A new web resource for advocacy?

So at about 8 o'clock last night I wrote about my wish to explore social networking and content management systems, and at about 11 o'clock some guy I met at a party said he thought Joomla was the best option out there, he liked my ideas, and he could offer some free space to start to try them out on... Maybe it's a good time for wishes...

I've spent a bit of time exploring Joomla today, and it has just won the Packt Open Source CMS Award (click on logo for link) as well as winning the UK LinuxWorld Best Linux/Open Source Project for the second year running. I was aware of the two runners up, Drupal and Plone, and I've also been looking at some of the also rans, most notably MediaWiki (a different type of CMS really, so not in the running). So far most of my attention has been on MediaWiki and Plone, although I knew Drupal needed to be looked into more carefully. Various examples of what I'm interested in include the townx blog (using Drupal, more than just a blog), Wikipedia of course (using MediaWiki), Schoolforge-UK (also MediaWiki), the Ubuntu Wiki (based on the MoinMoinWiki), the Free Software Foundation website (based on Plone again) and finally the Sheffield Social Forum Wiki which gives a good idea of how a community can be organised through a wiki.

I must say that so far I like the aesthetics of Plone and MediaWiki best, and I look forward to being shown that this can be emulated successfully in Joomla. I also think that it will be important for lots of people to be able to contribute to page content easily and quickly - and to feel like they want to! (like a wiki). [Edit 1/1/07 - looks like this shouldn't be a problem.]

First I need to get together some kind of spec for a website and start discussing this with people, and we'll see if Joomla can deliver...

Watch this space.

Things to do in 2007

Experience shows me I shouldn't be writing this - I usually do best when I sit down and write something spontaneously. I also want this blog to be pretty spontaneous - I'm not writing carefully thought out essays, just thought-provoking thoughts...

Anyway, there are a few things that I began writing and never finished, and a few things that I want to write about, and a few related things I want to do, and before I go out tonight I think I'm going to jot some of them down here.

1. Get a job. More about that later (any offers gratefully received).


2. Get some funding for Advocacy Action. It has loads of potential, but with no funding it's not going to achieve much.

But I want to focus on things for the blog here, so


3. I want to write something about risk management. I've started twice already but each time it's got too serious for a blog post. So I should work on a risk management policy, and blog about that perhaps. Something for the resources section of the Advocacy Action website.


4. I also want to work on an Engagement Protocol, hopefully for all the advocacy projects in Wakefield although maybe they would each have to negotiate individual agreements with the Council and PCT. I will probably blog about engagement protocols, their use and value, and the difference between them and things like quality standards. This will hopefully help me to get my head around what I want to include in the protocol I write.


5. I want to do a survey of advocacy related videos on YouTube and Google Video. I've found a couple of interesting ones, but most of the results you get from searching are related to political advocacy, and some of the others are quite dire. I need to set aside a day sometime for doing this.


6. I want to add some films to these online video sites. A friend of mine is interested in doing some video work with me, and I feel that the advocacy community should start making use of some of the opportunities offered by these Web 2.0 sites.


7. I did suggest at the NAN conference last November that one way of helping such a dispersed organisation get moving would be to develop more of a web presence. I will look at the various social networking sites like Ning and Elgg and the sort of 'community-based project management' sites like Basecamp from 37signals (and many others). Then I will try to work out how these resources could be used to support and develop our advocacy community. I need to do this by the end of January for the next NAN meeting.

Running out of time now, so more creatively...


8. I'm going to be a podcast host, all being well. I've had the invitation, it may end up being NSFW, but I may let people know if it happens.


9. I've got to finish off my posts about visctrix sometime.


10. I'm going to read Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (review, download electronic copy). I got it just after it came out in paperback in 2001 and never got around to reading it. I may even read Negri's The Savage Anomaly and develop my knowledge of Spinoza's ethics which I borrow from.

At the end of the day though, just keep coming back to the blog to see what's going on.

A cancer amongst charities

Last night in the pub we were approached by an ageing woman wearing a cowboy hat and a waistcoat covered with badges. As if that wasn't enough to scare us away, she then thrust a collecting tin in our direction and asked for donations to Cancer Research (or whatever it's called these days).

Now I think it's rude to just ignore these people, so while my foolish friends all put their hands in their pockets I explained that I never supported cancer charities and maybe she should consider collecting for some smaller local charities instead (like those represented around the table).

It turns out she's been doing the rounds of the local cities week-in week-out for years. She did Wakefield, Barnsley and Huddersfield one week, and Sheffield and Doncaster the other, one evening in each city. She claimed to have raised £140,000.

While I can only admire her dedication and persistence in some ways, at the end of the day I find this sort of practice both perverse and divisive. I've decided to use this strong language – maybe a bit stronger than I really need to, but it does serve to emphasise the point in a way that needs to be done occasionally.

So here I get the chance to explain myself in a bit more detail:

1. OK so I've spent ten years working with vulnerable and disadvantaged people, but I put the emphasis on working with them, and I think that charities need to get away from the patronising approach to helping the needy.
2. Really being a charity is a tax choice. If you are a registered charity (or you have charitable status in whatever way) it means you enjoy certain tax breaks. Yes, it also means that you agree to follow charity law, including limiting your work to certain areas and not making a profit, but at the end of the day you agree to do this so you can enjoy the tax breaks.
3. Cancer charities spend a lot of money on expensive laboratories, highly paid researchers, and glossy marketing. The people we are supposed to be working with are rarely in sight, except maybe as guinea-pigs. I support hands-on, grounded charities that are working directly with people and with volunteers and who see the value in cheaply photocopied annual reports or newsletters.
   
4. The big headline charities are getting more public donations and more Government contracts (see this article from 2003, no time now to search for anything more recent). This is at the expense of smaller charities and other voluntary sector organisations.
5. I don't really support street collecting, or its close relative TV campaigns. It's not all bad, but I'm not trying to give a balanced view right now. It's very easy to put 2p or £10 in a charity box, or even ring up and give £100 from your debit card, but you have very little connection with the result - it's just a feel-good thing really (and that's assuming it wasn't 2p just so the girl you're trying to impress doesn't think you're tight...)
   
6. In terms of cancer in particular there seem to be some very ironic competing urges in Government policy. Yes they are finally moving towards banning smoking, after many years campaigning, but they are still only taking small steps in this direction, and what about all the other environmental hazards that seem to increase our risk of cancer:
• holidays in the sun...
• destroying the ozone layer in our cheap planes on the way there...
• all sorts of other pollution in air and water from commerce and industry
• additives in foods
• pesticides and herbicides (on food and in the cotton in our clothes)
  
• powerful detergents and all sorts of other chemicals in our homes, offices, and in the streets
• prescription drugs
• and many others
It seems that much of our economy is based on cancer inducing chemicals, and rather than taking affirmative action to avoid these, the Government and the cancer charities seem determined to just add to the whole system - more investment in chemicals, more refusal to address the underlying problems.

There may be other issues, but that will do for now. Basically if you want to support charitable activities the best thing you can give is your time, your energy, and a bit of your human self. In most of the work I've been involved in, people are most grateful for a bit of human contact and respect, someone to talk to, someone to bring a bit of happiness and involvement into their life, something that will enable them to feel as if they've been able to make a contribution to something. I don't think these big laboratories and research projects will ever have as big an impact, and I'm quite happy to continue to give a bit of lip to the collectors who are out harassing me on my nights out.

Don't write everything...

More christmas drinks...

I met a social worker from another town. Seems like she challenges expected practice. Had a nice chat with her...

One thing that stuck out. She was asked to do a social circumstances report for a MHRT with about 3 days notice. On her first visit to the patient she decided he was too sedated to engage properly, she told staff she would come back the next day and she hoped his medication would allow her to talk to him properly. This didn't happen - his meds were still too high, and she couldn't get the information she needed from him.

The report she wrote was therefore very brief. It mainly said that she had been unable to get sufficient information to be more comprehensive. She then came under some pressure to explain why she hadn't gone into full detail (although she had explained this in the report).

It struck me that very often people are expected to deliver comprehensive reports, but also very often it is difficult to be so comprehensive. Social workers and psychiatrists and others use their professional experience and judgement to fill in the gaps, which is of course what they're trained and paid to do. The problem is twofold: that this gap-filling process is fraught with difficulty (it's hard enough to assess how people are, let alone guess what fits in the gaps); and the second problem is that whatever is written could well be referred to for years after.

These two small problems combine into one big problem: the guesses people make with the best of intentions then become the 'truth' that can dog the patient for years to come.

What a good idea then to produce a minimalist report that leaves gaps where there are gaps - at least there are fewer chances of making mistakes that could affect people for years...

Another way of saying what I'm trying to say: when we work with people with mental health problems, in fact whoever we're working with, there are bound to be gaps in our understanding and assessment of them... what we need to do is acknowledge these gaps and let them be reflected in our reports, instead of trying to be comprehensive and ending up misrepresenting people.

A resolution for 2007? Shorter reports, more gaps?

The road to success - don't be an advocate

Just had a quick christmas drink with someone in the pub, and they admitted that the reason they were being more successful in their job was because they'd finally realised that they shouldn't always try so hard to be an advocate...

Maybe everyone thinks this, but I do still believe the Wakefield is a more difficult place than many to be a proper advocate. The fact is that politics is still so important, sometimes it seems like you get better results if you play the game. So you sacrifice advocacy for results...

My friend thinks there will be a backlash against the increasing professionalisation of advocacy, and that projects like his, like IMCAs, etc, will eventually be rejected by the common people who want a 'proper' advocate who is going to try to make their voice heard rather than just try to get the result they want.

I think this is a challenge many of us are facing, in various ways...

Cool Yule

Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, celebrated as Yule in the old Celtic calendar.

This solstice was well known a long time before people developed instruments to measure this sort of thing. People were aware of it because they were aware of the changes in the seasons and the wider world around them. From tomorrow the days start getting lighter and the nights start getting shorter.

When the 'pagan' celebrations were taken over and lost by things like christmas, we lost.

I hope you can enjoy some sort of celebration tomorrow - have a cool yule!

I'll also wish you a happy new year, and all the best for 2007.

(Although actually the Celts celebrated new year at the Spring Equinox, 21st March, when the daylight becomes longer than the night. This is also the New Year in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish lands amongst other places, known as Newroz.)

Internet Explorer still not working

N.B. Now fixed, 20 December. Thanks to Christine - see comments.

I wrote a post some time back about the benefits of Firefox (a far better way of browsing the web).

I am shocked and disappointed to find that this new blog, based on a new standard Blogger template, doesn't display properly in either IE6 or the new IE7.

The banner at the top is orange, the title Advocacy Blog is a link, and the photo of lichen from Moel Siabod should neatly fill up just the subtitle row with the text showing up neatly on top of it (no white background).

IE just doesn't work.

Now I think Blogger must have some responsibility for this - I'd expect them with their expertise to be able to create templates that work in IE.

On the other hand all web designers know that IE is notoriously difficult to make pages work in, especially if you're interested in accessibility and standards compliance.

So to all you IE users, please switch to Firefox so you can see this post in the way that it's intended. (Feedback from any Safari (Mac) users would also be welcome here.)

Self-healing systems

[End of post edited 16/12]
When we think of cybernetics we usually think of bits of machines being incorporated into people, but this is an error caused by film and other media. It's actually a useful idea for patients in psychiatric hospitals and many other people too...

Cybernetics is really about self-managing systems. It comes from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kubernites - meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder; the same root as government).

A very simple example of a cybernetic system is a bathtub. You turn the taps on and go to make a cup of tea or iron some clothes. There's plenty of space to hold the water most of the time, but the space is limited. If you are distracted by whatever else you're doing, there is a safety mechanism: the overflow. When the water level gets too high, it starts to escape down the overflow. This is self-managing in a way - you don't need to intervene in order for the overflow to start to work - it works when a predefined critical point has been reached.

In a way this example is oversimple: it almost fails to be cybernetic because it is only a very primitive loop (and the taps fill the bath up quicker than the overflow can empty the excess water, so it does overflow eventually anyway. There are more impressive examples from many fields, but I think this one reflects nicely on the fragility of the cybernetic system that is the human body.

Which brings me to my experiences in psychiatric hospitals, and out in the community for that matter. Quite a few years ago now I read some of Carl Jung's writings. While I liked these quite a lot, I always felt that he was just missing some of the context of what he was thinking about and I never bothered remembering sources or doing anything too 'academic' with what I was reading.

Despite this I now find myself regularly recalling an idea I certainly read in Jung's work, though I can't find a direct source tonight. I talk about this to people and it seems to help (but I don't go into the detail I'm mentioning in this post).

What Jung said was that as we live our lives we develop 'habits' (this may be my term, but I know he was a fan of Bergson too) to deal with situations we come across regularly. So we go to work and we have quite a small range of different things we need to deal with, and at root there is only one thing we need to do - 'our job'. There is a similar situation at home and in the other places we go to regularly.

I don't have space to go into it in detail here if you haven't come across the idea before, but many people have observed and commented on the role of habit in our lives. In many ways we let the habits get on with themselves so we can concentrate on the more interesting things in our lives.

The problem comes because the world around us is constantly changing, and over time the habits we developed to be able to cope with the world usually begin to fall out of sync with the changes around us. The fact that we don't pay much attention to our habits makes this even more of a problem: we do things automatically because in the past they've helped us to live, but now as our automatic, habitual actions begin to cause us problems we remain blind to the cause as we're not paying attention to those parts of our life.

So we find ourselves increasingly having problems that are distressing because we can't understand them - they even seem irrational and unjust. The natural self-healing process that then comes into play often characterised as depression, although it can appear in slightly different ways or be given other labels. The point is that even if our conscious mind can't see what's happening to us, our subconscious can feel it and does react. The subconscious reaction is not particularly directed or understandable (my earlier post on the space not enclosed by words is relevant here in a way) but it takes the familiar form of a 'turning-in-on-oneself'.

The outward affects of this 'turning-in-on-oneself' are a tiredness, a difficulty in engaging with people or things, a slowing down. Eventually the conscious thought processes that define us as individuals can become so broken down that strange and unruly elements of our subconscious are regularly coming through into our consciousness. Sometimes these incursions of the unconscious are distressing and unpleasant, but some of them are much more positive. The key that Jung discovered is to engage with them. This is one element of his work that became a foundation for the various practices of psychotherapy that we find today. We can engage in them through journal-keeping (or other forms of writing), through drawing or painting, or through a range of other expressive practices.

Eventually, after the body has been shut down sufficiently to break the bad habits that have been constraining it, the idea is that we will be able to begin to go in new directions, begin to learn new approaches to dealing the world, techniques that will hopefully become habits that are more appropriate to today's world.

OK, so I said I don't go into that sort of detail. I suppose the main thing is the idea of habits, those habits getting out of sync, and then our bodies shutting down so that we can have a new start. This is a positive way of thinking about mental distress that seems to be sadly lacking in some institutions (as far as I can tell from what the patients say to me).

[added bit:] The question is, how can this be used, especially from the more non-interventionist stance of an advocate. Clearly it would be wrong to go and start talking to all our new clients about this idea: the main thing is to get people to speak out, and it's important that we concentrate on listening at first. I think it's more about putting things into context, especially after we've known people for a while. Advocacy isn't all about listening, it's more proactive than that, we set goals and develop action plans, and in between we need to care about the relationship we have with our partners. This relationship needs to be empowering, and it seems to me that helping people to find a context where their 'illness' can become more of a 'healing process' can help to give a little more hope to their situations. [end edit]

A more extreme example: when a very ill patient talked about his medication killing him, and wanting to die anyway but not by being poisoned by doctors, I talked about these ideas very productively with him. I explained the idea that mental illness was a self-healing process, that it could be seen as a 'little death' - a death of the old to make way for a renewal, and that these feelings of dying were a natural part of the process. I even went so far as to suggest that in a way the meds needed to make him feel like they were making him die, as they were trying to help him along and speed up this process of (partial) death and rebirth (though I think this is probably taking the analogy a bit far). N.B. Please see the distressed comment and my reply below.

I hope that some people who read this may get some insight, that this may ring a bell or touch a cord of recognition inside you. If that does happen then you'll find your own way of using the idea in your practice.

This is not advocacy in its pure form. I struggled with doing this sort of thing at times, and I do it sparingly. I do think it's relevant to engage with people in a wider and deeper context as an advocate than would happen if we simply did our jobs. Of course citizen advocates and others have known and practiced this for ages, and perhaps it's because my recent role has been as a professional/case work advocate in a very formal setting. I did also touch on these issues in my earlier post about advocacy and therapy.

I'm going to publish this without even proofreading as it's getting late. I hope it's come out ok.

A4A Forum

I've linked to this already in the external links section down on the left, but it's worth adding in a separate post.

While this blog is about advocacy, it's still quite quirky and personal. I am trying to stir up thought, and even controversy. I do think that this will gradually have the effect of developing a resource that people can hopefully use.

The Action for Advocacy Forum on the other hand is a much more serious and accessible place where some similar discussions are being had. I try to contribute to it as well (though I had quite a lull after I started this blog). Last night I added my bit to a discussion on confidentiality in advocacy practice, I've also added some thoughts about conflict of interest policies and independence, a case around reporting abuse (also covered under the confidentiality post), and various other things.

The great thing about the forum though is that there are loads of people, and it's attached to a prominent and vital organisation (A4A). There are currently 110 members and 288 articles about a wide range of subjects.

The one frustrating thing for me on the site is that the discussions and contributions are usually quite short. I personally don't think any important question can be answered without at least 1000 words (!) and I was writing too much there so I made this blog for my verbal excesses. On the other hand, these are busy advocates contributing to the forum, and the articles and responses are far more approachable than this blog for many people.

Anyway, if you haven't already, go there and contribute. The A4A forum is another important resource for advocacy.

Getting the house in order

Or rather the Home Office...

All I could do was laugh when I read that

"The Home Office does not have adequate controls to reconcile the payroll and personnel records to determine exact staff numbers."

The Guardian, 11/12/06

I think the laughter was more out of fear than real mirth, but it seems deeply ironic that the body behind all these sudden withdrawals and demands for reassessment of incapacity benefit and disablility allowance is in itself in such dizzy disarray.

Either the Home Office should immediately suspend all funding to itself for six months and force each employee to complete a 29,000 page questionnaire; or alternatively it should develop a monitoring system that more properly reflects the new professional standards that the government is clearly so keen on embracing.

Spam Shakespeare

If we sat a load of spammers in front of computers, gave them drip-feeds and catheters so they had no need to go anywhere, eventually, the story goes, they would spam us all with Shakespeare (if we haven't all ripped out our internet connections in terror before then...)

Actually sometimes I find we're not so far from that already. I get quite a lot of spam that appears to be made up of sentences gleaned from various web pages and then cut up and reorganised. I don't know which websites they use, some seem quite literary, some pretty trashy, some boringly technical, presumably none too high profile.

I remember the first time I got one I thought it was very strange and interesting. It was very short, had no links or images, and I spent a while wondering whether it came from a real person or was an attempt to get me to confirm my email address. In the end I waited, and sure enough more started to come in. Now I don't usually bother looking at them, but this one today reminded me of that first moment... There are too many of these really, and I've deleted a lot, but take any bit on its own and see if you can make any sense of it, it's quite an amusing distraction (these lot would have enjoyed it at least).

Together firmly mandates outcome determined upcoming wishes problem. Cia, married, arrested escapes kills. Handles seventytwo, traffic while consumes sixteen.

Playing isnt, fun, debut earlier.

Again, illuminate job guides talking printed. Zealot generally turn down speaking those? Join book club australia categories arts childrens literature.

Moonraker bernard lee spoof cut cast crew bondrobert.

Locate outside must mind when assessing benefits proposed affect.

Defying, sounded, cool drag solid progressed slow fake hookey.

New look

So I finally got the invitation to upgrade to Blogger Beta, and ended up going the whole hog and setting up a completely new design and colour scheme!

I hope it works. I'll try out the colours for a while and may revert, but as for the layout I think this is a big improvement, especially the new Archives, the bigger text, and the fact that most of your screen should be used (plus IE users will be able to see the sidebar now hopefully).

I also like the new labels which should help people find their way around a bit better (once I've added appropriate labels to all the posts that is...)

I've managed to sort out a couple of niggling little problems so far. I even created a new class in the css so I could format my name (that's hard-core programming for me!). The fact that the blog title is not aligned with the sidebar text is an ongoing annoyance though.

Let me know what you think.

Xmas list

Not that I believe in this sort of thing really, but take a look at this for an inspiring list (and I own none of them yet!)

The Atlas Arkhive

:-)

Street Angels in Wakefield

I was part of an interesting experiment last weekend, volunteering to be a Street Angel on their first weekend in Wakefield city centre.

As Street Angels we try to offer a safety net for people who become vulnerable, mainly around the main clubbing area at the top of Westgate, but also potentially as far as Henry Boons or Kirkgate and the bus station. We met all sorts of different people, but we expect our main focus to be people who have become vulnerable after too much alcohol. We go out on Friday and Saturday nights between 9pm and 3am in teams of three or four, and we have a base in the Westmoreland Centre that offers a safe place where people can come to get warm, have some water or a hot drink if they need it, and we hopefully work with them to make sure they can get home safely.

It was an experiment because it's the beginning of a pilot scheme that will run until New Year's Eve, that's 12 nights over the next five weeks. The project was initially proposed by the Wakefield District Partnership's Sustainability Advisory Group. Trying to show that their work wasn't all about Fairtrade and recycling, they were looking for a practical project that could make a real difference with a low investment through partnership working.

The model was provided by the Street Angels project in Halifax, set up last year. They have provided a lot of support and information to the Wakefield pilot, including their name. Other partners include Wakefield MDC, West Yorkshire Police, Wakefield Churches Together, Wakefield Cathedral, and Urban Space, together with numerous individuals (this isn't an official blog, just my observations, so sorry to whoever I've missed out). There are already 40 volunteers and we hope to get a few more over the coming weeks.

It's an interesting project to be a part of, butI'm beginning to feel a bit like I'm writing a travel brochure... I think it gives a good background, but what happened on the night though?

Well, apparently, we saved three arrests (I think), two of which would also have meant that a police officer would have had to take the person to A&E and wait until they were discharged back to the cells - all using up valuable time they could be using on the streets. We also helped about half a dozen others. One young woman was eventually taken home by the police and her father rang us later to thank us for our help. Another man was picked up by his mother. Both of them had suffered minor cuts to their faces and were in a state where it took over half an hour to get them to shelter initially and then over an hour each before they were taken safely home. In both cases if we hadn't been able to help then the police would have ended up arresting them, something no one wants to happen.

We also seem to have made a good impression on the Nightlife Marshalls which is useful because they seem to be the main calming and managing influence on the City Centre. We in return were very impressed by them, and they also seem to have an important caring role, offering first aid and managing taxi queues as well as being able to respond rapidly to any incidents along Westgate. The Nightlife Marshalls also work very closely with the doormen who also offered us a warm welcome as we started to discover our place in the night-time economy of Wakefield.

It was a nice quiet weekend, and the rain held off until about 2am on the second night. Friday in particular gave us very little work and was a good opportunity to get a feel for the role before the hard work really sets in nearer Christmas. Starting at 9pm we do a briefing and then go to a Police briefing with the Nightlife Marshalls. We have radios linked into the CCTV system which is also used by the Police and the Nightlife Marshalls - these were used to call us to the help of various people through the weekend, and can also track people who are identified as a risk as they move through town.

The easy start on Friday was useful as on Saturday night things were much busier. We got the last woman safely in a taxi at about 3.05 and all felt as if we'd done a good night. Quite a few people stopped and talked to us and a lot of people must have seen the papers because they were recognising us and shouting out Street Angels. There was a small amount of vaguely abusive comments, 'you look like twats' being most common, but it had a fair amount of truth to it, so I could only laugh - nothing threatening.

I'm going on a bit here, but it's my blog and I'll ramble if I want to.

So to ramble on to something maybe a bit more relevant to an advocacy blog, I'm wondering about the links and differences between the experiences.

The thing that stood out for me is that rambling drunk people don't hang around for the supportive empowering approach we take such trouble to practice. I was reminded more of the mountain rescue man who once shouted questions at me to say my name, what day it was, where I was, etc, etc, insistently for ages to stop me from falling asleep. That's another story, but I did find myself suddenly being forced to give orders: Stop; You Don't Know Where You're Going; You Have To Get Some Help. I managed to get his consent to this before I commanded: Come With Us Now. It worked. I don't think I'll be changing my career though.

In fact the delicate matter of gaining consent, and not being offended at any abuse hurled at you in the process, was important on the night too. Understandably when people have just fallen down drunk, their body takes over and most of their attention is focused on calming their churning stomachs and spinning heads. They probably don't want some unknown person in a massive flourescent yellow coat to come and ask if they're ok or want a coffee. The speech that then emerges is instinctive and obscene, but usually amounts to 'leave me alone'. I personally think it's very important to leave people alone when they're in that mood. In fact things can change very quickly in situations like these, so if we come back in 5 minutes we may get a better reception, but one good thing about Street Angels is that we have time to watch and work with people. There's no need to get an instant answer as we can continue to observe from a respectful distance and offer assistance when it's more appropriate later (or call in the professionals if necessary). The extra time we have helped us out with everyone we worked with over the weekend, and it's well worth using some of it to ensure we have the proper consent and agreement of people for us to help them.

Finally, many people have asked me how I can be involved in a project which appears to be so christian in it's orientation. I'll explain more of the background to this in the last post I'll write about visctrix on 'spirituality', but for now suffice it to say that despite (or perhaps because of) having been instrumental in the setting up of three charitable organisations, I have little time for the concept of christian charity. I think there are a lot of truths in the stereotypical images of christian 'do-gooders', and I think people can do a lot of damage through naïve efforts to 'help' others. I think there are a lot of 'blame' issues in christianity and the various christian doctrines, indeed christianity can effectively be called the first blame culture, and it has been well argued that this culture of blame has insidiously affected all the institutions of today's society. I don't think the humanists have grasped the problem really, let alone solved it, but I do think that person-centred and advocacy based approaches to working with people are a positive move away from what I would characterise as the more 'doctrinal' approaches to health and social care. I'm not sure if people will be able to follow my argument, I'm aware that I'm taking many short cuts in order to explain succinctly. This sort of effort is bound to failure, but it has its own rewards. For the more philosophically minded, references that spring to mind are Nietzsche and Foucault.

My reflections are going to get too metaphysical if I'm not careful, and I will try to explain the background to these suggestions a bit more sometime soon. To get more down to earth, while we do have a wide range of volunteers, because of the partnership approach and the origins of the project in a WDP advisory group, Wakefield Churches Together got involved early on and did a lot of advertising and recruiting for volunteers. It's also true that the Halifax Street Angels is run by the YMCA and has quite strong christian roots. And there are other issues that are not really worth the bother listing.

Given this background, what have I to say to the people who have questioned my involvement with Street Angels? At the end of the day I don't mind working with any individual people. It doesn't matter to me whether they're christian, muslim, drunk, sober, paranoid schizophrenic, disabled, from Iraq, or work as a police officer or social worker. I've met great people and insufferable people in each of these groups and I'm happy to work with many of them. What I think is important is that when we're working we don't impose our views on others. I have no intention of challenging people's beliefs while I'm working on this project, and I expect that they won't put me in a similarly difficult position. I do know that despite the cheesy name, this organisation does focus on the job of being a Street Angel, and throughout the meetings there have been no references to any christian practices or beliefs, except in the context of not imposing them on others.

I volunteered to be a Street Angel for two reasons. I've spent a lot of time out in the night-time economy over the years (and I've got quite a lot of time in me yet), and together with a few communication skills and a dose of common sense I think I can offer some support to the project. And I have been lucky enough to be hearing about the project since soon after its inception, and I think it will be a breath of fresh air for Wakefield and that it should hopefully inspire other people to find simple practical low cost initiatives that can really make a difference without the need to invest so heavily in capital and bureaucracy.

[Update 9/1/07 here.]

The right to advocacy

I just read in someone's engagement protocol that ‘access to advocacy is a right to which service users are entitled.’

My immediate thought was that this must be wrong: where does it say in legislation that people have this right? And why are people now saying that IMCAs give some people the right to an advocate for the first time in England and Wales?

But then I realised that it was true in an important way, and that we should say it loudly and clearly.

People do have a right to the support of an advocate much of the time:

• If someone arrives at a meeting with an advocate, they have a right to ask for the advocate to attend the meeting, and there is no law which prevents an advocate from attending most meetings (though they can be denied entry on a similar sort of ad hoc basis)
• If someone wants to speak to an advocate they can, as long as they fit into the advocacy scheme's criteria
• If someone asks an advocate to obtain information from an agency, and they fill in the appropriate form of authority, the advocate then has the same right as the person to access information about them

People may not have a statutory right to our support, but they do have these informal rights, and we can thus correctly say that people do have a right to advocacy support.

visctrix

visctrix is an important name for me, and now seems the right time to say something about it. As I explained on my Wikipedia user space, a visctrix is a space of creation of bodily affects that cannot be put properly into our usual words or names. I use it as my email address and as my online identity, especially in web forums, ICQ and games.

This comes from the Latin viscera or visceral - relating to feelings, affecting the internal organs - and playfully mixed with the end of the word matrix which is Latin for womb (a space of creation).

This name was created about six years ago when I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to run a 'cultural studies of the internet' course in the Fine Art dept of Leeds University. It picked up on a range of themes that can be found explored both in internet based spaces, but also in various discourses around art and identity politics (I prefer the word ethics to politics).

It is a name that doesn't like the concept of naming, a name that is constantly, hopefully, in progress or transition. Right now I'm certainly in a process of transition, and this needs to be managed carefully somehow - the aim is to be able to sustain myself and to be able to create... Part of this is a re-evaluation of where I find myself and where I'm going - a process in itself that people often write about in journals, diaries, and today, blogs.

So I am going to try to remember and rethink what the name visctrix means to me. The aim is to bring together some of the previously sustaining pathways that are beginning to diverge and disappear, and to try to reinvigorate them. I do think that this will be relevant to readers as it's also another way of naming my approach to life and philosophy, and hence my work, my thinking about advocacy, and this blog.

1. The Name
It seems Plato bears a lot of responsibility for this one, which has dominated the way we think in the West. Many people, including myself, think that the Name (with a capital N, meaning that it is somehow special, and Known, and a sort of fixed thing) is damaging and restrictive. Writers and artists and mystics and all sorts of people who fall outside the mainstream economic system have instinctively realised this and used pseudonyms and false names throughout time. The Name comes from the tendency towards control, originally from the wish of various people in history to control power, money and knowledge, now prevalent as the managerial and bureaucractic system we're all so familiar with.

Three examples will be quite grounding and constructive here. The first is about Joanne Bloggs whose community care assessment identifies eligibility for substantial access to care services. Unfortunately Joanne presents as a very angry young woman, so angry in fact that services are beginning to be withdrawn or withheld. I'm sure most advocates have met some people in similar situations where social care professionals simply seem to have labelled them 'Joanne Bloggs' - meaning aggressive, demanding and difficult. Of course they are demanding and difficult because their lives are demanding and difficult, but 'Joanne Bloggs' is well documented and she just can't sit down quietly and gratefully accept the help we offer. Often, not documented, there is joanne, or jo, or josey, or... These others don't have capitals, and in some ways they may feel they're better off without all that paperwork and managerial pressure. Outside the realm of paperwork and benefits and housing they put a brave face on life, have a laugh with their friends if they have any, and work their way through various problems in between. But then people come along and call them Joanne (even if they say 'Jo'), and ask horrible questions, and don't seem to listen, and they get upset and angry, and then the police are called or they get sectioned and everything goes even further downhill. Joanne is a Name, jo is a person, and tomorrow jo could feel much more friendly and pleasant because the sun's out - if only you'd come for the assessment the next day...

The second example is something I touched on in my note about the NAN Conference. This is about the Name of Advocacy (if Advocacy is a proper Name, it gets a capital too). It's a constant question, not just of Rick's, about whether we should rename 'advocacy'. No one understands it, some say. It gets confused with legal advocacy. The definition is too long and unwieldy, or too short and imprecise. To define something is the same as to Name it - once it has a definition we Know what it is, it's somehow special, and it's kind of fixed. This is useful for the legislators and commissioners, even the managers and the trainers: we can give people rights to it, we can manage contracts, and we can construct advocates to do the work. Maybe that's enough reason for you - we have to live in the real world, and if that's the way to get more advocates what's the problem? I would say wait though. Think for a moment about the link between Joanne and advocacy. At the moment advocacy has no capital - it's still a fluid concept, and it's practised in different ways. Without a capital, advocacy is a bit like jo, slightly out of reach of the catogorising tendencies of some of the people we work with. At the same time we seem to be able to communicate better with jo and others like her than many professionals. It's a subtle prediction, but something I think many of us kind of feel in our bones (or our viscera), that if we move too far into the realms of Advocacy, everything will become more defined and controlled and we'll end up only being able to communicate on Joanne's level again just like all the other Names. I think it's also important to remember that most of the people like jo seem to cotton on to what advocacy is pretty quickly after they start working with a good advocate. They don't need paper definitions, they need feelings, and I think many advocates, and many other people too, also work very productively in this space: let's celebrate and protect this slight vagueness and stop talking about burying advocacy under the tyrrany of the name.

My final example is just a quickie. Of course Social Worker, Psychiatrist, Police are all names, all names which are used to limit, constrain and abuse ordinary jos and johns who are often trying to give something back to the world, who often do extraordinarily sensitive work, and who are not described in my examples above. We are stuck with this tyrrany in some ways, and stereotypes are always breeding other opposing stereotypes. I am just trying to indicate the positions we find ourselves in as advocates when we meet the clients of some of the less accomplished practitioners.

Now this has already got long enough for one post. The other things I wanted to write about are listed below (they will become links as I write them up, hopefully soon). Feedback welcome as always.

2. Creation
3. Communication and movement
4. Community
5. Spirituality

We can't help the social workers if they won't help themselves

Quite a while ago now I was in a meeting with the Directorate of Social Services in Wakefield trying to persuade them to support Advocacy Action. It turned out later that they weren't having a good day, but since I wasn't asking for money at the time I had a relatively easy ride.

In fact the closest anyone got to challenging me was with the question ‘how are my social workers going to benefit from advocacy?’ The Director, bless her, told me I didn't need to answer that question: the point was, she said, that advocates help service users, not social workers.

I thought it was a good question though, and I insisted on saying that of course if people were supported to communicate more clearly it should be easier for everyone. Ok people may be more assertive or demanding, but at least they will explain their demands and their needs more clearly, and be less likely to resort to shouting or end up crying in despair.

In fact I probably take this further on many occasions as I actively try to empower nurses, care assistants and social workers to make decisions for themselves, adopt more person-centred approaches, and even feel they might be able to question their managers' decisions on occasion…

So it's been a long time since that conversation, and for various reasons I haven't had many opportunities to directly help any of his social workers, until now, and sadly so far is hasn't run as smoothly as I would have liked…

The first thing to point out is that I have managed to make a good impression on the Team Manager, his Senior Social Worker, and the Service Manager (as far as I can tell from their feedback). They have acknowledged that I have helped them to have much better conversations with the ‘service user’ (I'll fall into this jargon for confidentiality's sake).

I've also made a good impression on the service user and their family. They feel happy that their case has been much better described and documented over the last couple of months. We've been through some basic person-centred planning to help with the preparation for the community care assessment, and this has put things into perspective and brought out some issues that had not been discussed before. From their point of view the main problem is that I have been too trusting, and at the end of the day Family Services are still going to turn around and refuse to offer what they need. The sad bit is that last week they were proved to be right, and as we seemed to be near the top of the struggle to get proper services, now it feels as if the fall has been much harder.

It's not all over yet though, and it is worth noting at least a couple of problems that have occurred in my observations of Family Services. I will stress that I am writing this so that people may be able to see and understand these experiences, not in order to make any particular criticisms or complaints.

Problem 1 There's never been any negotiating.

I first became involved over a confusing and badly argued letter that said the service user person was not entitled to a service they'd received. When I went to the meeting that was arranged about the letter, the Manager said he was simply there to explain the letter (which he couldn't do anyway) and the decision had already been made so there was no room for negotiation. This amazed me, because by this time I'd got a lot of background information and the service seemed quite reasonable and in need of some compromise.

I had a discussion with a senior manager about the need for negotiation, which could well have got no further, but then last week, without any information or consultation or apparent consideration of the arguments that the use of this service had been reasonable and legitimate, there was another meeting where again there was no space for negotiation. This second meeting was the conclusion of the community care assessment, but there was no final paperwork, no care plan, and the only item on the agenda was basically that the service would not be offered again as it was too stressful.

Problem 2 Family Services complain that this person is argumentative and difficult…
…but then they back them into a position where they have made a decision and refuse to negotiate, so it's no wonder they become argumentative and difficult.

It’s even worse than this. They really do seem to have decided that it's impossible to communicate with this person. They complained to me that their partner is always butting in, and it's difficult for them to talk to the person directly: then they spent the entire first meeting addressing themselves to me instead of the service user. I sat there for some time looking at the person they were supposed to be talking to and they still didn't get the hint. At one point I suggested they should be talking directly to the person, and they looked at me as if I'd said something rude about their mother…

In fact throughout the several hours I've spent in meetings, every time the service user has become upset and raised their voice the social worker has basically ignored them and just seen the outburst as a barrier to explaining what they needed to explain, rather than a perspective that needs to be engaged with.

Problem 3 The service user has a history of complaining to the Director of Family Services, and to their MP — and getting services

I have been told from the outset that Family Services don't want this to happen, but bizarrely they never listened properly and never opened any spaces for negotiation. Then they said you can't have the services you want.

In between they seem to have ignored most of the material I have helped to provide them with through my direct work with the service user — evidence which if we do make a formal complaint will certainly help the service user to argue their case persuasively.

All of these factors really make a complaint likely. Looking back I can only assume that someone realised they made a mistake early on and has then entrenched and become determined not to admit it, but from my perspective this entrenchment is turning into a deepening black hole they are digging themselves into.

I have really tried to offer opportunities to the social worker that I've had most contact with to avoid this problem, but for whatever reason these opportunities haven't been taken.

Anyway, now I've warmed up with this anonymous blog post, I'm quite looking forward to writing in more gory detail to some senior person who will hopefully turn the decision over and help to make sense prevail. I'll try to put up an update when we get to the end.

Advocacy must be better value than advice

Here's a thought that could put a bit of wind behind the sails of both advocacy and advice projects... [N.B. It is a rough and ready formulation, in keeping with this blog's character - it can be developed into a more polished argument if there is a demand.]

There was much said about the 'huge' cost of putting advocates in every local area: £7.5 million just for one each was mentioned, a cost almost equivalent to the entire IMCA budget; and if this was to be extended to a whole advocacy scheme the costs would rocket.

I can't help thinking about the costs of some of my local and not so local advice services though. The CAB is of course a fantastic organisation, and has many great advisors. It is also old, and established to the point where every town and city seems to feel the need to have sometimes several large buildings stuffed with advisors, administrators and managers. They also have outreach workers in many other local centres. I have no idea what the national total of all the CAB projects is alone, but I bet it costs at least a quarter of a million pounds per year to run the average district branch - and then there are all the other independent and Council run advice centres as well.

This is of course to be expected - the concept of going and getting advice from a qualified advice worker has been around for 60 years, and it was given a good boost in the post war growth of the 1950s and 60s. And we do all benefit from these services, not least because we send people there (or take them) as part of our work as (non-advice giving) advocates.

The question now has to be asked though, is all this expenditure really worth it, and should the advocacy sector be asking for a slice of the money? I have to say that although I refer people to the CAB and other local advice centres, I also constantly have discussions with other people about the lack of anywhere reliable to get advice - the queues are too long, the length of time spent per person is too short, and the basic mistakes made with people's DLA forms seem to be too frequent. We send people to advice centres because that is what is done - advocates cannot give advice, Council and NHS staff can't give advice, and we all make the only referral that is open to us in the circumstances.

I should note again, before I get flamed, that this is just a broad picture of advice and not what always happens. On the other hand though, in my 10 years of community work experience in West Yorkshire I've witnessed various feuds and battles going on within and between advice services, neighbouring branches of the CAB who wouldn't talk to each other, a chairman who verbally abused members at an AGM, and numerous threats to cut funding followed by desperate appeals and last minute reprieves as commissioners decide there is no alternative.

There are more important and relevant issues though. Firstly, noticing various scandals and disasters that have occurred over these 60 years of advice services, the legislators have created systems designed to ensure that certain quality standards are met. So now it takes an army of managers and administrators to ensure everything is done properly, it takes months to train people to use the knowledge systems and follow the right procedures, and it takes a long time to see each client, while the rest of the queue is left waiting.

The other thing, connected to all this legislation, and linked to developments in other fields along the lines of providing properly scientific and regulated services, is that advice has to be objective and correct. This is one of the reasons it takes so long to train people to deliver it, but also one of the main reasons that it fails to meet the needs of many of the most vulnerable people who need it.

I think advocates could make a good case for providing an equally essential service, in many ways better than the services I've been describing.

For a start, we have a much better chance of helping people to solve their problems because we place ourselves closer to the people and their problems. We still maintain boundaries, but the boundaries are different: we work with people's own wishes, needs and understandings; we don't try to impose 'best' or 'correct' approaches to solving problems; we go with people to meetings, and follow issues through with them to the end, we meet them in a variety of places but there's rarely a desk or a computer between us. There are many other points - these are the unique advantages of advocacy.

Secondly, we are much easier to train. There are still training issues of course, but we don't have to use complicated computer systems, we don't have to follow rigid procedures, and we don't have to develop a huge expert knowledge and be able to provide the 'right answers'. We do need to be able to communicate (very) effectively with people, and we need to understand that we are helping them to develop and follow their own agenda, without imposing our (or our culture's) idea of best interest or propriety.

All these factors of course mean massive savings: less training, smaller offices, less IT infrastructure, fewer procedures, cheaper insurance because professional indemnity is not such an issue.

There are also other advantages. We can work with many people who are simply not able to understand and follow through with the advice they are given, even if they are able to get to the advice centre. As yet we don't have the squabbling and back-biting of some advice services (also a terrible waste of money). And we are a relatively new phenomena, with proportionately more excitement and enthusiasm amongst our practitioners.

Is there anything I've missed out. I hope you agree that on the face of it advocacy would seem to offer significantly better value than advice. I think there are many more reasons that I haven't covered here, so please let me know your ideas and let's move into those old advice centres...

NAN conference 2006 - Brighton

My main impression from the conference this year was that in some way the advocacy community has matured. At the same time there were lots of young and enthusiatic new advocates, often people who had simply seen the jobs advertised and gone for them, but nevertheless they were saying that they were now in the most inspiring and satisfying jobs they'd ever had...

The downside is that some people were still saying they couldn't explain their work to friends or family (or even some (local) government officials) and there is still an issue about what we do, but I don't think that is too big a problem. I like a certain amount of je ne sais quois in what we do, it increases richness and diversity as much as it may cause problems...

On this note, Rick Henderson did ask, somewhat rhetorically, if we should change the definition of advocacy. I almost got up and shouted YES. The definition that dominates all the A4A literature is the hopelessly ungainly and clearly committee devised*

"Advocacy is taking action to help people say what they want, secure their rights, represent their interests and obtain services they need. Advocates and advocacy schemes work in partnership with the people they support and take their side. Advocacy promotes social inclusion, equality and social justice."

My own definition is more like "Advocacy is about ensuring that people can make their voices heard." Although I've just noticed that the definition I published on the Advocacy Action website is a bit different... At least this is simple enough to be understood by the service users who are often being ignored, even if it doesn't meet everyone else's needs.

At the end of the day I was glad Rick's question was rhetorical, and I don't think the definition of advocacy needs to be changed in the way some people seemed to be suggesting. We need to embrace and champion our use of this word, for we do do something unique and special with it, and our organisations and our advocates have matured and become even more powerful and impressive, and our new recruits are being enthusiastic and empowered, and we were all inspired by yet another successful gathering of 170 advocates all being happy about what they do.

I'm already looking forward to next year...

___
* The approach developed in Rick and Mike Pochin's book was much better, and it was a shame A4A couldn't do something along those lines.

Thanks to all my returning readers

Hello again

Yesterday 13 people came to view this blog, people from Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, the US, Australia and France, one of whom has returned at least 17 times. The post about Being Non-Judgemental seems to be particularly popular.

Thank you to people for reading, and coming back, and waiting, and all the nice messages you've sent me. I feel privileged to get all this response, especially after I've published nothing for almost two months.

I am bursting with things to write, and should be publishing more soon. Hopefully these cold winter nights will give me some more incentive... Of course there's so much else to do too...

Anyway, this is my tentative start. The last three articles I wrote I must admit got a bit ambitious and were never finished, but we certainly do need this blog and more like it to write and think about and support advocacy in the UK.

So keep watching this space.

Thanks again,
Henry

At Chapeltown Carnival

Me at Carnival 06
Originally uploaded by visctrix.

Thank you Suna for the photo (see her other photos here, or find other Leeds carnival photos on Flickr here). Congratulations to everyone who joined the Black and Dred (Harrison Bundey) troup - 71 of us on stage! - and everyone else who participated in the carnival - there were some fantastic costumes, though I didn't get to see much.

Congratulations also to Ruth who won best individual, and I'll give you another foot massage any time :-)

And to my readers: next year Leeds West Indian Carnival is 40 years old - it's the oldest Carnival in the UK - so come along, join in, dance and be happy...

The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK

I often encourage people to use more ethical Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, of FLOSS - including Libre) , and they ask me for more information.

I usually direct people to the OpenOffice.org website, and especially to the newsletter there (on Blogger). Most people mainly use computers for familiar office functions, and OpenOffice.org is a free community-developed alternative that offers many advantages to expensive proprietary solutions. The newsletter keeps track of developments and particularly of big migration successes.

There's also the Mozilla corporation, developers of Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email client), and news sites like Slashdot ('news for nerds, stuff that matters' - you have been warned).

In fact from Slashdot I found this link from the Computer Business Review Online, The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK. It may be dry reading for the uninitiated, but I think it is an interesting and quite accurate investigation of some important developments. Returning readers may have picked up my commitment to FOSS and know that this blog is produced entirely on FOSS. Despite the fact that Linux has just celebrated it's fifteen birthday however (today - happy birthday!) people are not very familiar with using it on home or office computers.

There is a good feeling of the beginnings of a big change though. Over all these years of steadily developing FOSS, including the operating systems that make it all work (like Linux), it seems the big private players have been merely tweaking and adding minor aesthetic enhancements to their sofware (and then of course charging a fortune for upgrades). It hasn't been all that difficult for the FOSS developers to catch up then (this isn't true in the games arena). Now more and more organisations and individuals are realising that the transition to FOSS isn't all that big a leap. This article explores the current state of use of FOSS, and the voluntary sector should take note.

Drawing the line on advice

I haven't mentioned advice much on this blog (just in 4 or 5 posts). It's a bit of a tricky subject for advocates. I'd even go so far as to say that there's a bit of conflict there, although it's usually quite a friendly sort of conflict...

Certainly it's very common to see the statement, often in the middle of definitions of advocacy, that advocates don't give advice. I've always been at the forefront of arguing this point, partly because of the way I got into advocacy through more informal community work, and partly because of the way one local advice centre insisted that they did advocacy too, so there was no need for a separate advocacy scheme... Words fail me, almost.

Moving swiftly on, it is important that we differentiate our practice from advice work for at least two main reasons:

1. Advice work has become heavily regulated over the years. Now you need loads of training, loads of procedures, and loads of monitoring. Advocacy is, and needs to remain, simpler than this.
2. There's plenty of people out there wanting to hand out advice - proper regulated advice, professional opinion, or informal 'caring' advice. The problem is that the people who need advocacy can never get away from all the advice and begin to talk about what they really want. Advocacy needs to continue to support these voices.

On the other hand, despite the clear problems with falling into advice work, many people still find the separation from advice both difficult to understand, and difficult to do in practice. I've also recently had to admit coming across lots of situations where the line is a bit more blurred than I thought it was. Take these two examples:

• Working with someone who has been in the care system for many years: they've expressed a problem, explored a range of options, could be on the brink of making a decision, but they still insist on taking your advice...
• Or someone who just gets angry whenever they meet a professional: you can talk to them sensibly in private, but however much you plan together what to say, when it comes down to it they just lose control and ruin all their plans...

There are many more examples, but these are interesting because in the first example the advocate is being asked for advice against their will, and in the second example the advocate could easily get frustrated and want to impose more control than they would normally think reasonable.

There's at least a third general example too: when you are asked to do an independent check on a decision using a best-interests approach (especially in non-instructed advocacy, and what about if you want to bring a third option into the field?). I think this is the most problematic example, and it needs another post.

My conclusion when thinking about these issues and giving advice has to be pragmatic in the end: we should be able to work with people wherever possible, and we shouldn't let abstract principles get in the way unnecessarily. The first reason advocacy doesn't give advice is because it needs to remain simpler than the current state of advice work. For the same reason, we need to be able to identify for ourselves those boundary points where simplicity demands that we relent and start giving advice for a while.

Universal human needs

I found this in a little book written by some management consultants. Not my usual reading matter, and not very well written, but some interesting things nonetheless.

The book is The Thin Book® of Naming Elephants. It was about how to raise issues in organisations that no one wants to talk about, and it was interesting (if a little obvious) to hear how badly this affects businesses as much as social services, the NHS, care providers. It was a little short on practical advice though.

Anyway, right on the last page it had this little gem. They talk about what they call the 'three universal human needs.' Casting aside any difficulties we may have with the terminology here, it was very refreshing to not see those tired old platitudes of food and shelter; and what came out instead, from these management consultants of all people, is certainly worth mentioning. They list:

• Have a voice and be heard
• Be viewed as essential to a group
• Be seen as unique and exceptional

They also point to a couple of other alternative versions, including this:

• A positive view of self
• The desire to see oneself as competent
• The need to experience coherence and continuity

As an advocate I'm really happy to see 'have a voice and be heard' at the top of the list, and also the 'desire to see oneself as competent' seems to me a key issue. At the end of the day I obviously have issues with both of these lists, but I think it's been well worth my time thinking about them in the joint contexts of people with learning disabilities and people in multinational corporations; or people using mental health services and say the workforce of a small local company...

I wonder if anyone would like to suggest a list in a similar vein that could be used more directly in an advocacy context, hopefully both for our partners and for the organisations we work in.

Just busy...

I haven't been writing much here recently, but, dear reader(!), don't go away. I've just been busy and hot and doing other things. April and May were good months for writing for me, and I haven't forgotten all the beginnings I started and the promises to pick up on various themes.

This blog will keep on going. So do keep coming back and checking. And make comments - this is open to the world, and I would appreciate any input to spur me on to write more.

Thanks

Who's the victim?

I keep on hearing calls for courts to be more focused on the victims of crime, and I agree completely - they shouldn't cause these victims even more suffering.

But who's the victim? I've come across a couple of cases recently that have put this question into perspective.

Firstly two people with severe learning disabilities and a high level of support have been having problems in their shared tenancy for quite a few months. Some plans to address the problem by moving one of them were dropped a while ago. Now one of them has attacked the other and all sorts of emergency procedures are being invoked. I'm not so interested in the details of the case, only that one of the two is currently in the classical position of the victim (of an assault), while the other therefore becomes a perpetrator.

Secondly a person I know with a high level of support needs, but not quite enough of the right kinds of problems to enable him to access certain key services immediately. As time goes on he is increasingly presenting with additional problems, and there are 'rumours' that these include a return to some of the violence that he has been involved in in the past. Violence again implies a perpetrator and a victim.

It's clear that the perpetrators of violence in both these cases are also victims. Like all the stories I'm trying to tell I don't think there's anything particularly unusual or newsworthy about these situations - similar things happen to hundreds or even thousands of people in the UK each week. I don't want to start accusing statutory services of neglect, because again I think this is in a way a violent approach to solving the problem, which often results in violent defensiveness and doesn't get anywhere.

What I would like to think about is that if we are to take a more person-centred approach to working with people in general, then we also need to take a person-centred approach to people who are violent towards others and to all the people who are victims of this violence. At the same time I think there are some natural developments towards taking a more holistic approach to our understanding and responses to violence.

Some examples of this would be:

• protecting people who suffer from, say domestic violence or sexual crimes from the added violence that can come in the investigative and judicial processes that current legal systems still tend to impose (there are already many initiatives that address these issues, and they are linked to this agenda in diverse ways);
• recognising that people who behave in violent ways are usually victims of violence and abuse themselves, that they may suffer from the multiple effects of poverty, or that they may well have low level mental health problems for example that would be amenable to community based approaches to support and rehabilitation (all sorts of people are doing this);
• questioning the value of punitive approaches including imprisoning people or stigmatising them with criminal convictions and making it harder for them to find work or access other services;
• supporting more informal preventative and community-based approaches to avoid reaching crisis situations, including recognising some of the violence still inherent in our education system and incorporating a more ethical and community based approach to teaching and education from an early age (see the Steiner schools for one approach to this);
• recognising that violence means restricting action, that sometimes violence is necessary, but we should be able to see it for what it is, discuss it properly and act on our conclusions, including a recognition that bureaucratic processes are inherently violent and that while they are necessary in some ways we need to recognise this violence and develop more effective ways of dealing with it;
• the list goes on...
  

Refugee week events

The first event in Wakefield for this year's Refugee Week has just finished, and I ate and danced and helped clear up and still I'm home at a reasonable hour to blog, which is an added bonus.

It was the Iranian Cultural Celebration tonight, and there were a couple of live performances as well as DJs and lots of delicious food. First up on violin was a former member of the Iranian Philharmonic Orchestra (from the time of the Shah). There was a bit of a band going on here, but I sadly missed most of it as I ended up working the door. Later a different man with the same name played a saz I think (see pictures here) which is very similar to an instrument an old Turkish friend of mine used to play which he called a 'ballamer' (phonetically, approximately). In and around these performances the DJs kept the party dancing.

Later in the week we have a 'refugee day' event hosted by the local MP on Friday (invitation only) and an African Night in Wakefield Cathedral on Friday evening (free, just turn up). Then on Saturday, 6-10pm, there is a Kurdish Cultural Celebration in Lightwaves Leisure Centre again (ticket required, call RASA on 01924 368855).

Someone said to me that these events weren't very cohesive or didn't seem to promote integration: Iranian, African and Kurdish events on different nights...

I think there are two responses to this. First I can't help but remember the joint Eid/Xmas party I organised in 2003. This tried hard to combine all the cultures in Wakefield, and we had Iranian and Kurdish DJs, people came from many different countries including quite a few from Albania/Kosovo, and from different parts of Africa. As the finale we had a proper 5 piece African salsa band (afficionados may know that salsa originated in Africa - like 'all' music - and was transported to South America on the slave ships...). Anyway this band started playing, and 5 minutes later 146 people had left the room - and there were only 150 to start with. Even the African people, faced with this mass exodus, got up and walked out too.

Now I've personally always taken the approach that if some people are willing to go to the effort to perform for me, then I'll at least give them the courtesy of listening and then applauding their efforts (if not necessarily their musicianship or their taste). I learnt that night not to expect such polite conventions from refugee audiences.

There is in fact a whole article, to be carefully written, about racism and discrimination and refugees. Of course I know that there have been bitter conflicts in many parts of the world where refugees come from, and the memories of these conflicts and the deep seated prejudices that come with them are difficult to forget. They have also not had the advantages of the strenuous and focused anti-discrimination campaigns we have learnt from in the West over the last century (starting from women's suffrage, and moving through the American civil rights movement, etc). And finally, refugees tend not to discriminate against English people in my experience, but people with darker skin than them for example are more likely to lose out (along with their traditional enemies) in a movement that we can see being replicated around the world again and again.

I don't want to make any sweeping generalisations here, but I always half expected refugees who had fought for freedom and justice for people in their own societies to still be standing up for freedom and justice in their new lives in the UK, and I've usually been disappointed (although I love working with them anyway, and they're no more intolerant than many English people, just in different ways).

So all sorts of clarifying statements are rushing into my head, and I know what I've just written could be contentious, but with all that in mind I'd like to move swiftly on to the second response to the lack of cohesion/integration suggestion.

These people are living in the UK every day. Sure there are positive steps we can make towards integration, and we're taking them on many of these days: finding work, getting on ok at school, bringing our children up well, etc. All this needs integration. This is happening every day.

So why can't we, one or two days a year, have a day to celebrate native cultures? In fact I think it's imperative to do this: refugees need to do it for their mental health, to help them maintain their sense of identity and history, and to help their children understand their origins; and the rest of the population need occasional days like this to add a bit of colour and spice to their lives and relieve the exhausting boredom.

And who are we to say that these different cultural traditions should be celebrated within the confines of a single event, or that refugee week events should be concentrated on being more cohesive and on delivering the Government's integration agenda? In fact there were quite a few English people there tonight, quite a few Kurdish people, a chinese woman, and an African man (with a work permit of all things :-) ). There was integration here as well as cultural stimulation and mental tonics.

I'm looking forward to the next event - but you have to have an invitation to attend, so how integrational will that be...?

Friends in high places...

...that's the side of a hill in Glasgow anyway (or the local department store).

Anyway Cartside is an interesting blog from a woman who works with refugees and languages and victims of human rights abuses. I particularly liked her descrption of the problems of getting funding, and I hope she finds a good resolution.

She linked to this blog a couple of weeks back in a post about refugee blogs, and I hope if she sees this that she'll find my thoughts on interpreters interesting.

Something to read for anyone who thinks the notes on resolving the police issues are too long...

Police issues resolved

I had a positive meeting with representatives of the Police on Friday, together with key members of the Advocacy Action Committee. This stems from a post I wrote on this blog on 14 April which was removed shortly thereafter and replaced with this note.

Amongst other things this note says that the Police were threatening legal action, and it is now necessary to provide some clarification and closure to this issue. It was my intention to republish the post at this point as the information it contained is still valid (see below for how). For a variety of reasons however I have decided to just write a summary of events.

Four days after I started this blog I received an email about a young Kurdish man who came to a youth group in some distress saying he'd just spent the night in a police cell, he didn't know why, and he thought the officers had been racist. This was a reply from a colleague to a request I'd sent out for things to write about. I published the email with some identifying information removed and some background information to put in in context, then I emailed various key people working for the Police, the Asylum Team, the Community Cohesion Advisory Group of the local strategic partnership, and others. On the first working day I received two emails from a police officer which I published in a comment to the original post, with some disparaging remarks about their investigation.

On 20 April, two days later, a senior police officer contacted one of the Advocacy Action committee members and said they were very unhappy with the allegations contained in the post, and in particular with the fact that I'd named an individual officer. They additionally felt that the blog could be a risk to community safety, and requested for it to be removed and for an apology. This was done immediately, together with a number of other changes to clarify that the blog was my personal work and was not a project of Advocacy Action's.

-------

I just want to make some remarks at this point on the four areas of continuing relevance, community safety, complaints, and finally racism.

Continuing relevance
The Police have investigated the original story, and they are convinced that the allegations were unfounded. They can't find any evidence of an arrest or custody, and in fact the cells in the Police Station we identified were taken out of service years ago. There were also other discrepancies in the story, although it is true that the man's door was broken down in the course of an unconnected investigation.

I still have a different perspective on this issue, as do the other people who have spoken to the Kurdish man (he hasn't wanted to speak to the Police). I won't go into the objective details (see my post Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity) because I'm interested in a more person centred or community focused approach.

Firstly the man was upset when he arrived early at the youth group, and he was clearly upset about the police. This may not be a legal issue, and it may not be an issue for a formal complaint, but he is still upset about the police, and from a person-centered perspective this is an issue that deserves some attention. It's also important that he wasn't trying to gain anything from telling his story, apart from some kind of catharsis probably. He never wanted to make a complaint (I stressed this in the original post). He was simply upset and he told the youth workers what happened to help him calm down.

From a community perspective there are also important issues. I have heard that there have been several similar incidents already in the last few months, and not only the Kurdish community, but also the professionals who work with them are talking about this. Several other people have also come up to me from the English community and told me about similar things that have happened to them, and one person told me that when they tried to complain the police had no record of their detention. This is all circumstantial, and can't be verified, and I'm sorry if the police are upset for a moment about me writing this, but this is what the community are saying, to each other at least. This is not an insignificant issue, for the community or the police, but it seems to me that the lack of corroborable evidence makes it difficult for the police's systems and approaches to deal with.

Community Safety
As I have already mentioned, the police were concerned that the content of the blog could have an impact on community safety within and around the local Kurdish population. I listened to the police's concerns on Friday and I don't want to detract from them, but from the perspective of this blog devoted to ethics and communication this is another opportunity to explore and think about why I disagree with them.

The first thing I said was that I've been trying to encourage people in the refugee and asylum seeking community (and others) to complain if they have a grievance for years, almost completely without success. The reasons people don't want to complain are quite worrying really, certainly disempowering, and do lead to an already vulnerable group of people becoming even more vulnerable in some ways.

Basically people just don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to challenge authority in a way that might cause them more problems. People think that if they complain they might be beaten up, evicted from their properties, or even deported from the UK. I remember one story of illegal working came to light after a man asked for the £20 pounds he was owed for his 10hr shift, only to be beaten so badly and kicked down the stairs that he had to be hospitalised: in the face of this kind of threat which illegal immigrant is going to complain? Another occasion a man went with his brother-in-law (who is incidentally a Home Office registered interpreter based in another part of the country) to report a racist assault, but when his details didn't come up on the computer he was taken into custody for 5 hours while his immigration stutus was checked: the assault was never reported.

The other reason is that this is already what they expected pretty much. This is how they expect to be treated by the police, and it's much better than their own coutries where summary beatings are carried out with rifle butts. England generally is much better in many ways, or at least it's where they want to be at the moment, so they will work for £2 an hour, they will turn their backs on low level racism, they will accept the various trials that come their way. There is a mixed story here: many people like working with refugees because of their strength and humour in the face of adversity - some of them are role models for us all. On the other hand why should people suffer unnecessarily, especially when there are laws and social expectations of good practice that are meant to protect them?

Even today with my more distant relationship to the refugee community I hear quite a lot of stories going round. And the reaction of the community to this story of being detained overnight by the police? People aren't exactly indifferent, but they're not very impressed either, it doesn't seem like a surprising or serious matter to them.

I think this is the real community safety issue, and I'm sorry but I can't see anyone who might threaten community safety taking the time to read through this blog (although I wish they would, they might change their ways). How can we address these issues? The first thing has got to be being able to talk about what's going on, or to read about it, and certainly to think about it. There are lots of organisations who are actively working towards making our communities safer places to live, but this story, and this blog, suggests that there are some continuing issues that need to be looked at in a different way if we are going to effectively deal with them.

Complaints
No complaint was made in this case: neither the Kurdish man, the Police, nor I made a formal complaint. I've already said that Complaints are great, but the practice of them often is not, so in many ways I'm glad.

The Police do have a statutory complaints procedure providing initially for a local resolution of minor complaints, or through the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for more serious matters.

I've been lucky to have been able to do quite a lot of thinking about complaints over the last nine months, and lucky that it's been in the context of a multi-agency group writing a code of practice. In the light of this experience, and knowing the issues with making complaints under other statutory procedures including that for Social Services and the NHS, I can't help thinking that the proper police procedure is still inadequate in some ways and for some situations.

The main problem is the unwelcoming bureaucracy: if we are going to encourage people to feel that complaints are great, we need to be more open and encouraging about the process, and we need to be going out of our way to support people to make more complaints. This system isn't very encouraging though, and as with many complaints procedures it is tiring and difficult for the complainants.

I also can't help thinking that while the police are very good at investigating crimes, the process of investigating a complaint is quite different, as are the potential outcomes and methods of redress for upheld complaints. I feel that the police culture and experience of investigating crimes is actually a barrier to the sympathetic handling of complaints. It would be interesting to do some research about this perhaps.

Racism
Racism is a very emotive word, and probably not something to put in a headline on a blog. Since these events I have written some thoughts about Racism and discrimination. Racism is a very important issue for me, and I have many friends who experience it at different levels. At the same time however I don't think we should be too upset by it - we need to talk about it and work against it and concentrate on moving on.

The Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry provides one positive step in this direction (see here for background), with this definition:

A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.

This definition takes us in two directions which is not all without problems, but while it opens up many more incidents to be counted officially as racist (a relief to the victims), it also takes the focus away from the perpetrator of an incident and away from the criminal law, placing it instead on perceptions and feelings.

In this way we can see that someone may act in a way that they think is positive, but which others may percieve as racist. The Macpherson definition allows a debate to go on around these borderline examples without undue pressure being exerted on those who would previously have been considered 'alleged criminals'. The analogy I tend to draw is with that state of 'marital bliss' where the loving husband (it can work in all sorts of combinations) offers help to his wife: he is just being nice; she thinks he's being patronising (or, why can't he offer to do some of the dirty jobs, or what's his ulterior motive, or...). The point is in this common situation between people who know each other well there can be and quite often are quite different interpretations placed on people's actions.

At least one of the officers on Friday was upset at my implication that police officers could act in a racist way without knowing it. This was seen as a slur on those officers' professional practice, but actually it was meant as a softener, a reminder that even if I agreed with the Kurdish man that police actions had been racist, it was those actions that were the problem, not the individual officers. It was also an indication that there was a learning opportunity here and I wasn't simply going to throw allegations around.

Conclusion
At the end of the meeting we discussed some ways that Advocacy Action could work with the police in future. Obviously I promised not to publish individual officers' names on my blog (although anyone is welcome to publish my name as I work in the community).

More positively we did think about some of the experiences with the police that the community are talking about, and how we can address these issues in a more proactive way.

We thought about developing some simple guidance for young refugees or asylum seekers who may have dealings with the police.

We agreed to pick up the phone more, talk to each other about any issues that come to our attention.

Some hopefully this debate will continue in more practical ways, and I am certainly feeling positive about this outcome.