Safer Communities Scotland Podcast

In our latest Safer Communities Scotland Podcast episode, we spoke with Jimmy Paul, Head of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit.

In a wide ranging discussion we spoke to Jimmy about the history of the Violence Reduction Unit and violence reduction in Scotland. We also discussed recent increases in youth violence and their causes, the changing nature of youth violence and how public health and trauma informed approaches help to reduce violence.

You can find out more about some of the items discussed in this Podcast episode below:

In this episode, recorded just before Christmas 2023, we were delighted to speak with Sarah Smith OBE, Deputy CEO of the Office for Product Safety and Standards.

Sarah leads the UK Government’s approach to product regulation and market surveillance, and legal metrology, including administering new sovereign functions such as designating standards and operating regulatory approvals processes and leading the programme on ports and borders interventions.

Our National Development Officer Kevin Chase spoke to Sarah about all things Product Safety, including enforcement, online market places and shopping safely at Christmas.

For our latest Safer Communities Scotland Podcast, we were delighted to welcome back former SCSN Board Member Stuart Stevens, Deputy Chief Officer of the Scottish Fire & Rescue Service.

The Scottish Fire & Rescue Service has already begun to see the Climate Crisis impact on their work - in particular via sizeable increases in flooding and wild fire incidents in Scotland.

We discussed the impact the climate crisis is already having on community safety in Scotland, what further impacts might come & how we can work together to adapt and respond to current & future impacts of our changing climate.

For the latest episode of our Safer Communities Scotland Podcast, we were delighted to speak to John Gibson, CEO of the Canmore Trust - a suicide prevention and support charity.

John founded the Canmore Trust after losing his son Cameron (an anagram of Canmore) to suicide in 2019. Struggling to cope, John made an attempt on his own life in 2020.

However, John is now in recovery and now uses his experience of suicide to help others, especially encouraging men to talk about feelings of suicide.

In this episode, we discuss John’s story, the Canmore Trust, the latest stats and research on suicide and more.

We’re delighted to welcome back Professor Niven Rennie to the Safer Communities Scotland Podcast, in his new role at the head of the recently established Hope Collective.

Our latest Safer Communities Scotland Podcast episode saw us sit down for a chat with Dr Vikki McCall of the University of Stirling, to discuss her work and some of the latest research on inclusive home adaptations.Kevin Chase, our National Development Officer and Home Safety Scotland Lead, joined the Podcast to lead the discussion with Vikki on how we can best design homes and other spaces to be inclusive, acceptable and safe for children, older and disabled people.

On 29th March 2023, the SCSN held a film screening of the documentary movie 'The Wisdom of Trauma: with Dr Gabor Mate'.

Following the screening of the film, we held a panel discussion with expert panellists - Aidan Martin, author of Euphoric Recall and CEO of The Scheme Livi; James Docherty of the Violence Reduction Unit and Katy MacCleod of the Scottish Drugs Forum.

We're pleased to bring you this panel discussion as a Podcast!

N.B. As SCSN is a small organisation with limited budgets, please note the sound quality may vary at times throughout the Podcast. We apologise where this is the case.

For our Safer Communities Scotland Podcast this month, we’re delighted to be speaking with Aidan Martin, author of the book ‘Euphoric Recall’ and CEO of The Scheme Livi.Aidan will be one of the panellists at our Wisdom of Trauma with Dr Gabor Mate screening in Glasgow on 29th March.We sat down with Aidan to discuss his book, his lived experience of trauma and what it’s taught him, his work at ‘The Scheme Livi’ and his general thoughts on the importance of and progress towards Scotland being a trauma informed nation.

In this latest edition of the Safer Communities Scotland Podcast, we sat down with Kirstie and Mike from the Cyber & Fraud Centre (formerly the Scottish Business Resilience Centre) - to talk about cyber security, why it’s important & what we can do to protect ourselves.

Below you can find links to some useful Cyber Security resources, including those mentioned in this episode.

In June 2022, we sat down with Mark Nicol, Community Improvement Partnership Lead at the Wheatley Group, to discuss their newly launched ’Keeping the Peace’ campaign.

This campaign takes a pro-social, early intervention and prevention approach to anti-social behaviour.  

We discussed what a pro-social approach to anti-social behaviour looks like, what anti-social behaviour is - and also looked at some other Wheatley Group campaigns designed to improve their communities wellbeing.

In this episode, we chat with Simon McLean, head of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) Scotland.

Carlene McAvoy works as Leisure Safety Manager with RoSPA Scotland and is also secretariat and founder of Water Safety Scotland.

In this episode, we discuss how community safety partnerships can engage with Water Safety Scotland, what we can learn from other countries approaches to water safety, impacts of climate change on water safety in Scotland & what people can do to stay safe around water.