I've just come back from the Housing and Support Alliance Conference, amazing, inspiring, brutal...
I reacquainted myself with some great people and met some new ones. I drunkenly met Sara Ryan, was lost for words, and wine wasn't the reason. I vaguely remember saying that I try to make things funny. It's not funny. Not for the dudes.
Anyway here's the tale...
I was recently dismissed by a Social Worker in one branch of a local authority as 'not being a professional' (while doing some canny work in another branch of the same authority.) I was slightly piqued and almost fired off a big-headed email in which the subject heading may have read, 'Do You Know Who I Am?' Like a '90s boy band member trying to jump the queue at a seedy nightclub. Then I began musing about 'professionalism' and how people and families are dismissed with much harsher consequences than a slight prick to their over inflated ego.
The backdrop of all of this is another of the appalling story of a young man abandoned in an ATU. While the 'professionals' argue about who pays, solicitors piss about not sharing info with the family, the hospital makes the young man's emotional and physical health worse, social services departments in two areas of the UK do either nothing or precious little, both at the pace of a sloth hitching a lift on a snail. The DoH sends in a team and no lives appear to improve.
In the middle of it is a young man and his family, lost in the system, desperate, drowning in reports, advice and professionalism.
I'm glad people don't think I'm a professional, you could train a pig to be a professional in these situations, and it wouldn't be a long course of study. I remember a quote, "don't wrestle pigs, you'll get all muddy and the pigs will love it." I think we are pig wrestling on a grand scale and it isn't the professionals getting muddy.
I'm having a bit of a struggle at the moment, I cant remember a time in my 'non professional' career when I've felt so powerless professionally or politically. I've always felt I was on some kind of crusade...now I think I'm just bringing home the bacon.
The conference fired me up though, not to back down, to 'fuck the label' to not accept the cuts, to stop the shit holes.
And it WAS funny especially the uvavu bit...
Disclaimer. I'm not describing anyone as a pig. It is a metaphor or a simile or a split infinitive or summat like that. I also stand by my long held view that professionals are usually really good, and try really hard. They are great tireless workers struggling in a pretty broken system. You do unearth the odd truffle...
