Professionalism, stealth, and Sun Tzu

I know sometimes my posts get a bit long and rambling, and while I maintain that that is a vital part of my exposition (my practice, my methodology, my ethics) I do also accept that I need to try to offer some more bite-size chunks as well...

I've been discussing my thoughts about professionalism (hidden in the review of christmas and Street Angels) with a few people over the last couple of days and I've come to another couple of conclusions. Firstly that it could more simply be described as 'friendly professionalism' (if that's not a bit too cheesy for you), rather than 'stealth', which has its own advantages. At the very least I think most people can see the value friendliness has in aiding communication and this perspective can help us adapt our practice in different ways and give us new understandings of our physical and social environment (and the post about accessible computing is similarly about adapting to new technology).

Another friend immediately started quoting lots of classic Chinese and Japanese texts to me and I'm afraid I've forgotten most of them except Sun Tzu's The Art of War. I did remember a lot of the context though, gleaned from various places. The art of war is stealth (broadly) - you conquer your enemy without their even realising it - and the characterisation of stealth by Sun Tzu has found many other applications. Mark mentioned that people work with a good leader automatically (and I would add comfortably) and don't even question the leadership because it just makes sense. This approach has found applications in many fields over the last 2500 years, and it could be interesting to write something about The Art of Advocacy... (if anyone's got any ideas get in touch).

Publish, publish, publish!

This is a post for my next blog really, but I'll write a draft as a sounding board here...

There are several starting points for this idea:

• Organisations seem to be very wary of publishing things (maybe becasue they are scared of being judged, or losing out somehow commercially?)
• This blog is an opportunity for me to publish snippets of half-formed ideas, or bits and pieces that may or may not be useful - this is a very interesting sort of opportunity, and I think it's valuable to be able to do this. I would like to see a place where many people could collaborate in a similar way (probably more consensual). One example I thought of is prison advocacy: it would be good if there was a webspace where anyone could publish ideas about this (however vague), find others who are interested, and over time develop a collaborative resource out of the ideas. Very different format from this blog, but quite open and unpressured still. Subjects in this space would be wide ranging, but easy to find.
  
• The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community are an interesting model. The alternative is proprietary software where companies like Microsoft protect their intellectual property and charge a lot of money for the software. FOSS developers share the intellectual property and give it away for free, but at the same time they solve problems and improve things as a community, and they make money in other ways, e.g. from selling support (services) instead of software (products).
  
• Advocacy can benefit from this model by recognising, for example, that if we shared good practice and published our policies, that many more people could benefit from good quality advocacy, and well-run projects would still have a good chance of winning contracts and remaining sustainable.
  

I suppose it's the glass half empty or half full situation. I find it a bit sad that a lot of organisations who work with people who are entitled to social care are so careful about publishing things and sharing them. I think we could create an opportunity for shring good practice in many common areas, celebrating different approaches to our work side by side, and opening up new areas which aren't written about (or at least published) because they're too new or exploratory...

I'm still going to be thinking and writing about this in the next few weeks, in amongst hopefully more direct material about advocacy.

Keep on skanking

Hey hey. 2007 is moving on already, and I've been busy doing things I want to blog about and not having time to write (actually I've got two quite long drafts from the last week, but haven't been able to finish them).

At the same time, I'm managing to get a bit of consistency back with my posting, and this seems to be rewarded with more hits and more returning visitors: nothing amazing, but gratifying just the same, and also some positive comments. In return I feel like I need to be keeping people satisfied with new content...

Skanking means moving to me, but with a bit of flava. I'm looking forward to getting back to dancing next week, and our teacher always wants us to ‘ben' up’: keep on moving, but not in too straight a line, not with a straight back at all...

This blog is about dancing a similar bent-back dance, while circling vaguely and persistently around a centre known as advocacy. In some ways this crazy bent up dance of advocacy keeps on tempting me in different directions. I'm thinking at the moment of trying to sort this out and create some alternative spaces that would be more appropiate for those sorts of thoughts, other kinds of dances. One of these alternative spaces at the moment would be more experimental and philosophical (based on visctrix.net), and one would be more strict, accessible and sensible (the advocacy community site).

Hopefully that will leave this for more focusing on advocacy in a quirky and independent way. I've had a good conversation tonight about upsetting people: my friend thought that although she loves me, maybe I upset people unnecessarily. In the end we agreed that there are some people who I should be free to go on upsetting: this is partly the necessary sacrifice (for me) to be able to work successfully with and gain the trust and understanding of vulnerable people and others I already know and work with; and it's partly to avoid the grey area where I could try not to offend anyone and end up completely bland and with nothing interesting to say.

So I think this blog will stay a personal space for me to try some challenging ideas and remain philosophical, but I'll try to be a bit more focused on advocacy in the future. I would also like to make it a more integral part of my work and be able to devote some core time to it instead of mainly writing late at night when I'm tired. That should also give me more chance to write responses to publications of various types (not just the videos I mentioned in my plans for 2007). Finally for now, this will be more of a sounding board for ideas that may be written more carefully and inclusively in other places.

I hope this makes sense... the key is to keep posting I guess, but in the meantime any comments or thoughts or any sort of feedback will be appreciated :-)

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.

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.

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.]

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...

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.

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...
  

A different way of thinking

I'm doing a bit of work a the moment with a homeless man. I wasn't fully recovered from my recent illness perhaps (also why I've missed posting for the last 10 days), but yesterday things didn't run as smoothly as they did before.

There were two problems. Firstly he asked me to fill in a referral form, and I in turn asked him the questions I was being asked. These sorts of direct questions from someone else's referral form aren't the easiest of things to balance with an advocacy approach, and the half answers I was getting didn't seem to match very closely with the things I already half knew. I realised that I was straying into support worker territory, and it was strange, as an advocate, to try to fill in a referral form which was supposed to be from me, in my voice, when in fact I was trying to make this man's voice heard.

The second problem was that during the slightly bizarre form-filling exercise, someone from the Council called. Now we've been getting on quite well, and we appreciate the work we're each doing on this guy's behalf. But after a couple of minutes he starts telling me that the guy is not really credible. He tells me some information from a pre-sentencing report (I do have the authority to know this, and the guy's in the room with me consenting). The Council man is vaguely worried about our guy's credibility, and I can guess that his colleagues are more worried.

So the difficulty I'm having filling in this form is suddenly compounded by other people's vague worries, and I make the mistake of asking my guy directly: why are you being inconsistent and evasive (I didn't use those words, but that was the gist of it).

He then accuses me of accusing him of 'lying'. A hole has suddenly appeared in our relationship.

I don't think he's 'lying' as such. I think he's trying to communicate his need for somewhere to live. I think he's trying to navigate his way through a whole lot of confusing questions. I can see him rooting through scraps of paper that fall out of holes in his pockets or get wet and ruined or thrown away by mistake. These pieces of paper are so closely connected to his story in many ways: some of them contain concrete evidence to support his story, some of them just have phone numbers with no names or other random scraps of information that may or may not be useful or relevant. He tries to save them, to order them, to show some of them to people who might help him (while withholding others). On some wet nights he's lost the whole lot, and they can never be replaced.

The information in his head is very similar. I think he remembers different things at different times. He talks to all sorts of people and they all want different parts of the puzzle. They also interpret the information in all sorts of different ways. It's also true, though I don't want to stress this too much, that many of the people he talks to have a very different level of education, not to mention literacy. Maybe I should say that they think in different ways to him.

Then whenever his credibility or consistency is challenged, it's a challenge to him, to his sense of self. And when he is challenged in this way he defends himself, and he gets stressed and agitated, and then seems even less credible. It's a vicious circle.

At the end of the day this makes him even more vulnerable and in need of housing, but this very vulnerability is being misunderstood and used as an excuse not to offer him services.

A practical novel

I read an interesting book this weekend, Benjamin Zephaniah's first novel, Face. The reviews on Amazon are indicative: the first two say the book is real and fantastic, and the second two say it's simplistic and empty...

I think this disagreement is because it's a very practical book. It was dedicated to the Changing Faces charity, whose aim is to 'change the way we all see disfigurement', and Zephaniah seems to be targeting a specific audience of people who have come into contact with some sort of disfigurement (either themselves or through a friend or family member). The book is not really targeted at 'the good readers of literature' however, and this is where the latter two reviewers fall down.

One of these reviewers even suggests that Zephaniah should stick to poetry, which I think also manages to miss the point that his poetry is very practical too, and arguably no more 'literary' (in the egotistical and elitist sense) than the text of Face. I've seen Zephaniah perform a couple of times, I met him very briefly last year when my friend Shaun arranged for him to come and perform in Leeds, and I have the greatest respect for the guy. I hope he doesn't think I'm damning him with faint praise (he shouldn't, given the context of this blog) but I think what does it for me is the simplicity and directness of his poetry, and it's clear entertainment value, especially in performance.

There are no literary pretensions in this poetry (except in the eyes of some Amazon reviewers): the aim is to talk about politics in life stories that will make people laugh and cry and think and talk instead of just turning off. There is more debt to the (Afro-Caribbean) history of story-telling and entertaining than the modern experience of poetry. The literary elite may say that there needs to be more 'poetry', more space, more fluidity, more depth; but then the sort of talking they end up doing often does little to help the rest of us...

Face doesn't have these poetic niceties, but I'm very happy that I've read it, and I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I see it, apart, obviously, from being a novel, almost as an extended case study. Martin, the main protagonist, obviously has a unique story just like anybody else, but he is real enough for many of us to believe in, and recognise in lots of ways. I see that the book is in some English curriculums, and I can certainly see it's pedagogical value. I think it would also be of value, not only to the specific target audience I've already mentioned, but to a wide range of people who suffer discrimination because of something about how they look.

I'm always looking out for good case studies, and I think we should encourage more books like Face. This isn't the sort of thing you could fit on half a side of A4, and neither is life. For many people we need to get longer case studies, but they need to be practical, and not too poetic.

Theory and practice

For anyone who reads Maria's post (linked to below) I should say that although there are some terrible books and papers out there, and her assessment of Muller's piece was probably as ethically real as it appears from my quote, I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I read such negative experiences of reading.

This is for two reasons. Firstly I tend to think that any article that makes you that unhappy is probably not worth advertising. In fact it's not worth wasting any time over and I'm glad she didn't read it to the end. (This is contrary to the traditional 'wisdom' that we should study the mistakes of history so we can learn from them, and I'll write later about why it's necessary to oppose this latter view).

Secondly, there are also loads of great books and bits of writing out there. Much of this is written in extremis: Bataille called writing (amongst other things) the 'impossible': that which we are compelled to do, because of it's very impossibility: that is there's something that drives you to write, but it's outside the realm of the written word, but the words that come out seem to circle and begin to clarify this driving force. Like any force, this is creative. People have published great books from the world of academia and the world of psychology as much as from the world of mental illness or art or stories of life.

These books are people's practice, and I've been meaning for a while now to write something about theory and practice. I want to say that theory doesn't exist. By this I mean that the artificial distinction between practice and theory is both wrong and unnecessary. In other words theory shouldn't exist.

Now I find myself with a good example to explain this better. There are some writers who do amazing things for us. They come in all shapes and sizes, and again some of them write about ethics or psychoanalysis, while others write survivor stories or blogs. This is the writing, and this is what we should spend our time interacting with (and hopefully trying to do). On the other hand, sadly, there is theory. Our history and development have created it. Our teachers haven't always had faith in us: they've said, the original is too hard, read this secondary text which explains it. Quickly most books seemed to become books about books.

We get trapped in the game of mainly just absorbing and regurgitating knowledge that we forget to see and listen to the person in front of us. We really should forget all this garbage: it really is turning us grey.

Spend time reading and writing about proper writing, and about life, and things will keep on moving.

This is our practice - keep it up.

Complaints are great

Am I mad? Well maybe a little hungry and sleep deprived... Anyway today I completed the 'final draft' of a code of practice for children and young people's complaints, and I think I've convinced myself that complaints really are great. Now all I need is a few other people with the same attitude.

Of course in practice people don't seem to deal with complaints very well:

• they're often seen as threatening and horrible
• people can respond extremely defensively
• sometimes as soon as you mention a complaint senior managers get involved and it all becomes very bureaucratic (e.g. in the NHS I'm told)
• in the end the whole experience is very painful for everyone

My personal experiences have been bittersweet. Several complaints have been made against me in the past, and they were usually quite painful experiences while they were being investigated. Powerful people have warned me not to defend myself or projects I cared about would suffer. I had to do a lot of extra work dealing with the complaints. Other people have been forced to get involved and do lots of extra work unnecessarily. There's the worry that something bad is going to happen at the end...

...then when it comes down to it, so far (touch wood), all the complaints have either been dropped (when I get a chance to have my say) or they've been turned around and the complainants have had to mend their ways. In practice I'm very careful and conscientious about my work, although my 'principled' approach does sometimes lead me into dangerous territory where my actions can be misunderstood (or people just jump to false assumptions).

Of course I have also learned good lessons myself in the process, but these lessons have often seemed to be despite the complaint, not because of it. What I mean is that I spent so much time carefully analysing what happened that I would be foolish not to be able to find some lessons, but usually the complaints are out of all proportion to the lesson, and the lesson is often more about avoiding complaints rather than mending alleged bad practice.

I've also had a couple of experiences recently where I haven't been complaining, but my requests or interventions have been taken as complaints. One recent request ended up on the desk of a very senior finance manager, who assured me my complaint would be responded to within 10 days. This sent shivers down my spine: I didn't want that sort of attention, and I could see all the middle managers dealing with the issue bristling with indignation that such a minor issue was causing all this fuss.

So despite all this, I think complaints are great? Yes, but to really realise how great they are we need much more of them, and we need to learn to deal with them more effectively.

Potentially some of the benefits of complaints:

• they can help us to identify potential improvements to services
• they are a form of 'customer feedback'
• they are a form of mutual problem solving: people can express their frustrations and see some positive results
• if they are handled well, they are empowering (because of the mutual problem solving aspect)
• they break down the barriers between staff and 'clients'
  
• they can show an organisation cares, beyond the fact of simply delivering a service, if they handle complaints well

Also of course, if complaints are properly handled, you avoid all the negative sides of current responses to complaints:

• people won't be so upset by them
• they shouldn't grow into such time-consuming bureaucratic messes
• people will be able to work on them between individuals, and avoid involving too many others

So take a complaint today, and be nice about it - it may make you feel better...

Being independent...

We talk about independent advocates, but what are they independent from? In fact we talk about being independent in lots of different contexts: sometimes the word actually means different things, but there's often some confusion if you ask someone to actually explain it...

Advocates have a good and simple way of explaining it. I don't think I can add anything to the published explanations - but who knows where they are...? So here goes:

'independent means free from conflicts of interest'

This is a special case of the sort of independent used in 'independent living' which means 'able to make your own choices'. The 'freedom from conflicts of interest' definition is aimed at professionals (paid or unpaid).

A conflict of interest is when one person is asking you to do one thing, but you also feel you should be doing something else. You may feel this conflict because of your own beliefs or morals or professional approach; you may expect your manager or colleague or friend to disapprove; or someone may have specifically given you a contradictory instruction.

What about some examples (based on advocacy practice):

• you start working with a person with learning difficulties, and then their wife or brother or mother get involved too... who is making the decisions here?
  
• your contract says you can only work for 4 hours with each client, but this person clearly (to you) needs more time
• you are asked to support someone to make a complaint against a colleague
• you go into a meeting with your partner, and since you've been an advocate for ten years now all the senior managers know you and greet you like a friend (your partner meanwhile is looking at you as if they're wondering who you really are after all...)
• someone tells you that your partner may have all their problems solved if this great new project happens in about 4 weeks - but it's all hush hush at the moment and you can't say anything to anybody until it's officially announced...
• you and a colleague have been working independently for a long time with two people in the same care home, then they have a fight and each want the other to move out
• most of the funding for your project comes from the local authority, and most of your work is for people in local authority care
• there's been a recent funding crisis and several new committee members have been recruited including a psychiatrist, a GP and a local councillor: they think the project needs to do much more effective recording of its work, but you think this will take away from the time you have to do advocacy (and your personal record is exemplary)

How can you avoid conflicts of interest?

• make sure people understand what they are and when they can occur
• clearly define the boundaries of your work
• have a clear confidentiality policy (anything told to you is liable to be told to your advocacy partner)
• develop working relationships with other local advocacy projects so they can take on work that possibly involves conflicts
• get funding from a range of sources, and have clear clauses in your local authority or PCT contracts to safeguard you from potential conflicts
• let people, especially senior managers, know that you will be rude to them when you're with an advocacy client (or at least seem to ignore them)
• anyway, don't talk much to people who might cause a conflict, including managers, parents or other siblings, care staff, etc. (but be nice and don't cause different sorts of conflicts)
  

Ethics vs morality

This blog is obviously about advocacy, but another constant underlying theme will be what I call ethics. It's ethics that got me into advocacy, and ethics that keeps me going. This needs some explanation.

Originally ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning character, or way of living, and I want to recall this sense of the word when I use it. Morality came from similar roots (in Latin), but to me over the years even though both words have become confused, morality has become much more associated with an idea of 'moral law'.

In talking about ethics I want to remember both that it means our way of life, and to distinguish it from laws and rules.

How can you see this in the blog?

1. I will write about things like humility, independence, violence, etc. We need to think about these things rather than make rules about them; we need to explore how we use these ideas in our lives and in our working practices. These ideas and others like them are the ground where an ethical practice can grow.
   
2. We need to understand these ideas in terms of stories, and we will never learn their lessons in the real world unless our bodies experience some kind of incorporeal transformation (you may well have already gone through this, I'm not trying to preach). Learning a definition of humility as an objective fact is not going to be any use, and I won't present ideas in these terms.
3. Laws are relatively closed - they can be changed, but it's not easy to do. This blog will on the contrary try to remain especially open. It is published openly, and its contents are openly reusable. It is also published 'on the fly', without much editing, warts and all. I'm not trying at all to say everything, just to open up conversations. I will inevitably make mistakes and say things that I will clarify or correct later.
4. You will see an interplay between ethics, practice and methodology: these all mean basically the same thing, but in slightly different contexts. Ethics is more about the way we live our lives; practice is more about how we act, what we do; and methodology is more about planning, tactics and strategy.

Is this a new way of looking at ethics?

No. Firstly, having learnt from some books about this way of thinking about ethics, I've noticed that actually this really is the way many people live their lives. This is especially true of people who haven't been too much damaged by education, or people who have been excluded from normal society for one reason or another. I think many of my readers will recognise what I'm saying, it's not that strange.

Secondly, I'm not an academic, but I have found that this approach is similar to the work of some of the very early pre-Socratic Greek philosophers as well as later writers including Lucretius (Roman), the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and people like Foucault and Deleuze and others more recently.

More down to earth, I recently saw a section in the Barefoot Doctor's Handbook for the Urban Warrior subtitled 'Morals make the moron' - this coming from a sort of modern Taoist perspective.

Being non-judgemental

One of the things that attracts me to advocacy is the basically non-judgemental approach. We help people to make their voices heard: their own voices and their own wishes. We don't give advice, we try not to let our own feelings or beliefs get in the way of our work, we'll even help people to say things that we think are just wrong - in the hope, perhaps, that by effectively saying them they'll be able to get into a debate with other people that might help them develop more palatable aims.

I want to get away from some of the issues I've been dealing with recently, although there's some pretty good examples among these, especially among the acute psychiatric patients. Perhaps an interesting one is an example from Advocacy 2000's Key Ideas on Independent Advocacy:

An advocate works with a person wanting to be rehoused because they object to the ethnic origin of their neighbours. How can the advocate support this view without comprising the inclusive principles of advocacy?

It seems to me that today many people would be pretty judgemental about this one, and in fact I have spent so much time working with people on the receiving end of racial discrimination that I'm quite keen on these issues myself. On the other hand, this person has come to an advocacy project, so maybe things can turn out a little differently...

So the 'judgemental' people, quite possibly with the best intentions, may well say that 'we can't possibly help you express your racist views, that isn't a good reason to move, pull yourself together and learn to be less offensive.'

I would hope that most advocates would take a deep breath, combat their natural alarm bells, and start to ask this person some open questions to find out what really lies behind their basic question.

Now this is a difficult one, and I would support any advocate who felt they couldn't work with this person: we can try to find an alternative advocate (although if another person comes along later with a similar request I hope you wouldn't still find it so difficult).

The next thing I would hope is that through working with an advocate this person will develop some more clarity about their needs and wishes. I can imagine they've said this to quite a few people before they found an advocate, and I can imagine the housing officer, the police, the advice service, maybe even the social worker all getting quite offended and refusing to talk about the issue. The advocate talks though, and through this talking probably finds several other underlying issues that are translated into race discrimination through lack of communication skills. Talking to the advocate helps them to identify these issues more clearly, and sometimes talk about them, instead of the ethnicity of their neighbour.

Anyway I'm sure you can continue the argument from there. And to put this into the context of the not very ethnically diverse and mainly rural metropolitan district I currently live and work in, I have found myself supporting asylum seekers to be moved from almost entirely 'white' communities into more ethnically diverse areas, which I see as closely analagous to this example.

So this was an example of being non-judgemental. You will have noticed that the advocate took a deep breath just before they started work. This is because being non-judgemental in this way is an active process: it requires hard work and commitment. Like my recent post Humility is not a passive state, it is important to see that being non-judgemental is more than simply not doing something.

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OK. So now we've established that, I also want to say something related but slightly different about being non-judgemental. This is about the sort of statements we make, and it is a move against the sort of political correctness which is slowly creeping through society, even though we reject the term as it was popularised in the States in the 1980's and 90's.

I have a friend who is fat. Occasionally she gets fed up with people who pussy-foot around the subject and feel embarrassed to say the word fat in her presence. Some people wouldn't even say the word when she was life-threateningly obese. She thinks they should grow up and get a life. There are also people who want to reclaim the words mad or crazy or dwarf or midget. Look at midget gems after all: they're pretty sweet, so why can't I be? (and believe you me, I can be...)

On the other hand my fat friend has knocked grown men out after inappropriate comments. She's easily able to tell the difference, and so are they (when they wake up). There are also boderline cases. I have a laugh with my friend and most of the time she appreciates it, but there have been occasions where I've upset her. This is partly to do with her health at that moment, but I don't want to make excuses.

The fact is that I need to strike a balance between speaking the truth and remaining sensitive. In the end this is an impossible task, but it is a task which I feel duty bound to attempt.

This is being non-judgemental: it is an impossible task, but if we are going to acheive it at all we can't simply go in one direction towards what we think is safety - that is judging safety to be better. If we spend too much time seeking safety though we just end up in that grey world that I have already said I am working against (see Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom).