Out of the darkness and into the light

Ossie Yemoh, Chair of B3 explains how his involvement at Lift has put him on the right path to achieving his goals.

 

 

 

 

I am a barber by Trade but I always felt an inkling to move into support work. In fact, I found that a haircut often turned into a counselling session for many of my customers! People always seem to speak to me when they are looking for advice.

I was in recovery from using drugs when I was referred to Lift’s employment service, and almost right away I had in place an action plan highlighting what it was I wanted to achieve.

Lift is so much more than employment support and my progress has escalated at a rapid but steady pace.

The support from Lift gave me the confidence to deal with my educational needs, tackle debts for the first time in years, and channel all my energy into positive thinking. For the first time in my life, I had the belief that I could translate my dreams of becoming a support worker into a reality.

I’m now studying a supporting needs of vulnerable people course at College and I’m a volunteer caseworker in Lift’s employment service.

Not long after I came along to Lift, I was told that a group of service users wanted to start up a group called B3, which sought to improve drug and alcohol services in Brent. I was invited to be the chair of the group which was a great privilege.

This group has now become the Brent Drug and Alcohol Team’s official service user Council. Through meetings with B3, we realised that there was a lack of safe weekend facilities for those in recovery from drug and alcohol. We decided therefore to start up BSAFE, a volunteer run Saturday social space, which will have its 1 year anniversary on the 14^th January.

Lift is a genuinely user led organisation, and this means that I have been able to get involved in a way that is not just tokenistic. I am a Board Chair and a volunteer employment caseworker, my ideas are not just listened to, they are acted upon. To have these opportunities is pretty unique.

All these experiences and responsibilities are putting me on the right path to where I want to be.

To put it simply, Lift has allowed me to move out of the darkness and into the light.

A diverse board: Mixing service user and professional experience

The role of a trustee is central to the success of a charity, and during an economic downturn, the survival of a charity depends greatly on the presence of a strong board.

If, like London homeless charity Lift, you have also embarked upon a rebrand of your organisation, the strategic leadership of a board is even more crucial.

Lift (formerly Brent Homeless User Group) was formed 10 years ago by a group of homeless service users who felt that the support services that they were engaging with were not meeting their needs as effectively as they could.

Over the last decade, the organisation’s services have expanded to cover training, education and employment support, and a research and consultancy service where service users are trained to help evaluate the effectiveness of front line services.

User-led ethos with professional expertise

The user-led ethos remains at the heart of what the organisation does, but in an increasingly challenging time for the charity sector, it was deemed essential to draw upon a greater diversity of skills and experience at the board level. The organisation has moved from 80% of its trustees being service users to 50%; a figure that the organisation intends to stick to. This has made way for new professional expertise, helping the charity to expand its services at a time when they are needed the most.

Lift’s tagline is “Lifting Lives, Lifting People” which was agreed upon through an extensive consultation process with the board, staff and service users. David Wright, a former service user and now trustee of the organisation came from a career in brand management and marketing, and played a crucial part in the rebranding process. As David says:

“Brent Homeless User Group was reasonably successful, but the name limited the organisation geographically and in its scope. We no longer just operate in Brent, and we no longer work with just homeless people. Many of our clients have been excluded in a whole number of different ways. Relaunching to Lift gives us the national identity that better reflects where we are now and where we want to be going forward.”

The right skills mix for growth

Wendy Pretten, a new trustee (pictured), joined the board after being impressed by the organisation whilst supporting them through a bidding process. Wendy felt that her skills gained from over 20 years in the social housing sector would complement the current skillset of the board by offering a national social housing provider perspective. As Wendy said:

“I got to know the work that BHUG did and was very impressed by them, especially their user involvement and the positive difference I could see it had made to individuals lives. I felt it had a unique product and service which filled a real gap, especially in these times of austerity measures and cuts in funding. When asked if I would be interested in joining the board, I readily accepted. I really wanted to support Lift to grow, develop and tap into potential markets across the country delivering essential services.”

The board now represents the mix of skills and experiences needed to govern the charity effectively. Martin Cheeseman OBE, the Chair of the Board, was formerly the Director of Housing and Social Care at Brent Council and as such brings a wealth of knowledge and contacts in the sector. Other recent recruits bring employment law, private sector, and advocacy expertise. Chief Executive Atara Fridler believes that the strength of the board lies in this diversity and professionalism:

“It’s a real privilege to work with a group of people that can bring such a wide array of skills and experiences to the table. At a time when we are competing for funding in an increasingly difficult environment, it helps us not only to survive, but identify new ways in which we can broaden the reach of our employment and housing services for some of the most vulnerable members of society.”

Client thoughts on Personalisation

Community Insight recently hosted a discussion with its peer consultants at B.HUG’s office in Harlesden, to find out what they thought of the future of supported housing and changes taking place in the sector. One of the discussion points was Personalisation, the provision within support services for clients to directly control a portion of the money spent on their support and spend it as they see fit (within certain limits). Those taking part in the discussion had some strong views on Personalisation and in particular what they would need, and want, to know if and when they were picking a service provider to spend their budget on:

“It is really, really important that the service user finds out what the provider can do because their money is allotted for a year, so if they use that up in the first six months, how are they going to manage for the next six months. So that information has to be out there, in black and white, clear, so the service user can use it and to be able to gain from that service what actually they want.”

“You might want to know what each provider is best good at, because they have their own specialist things.”

“You need to know what their performance is like.”

“I would want to know the price of the service, the cost, so I can choose.”

“I would want to know if there is continuation of the service after the initial period that you booked the service for or will there be pathways on.”

“Availability of the support is important, in terms of the distance support workers would have to travel to come and give you support. If every two days she’s going to say ‘I can’t come next week’, it’s going to be very difficult.”

Building a community

When it comes to creating a sense of community some organisations working in the voluntary and community sector have an easier time than others. If you provide an essential service to the people you work with, for example supported housing for a specific ‘client group’, a sense of community and connection will come automatically. This sense of community is important, for the wellbeing of clients, but also to sustain your organisation and bolster the sense of purpose that hopefully already exists and fuels hard work and commitment amongst employees.

But if you don’t provide a service that people depend on then you have to build yourself a community and create connections. At Community Insight we work with a wide range of people who come to us with different perspectives and sometimes exist in different worlds – by that I mean the world of addiction compared to the world of mental health, for example. There can be different languages, exclusive jargon, and entirely different ways of thinking between these different worlds.

To break down those barriers, to bring people together in more than a physical sense (because people can sit in a room together but remain entirely separated) we have been trying to build a community and create something that lots of different people can feel they belong to.

To do this we have started holding a meeting every two months (the Peer Consultants’ Forum), where we (the staff) can raise issues and peer consultants can table items for the agenda too. At the start of each meeting a new chair is chosen, to give everyone a chance at this role. So far these meetings have worked well as a way to get everyone together, although the attendees have changed each time!

We have also started holding supervision sessions every six months so that we know what our peer consultants’ goals are and what they would like us to do to help them achieve them. This has proved a great way to build better relationships with the people we work with, understand them a lot better and provides a transparent framework for the voluntary work that the consultants do for us.

This community building is likely to be a long process (Months? Years?), but it’s a vital one, because of the reasons mentioned already and because the more connected our volunteers feel the more they will want to be involved in what we do and hopefully play more of a role in making things happen.

Views on social activism

When our Peer Consultants were trained as community researchers the context for their role as volunteers was the Supporting People programme’s emphasis on ‘service user involvement’. Service users were encouraged to sit on management boards and take part in other decision-making forums to ensure that services were being designed to suit their needs.

There are obvious benefits to involvement in this form, for example it means (when it’s done well) that there is a partnership between the providers and beneficiaries of services that facilitates feedback and respect for beneficiaries that is empowering for them. However, sometimes it isn’t done well and this is why there is some criticism of this approach. One argument is that because involvement does not alter existing power imbalances it is just the people who make the decisions allowing those who don’t a place at their table – but without real influence.

We want our peer consultants to have real influence over the services that they and their peers receive. We’ve had a lot of success in making sure the ‘traditional’ involvement activities our peer consultants undertake are genuinely empowering, but we’re also open to new approaches to involvement – including social activism. We didn’t know what our peer consultants would make of the idea that they become activists and campaign in their own interest, so we asked them. A key debate that emerged during the discussion we facilitated was about what activism meant to them and the methods they would employ.

One opinion was clearly that activism would not be effective if it meant demonstrating on the street; you had to have influence in other ways:

“With the cuts that are planned and happening anything that anyone is demonstrating about is going to be ignored. It doesn’t matter that people are demonstrating if there is no money, what can the government do? The thing to do is sit at the table rather than stand in the street. That’s true activism.”

“To be truly active you have to be part of community engagement activities rather than protests. Street protests don’t change anything – it’s the wrong way.”

“You get more done by sitting round a table talking.”

However, there was a worry that if you didn’t protest your voice wouldn’t be heard:

“Activism is about raising awareness and following that up to make sure that the people who can bring about change are actually going to do it. These people can often be inert, so sometimes you need to go out there and protest on the street.”

A key concern about demonstrating was that it could have detrimental effects, something that supporters of this approach acknowledged:

“But protests get undermined by violence – it is human nature, regardless of the training people receive. Nobody listens if there’s violence at a protest and there always is.”

“Violence will happen but you shouldn’t be put off by that, it shouldn’t stop sensible protest.”

But the benefit to protesting was felt to be its power to demonstrate the feelings of lots of people:

“In a meeting there’s only you – in a protest there’s a crowd to show the number of people interested in the issue.”

The discussion ended with a clear statement of interest in becoming social activists:

“Being an activist in your spare time would be great – you would be putting something back into the community.”

This reinforces the central point made by the Manifesto for Inclusion – people from the margins of society have knowledge, experience and insight that they can share with their local communities. It also demonstrates they have a pretty nuanced understanding of how ordinary people can influence those with power and create change. We hope to secure funding that will allow us to provide the training in activism that the peer consultants say they need to take on this role.

Names matter

In the sector we work in, probably best described as being the social sector, it matters what name something or someone is given. Many people for example dislike the use of the term  ‘user’ to describe someone engaging with (using?) and benefiting from a support service. People inside and outside the sector often associate ‘user’ with ‘drugs’, so the dissatisfaction with this term is probably justified. Few of the people we work with who have misused drugs and alcohol want to feel like they are permanently labelled a ‘user’ when they have been through hell to stop ‘using’.

The term ‘client’ seems to have more currency and is what we as an organisation most often apply, though you’ll have noticed we’re still called Brent Homeless User Group (in our defence we were founded by a group of homeless people, so clearly the dislike of this name is not universal). The only problem we have with this usage is that our social enterprise thinks of clients in the business sense, making for internal meetings where who’s who can be unclear. To settle that particular problem we’ve decided on a customer/client distinction, but the use of ‘customer’ in the rest of the sector may not be appropriate – are people receiving support to deal with their mental health problem customers of the support provider? Actually with the introduction of personalised budgets they might be and that might be the right term to use, loaded as it is with concepts of choice and a market for goods.

Our social enterprise also uses a third term, Peer Consultant, to refer to people who we have trained and who volunteer on our projects. This moniker reflects their importance to what we do. Their lived experience is the expertise we draw upon to conduct field research and deliver training. It also reflects the change we aim for: the development from depending on a service as a client to applying skills and gaining confidence as a consultant.

Film of our ‘Big Society for all’ event

A Manifesto for Inclusion

At B.HUG we have been working for many years with vulnerable people who have experienced homelessness, addiction and mental health problems. We know from experience that while these people are often the most excluded members of our society, they each have different knowledge, experience and insight that they can share with their local communities. It would therefore be a huge missed opportunity if the Government’s plans to create a Big Society did not make provision for these individuals and ensure that they are included along with other members of our communities.

This was the starting point for our organising an event to discuss making the Big Society an inclusive project and for the creation of this manifesto. We do not see it as B.HUG’s manifesto, but rather the product of debate and discussion between professionals working in the voluntary sector and the people who are empowered, involved and supported by voluntary sector services.

We hope you will join the conversation that has started and share your vision of an inclusive society.

Atara Fridler,

Chief Executive, B.HUG

Introduction

On 1 September, more than 80 people gathered at a B.HUG-led event to discuss one of the focal points of the new Coalition Government – the Big Society.  Service users and representatives from voluntary sector organisations met at The Salvation Army headquarters near St Paul’s Cathedral in London to discuss whether a Big Society can be truly inclusive and whether it will really support local communities. The key question was how can we create something that we can all participate in? How do we create a Big Society that includes people who have been marginalised, that allows and encourages all of us to contribute as well as get the help we need?

The Coalition Government begins their explanation of the Big Society by stating: “We want to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want. We want society – the families, networks, neighbourhoods and communities that form the fabric of so much of our everyday lives – to be bigger and stronger than ever before. Only when people and communities are given more power and take more responsibility can we achieve fairness and opportunity for all.”

The Not just big but inclusive event gave us a way to discuss the creation of ‘a Big Society for all’ and made it possible for us to talk about a Big Society among people with firsthand experience of homelessness.  From the frontline of poverty, to the centre of a community of people who believe in participation, our discussion was about the possibilities and realities of a Big Society, the limits and lengths of de-centralisation and volunteerism.

This manifesto is the result of that discussion – this is the distillation of our hopes, concerns, and contributions to the development of a Big Society.  We are sharing this manifesto with policy makers in the spirit of a Big Society where everyone has a right and a responsibility to help direct the development of our communities.

The Manifesto

We support the cornerstones of the Big Society agenda: devolving power and responsibility to local communities, encouragement for volunteering, support for social action, training for community organisers, and the delivery of services by social enterprises and other non-governmental bodies.

We believe that the Big Society has great potential to change perceptions of marginalised people, to bring power to people who have lived on the fringes of society, transform the places we live in, and to address poverty by tackling exclusion.

At the same time, we recognise the challenges to wide involvement in a Big Society. We believe that everyone can participate and can be a ‘doer’, but only with the right support. Homeless and disadvantaged people need training to be volunteers and to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to be able to set up social enterprises and run other bodies, but it is not yet apparent what training and support will be available. Voluntary sector organisations that play a crucial role in facilitating participation and capacity building are threatened by funding cuts. Opportunities for participation will have to take into account the differing needs of individuals and groups, but it is not yet clear what structures and guidance will be developed to make this happen.

A Big Society for all is one that:

Shares information and resources with everyone

A society in which decision-making and service delivery are devolved to a local level will become more unequal unless resources and information are shared with everyone. The potential of volunteers to support local people in Brent will not be comparable to the potential of volunteers to support local people in Kensington and Chelsea unless both communities have access to adequate knowledge, funding and facilities.

Creates opportunities for everyone

Some people do well articulating their ideas in meetings, some do not. But there should be a way for everyone to bring their experience, concerns, and perspective to decision-making in a Big Society. New technologies and creative ways to participate in dialogue make it possible for a wider community of people to take part in decision-making. This should include people who have never taken part in community activities before as well as people who have, those who disagree with the Government’s ideas and those who are enthusiastic about them.

Recognises that everyone can and should contribute

A society in which marginalised groups continue to be excluded is one that will miss what people from these groups can contribute. We see the participation of marginalised groups as essential to creating lasting solutions to local problems.

Devolves power and responsibility to local groups and individuals

We support the vision of a society that puts power into the hands of grassroots organisations, community groups and individuals, and not only local government. We believe in local government that works in partnership with local organisations and individuals rather than leading and delegating to them.

Offers more than token inclusion and empowerment

The limits of participation and community-led development should be decided by people on the ground. The structures for decision-making and service delivery should be designed by the people who will experience the greatest impact of those structures and services.  A Big Society that offers only occasional consultation or places young people and service users in advisory groups will not truly devolve power and responsibility.

A big society for all is where the homeless and disadvantaged are:

Involved with their communities

There are many different ways homeless and disadvantaged people can participate in their communities, particularly when so many organisations and communities are in a state of transition, and as new technologies are becoming available to people who have never had access to them before.

Acting as community leaders

Community leaders need to come from many different backgrounds; they cannot simply be people who can afford to volunteer or people who already have the confidence to stand at the front of the room. Some potential leaders will need training, support, and mentoring to begin to serve their communities.

Having a say in budget decisions

Budgeting will play a major role in deciding what services are delivered, how they are delivered and who has access to them. Unless homeless and disadvantaged people are able to participate in decisions about local budgets, the impact of their participation will be very limited.

Having a seat at local and national decision making tables

Responsibility and power can only be shared when people from all different places in society – including marginalised people – are able to participate in decision-making on equal ground.  This means having seats and votes in national and local decision-making bodies, not simply participating through consultations and advisory groups.

Standing in local elections

A society that is truly inclusive values the input and representation of people from all backgrounds. Communities benefit from having elected officials whose experience falls outside the standard CV.  Elected officials with personal experience of some of the problems communities face can address them from a new perspective.

The next steps for the Big Society agenda should be to:

Promote what is already being done to empower vulnerable groups and individuals

Many organisations and agencies are specifically focused on empowering vulnerable groups and individuals.  Grassroots organisations as well as second tier and umbrella groups make it possible for small community groups and individuals from marginalised communities to link with one another, learn from one another’s work, and join with each other to make their voices’ heard. We want to know how work that is already taking place to empower people will be incorporated into and supported by the Big Society.

Provide adequate funding

Many community and grass roots groups are eager to increase local involvement and volunteerism, and also ready to support local delivery of services. They can play a key role in developing truly responsive new ways to provide local people with what they need, but they cannot do this without adequate funding.

Provide greater clarity about the Big Society and what it hopes to achieve

We support the principles and goals of the Big Society that have been sketched out.  At the same time, we need more detailed information about how the agenda will meet its goals, what plans are ready to take it into action, and how the goals match the needs and capacity of different kinds of communities.

Involve usually excluded citizens in local social action

By reaching out to people who are usually excluded at the initial stages of developing Big Society programmes, we can create an inclusive agenda that really meets the needs of the whole community, with solutions to local problems developed in part by those who have firsthand experience of those problems.

Educate and prepare private companies and others to involve vulnerable people in what they do as part of the Big Society

Inclusion and community involvement should be taken into account at all levels. Private companies have as much responsibility as individuals to support the local areas where they do business, and like charitable organisations and community groups they will benefit from inclusive practices.

Make use of the whole voluntary sector’s experience and knowledge

Community groups, charitable bodies and voluntary organisations are already supporting vulnerable people. If contracts for delivering services only go to large social enterprises and businesses, if second tier organisations and agencies that support and facilitate communication between these small organisations disappear, then the community groups’ experience and knowledge will disappear also.

What happens now?

The Big Society is not just a call for greater participation and increased localism; it is fundamentally re-shaping the way services are designed and delivered. We anticipate services shrinking even as need initially increases. We are concerned that the impact of funding cuts and greater use of volunteers will be felt now in the ways people live their day to day lives and in future years if opportunities to improve services through greater inclusion are lost.

It is impossible to create a map for a place that no one has ever been before, but we have a vision of how the landscape might look based on the places we and other community groups have explored.  We have an understanding of how to make our way there and what pitfalls might be found along the way.  We realise the kind of preparation we will need to meet our goals and we know what kinds of resources are required.

Finally, we know that while we want to seize opportunities that benefit our vulnerable clients and try new ways of doing things, we will need to plan for the transition to a Big Society as well and our planning should include the people upon whom this transition will have the greatest impact.

This manifesto is the start of a discussion that we hope will include many voices.

A Big Society for all

What better way to kick off this new blog than to talk about a highly topical subject: the government’s Big Society agenda. It would be fair to say that very few people know exactly what this agenda is going to include, but from what the Prime Minister said during this speech, the emphasis is on