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