Abstract:

Through 13 years of working with some of the most vulnerable people in British society Ed Tytherleigh, now with SPEAR, has seen what works and what doesn’t.  Here he argues that compassion alone is not enough to change the lives of such people and instead we need compassion with a focus.  He argues that we should channel our compassion for these individuals in a manner which not only provides them comfort, safety and emotional support but also makes the interventions needed to change their lives.  Simply providing compassion does nothing to break the cycle of marginalisation the most vulnerable people face.

He relates this to the experience he has working with rough sleepers on the streets of Manchester and London and questions whether many of the services he have seen do enough to change lives and can, at worst, embed individuals deeper in their sense of identity as a marginalised person and by being simply compassionate can actually do more harm than good.

SPEAR is the largest social welfare charity in the Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames and provides a wide range of services to many of the most vulnerable adults in the Borough.  We operate street outreach services to enable the street homeless people to access accommodation.  Last year we found 125 people sleeping rough in the Borough of which we were able to take 76 away from the streets for good.  We operate an award-winning hostel which recently closed for a £1 million refurbishment programme having been awarded a capital grant from central Government.  We support 71 different individuals in tenancies around the Borough, operate a service targeting problematic drug users enabling them to access reduction services, run a resettlement service which saw us set up 113 tenancies for homeless households in the private rented sector last year and we run a young  person’s hostel for homeless 16 and 17-year olds.

For all these services we carry out a lot of work on top such as training on lifeskills, volunteer and trainee schemes, a job club and a wide variety of other activities and recreation opportunities.  Our aim with everyone we work with is that we don’t just find people a place to live or treat their drug and alcohol and alcohol problem; we aim that for every single person we work with we give them the skills and confidence to live an independent life away from support services.

Compassion is at the very heart of what we do and is what drives us an organisation.  Speaking on behalf of myself and my colleagues I know that we are all driven by the emotional and practical needs of the individuals we support.  We are an organisation that raises funds not to perpetuate itself, but to ensure that we can get as many resources as possible to the people who most need it, our beneficiaries.

However compassion alone is not enough to change lives for the individuals we serve.  It needs to be combined with a focus on the solutions that will enable our service users to lead fulfilling lives.  That it is not to say that it isn’t needed; compassion is a vital component of the ultimate solution.  Without compassion you cannot have empathy and nor can you enlist the trust or motivation an individual needs to make profound life changes.

The majority of the vulnerable people we work with have lived in and around poverty all their lives.  They have been brought up reliant on the Government for the majority of their basic needs; housing, income, healthcare, education, recreation and, all too often, social work.  A service user who does not have this background is the exception.  These individuals have deeply entrenched cultural and social barriers that prevent them turning their back on this situation and while we have an increasingly mobile society the majority of individuals from marginalised backgrounds will not leave it.

SPEAR sees their role not as simply applying a sticking plaster and making our beneficiaries’ a lot more comfortable.  Instead our aim is to buck this cycle of individuals living their lives on the peripheries of society.  This requires hours and hours of targeted interventions when every intervention we make is aimed at changing an individual’s horizons and equipping them with the confidence and skills needed to make profound changes to their lives.  Our job is done when they leave our services equipped to live on their own and, if they were to have the children, with the hope that their children will have the same lives expectations as the rest of us – and have the opportunity to fulfil their hopes and dreams.  We are not naive enough to suggest that we can do this for everyone and despite our best efforts some of the most marginalised will not make such advances, but we set out with this aim for everyone we work with and for many we will break this cycle.

In order to achieve this we need compassion.  It should underpin everything we do and it should drive us to do as much as we can for our beneficiaries.  However it also needs a structure to channel this compassion and to give a framework to the support we give.  We use a variety of tools to achieve our aims including carrying out assessments and formulating action plans under ten headings (from the ‘basics’ such as health, substance misues and accommodation to more innovative headings such as confidence & motivation, work and social network).  The onus will be on the individual to carry out the action plan and our staff will be there to support them all of the way.  In order for the vast majority of individuals to be franchised in this process they need to feel in a safe place with the support of those around them.  This comes through compassion.  If we use threats and a metaphorical stick we will not elicit the response we want from those we support and fail in our duty.  Compassion should also drive us for the rare times we choose to criticise someone for failing to do what they should because we are doing it to help people focus on where they want to get to and to own the process of change.

In the United Kingdom, and indeed all around the world, there are thousands of projects providing all manner of services to vulnerable people.  Most (sadly not all) of these are driven by compassion but not all of them are excellent services.  An average service can often serve only to maintain the status quo and, at worst, further embed someone in their status as a ‘vulnerable’ person and do nothing to enable the beneficiary to lead a better life, only to make their present life more comfortable.  Only the excellent services that can utilise this compassion and channel it to achieve something above and beyond can really bring about the life changes needed to reduce the number of vulnerable people in our society.  This is what SPEAR aspires to and what we regularly achieve, although we can’t achieve miracles and we can’t achieve such success for everyone. 

Often our compassion can cloud our judgement to do what is best for the individual, we have all heard of the over-protective mother and the same can apply to the delivery of social work.  By focusing solely on ensuring that someone is comfortable and safe (laudable aims as they are) we can respond to the most immediate needs and fail to respond to the long-term needs of every human; a sense of fulfilment, a sense of purpose and a sense of satisfaction.

I wish someone had taught me these lessons as a nineteen year-old when I got my first job.  Having volunteered making sandwiches for homeless people at a Christian drop-in centre in Manchester , I applied and was accepted as a street outreach worker with the job of going out at night and early morning to find rough sleepers and facilitate their move into hostels and other forms of temporary accommodation.  Aside from the fact that I wouldn’t dare do that job now and I have someone fascinating anecdotes from this time, looking back I now see the negatives of me doing that job.

I had huge amounts of compassion and drive and I thought charging around doing everything I could to get some of the most helpless, vulnerable people in the country off the streets was amazingly rewarding.  It was – for myself.  But looking back I cannot help but wonder if the people I helped did actually make the transition from rough sleeper to member of mainstream society or did I just transfer the person, complete with all the problems and challenges they faced, into a place to live.  Yes, they were warm and a great deal safer, but the job was only half done, something I completely failed to realise at the time.

Furthermore I wish I had not always been so soft on the people I was supporting.  Blinded by compassion and full of desire to advocate for the people I worked with to others, sometimes I failed to advocate on their behalf to themselves.  When they came to me having missed crucial appointments of were clearly making wrong life decisions I did not try to interrupt them as I wanted to be their main supporter and I thought I would fall short of that by contradicting them.  In hindsight I wished I used my judgement when to intervene and when to let things go with a view to building up their self esteem, their confidence and their horizons.

In our society there are many conflicting opinions on how to help vulnerable adults.  I would argue that those services without compassion will always fail.  As an example, most people who go to prison come out as likely – or even more likely – to reoffend as when they went in.  Why?  Because we fail to show any empathy or compassion for the vast majority of criminals whose reason for offending is more social and cultural than due to their personality, and therefore we fail to develop the solutions that will prevent them reoffending in the future.  Another example would be recent experiments to ‘hose down’ rough sleepers to get them to move on.  This profoundly lacks compassion and, accordingly, completely fails to solve the problem society faces when an individual sleeps rough.  Indeed I suggest it is likely to decrease trust the rough sleeper will have in ‘the establishment’ and make the individual even further from constructive help.

In putting forward this proposal I do not want to be seen as promoting a ‘cruel to be kind’ approach to human welfare.  I am promoting a ‘kind in a considered manner’ approach.  I do not believe that a big stick works to motivate people and I believe that each and every person should be given every opportunity to lead a fulfilling life.  I do, however, express concerns that far too many of our services have compassion but do not do enough to use this to break the cycle of marginalisation the people we support face.  Our aim should always be to change lives for the better and not just sustain people  in their current situation using compassion alone.