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.

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.