Blog

I saw Penny Woolcock’s On the Streets at the Sheffield Documentary festival in late 2010- it was a brilliantly sensetive protrayal of life on the streets in London giving real insight into the causal factors of homelessness.

At thinkpublic we’ve been working for a couple of years at involving users of housing benefits in the design of council services.  We used a lot of video to bring together local service providers and their users to idenitify problems with services and to work together to improve them.

Penny’s film seemed like a great opportunity to do this with a broader audience – to bring together homeless people with policy makers and service providers to develop a shared understanding of the problems of homelessness.  On the 24th of March we’re going to have a small experiment; working with The Young Foundatoni and Streetwise Opera we’re inviting a small audience of homeless people, policy makers service providers to a special screening of the film at the BFI.   We hope the event will provoke a constructive and useful conversation.

If you’d like to attend, or know someone that should please email me at ivo[dot]gormley[at]thinkpublic[dot]com

Below are the final week blogs from Cephas, Asha and Millie, three of our six prototype Community Coach volunteers. All the volunteers got together last week to review their learning and help us shape the design of the future Community Coach service.

MILLIE:

“I have really enjoyed being a part of this, and I felt really good about myself doing it. I felt useful and I felt as though I’d helped someone to feel supported and to feel happy… I’d been out of work for a while and has started to dip. So it was amazing to be asked to do this, it came at a good time for me and it has given me a boost. I have also really liked being part of such a different project, and I have felt like I am really helping to shape something”

ASHA:

“Hi, everyone.  I met with my family for the last time last week. The family member I assisted was a lovely married mother of three.  Her current occupation is a housewife full of life and with many dreams and unfulfilled goals.  She has few ties that are holding her together and are helping her fill in the gaps in her life.  I hope after our last meeting that I managed to successfully convince her that it is never too late to follow your dreams; I hope that I have inspired her to fulfil her goals.”

CEPHAS:

“I have been blessed to have had access to more families than I could handle. I picked one from among the coaches and a neutral one. I call them Diva and Adam, respectively.

Diva is a single mother of a seven year old daughter. They share a house with a larger family consisting of her three brainy young adult sisters and their mother (six females in all). I have met Diva twice. The first tool we used is the Wheel of All Sorts to check how balanced her life is. At the second session we used the Dream Machine and Goal Map to explore what she wants to achieve in five years. Prior to this meeting she has never had any long-term plans, on paper, taking life as it comes.

Adam is about 45, unemployed, and married to career woman on a low-to- average income. Both are on their second marriage. Mrs Adams has a teenage daughter from her first marriage. Mr Adam felt that once he is sorted with work/business set up through the coaching process the rest of the family would benefit from changes in his circumstances. On the Wheel of All Sorts he scored very low points (2 out of 10) on home, play and money; 5 on life purpose and 8 on Spirituality and Self-esteem.  The rest of the family could come on board later.

Adam telephoned me to arrange a second meeting yesterday. He came with some notes of the options he is considering. After about an hour’s session he drew up a short term plan for six months and we agreed to continue with the relationship beyond the prototype period.”

Just before Christmas I went along to the launch of NEF’s (the New Economics Foundation) The Great Transition. The event was to discuss the current economic situation and banking reform.

It was a really interesting event, and the way it was structured was excellent, with a soap box in the middle of the room with one minute “speeches” or points being made before you were ushered off.  It was really quick fire and energetic.

They had put together a one pager which you can get here, with some great ideas and advice on how the system could reform in the short term, and long term in order to create a more stable, fair and ethical system.

Over the past year or so I have become more and more frustrated with myself with how I spend my money, where I save and hold my money, and also the patterns of my spending. I have realised that actually a lot of the things I spend my money on make me less happy and make me feel less free.

What I found great, and maybe a little more inspiring, was some of the points made during the event about what you can do to put some pressure on the banks and Government to reform. But also what each of us can do if we are not happy with the our personal contribution to the current system.

Therefore, there are some actions that I have taken.

1. CHANGE BANK – I wasnt happy with my bank, for the service they provide, and what they stand for. I thought it was such a drag to change banks to a more ethical institution. So I have just opened a savings account for now, moving my savings into it, and some of my wages. Slowly moving across, by the end of next month I’ll be free from the bank.

2. STOP PAYING ON CARD – By stopping paying on card I can have a more tangible understanding of my money, how much I’m spending and how much I’ve got. However it also means that the banks arn’t making money off those transactions, and as someone at the event said they actually incur a small fee if we withdraw money and pay by cheques.

3. BUY LOCAL, LESS AND BETTER – This year I am going to strive to buy less stuff. The stuff I do buy I want to be of a higher quality, ethically produced, by ethical companies, and try and support my local businesses more and not take the easy (less tasty) options. Its really important to treat yourself once in a while and I recently read Amisha Ghadiali (Ethical fashion guru) blog post where she has some sound advice;

‘Try and set a limit for how many things you can buy a year. Make it the right number for you, think of how many things you usually buy every month or year and then take off at least a quarter.’

Also our everyday decisions can really have an effect. I’m trying not to think of these as resolutions, but more as a theme for the year. This way I hope it will feed into my everyday life easier, rather than being a list of things I need to do, but inevitably wont. It’s going good so far. I’ll blog my progress.