By Andy Meakin, Director, VOICES   This may be an apocryphal story, I can’t remember where I heard it, but it illustrates a point… A doctor was about to do a first shift in charge of a busy A&E department and expressed some anxiety to their supervisor.  Their supervising consultant offered some coaching through the following advice: “If you’re feeling overwhelmed, under pressure, so you don’t know where to turn, or what to do, if you feel lost and alone.  Don’t hesitate to cope.” The message was that struggle is normal, rely on your training and skills, rely on your network of colleagues, overcome problems, grow, and be ‘resilient’.   Promoting resilience has become an inescapable message of public dialogue on hardship and wellbeing.  I think we need to re-examine this refrain.   The implication of the resilience narrative – for some – is that the solution to hardship and poverty is found in the individual.  And, that hardship and poverty, as well as its consequences for physical and mental wellbeing, is the result of ‘lifestyle choices’. Our popular dialogue on the subject tends to organise – consciously or otherwise – into categories of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.  Sadly, we sometimes see these judgements documented in eligibility criteria that… Continue Reading

Get Talking Hardship was a community research project commissioned by the Hardship Commission in Stoke-on-Trent and funded by The National Lottery Community Fund through VOICES. The research was led by Staffordshire University.… Continue Reading

In this short case study Anna talks about the origins and necessity of our Food Banks, and how this relates to our customers who are often rough sleeping.… Continue Reading

By Dean Spruce, Communication & Media Coordinator, VOICES   The month is January, it’s cold, there’s snow on the ground, the Christmas holidays already seem like a distant memory and people have returned to work and to their regular routines. For some people however, the Christmas period doesn’t promise a welcome break, nor time spent with family or turkey dinners.  For those that find themselves outside, by which I mean sleeping rough, it represents the most difficult of all challenges – staying alive.  There is little time to worry about gifts or any of the other distractions that most of us are more than willing to engage in, when you have nowhere to go, no money and potentially only the clothes on your back to keep you warm.  For these people the Christmas period is most definitely not over.  The weather is getting worse as we head into 2019, the cold snaps temporarily delayed by the unusual lasting warmth of the previous summer have now firmly set in, and the risk to human life is high. Poverty in the UK is on the rise, recent figures published by Crisis revealed levels of rough sleeping – including sleeping on public transport and in tents – had doubled in… Continue Reading

Written by Steven Barkess, Community Development Coordinator, VOICES I am a member of the LGBT community and have had the privilege to witness many social movements of equality for many LGBT people in the western world. I have and have had many friends both part of and external to the LGBT community and I am still shocked to find that people in both spheres still have a huge lack of understanding of the issues transgender people face. Especially those going through gender reassignment. I am not an academic, or a specialist in transgender issues or trans myself but I am able to recognise some of the inequalities such as class and race which effect transgender people in today’s society. I am however a gay man who has got to know many transgender people both before and after transition. Within my career working with vulnerable people I have also observed some of the serious issues that trans men and women face. This has made me think a little more about the whole process. For someone to live their life as their true gender they often need to have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, not only for the legal recognition but also to access medical… Continue Reading