Feeding beasts and boiling eggs

Another week on the Elephants Trail, with stops on route via Housing First, GM Systems Changers and Our Agency! Questioning when people in power are going to get real about inequalities and the only things which are going to make a blind bit of difference to whether people are poor or not! When are people going to understand that people being in dire poverty, but just about surviving and still managing to volunteer, isn’t OK? It’s exploitative and wrong, all whilst we allow beasts such as Serco to siphon off so much tax-payers money. All whilst the huge universities, media outlets and think tanks swallow the vast majority of money available for the production of knowledge, art and media.

Grass-roots groups living hand to mouth and propping up failing Health and Social Care and welfare systems? Check!

The people people doing so much to help their communities through this national crisis still being expected to feed their families on the ‘appreciation’ of those who control budgets? Check!

Community activists, collaborators and organisers burning out? Check!

A lack of funding for communities to come together to generate their own knowledge, their own art and media and their own solutions to social issues? Check!

Evidence of how much we are still feeding the beasts which perpetuate inequality? Check!

The hope which comes from working in the parts of the system which value lived experience in financial terms rather than mere ‘appreciation’? Check! The only thing which keeps me going in a system which, on the whole, values all the wrong things! It’s about the only thing which stops me from exploding with frustration!

Feeding beasts, why economies of scale aren’t that economical.

The current ideology around commissioning is very skewed. Most public money is commissioned and contract-managed in a way which strangles creativity, innovation, personalisation and coproduction. Do you remember us being promised these things through the process of privatising probation services? The work which was supposed to ‘Transform Rehabilitation’? When all the money did was feed huge corporate beasts and their excessive management costs and shareholder dividends. The beast then concentrates on expansion/world domination and fails dramatically to truly be ‘in the work’ alongside the communities they are supposed to serve. The narrative is that they are cheaper because they can deliver services on a huge scale, the reality is that they just fail to deliver services on a huge scale.

Those of you who know me will understand that my politics can be a bit ideological. I firmly believe that public services which require compassion, understanding and personalisation are rarely delivered well by private companies. But I don’t shy away from the fact that there are public sector beasts. Trusts and national charities which are designed solely by people’s whose belief is that top-down standardisation works. Their lens is informed only by what makes their jobs neat and easy. It leads to staff members making assumptions that it’s ok to teach grannies how to suck eggs, and a 22 year old, struggling with addiction and leaving home for the first time, how to boil them.

At 22 years old I was managing my addiction pretty well, I was on a small dose of Buprenorphine (an opiate substitute) and I wasn’t using anything illicit. I’d decided to try moving away in the mistaken belief that it would help me avoid temptation. The process of getting my prescription transferred was ridiculously complicated, I was given vague instructions about what I needed to do and I soon fell of my script. On the plus side I was given a book entitled ‘how to boil an egg’ which was, of course, my ticket to independent living. I didn’t need a smooth transition to services in Leeds. Clearly I also didn’t need linking to any wraparound support or networks of peer support either in Tameside (who could have helped me explore the realities of what ‘running away’ might have meant) or Leeds (who could have helped me settle in the area).

Huge public services are designed by people who don’t understand the communities they serve and these are the unintended consequences. Four months later and I was back at my mums, in thousands of pounds of debt and injecting a gram of heroin a day again.

What I actually needed was a combination of:

1. Specialist services who understood what transitions are like for people like me, who involve them in the co-design of services and
2. Properly nurtured and funded grass roots organisations who can have an understanding of me through their own lived experience.

What we are in danger of now is thinking that the latter is always ‘free’ (in terms of spend from the public purse) and will emerge solely from the good will of people in poverty who want to stop others from going through what they went through. In addition, because the ‘beasts’, in the form of many organisations with large public sector contracts, are so wrapped up in keeping themselves fed through:

1. Long and draining tendering processes

2. Winning enough tenders to maintain their bid-writing and back office teams

3. Responding to the over the top contract monitoring requirements, they often just want to transfer all the pressures of actually working with people on to the latter.

Cue the knowledge economy and their ability to convince budget holders they have a strategic fix to these problems. One person in the knowledge economy, who is being paid extremely handsomely to sell himself as the solution to our failing systems, told me that charities being over-burdened by the process of statutory services transferring this responsibility for service delivery over to them was, and I quote, ‘a good problem for them to have’. I’m assuming he’s not spent as much time as I have with burned out leaders of charities and community groups who are struggling to stay afloat financially (one person I knew was, at the time of that ridiculous comment from the false guru, working five days a week to meet the demand and only able to take a wage for two).

I can assure you that working way more hours than you are paid for because you can’t bear to see people left with nothing isn’t a nice problem to have. I do it myself every single week, but at least I am paid for more than two days of that time.

There are some parts of the system, which I’m fortunate enough to be working in, that are making concerted efforts to:

Do meaningful co-design and co-production

Here I will point to Housing First and the wider work going on through GMCA, The GM HAN (Homelessness Action Network) and the people coming together to form learning partnerships in the local authourities. This week as myself and Emily presented at the Housing First conference around involving people with lived experience in recruitment of staff, I felt privileged that GM was so willing and able to invest the financial and time commitment to do this so well. We’ve also been exploring how other areas of the country have developed Asset Based Community Development funds, with the aim to ensure those burned out leaders of small charities have enough opportunities to earn a fair wage for all they do for their communities.

I’m also really looking forward to GM HAN’s Legislative Theatre on Funding and Commissioning this coming week, where I have no doubt that new insight around these issues will emerge, alongside a strengthened commitment to working together to resolve them.

Connecting policy-makers to the stories behind the statistics

On Friday morning the Elephants Trail were in the Bury North hub discussing how to get the voice of lived experience to play a much greater part in the scrutiny and accountability of mental health services. We are preparing some questions for the upcoming scrutiny panel. One of which will be about the financial commitment to developing the community assets they are socially prescribing to, and making sure this is done in an equitable and ethical way, rather than simply looking to transfer responsibility.

In the afternoon we met with John Domokos from The Guardian to talk about the next steps in our project to involve communities in the production of multi-media content, and planning how we are going to support people with lived experience to get their stories across in a way which will influence policymakers and budget holders, whilst they maintain choice and control over how their story is edited and portrayed. The videos we produce will be a great complement to the podcasts Lex has done this week and the blogs, poetry and visuals Jules, Karl and Selva respectively have produced for the Lankelly Chase newsletter.

This morning myself, Lex and Karen were in a workshop with the awesome Sophie Yates Lu and learning a lot about the approach she uses for ethical and equitable lived experience storytelling. Investing both time and money into working alongside people as they tell their story in a way which makes a ‘call to action’ based on what the person telling their story wants to change. This gave me so much inspiration for how the Legislative Theatre tools we’ve learned alongside Katy Rubin, the journalism we’re learning alongside John Domokos and the creative tools we’ve been learning alongside Paolo from Fero studio and the podcasting Alexa has taught herself can be used to help others develop their authentic voice in an equitable and ethical way.

There will also be work undertaken through Lankelly Chase’s GM System Changers spaces fund to connect policymakers to people in communities who are creating spaces for people. In these spaces people come together around a shared identity, interest or experience and produce learning about the way in which systems in Greater Manchester need to adapt and change.

People being both paid and ‘followed’ as they find out what matters most to them

We want people who are living with disadvantage are going to be able to generate their own art, media, knowledge, enterprises and networks of social support and infrastructure. We want all the money which is spent on supposedly trying to ‘fix’ them (usually designed through the lens of what a rich white man with huge blind-spots assumes is the fix) instead benefits them and stays within their communities. The huge challenge in all this is people’s economic realities which make it so hard to prioritise the amount of unpaid labour that usually goes alongside learning and developing the type of skills the system values the most financially.

I have, somewhat, been able to go through this development process myself, but only with some financial support from family members, and not many have this privilege. These are the ideas we are starting to unpick in the Our Agency work, currently trying to design a mechanism through which we can follow people as they ‘try new ideas on for size’, working to unblock the things which would have traditionally stopped them from being able to try out the activities often reserved for more privileged people. We won’t be looking to lead people down a pre-designed path, instead responding with enthusiasm and resources when they tell us what matters to them.