viana maya is
relentlessly empowering
Viana Maya is empowering Scotland’s people by empowering Scotland’s institutions to lead with empathy and inclusion. Viana herself experienced the barriers to employment and social equity that are present in many of Scotland’s organisations, barriers that pushed her into a period of in-work poverty and homelessness. To help others walk a different path, Viana founded pRESPECT; a consultancy that doesn’t just work to support others to overcome barriers, but works to tear them down altogether.
Viana moved to the UK aged four from Luanda, Angola in Southern Africa. She and her parents made a new home for themselves in East London, where Viana spent her younger years growing up and watching her parents overcome hurdles to building a new life for themselves with refugee status. She witnessed the difficulties her parents experienced as a result of their involuntary new identities as refugees. From visa issues to employment challenges, she began to understand that a label like ‘refugee’ could determine your outcomes in life. In spite of the issues they faced, Viana’s parents worked hard at several cleaning and warehouse jobs and saved enough to buy a house and build a solid foundation for their family.
Viana herself was also learning what it meant to be an African girl in London. Code switching from her Western upbringing with friends to her African home environment with family, she quickly realised that to fit in, society and systems required her to fit a certain box. These realisations began to manifest in a worldview and ethos that put fairness first. “As I grew up, social justice has always been something that I’ve been interested in.” This outlook would go on to activate a lifelong pursuit of equity.
Another mantra that would determine her future was an early understanding of the importance of education. “The mantra at home was if you didn’t know something, you had to learn.” Viana’s parents were adamant in teaching her the power of education as a form of self-empowerment. This instilled in Viana a love of learning, and aged 19 she moved to a housing co-op and started at university studying business.
This is when life began to throw its challenges at Viana. Whilst studying, she found herself homeless for a period of time and decided to change direction and move to Edinburgh. It was here she discovered her love of acting and performance, and chose to pursue opportunities on stage and screen. To make ends meet, she simultaneously took up a job in care, and witnessed the disparity in treatment of care assistants. “I saw the difference in how people were being treated, how the African nurses were spoken to.”
After moving back to London with her partner and picking up a few acting jobs, Viana fell pregnant and found herself facing an employment barrier. “The world said ‘we don’t work with pregnant actresses.’” Living in in-work poverty, Viana and her partner were forced to leave where they were for financial reasons, and experienced for the first time what it was really like to access the welfare system. Viana discovered the logic and dignity that one had to lose in order to access the services they needed. She was informed that she and her partner would need to physically turn up at the housing provision with packed suitcases to claim themselves as homeless, despite the fact that they had an eviction date further in the future. “It felt like you had to lose a lot of dignity and common sense in order to access help.”
Viana and her partner were eventually housed into temporary accommodation where they lived with their newborn daughter. Purpose built for local authorities, her building consisted of 10 rooms, each of which cost £625 per week. In another nonsensical turn of events, she was warned off finding work. “We were told when moving there not to do anything silly, as in to get a job, because then you’d be sent that bill for that £625 a week.”
Although the law stated that families with small children should be housed in permanent accommodation within 6 weeks, Viana and her family were stuck in their temporary room for 3 months. After many calls and letters pleading for safer housing for her newborn daughter, Viana finally got news they would be moving to Barking. When they arrived, they found themselves in a flea infested flat. As they waited at the local Festival Hall for their home to be fumigated, Viana and her partner made a very deliberate choice. “That’s when we decided, if we stay within the system, we’re not going to leave the system. We’re going to be stuck and continue to spiral.” Viana and her partner decided to find a way out.
The first step was finding money to move out of Barking. Viana baby daughter secured a role in an ad, their fee enabling an upward climb out of the system. The family moved to Exeter where Viana had been promised a job at a family farm. When she arrived on her first day at work, however, she was informed that the job had been given to a friend of a friend, the contract nothing more than an empty promise. Viana once again found herself up against an employment barrier, this time in the form of nepotism.
Recognising that there were more opportunities in Scotland, she and her family moved back to Edinburgh. As she enrolled in online courses and applied for jobs, she was beginning to realise that to many, her labels outweighed her skills. “I was now a mature student and a mum and that’s all really people would see, everything else didn’t really count in terms of experience.” Viana’s solution was to upskill even further. “I saw it was actually easier for me if I went back to university and started my career from a graduate space.” With support from her partner, Viana enrolled at Edinburgh Napier University and during her studies secured a job as an employability coordinator working with refugees and migrants.
“That’s when I realised, with all my life experience from being here as a refugee from the age of 5 and seeing the experience my parents went through, then my homelessness and trying to find opportunities, that it’s just a vicious cycle that repeats in different ways and different forms.” Viana suddenly saw the injustice staring her in the face. Whether it was income, ethnicity, migration status, age or class, Scotland’s systems were packed with discriminatory barriers that prevented people from certain groups from moving upwards.
During her time there, she decided to do things in a different way, focusing on the person and not the labels. “When you’re under a label, either unemployed or homeless for example, people stop seeing who you are as a person. It becomes your identity. And that chips at you, because you stop seeing yourself.” So Viana implemented a person-first approach in her role, focusing on people’s aspirations and futures rather than getting stuck in their pasts. And her approach was working. She helped get people from zero hour contracts into good jobs in the likes of finance and policy making. On reflecting on the success of her strategy, Viana realised that Scotland was in need of a shift. “Not just a shift in people but a shift in policies and systems.” Because the people she was working with weren’t just lucky to get their jobs, they were actually overqualified. Just because they didn’t have a specific qualification gained in Scotland did not mean that they didn’t have more than suitable experience.
And so with support from the Hunter Foundation and Scottish Government partnership advisory enterprise, The Social Innovation Partnership (SIP), Viana registered pRESPECT and set about empowering Scotland’s untapped talent and transforming Scotland’s employers through inclusive, person-first consultancy. Early on in her journey at pRESPECT, Viana experienced a barrier to progress that came in the form of funding restrictions. In this instance, a funder who intended to facilitate her impact, was in fact hindering it as a result of prioritising a box ticked over a person supported. Viana’s acting background perhaps enabled her to see the conditions for what they were - performative.
Viana, therefore, decided to conduct research to build out data on the untapped talent in Scotland’s economy. “There was a lot of missing data in employability, especially employability aimed at minorities. As soon as you start talking about change, people say we don’t have the data. So I fixed that.” In her study, Viana proved that there was a huge disparity between the interpretation of people’s needs, and people’s actual needs. Funders, employers and systems alike were asking people to fit specific boxes to access support, when it would require them to go through discomfort and against common sense to do so, much like Viana’s experience with the welfare system.
Nowadays, pRESPECT has two branches. A Limited Company that provides equity focused training courses and consultancy products to employers, and a Community Interest Company that works directly with funders on inclusion and anti racism. This model allows Viana to generate income from training that feeds into influencing change in some of Scotland’s most powerful institutions.
Viana goes above and beyond to support those who fall through the net of the support system, even creating a digital food bank during the pandemic, for which she was awarded the IoD Director of the Year for Innovation.
Viana’s goal is to build true social equity and influence policy change by empowering Scotland’s organisations to empower Scotland’s people. She wants employers to see people’s potential, not their labels. She wants institutions to lead with empathy, not with checkboxes. But her ultimate goal? She wants pRESPECT not to exist. Because when she is no longer needed, that’s when Viana will know her work is done.
