My answer is to appoint a Community Connector in each town or area. The Community Connector will need to have some prior knowledge of helping people in need and the 7 Community Connectors currently in Cheshire have backgrounds which include being a Counsellor, being a Citizens Advice volunteer or working for a Housing Association.
The Community Connector then needs to be trained – perhaps by Citizens Advice – to know each and every help organisation in their area.
The next step is to tell all the local organisations that if they have a client – lets call her Mary again – who needs more or different help than they can give they should refer Mary to the Community Connector.
The Community Connector will have a set rota each week so everyone knows where he/she will be at any time – very often they will be at the Foodbank as that at present is probably where Mary will go first.
The Community Connector will then sit down with Mary, have a cup of tea with her, and take as long as it takes to get to know Mary the whole human being. They will discover that Mary is mentally ill but they will have the time to discover why – lets say in this case because she is in debt. So the Community Connector will then take Mary to the local Debt Advice charity and if necessary help her to get a court order to stop the bailiffs knocking on the door every day. And then Mary can go back and see the same Community Connector again and again and again – as often as she needs to – and a relationship of trust and friendship develops and importantly Mary is not asked her mother’s maiden name or her date of birth 10 times by 10 different people.
We are now looking at Mary as a whole, we will help her to get her issues into some sort of priority order and the Community Connector will, where they can, help Mary personally but often they will take her to the right place where she can get the advice and the help she needs and importantly they will where necessary go with her to make sure she does get there and whilst there will act as her advocate to make sure that Mary asks the right questions.
This is different from the normal Citizens Advice model because there each time that Mary visits Citizens Advice she is likely to meet another volunteer and so there is little opportunity for trust and understanding to develop. As Mary meets the Community Connector repeatedly trust develops and we slowly can get to the underlying issues which are causing Mary such stress.
Sometimes Mary may only need one meeting with the Community Connector to point her in the right direction or to help her to complete a benefits form correctly but very often she will have multiple visits and the Community Connector might on one occasion help Mary personally, on the next take her to the DWP to help her fill out a form on line and the next time accompany her to a visit to the Doctor to help her to ask the right questions. And then they might introduce the children to the local youth club or the local football club.
Just in case I have not excited you about this let me tell you two real stories.
1.A week before Christmas a lady arrived at the Winsford Foodbank with a 2 week old bay in one arm and eviction notice from her private landlord in the other hand. She was terrified that she would be on the streets and that the bay would then be taken into care and both their lives would be ruined. The local Community Connector was there and he listened to her sad story and he thought that the lady qualified for social housing so he physically took her to the local Housing Association and to cut a long story short they gave her a flat and mother and baby are living there happily.
2.The Community Connector in Ellesmere Port had met a man who was disabled and tried to help him. But then he did not come back for a few weeks. But after a few weeks he did come back and it transpired that he had been in prison for stealing food as he was hungry and had no money. The Community Connector discovered that this man had been refused benefits by the DWP and she discovered that this disabled man had not completed the PiP for correctly and so benefits had been refused. the Community Connector personally helped the man fill in a PiP form and the result was that he received a back payment of nearly £6000 and a promise of a monthly payment for the next 5 years because of his disability. A few days later he phoned the Community Connector to say that she had changed his life. He had been able to pay a deposit and to rent a flat and he said “You have changed my life.” Without this help he might well be back in prison.
We live in a country where the help does exist but it is disconnected . It is hard to find the help if you are both mentally and physically well and computer literate but if you are none of these you need help and this is a simple and relatively inexpensive way to transform the lives of some of our most needy neighbours.
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