The Grey Space between Policy and People: My experience as an intern at MV

Mutual Ventures were lucky to welcome two interns in 2026 for a ten-week programme. In this article, Lubna Hamza reflects on her time at Mutual Ventures and her newfound appreciation of public services.

Before starting at Mutual Ventures, the world of Public services was a very distant land to me. Sure, I knew who picked up my bins, who I paid my council tax to, and who was ultimately responsible for the council estate I grew up on being demolished. What my internship has opened my eyes to is how these public services had formed my understanding of community and culture as at first a child, then a teen, and now a young woman who’s lived her whole life in London.

Before I started working in this space, my understanding of public services was shaped mostly by assumptions and a lack of exposure. Because no one in my world was exactly advocating for the value of public services, that gap in understanding quickly turned into a set of clichés about what they were and who they were for. I imagined them as dated institutions known for being slow to change, constrained by tired budgets, staffed by overworked people, and fuelled by a bureaucracy that felt worlds away from anything dynamic or relatable. In short, public services seemed like a difficult, grey system to navigate, one that people like me especially struggled to connect with.

It wasn’t until I started my internship at Mutual Ventures that these assumptions started to get disrupted. I very soberly realised that public services are not slow because people don’t care, but because they are inherently complex systems, shaped and constructed by rising and competing needs, resources and most importantly, real human lives. Immersing in the world of public services has quickly dissolved the image of a single, static institution and shone a light on a vast ecosystem of relationships, pilots, policies and people, all trying to solve problems that openly refuse to sit neatly within one organisation, budget, or timescale.

One thing that has struck me working within this space, was the experimental nature of pilots layered on top of pilots, layered on top of even older pilots and years of learning (and feeling) captured in reports, workshops, and case studies. This, at first glance, almost mimicked inefficiency, but was sign of a system constantly trying to respond to problems that are too complex for any single solution. This ongoing testing, iterating and adapting isn’t a sign of a disorder or fault, but the trail of a system doing its best to learn its way through complexity and uncertainty, even if the process looks imperfect from the outside.

Sitting with this complexity also meant confronting another assumption that there are clear right and wrong choices in public services. Through my work it’s clear that decisions are hardly ever straightforward or universally well received. Every intervention carries a trade off, and progress sometimes means holding space for iteration and testing rather than waiting for a perfect solution. This is when I truly began to understand why so much of the public sector sits in a ‘grey space’, shaped by teams navigating limited workforce, finite funding, and intense time pressures, yet still finding ways to respond, adapt, and move work forward even without perfect conditions.

The ‘grey space’ that sits at the heart of this sector isn’t just structural or bureaucratic but deeply influenced and moulded by the people it seeks to serve. It’s shaped by regular people navigating uncertainty, interpreting shifting, complex needs, and doing their best within constraints. Change depends not only on policy, but on the experience, judgement and trust of those delivering it, and can only be embedded when it’s designed with the people it effects in mind, and when the process allows room for learning rather than assuming a perfect answer from the start. The more I understood this, the more I realised that the grey space isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s where responsiveness, input and agility have the chance to emerge.

Working in the space of Violence against Women and Girls gave me a chance to experience this grey space in reality. So much of the work sits in the spaces between agencies and responsibilities; in the moments where practitioners are trying to make the best possible decisions with limited time, stretched capacity, and rising complexity. As I read case studies, traced how different services interact, and spoke with people across the sector, I saw how often progress happens through interpretation, professional judgement, and a willingness to act even when conditions aren’t perfect. The grey space I had been learning about became tangible, something that directly shapes women’s and children’s safety, stability and outcomes.

Spending time immersing myself in this work meant sitting with the emotional weight of statistics and lived experience but also finding grace for systems that are meant to protect, but do not always succeed in doing so. I became hyperaware of my existence as a women living in this city, and the distance between policy and personal safety disappeared. The complexity, trade‑offs and grey space I had been learning about were no longer abstract, they directly shaped how safe women and children are, how safe I am, and how public services can effectively respond when harm occurs.

As I reach the end of my internship with Mutual Ventures, public services no longer feel distant or irrelevant but deeply intertwined with my everyday understanding of life. I now see them not as rigid institutions, but as human systems doing difficult work under immense constraints. This experience has reshaped how I think about change, responsibility, and impact and has left me with a lasting respect for the people working in this space, trying to make things better, even when the grey looks endless and vast.