By Aaron Barbour
“People who experience a problem understand it best.”
Extract from Community Links’ founding statement
Community Links and ATD Fourth World, are two charities both working with people who live in poverty. We jointly conducted a series of workshops with people who have long-term experience of poverty to explore their experiences, draw out common themes and develop ideas for changes to the system that participants felt would help them move out of poverty, off benefits and into sustainable secure employment.
These are the stories of the people we work with everyday. They are the ones who have to queue for 40 minutes in the Jobcentre, the ones who never see the same member of staff twice, and the ones who have to negotiate the bureaucracy of the benefits system just to be able to feed their families whilst they look for work in this ongoing recession.
“Working Alongside“ is the latest in our Evidence Paper series. It is an account of those three workshops and some recommendations. We hope policymakers and other practioners will learn from this work to inform their strategy and policy and go on to improve services offered by the Department for Work and Pensions, Jobcentre Plus and their partners.
Download a copy of “Working Alongside“.
[...] by the end of this week about improving the service and efficiency at the Jobcentre. Immediately Working Alongside People of Influence and Time Well Spent sprung to mind. I emailed Jim’s private office [...]
[...] Current reforms mean government employing large private organisations like A4E to deal with the long-term unemployed whilst they get to grips with the latest recession wave of white collar workers. Face the Facts, the JCP isn’t working, aired on Radio 4 last Sunday interviewed people recently made redundant, people who had an impressive CV and keen to find employment and yet were completely let down by the JCP service. The same frustrations voiced in this programme were echoed by the long term unemployed in our report Working Alongside. [...]