Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

current issue

December 2024 – January 2025 : Solidarity READ ONLINE

RECENT TWEETS

Listening, the key to visibility

December 01 2024
© John Sheehy © John Sheehy

Our deputy editor discusses the lessons he learned while working on Groundswell’s Listen Up hub project. By Mat Amp

For the last seven or eight years my professional life has been focused on storytelling. As a researcher and interviewer I’ve listened to people tell their stories, while as a writer and public speaker I’ve shared experiences through a range of different mediums that include this column.

While any good story will have a foundation in people’s experience, the type of storytelling referred to here is factual rather than fictionalised. They are stories told by people who have faced the myriad, complex challenges that homelessness offers including mental health issues, addiction, loneliness, financial setbacks and, of course, health complications.

There are two major positive gains from the telling of these stories: the impact on the storyteller and the person the story is told to. People sharing their stories benefit from being heard. It can bolster their self-esteem and help them to overcome the shame of having to keep experiences to themselves. The other major benefit is to the people hearing these stories, who are helped to understand that we are all individuals, not identical products of lazy, ill-informed stereotypes.

In the case of Listen Up, the stories came from two major sources. On the one hand there were up to 20 reporters at a time submitting reports that focused on either their first-hand experiences or what was happening around them in their day-to-day lives. On the other hand, we conducted hundreds of qualitative research interviews across the country, talking to people with experience of homelessness about various issues, from digital inclusion to their views on ‘community’.

We shared the ‘findings’ of these reports and interviews through webinars and briefings with service providers – in order to improve front line service delivery – and with the public through our Listen Up hub. So often in this sector, people have been told what they need and provided with the solutions regardless of what they want. There has been a pervasive view held, even among some of the most liberal people in our society, that homeless people are homeless because they don’t know what is good for them. In other words, they need to be looked out for and looked after.

People who have experienced homelessness often talk about the problem of being invisible, which is a strange thought when you consider the rising number of people that we are seeing every day on the streets of every city in the country.

In my opinion, the problem is not that people experiencing homelessness are not seen, it’s that we are not heard. And it’s not enough that someone just listens and does fuck all squared to help either. That’s the equivalent of the millions who walk past homeless people on the street every day, doing their best to pretend that they don’t exist or that they choose to live this way. I mean what an insane thought that is, that anyone would chose to be out on the streets over a decent place to live. Sure, there are a few people out there who would rather stay on the streets than go into a homeless hostel but that doesn’t mean they are choosing to be homeless because it’s their desired lifestyle. It just means that they don’t want to put themselves through the often dehumanising process of homeless warehousing that hostels can sometimes feel like.

And this is where projects like Listen Up come in. If we allow people experiencing homelessness to express themselves and provide a forum to share their stories we not only start to tackle some of the lazy and horrendous stereotypes out there, we also learn how to provide solutions. While people’s first-hand accounts of their experience tackles stereotypes and provide the information necessary for case workers and health professionals to improve service provision, there is often a positive impact on the storyteller’s wellbeing.

Shame breeds in the dark and shining light on the experiences that create that shame can help people to move past it. It can also help others who have had similar experiences by showing them that there is nothing to be ashamed of: ‘If they are managing to talk about it so openly then there is nothing to be ashamed of’ sort of thing.

For example, one of the Listen Up reporters wrote a piece about the severe abuse he suffered as a child. He described the feeling he got from doing that as tantamount to having a huge weight lifted from his soul. Somebody else who read that piece told me that reading it had the same impact on them.

Listen Up started as an NHS-funded project called ‘the Covid Monitoring Project’ that did what it said on the tin. It was a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and an attempt to find out what had changed for people experiencing homelessness. What soon became evident was that people without a safe and secure home weren’t facing a Covid crisis. They were facing a crisis full stop. In other words there had always been a reason to ask people about the issues they faced living without a safe and secure space to call home.

This realisation and the success of the Covid Monitoring Project inspired us to apply for Comic Relief funding for a three-year project based on the same model. Listen Up was born. If you work in the charity sector you will probably be aware that many three-year projects follow a similar curve. The first year is usually about learning what works, the second is about consolidation and, by the final year, the project fires on all cylinders. The difference with the Listen Up project is that it was built on the foundation of that first year as the Covid Monitoring Project. As a result we knew what we were doing from the outset.

This was one of many reasons why the project was so successful. Not only did we share the learning from the incredible stories submitted by reporters and the countless research interviews conducted with people experiencing homelessness across the country, but we provided reporters with a platform to share their experiences. This has helped to shape and improve services as well as offer a springboard for recovery, both for reporters and for people reading their reports. Those reports remain accessible on Groundswell’s Listen Up hub, by the way [just Google that and you’ll find it]. The stories are tagged and if you’re looking for a bit of inspiration, I seriously suggest you check it out. 

If we are going to provide truly holistic care, fuelled by the experience of those who have lived it, we must learn to work with the people going through that experience and not for them. We need to actively listen to their stories and act upon them.

We all make generalisations and fall prey to stereotyping in some form or another, but try to remember that we are not homeless people. We are people who don’t happen to have a safe and secure place to call home. We are people made up of thousands of unique experiences that makes us the incredible individuals that we know we are.

< Issue 153: Comics Solid as a rock >
December 2024 – January 2025 : Solidarity

CONTENTS

BACK ISSUES
BACK TO PAGE TOP