, that which is not going to waste and again, that changed the whole model from a food bank model to a reduction of waste model and I wonder if you could tell that about the impact it has on the people who now use and support the Cherwell Collective.
[00:28:09] Emily Connally: To be fair, the supply was always surplus, but it changed how we talked about what we were doing to people, like to our users. So before, it had been about topping up their food once a week so that they knew they were getting some food, so they wouldn't leave their homes to help contain the virus. Then we wanted to know what kind of food they wanted because we needed to make some decisions about suppliers and then we found that the largest portion of the population came together around not wanting to waste food. So then that did feel very much like this opportunity to bring people together about like a shared goal, sort of a shared strength, instead of needing the food. So our approach then was basically thinking about, well actually, yeah, we do produce somewhere like 30 percent more food than we need and food waste is one of the leading contributors to climate change and why not tell the truth about how anyone receiving this food is actually doing the rest of us a favour because they're helping to build climate resilience. So we just started celebrating it and thanking people for helping us save the food.
The reports after that is that people felt a reduced stigma to taking it. People who previously wouldn't take it because they would never go to a food bank, because they wouldn't want to feel like they were taking it from someone who needed it more, felt comfortable taking this food because they understood that taking that surplus and using that surplus first is quite critical to preventing the damaging consequences of food waste and I think that became part of the approach.
[00:29:39] Patsy Day: And we're moving into the Christmas period of joy, but of excess. Please tell us what the Cherwell Collective's activities are gearing up for Christmas.
[00:29:48] Emily Connally: I mean so first of all, we really encourage people to shop surplus first. So this means secondhand items for any kind of gifts. Think about where your gifts have come from, so be informed, buy less but better, think about potentially having experiential gifts rather than more stuff and we facilitate that through No Waste Noel. So this is a marketplace where the vendors must repurpose items in order to have a stall and we have gift swaps where people can come in and just swap for another gift, we repurpose food in a, you know, our sort of street food offerings there as well through Climatarian Kitchen and we try to just offer an example of what a sustainable celebration looks like.
All of the decorations, everything are secondhand, nothing is new for this and it doesn't look any different than any other celebration. It looks just like every other Christmas market, really. So the Christmas market is No Waste Noel, and that's at St. John's. Church in Kidlington on the 7th of December from 11am to 2pm and so that's St. John's on the Broadway. After that, starting on Christmas Eve when the shops close, all of the food that they had intended to sell for people's Christmas dinners goes into the surplus chain and all of this food is ordered the Christmas previous, right? So it's based on what the ordering algorithms were the year before and there's always way too much ordered and especially things like brussel sprouts, parsnips, potatoes, bread, and like weird party food, like little pre made party foods.
All of this goes into the surplus starting on Christmas Eve. So we have what we call our, well, we used to call it Midnight Mass distributions, but we were told that was inconsiderate. So now we call it Midday Mass distributions where we make that surplus available for anyone to come and take it and we encourage people to think about not overbuying and not like stocking up their freezers, because there is so much surplus available, they should really stock their freezers with that and last year we went through about 50 tonnes of food in two weeks and what we do is we collect it sometimes from grocery stores, also Oxford Food Hub and Sophia collect it and we distribute it for them and we'll have entire pallets full of food and people can just come and fill up a bag, take it back to their neighbours and again, it's cream, you know, last year we did a big outreach with individuals showing them how to make butter out of the cream, because we had double cream coming in, in like 12 liter containers like two tons of cream, right? So what are you going to do with cream? Nobody's going to eat that much cream. So we did some tutorials and people were posting guides on how to turn that cream into butter. So you put it in the mixer, turn it into butter and then you can freeze your butter and you have a product that will last longer.
It is about using those resources and sharing those skills and it's great how people come together and say, and on our Facebook page and say, Oh, here's what I've done with this food and sort of show what they've done. But I really encourage anyone who can possibly save the food, to try to save the food, because there is more of it than you could possibly imagine and I think it's really, really important for people to understand the scale of food waste and when you see that Kidlington, which is still a village, has that much food going in that one period and then you think about, well that means actually all of the other places that are about that size also have that much food going in that period. You can feed thousands with this amount of food, you really can start to understand the scale of the problem that we're dealing with in terms of waste and overconsumption and overproduction and production lines are the predominant cause of climate change. So really we need to cut those production lines however we can. We think it's something that individuals can do quite easily is by shopping surplus first and then that informs that people aren't buying that at the shop and there's too much surplus in the system.
[00:33:30] Patsy Day: And we can find out more information on your Facebook page.
[00:33:34] Emily Connally: Yes, we're on our webpage, so www. cherwellcollective. com.
[00:33:37] Susannah de Jager: Amazing.
[00:33:38] Patsy Day: We have a question we ask all our guests, What advice would you give your 30 year old self?
[00:33:43] Emily Connally: Now that's really interesting. I had a different husband at that time and a much different career path. Maybe trust yourself? No one really learns from winning.
[00:33:51] Susannah de Jager: I like that.
[00:33:52] Patsy Day: What would you say to someone else who looks at your career and says, you've done such varied and incredible things, I could never do that.
[00:34:00] Emily Connally: I mean, I firmly believe that anyone can do anything that they want to do, but people need to think about whether they actually want to do it or they just feel like they should and I think whatever's making you feel like you should do something, if it's not your own sort of drive and curiosity and goals and motivation, maybe you'll feel content, but it's not going to make you feel like you're really satisfied or it's the best fit for you.
I also think a lot of everything you've ever done is always in your toolbox and in my view, especially when it comes to women, so much more is required of us to get through life. So I would say don't forget that those skills as well are skills that can help you figure out what is the best path for you and don't be afraid to, I don't know, be comfortable just saying, no thanks.
[00:34:53] Susannah de Jager: I love that. I think that's an amazing note to finish on and if I were just to play that back, we're talking about the explicit skills that we know we can take and I like the expression of toolbox. But what I almost heard there as well is that there's a whole lot of silent skills and perhaps we should do some work on identifying and valuing those as well. Thank you. I've loved this conversation.
[00:35:15] Patsy Day: Thank you so much, Emily.
[00:35:17] Emily Connally: Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.
[00:35:19] Patsy Day: Thank you for listening to The Wobbly Middle. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify, it really makes a difference and if you're in the wobbly middle of your career and would like to share your story with us, please drop us a line via Substack, Instagram or Facebook we'd love to hear what's inspiring you or, if you're out the other side of your wobbly middle, please let us know how you got there.