It’s my birthday this week – I’m 52 – I know it’s hard to believe with my youthful rock star looks. Even at this ripe old age I’m still learning something new almost everyday.
Thank you to everyone who came along to the VIP3 conference in Wolverhampton this week. As always, it was a fun and thought-provoking day which allowed me to hear and learn from people we work alongside.
On Wednesday I went to another conference in Stoke on Trent organised by Expert Citizens, an organisation set up and run by people who have used services. They were able to get Lemn Sissay to speak there. I was totally blown away by this guy. His experience of being removed from his family and placed in care is a spectacular example of how not to look after children.
In my speech at VIP3, I said to my P3 colleagues and people we work alongside that I love coming to these events, and meeting brilliant people who have been able to change their lives for the better and who are, in turn, helping us to make our services better. But in some ways, I wish I’d never met anyone through P3.
I wish that the initial need that brought someone through the doors of a P3 service simply hadn’t been there - be that a roof over the head, leaving foster care, access to benefits, food poverty or finding the right mental health support. I wish that there was no reason for people to come to P3 at all.
This is no reflection on any of our services or the staff who make them exceptional. But what I want for P3, ultimately, is to shut up shop. I want us to get to a point where society takes care of people to the extent that charities like us simply aren’t needed.
We heard this week that Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world and head honcho at Amazon, has donated $98.5million to organisations addressing homelessness. As some have pointed out, the way big companies like Amazon conduct their business is part of the reason that societal issues like homelessness are so prevalent in the first place.
As long as big businesses are benefitting from tax loopholes, while people at the other end of the scale are suffering from public spending cuts, there’s a gap there. Often, this gap can only be filled by charity.
Charities are by nature, generous, big-hearted, caring and giving - all good, decent attributes which we should aspire to as human beings. But it doesn’t make it right that people are forced to depend on there being a charity in their neighbourhood, at the right time, who can help. It could be individual circumstances, location, or even just access to information that means people are unable to get that help, and end up slipping through the gap anyway.
“The point of post-1945 European welfare states was to free the needy from dependence on private generosity” – Peter Wilby
People shouldn’t have to wait for a benevolent benefactor to come along and save them when times are tough. The infrastructure should be in place so that the money they’ve worked hard for, and paid back into the state, should return to them as support and guidance when they need it most.
I’ll end this week’s blog with something that Lemn said in his speech, which shows why, until the state learns how to be compassionate and caring, charities like ours will always have to exist.
“When I used to ask the carers and social workers at my children’s home why they did the job, they used to say “because I love children. It was always that response which is heartening to hear, yes….because they “love children.”
“I wonder why then not one of them ever told me they loved me? It was always in the third person, always about a cohort of anonymous children but never me … never ‘because we love you’. I spent my childhood in a place where my basic needs were met and I was always asked what could be done to make my experience better. They never realised that I didn’t know what better was, what being cared for was, what being loved was – my lived experience was being fed and watered and I thought that was OK.
“I was a child and yet they relied on me and my experience to improve the services that were supposed to help me – involvement is pointless unless you can show people what good looks like.”
Thanks
Mark
We think P3 people have already got this in the
bag … celebrate the start of Advent on Sunday
with the Kindness Calendar
