Sunny Side Up
We hear from Sally, Lilly and Laura how Eggtooth came about, from both sides of the process. We met in The Nest their very own all-purpose happy place, in Hastings.
Sally Greig Director and Eggtooth Founder. Incubate Music and Creative Arts Lead.
Lilly Cooper Former Social Media and Marketing Manager.
Laura Clarke Director and Eggtooth Founder. The Egg Mental Health and Safeguarding Lead.
With Eggtooth, The Nest and a podcast, you certainly have a lot going on. How did you get started on this path?
Laura. In 2009, Sally Greig and I worked for another organisation in Hastings, we didn’t work together, but we knew each other. We realised when we met that we had all these coincidences. We had come down to Hastings the same year, 2004. We had lived in the same area of London. We’d both worked in theatre. We got married in the same year, not to the same guy, and both wore gold. So, everyone was being made redundant; we sat there in a meeting, looking at each other, and we both said, now is our time; we had been thinking about running our own organisation.
Soon after that, we went to Spain to stay with Sally’s family, while sitting in a swimming pool we talked about how to invent the maddest course ever, how would it look? We had a few different ideas based on other age groups; then we went, no, what we need to do is work with year-nines (the third year of secondary school). When children are 13 or 14 years of age, sometimes decisions get made where things can go that way or another, and those decisions can be arbitrary. So we are interested in that age group. So we came back from Spain and recruited a psychotherapist called Ben; we decided whatever we wanted to do had to be psychologically and emotionally safe. So we went to the Hastings Academy to pitch our idea to the headteacher. It sounded a bit bonkers and had kind of been written a little back on the back of a fag packet. Essentially we were saying; we want to take your year nine kids out of school for a day every week and into the woods. We want to sit in circles and get good at talking. We want to do art, drama and go out into the community. She said, yeah, I love the sound of this; she took a punt on us, and so we started Eggtooth in 2011 with our first cohort of 15 year nine kids, and that’s where we met Lilly.
Lilly. I can relive those memories from that time; they are so vivid. Sally, Laura and Ben pitched it to a group of 12-year-olds; they pitched it to us before we moved into year nine. I was obsessed with the idea straight away; until that point in school, you never get told you should be selfish or that this is your time. Someone might rarely let you know that you are important. So we were in this room with these cool people who said we would like to take you on this course and do all of these incredible things because we want to help you know that you are valued; it’s all about self-development. To be told that as a 12-year-old was amazing! I thought, wow, I got the idea right away, and the rest of the group came round probably about six weeks later. It was all about consistency, going there every week; the course was long, so we created incredible bonds with the facilitators. It was a very special time.
The teachers picked the kids to go on the course; the idea was that the kids that were doing well in primary school in terms of grades. Then in secondary school, it looked like they were even going to plateau or their grades would go down. And that was me, I have always been naturally academic, but it didn’t matter; you don’t want to be bullied; you want to be liked. So that is what I cared about; I wasn’t going to try and do well; I was going to try to survive. Eggtooth made it, so students indirectly had better attendance; they made that happen. From a kid’s point of view, it didn’t feel like going to Eggtooth once a week, and you’re going to do better at school; it was never about that. Going to Eggtooth will make you feel better, and in turn, that makes you do a bit better at school.
Essentially, it’s based on an attachment theory, how we all need attachment and connection as human beings and how we can disconnect in school very easily because of the environment. And, if you are in a natural environment, like woodlands, and you are with people who are accepting and safe, you will reconnect with them and your environment more broadly.
Laura. I don’t want to say that we didn’t know what we were doing because that’s discounting, but it was a bit like that; to be honest, it was very intuitive. We planned as we went along, and our own experiences informed it from our school days, so we instinctively knew what these young people needed.
If you are trying to connect, you are creating solid relationships, and you are helping these people figure out their identity; in turn, that will help their mental health and function better. At that age, you are going through a transitional phase; you can feel a bit unstable. So having Eggtooth support us through that time by doing creatively based activities worked.
A couple of years later, we looked back at the modules that we had created, and they were based on a child development model, which we didn’t know at the time. Initially, it was about being with each other in nature. And then it was about doing, then thinking and then leading. We had created this modular thing, which led from the basics of being a human being up to when you decided how you want to be in the world. It was transformational when these kids were back in school, and there was a lot of, I don’t know what you are doing out there, but some thing’s going on. The results for many of the young people involved were quite extraordinary. But we were busy doing it, and we weren’t there to sort of track results. We did three rounds of those courses, so three cohorts of young people, and then we didn’t repeat it because it was all about the funding and how the academies changed everything dramatically. I don’t say this in a disgruntled way, but it wasn’t seen as being valuable to the academic world, which in a way, it really was.
Then we needed to shift how we worked; we started working in primary schools. We did a lot of work with parents of little ones and we worked on an attachment parenting model. So we worked with parents and talk about how they were parented. Then we’d work with the parents and the children together and look at creative activities again in the woods. These courses were three years in length sometimes. So it’s kind of an overused word, but what we offer organically grew.
Lilly, you were 12 when you first met the Eggtooth team; you attended, enjoyed and got a lot from the three-year course. You have stayed in touch and become part of the team?
Lilly. When I was 18, I had kept in contact, and we did lots of different things together as I grew up; Sally and Laura asked if I’d like to become a facilitator on one of the new courses. It was six weeks, a reduced version of the earlier course with just five young women in the woods.
Laura. It worked well because we knew that we had a significantly reduced time to engage with these young people, and the modelling is a very powerful thing. So we knew that if Lilly were there in the first meeting in school, those young people would watch how Lilly interacted with us. They would clock that and think, well, she’s cool, and she gets on well with them, so we can trust them. It worked incredibly well, and we did that with several different cohorts of people, actually smaller groups and for shorter amounts of time, but a similar kind of model.
Lilly. As Eggtooth grew, we got practitioners, facilitators, psychotherapists and counsellors involved.
Laura. There was a massive reduction in one-to-one mental health support for young people at the time. We used to have some places that offered free counselling for young people and they were disappearing. So we really noticed that whilst we were doing a lot of group work, if somebody needed more input, there just wasn’t anywhere to send them . So in the meantime, Ben moved on; he was a psychotherapist, so I did the same training as him. I wanted to understand the theory behind the psychotherapeutic input. Then we created something called The Egg, a specific therapeutic strand of Eggtooth that was about four years ago.
The pandemic hit then, of course, and we decided to put everything online. To allow people to self-refer as opposed to having to come via a school or an organisation. And then, suddenly, we had this brand new service that anyone off the street could get, for example, a 12-week course working with an artist, musician, a makeup artist, a cook or therapist. So, COVID hit, and we had all these therapists that could still work because they could do it online. And then the service just became super accessible, and it went mad from there.
What’s important about The Egg is how the team is growing. So it is like, we’re going to find the right person to figure out what’s going on with you. And then we can tailor our service to you. It is very much looking at the individual and meeting them where they are.
Sally. Roughly three years ago, we started to think about The Nest. One of the projects that I run is called Incubate, which is mentoring for emerging young artists and musicians. From an audition through to mentoring, recording, to performing. We’ve done three rounds to date, and we have always used venues for the performance side, which has been fine, but it has never fully felt like ours. So that is where the idea of having our venue developed from, and we call it The Nest. And now that we have a café, we can train young people in hospitality and have a place where people could come and train, which we had always wanted to offer.
Laura. It offers an opportunity for training and employment. The Nest is a blend of lots of things, event space, training for hospitality and therapy. We have a lovely café that offers food and drink and an alcohol-free bar with a stage with high tech sound, a projector, and lighting equipment on the ground floor. Then upstairs, we have a lift for accessibility. We have an open plan workshop space, which can be multi-use because it is all moveable. We have groups here, art workshops, parenting groups, and groups for young people. We’ve built two therapy rooms, so we’ve got an art space, a counselling room, and a commercial kitchen. We have been open for around seven months, so it’s still relatively new.
We feel strongly about how you combine something commercially sustainable, so not dependent on funding, which The Nest isn’t, but it’s got an authentic community hub flavour as well. And we’re getting there; we have multiple community groups that come and use or hire the space. So we feel like we are within our community, working with our community instead of an external charity.
Bird art by Luke Brabants - lukebrabants.com
You also have a podcast; how is that going, and will there be a second season?
Laura. So we talk a lot about mental health, well-being and how we need to look after ourselves. Especially over the last two years, that has been a conversation everybody has been having. How do we navigate this new terrain? We have all been impacted mentally and physically by what has gone on. So we very much bring ourselves into what we do; it is not the dynamic of a therapist that doesn’t share. We are very sharing, and we’ll talk about how we feel. So our podcast, Cracking on With Lilly & Laura, the episodes work well because people brought themselves to the conversation, with some deep, good stuff coming out of those conversations. From a wide range of people that we talked to.
Lilly. We’d love to make a season two; it needs to carry on. We had such good chats with members of our community. It was about the normalisation, being honest, open and having conversations about your mental health, which we all should want to do. So we are trying to find the theme and might change the podcast’s name. Also, the format might vary; we could talk about our work and experience sometimes and have conversations with others. It is great fun to make, and it is good to get two perspectives from two different generations; that feels important, I think. Season two is coming soon!
I’ve been doing social media and marketing for Eggtooth for two years now. I’ve been here from the start, so I am part of the voice, as I can tell our whole story, as somebody on the first-ever course.
We want people to know that we are entirely approachable and want you to come and get to know us.
Where did the name Eggtooth come from?
Lilly. The name got me interested when they pitched it to us; back when I was 12, it made so much sense. Some kids were like, what the hell is Eggtooth?
Laura. We heard the name some years ago, and we loved it because it fitted perfectly. So an egg tooth is a protrusion on a bird or reptile’s beak before it breaks through its egg. We thought what a fantastic metaphor that we are that tool for people to create their own breakthroughs. Then when they are ready, the egg tooth drops off.
We’ve grown so quickly, there are multiple projects, and we are so grateful for how far we’ve come and all the love we receive from our community. Our current focus is to consolidate and sustain what we’ve got. We have no plans to make a chain out of The Nest. We received National Lottery funding moments before the country went into lockdown. We are on the cusp of potentially getting a contract with the NHS to fund our mental health service. So there are amazing things that have happened, and we need time to settle and acknowledge that and make everything as good as possible.
Lilly. There will always be a demand for mental health services and support. To be able to offer our community this is incredible, so let’s carry on.
Eggtooth + The Nest
The Old Town Hall, Hastings TN34 3EW
www.eggtooth.org.uk
info@eggtooth.org.uk
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