We’re not all at equal risk of homelessness. Every person carries their own unique experiences and faces different barriers to housing. Some groups of people are systematically disadvantaged, and despite legal duties, the evidence tells us that inequalities persist in Scotland.
The Unequal Risk, an online course provided by our training and consultancy social enterprise All In, is focused on this issue. The training encourages reflection on how we can better listen to and represent diverse communities, covers the underpinning legislation, and offers practical tools to create better services. Read what community resilience worker Lizzie Ashworth experienced during a recent session.
I recently joined a Homeless Network Scotland training session, ‘The Unequal Risk: an equality and human rights lens in housing and homelessness’.
The training offered an inspiring and constructive opportunity to reflect on the unequivocal entitlement of all individuals to have their rights fully upheld and respected in their engagement with housing and homelessness services across Scotland, and the continued gaps in service-user experience.
The trainers facilitated great discussion on how best to redress inequalities around service access, including a consideration of the encouraging move across housing and homelessness provision to embed person-centred and trauma-informed best practice into frontline service delivery. The training also touched on the huge value lived experience from diverse communities brings to informing service design and appropriateness.
For the past 20 years, I’ve worked in community outreach and development, most often directly with marginalised and disenfranchised communities around themes of inclusion, rights and diversity.
I have seen first-hand how individuals’ rights have been breached both implicitly and explicitly in service design and delivery, from Gypsy/Travellers failing to access women’s health advice due to services being ill-equipped to provide culturally appropriate services, to adults experiencing homelessness failing to access mental health support due to an absence of assertive outreach provision.
The training supported a broad consideration of how an absence of rights awareness in how community services are developed and delivered both create and sustain significant and enduring barriers for individuals accessing critical advice and support.
It is encouraging to see best practice in inclusion, person-centred and trauma-informed support becoming increasingly commonplace across housing and homelessness services. Creating safety and ensuring that choice, compassion and respect permeate service delivery go a significant distance in meaningfully upholding the rights of service-users.
However, an acknowledgment of current challenges seems unavoidable, and the widespread funding cuts across Scotland’s health, social care and housing sectors paired with the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on service-users and sector professionals are significant.
Together, these circumstances create an increasingly demanding and challenging context in which professionals find themselves under mounting pressure to sustain delivery of high quality humane and dignified support.
Ethical commissioning and ethical funding cycles seem to me fundamental to ensuring organisations and their staff retain capacity to deliver rights-informed and upholding services.
However, increasing job market competitiveness, impermanent job contracts and the worrying wider context of world events increasingly create conditions for declining mental health and burnout amongst statutory and third sector staff.
It’s easy, in the busyness of day-to-day service delivery, to overly focus on the task at hand, particularly where the task is assisting vulnerable individuals to access urgent and critical support. It can be easy to lose sight of good process, of checking what supported individuals value, need and want themselves – and how we can empower them towards improved circumstances, as opposed to services “doing to them.”
I found Homeless Network Scotland’s training a refreshing antidote to the bleak reality of current day-to-day news, and a potent reminder of the power and responsibility we all hold to make this world a more humane and dignified place, for ourselves and others, and striving to embed a rights-based approach into all our relationships and the services we deliver.
Lizzie Ashworth, Community Resilience Worker, Cyrenians Reset Project
Join us for the next unequal risk session on 10 July to explore how you can make your practice, service and organisation more inclusive.