Rural poverty and resilience

Rural Poverty and Resilience Lecture to Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research and Development Bangor University June 2010 and University for Cornwall Tremough autumn 2010 Introduction: I shall refer to the research methods used in pieces of formal research work I have been involved with in rural areas over 20 years and link them to themes in relation to the transition movement and resilience. First let me just tell you who I am. I am an ethnobotanist which means I have a biology degree and environmental post grad. I was born in Wigan to a family where single motherhood has been a tradition for over 150 years, my great grandmother read tea leaves and my grandmother was a political activist. I have spent 13 years on state benefits with my daughter, co-founded Penwith Women’s Aid, Kerrier and Fal Credit Union and Bangor Earth First. Plus I have just left a secure job with the LA to live in a caravan and get paid to work people in the natural world and plotting to try and get funding to finally do my PhD. When I was a plant biology student here in Bangor in the early 1990s we had research scientists then looking at what impact rising CO2 levels would have on plant growth but it seems to me we have not yet worked out how we will manage as people, families and communities. Some people think we may need to get extra terrestrial. Most are either ignoring or just accepting the inevitable as our collective fate. The politicians especially seem to be wrapped up in their own little irrelevant fictitious drama. As Rob Hopkins, in his book The Transition Handbook puts it: that economic growth can continue indefinitely, that possessions can make you happy, that economic globalization is an inevitable process to which we have all given our consent..these are all stories that are positively harmful for the challenges we find ourselves facing faster than we think’. He goes on to describe the challenges as ‘rebuilding local agriculture and food production, localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking how we manage waste’ and I would add local transport and small micro economies to the list.’ So we get to the word ‘resilience’ to define what we might aspire to as individuals, within our families and at a community level. It’s a word used in ecology and the definition I’m using here is: ‘The ability of a system, from individual people to whole economies, to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shocks from the outside’ For people already living on the edges of society even seemingly small negative changes can have devastating effects, especially the most vulnerable: the elderly and the very young. I mean even a change in a bus timetable or changes to a school or work day can have a knock on effect which might lose someone their job. So when bigger changes loom such as changes to benefits income, rent increases or job losses, homelessness or victimization the effects can be of disastrous proportions to families and individuals. Recessions come and go the gap between the rich and the poor just gets bigger. But there are community leaders and activists in almost all communities and many people are willing to accept positive change and even participate in it. In rural areas we might be at an advantage in the Transition agenda where our communities are smaller, more distinct and defined. People might know each other better, with the rich, sometimes the very wealthy, living cheek by jowl with the very poor in neighbourhoods, at the school gate and in the GP surgery. Another contextual issue I want to raise is the importance of being aware of ourselves as researchers in making the methods and processes we use not only repeatable but which leave people, at least unchanged, at best better off than before we came on the scene, so that the process becomes as important as the product. We must include ourselves in this it in that we are of course consciously building on our own learning and that of others around us in each piece, again making it a positive process for all concerned. I shall first outline the research and the methods and come to the outcomes later. I was appointed as the SureStart Local Programme Manager (SSLP) in the Falmouth and Penryn area of Cornwall in 2001. All of Cornwall is officially rural and many parts of it are eligible for European convergence funding in recognition of the high levels of deprivation. According to some sources Cornwall has the lowest wages in Britain. There is a shortage of social housing and high house prices due to second home ownership. I was given a mobile phone and a laptop, a ½ million pound revenue budgets and 1 million pound capital budget to deliver services to children under 5 and thus end child poverty in one generation. The geographic area was (and still is) one of the highest levels of deprivation in the UK. Our total numbers of under 5s was just under 700 children. This was originally assessed against electoral wards using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (aka IMD). Within a couple of years the tools for measuring deprivation had been refined down to sub ward levels called Super Output Areas (who comes up with these names?!) and then down again to Lower Super Output Areas. The brief was to reach every child under 5 and their family and to measure the impact. The outcomes we were being asked to impact upon were really the forerunner of ECM i.e. teenage pregnancy, smoking in pregnancy, obesity, nos of children being put on the at risk register (and taken off and put on again within a year), parental employment and adequate housing and the local environment for children under 5. So we needed a service plan based on needs and perceived needs. The Children’s Society had already done a day event on the local park with allsorts of interactive Planning 4 Real participatory stands and stalls to try and elicit info. I engaged any and all parents I was coming across who might be willing to help, through HVs and community contacts, volunteer bureau, and from 3rd sector agencies. Some of these volunteers eventually went on to become paid staff in the services. Using the NHS database, a questionnaire was sent to all the families with children under 5 with a Freepost address. We had editorials in the papers and on the radio and enticed people to respond by having a selection of prize draws. The questionnaire was generally about what people thought about existing services and what they felt they needed. For the qualitative side of the research we looked at the feedback from the day event the Children’s Society and people wanted more trips out of the area (a common theme, no car stuck on the estate; ‘get me out of here!’). So we booked coaches and offered free day trips to local childrens attractions, only the tourists can afford to go to. We had 3 such day events therefore reached approx 150 people. While on the coach semi structured questionnaires were used with volunteers talking through the questionnaires. After 3 years suddenly SSLPs were morphed into Children’s Centres, SSLPs became the unspoken of ugly sister and I was abruptly moved from this project to another SSLP programme area. My brief now was to expand to reach of the rest of a district borough with a wider age range on more or less the same budget. Our target group were just over 12,000 children under the age of 13. We had apparently failed to reach ‘the hardest to reach’. I shall come back to this later. We had been told we had a generation when along came Iraq, where one tank was costing the same as a hospital. The notion of reaching our poorest babies as an aspiration went back to being just a pipe dream. Also in the new climate the middle managers lost their autonomy with regard to how the budgets were spent. For example we were not at liberty to deploy the best staff we could possibly buy. The good times were over. We were told the new area needed a new plan. So again we looked to the staff and the now small army of post SureStart parents who were willing to get involved. We conducted qualitative and quantitative research to reach families and their views and opinions. The population was invited to respond via the Borough Council’s newsletter which went to every household, in which we had a short questionnaire for the parents to respond to. In return respondents were entered into a free prize draw. In order to glean more detail of concerns and issues facing families with young children ,more in depth face to face research was conducted through the summer months of 2006, ‘piggy backing’ existing events aimed at families which were due to happen anyway, Gala Days and Fun Days. Interactive consultation methods based on Planning for Real techniques were used at each event with mountains of free exotic fruit for participants. Individual ‘live’ issues adversely affecting families at the time the research was conducted were dealt with by staff in attendance on the day at the time. 87 parents were consulted, 60 problems were identified, best services were scored, and 25 services were requested. In addition: A further 4 parents focus groups were commissioned in each area to reach young parents, traveller parents, BME families and other vulnerable families. Consultation with children involved in each area was also commissioned and delivered. We also approached all the key partners in the borough by postal questionnaire. We also had local consultation in each Childrens Centre area with key stakeholders including 55 service providers. And we referred to secondary research of local data. All very thorough and good practise.....but after all this effort and expense there were absolutely no surprises in what families said they needed. It was almost all about more advice, guidance and support for the whole range of issues, housing, health, employment, benefits and rights. There is no secret to how we might reach the most vulnerable families. It takes time. Parents who have been consistently failed by their own families or by the system are mistrustful but it helps when their friends and neighbours are saying services are good. At interview staff need to be tested for their attitudes, with parents from the heart of high IMD LSOAs sitting on interview panels and decision making boards. The model that people get help at home or very near their home, when they feel they need it where statutory universal services (GPs, health and schools) referring the families they meet to 1-1 home visiting family support teams which encourage family’s to come to an open access drop in offering services across the ECM agenda. We found this model the most effective especially at reaching the most vulnerable and excluded families. And this is in fact just a model for community life. The next piece is one among a community of migrant workers living 1.5 miles away from an ex clay mining village. The community here is to be found on a tiny single track road no more than 500 m long with 13 different caravan sites and encampments in varying states of upkeep or disarray with an estimated 550 people in total. The inhabitants are migrant workers from Portugal (who have been enticed over by the local meat factory owner, an added irony I think given my context today), people from the accession countries of Eastern Europe, families from other parts of the UK and a very small number from the local area. Many are on the local housing waiting list to be homed; the local housing authority actually uses the better sites to house the homeless but spends no money on any basic amenities such as footpaths or street lighting. This qualitative research piece was conducted in 2007 as part of MA studies by a member of the community development team for the local SureStart programme. Volunteer parents from the research area were encouraged to get involved to help the process with at least interpretation. They were checked and given basic training as volunteers. The study found 77 homes that had children aged 0-15 comprising of 144 adults and 133 children and young people. We found babies are being born in homes with no running water and one family we came across has 10 children in one caravan with both parents doing shift work at the local meat factory. The study found that isolation was made worse by the unwillingness of service providers to come to the site to help to address the needs of families. Staying in the same geographic area we had a popular young mums group at a local youth project and we knew there were a number of disaffected young dads. For example some of the young mums were reporting domestic abuse and some of the dads had spent time in prison. Some of the dads had access to their children and some wanted to make their relationships with their partners work. The national evidence is that quality access to dads who have offended can help undermine the often circular nature of abuse in families. If we were to stop the cycle and stop the boys growing up now, from becoming offenders we needed to reach the dads to try and improve their relationships. The local youth worker was seconded for a year to our team to look into what they might want and need and how we might provide services, which might improve their relationships with their often small and fragile families. The first obstacle in research terms was that no one was recording father’s existence when mothers came to the doctors or hospital at the start of pregnancy, so no one knew who or where they were. It was therefore impossible for us to be able to reach all the young dads in our area not to mention further afield. We used our networks and media to get the word out and the worker went to meet every young dad he could. From the start our member of staff was helping and supporting the young dads with a gamut of needs: housing, benefits, access to adequate and appropriate health support, access to their children where appropriate (obviously working with the help and support of the local DV services), help with getting to college or into employment. Young men were finding it difficult to access support services because of lack of confidence or information, literacy issues or addiction, or racism. One young dad spoke with primary health staff more than 4 times about his concerns about his partner having PND. He was stone walled, ignored. Eventually she self harmed and dad was pushed aside and it was inferred he knew nothing. It was a very good piece of qualitative research but when the funding ended nothing more was done. Next piece was conducted back in 1989. It was a small but beautiful qualitative survey conducted when we were trying to get a refuge for victims of domestic violence opened in Penzance. So again housing issues were pertinent since the reasons why most victims take so long to leave is due to lack of anywhere safe to go to. At the time in Cornwall, as with many other rural areas there were far fewer safe houses than was needed. We were just 4 women (remember Margaret Mead’s quote on the power of a small group of people). We decided to send a letter to every conceivable agency and individual in the community that had any connections with the issue. The costs of letters and postage paid for a by a fund raising gig. Letters came back showing the majority of those working in the field agreed we needed our own refuge. This evidence plus loads of fundraising events in the community put the project on the map and eventually convinced the LAs and future funders. One day while doing a door to door collection for jumble (remember them?! See recycling even then!) one man said ‘ha! You’ll never get one of they in Penzance’. It’s surprising how we get our motivations! In 1999 as a com dev officer on the Lizard peninsula I worked with the one other staff member from the Children’s Society and we conducted qualitative and quantitative research with the cyp on the Lizard. We reached an amazing 89% of all the cyp. This was simply by working with the schools. We used a standard questionnaire, set up little consultation groups at each of the schools and at the local youth group to discuss specific issues and went out into the larger villages in the evening and talked to the cyp at the bus stops. It was then written up and included in the overall integrated strategy for the area. The last examples are ethnobotanical. Quite apart from the myriad wrong doings of the pharmaceuticals industry in research, development, production and distribution drugs, petrochemicals are used to manufacture analgesics, antihistamines, antibiotics, antibacterials, rectal suppositories, cough syrups, lubricants, creams, ointments, salves, and many gels not to mention the oil needed to make a whole host of medical equipment, transport medical supplies across the world and to maintain all our hospitals. We are in fact going to need a total transformation of health services in a post oil world. As a plant biology under graduate here in 1995 I decided to try and find out what people knew and remembered about plants for medicines on Anglesey. My thinking was that although I knew in my family most of this info died with my great grand ma when I was a baby, there was a chance that in a large elderly population of many Welsh speakers that some information may have been retained. Anglesey was also a sensible choice because despite its size, it has rich spp diversity with about half of all the flowering spp in Britain to be found here. My biologist research advisors were amazingly compliant with this research suggestion but insisted I had to do quantitative as well as qualitative. A bi-lingual questionnaire was prepared and initially sent out to 100 randomly chosen addresses and got just 26 replies. So then I walked the streets of Anglesey for a further 74 completed surveys. All for a measly 0.2% statistic to spit out at the end. In hindsight however I’m glad I did this. I think it is a valid statistic which reflected how little info there was in the community but that it was in fact there as opposed to altogether extinct. I also conducted 33 non random interviews. Not surprisingly the majority of the information was found to be amongst elderly welsh speaking women. In total 57 different plant spp were referred to, all but 5 were to be found on the island and all but 1 having empirical supporting evidence for the same recorded use. 2 days after I graduated from Bangor my daughter and I went to Peru. As part of my ambition to be a bonafide ethnobotanist I had tracked down (pre internet days!) the Institute of Ecology and Plant Medicines in the Andes, it’s HQ in Cusco. We were based on a farm high up in the mountains in a place called Calca in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, 3500m above sea level where they grew and harvested plants to make into medicinal products in Cusco for use in Peru but also for export to their German backers. The organization knew that some of the local young families were spending more than a month’s wages on western medicines for paracetamol or antibiotics for example having no faith in their traditional knowledge. It is critically important not to romanticise the rural poor but to try and see what is actually happening when the multinational companies are at work. These include not only the chocolate and confectionary, soft drinks and burgers but also the pharmaceutical varieties. My brief was to find out what local knowledge was still held in the community and what the availability of these plants was locally. I had finally arrived. I was finally an ethnobotanist in a far flung destination! I worked with a small women’s co-operative all members of which had lived in the Valley all their lives, and whose ages ranged from late teens to ‘old’- no one would tell me exactly how old. They all made their income from living off the land. I met with them all in the first instance and explained what I was trying to do. I worked with a Spanish speaking interpreter who interpreted from Quechan to Spanish. I then met with them individually and informally on their own land and I asked them a few open ended questions regarding their land and the lives. I then asked them all to ‘free list’ what they knew about plants for medicines. After these initial discussions we met and visited all the families regularly and got involved with their daily routines. I made 4 transects (lines of string) of 25m each at intervals from the valley floor up the slopes of the mountains, along field edges where necessary, and up to the tree line covering an altitude range of 2900m to 3800m . Each plant on each transect was recorded, photographed and specimens taken. I made a portable herbarium of all the plants I had found in addition to other common local plant spp. The herbarium was used in conjunction with a piloted questionnaire as I re-visited all the women and conducted semi structured interviews and spoke with all the people they then told me had information, including very elderly people and the local curanderos or healer, using the same basic set of questions and pursuing other information as it was told to me. A total of 49 plants were referred to, 27 of which are recorded as having medicinal value by more than one person for one major purpose. Our memories and my copious notes capture a social and cultural life which included lots of social events where many families work each other’s land for a day, followed by slap up communal meals where the dancing was so fierce clouds of dust would form in the bare rooms of the houses made of the earth and, where Domestic abuse was not as covert as it is here. This was my first and to date last piece of ethnobotanical research. I am currently trying to get support to do my PhD by studying the knowledge held in families now across Europe about how they use plants for medicines by identifying informants from communities in the UK. To this end I have started to seek out and meet for example Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian women and also a French lady. Speaking with young women from accession countries living in Cornwall it seems that just like the young Peruvian families, some seem to find the whole notion of plants for medicines to be redundant. While they may indeed use plants for medicines at home, this is what their grandparents did, is an indicator of rural poverty and therefore one of the reasons they left their home countries, so why would they be interested? And so to right up to date and the research that’s hot of the press, well still waiting to go to press in fact. It is a very different type of ethnobotany, more ethno/ecology in fact. Rather than people and their relationships with individual spp, this time it’s about how we interact with habitats. More specifically what impact the natural environment can have on the health and well being of children. I love the reference in the WISERD policies to the ‘clear red water’ difference between the Welsh and English perspectives and the one about education is particularly pertinent here I think. In reference to small human scale education I read recently that ‘schools are still fundamentally instruments of social control’ rather than necessarily meeting the needs of individual children in our community. Class sizes alone would suggest this. In a recent UNICEF study of the top 21 industrialized countries in the world, UK‘s children came bottom in overall ranking for well being and Save the Children recommend the UK needs a full blown national survey of children. As part of my escape from the council I run a project called nature workshops (leaflets at the front!). So we take groups of up to 12 children ideally aged around 8 or 9, mostly into woodlands and play games, make things, learn to use tools, make fires and cook, all in a context of learning, looking after themselves and each other. We were given a grant earlier in the year to run a pilot programme and for us to measure the impact. We use qualitative review as part of the practise with the children and as practitioners between sessions and so we used entirely quantitative methods in this research. This included pre and post measures before all the sessions began with the child, parent and teacher, and more measures at the beginning and end of each session to see how the children were feeling and what they thought about the activities. This pilot research will be used in a variety of ways. Firstly I shall send it as part of a BL bid next week, where we are asking for support to reach 1000 children. I shall send it to the funders of the pilot and all the collaborating agencies. I shall also try and get it published in Psychology today for example, to spread the word. So now for the outcomes in no particular order: The Peruvian research was translated into Spanish, Quechuan and German. It would be really interesting now to repeat both this and the work on Anglesey to see what information has stayed and how the biodiversity might have changed. At the rural encampment of migrant workers we provided mobile services at the sites with primarily play opportunities and other children’s activities being delivered from a specially refurbished bus which inc internet access and Family Information Support services. It has a sink to allow for health services to be delivered from it and could also be a shop or post office etc. A simple, green and not too expensive start! Pz women’s aid is now Penwith Women’s Aid, and a countywide service, managing a refuge and supporting many hundreds of families’ pa. I was sent to London to do fundraising training with Shelter. For me it was part of the confidence building to get me inspired to do HE. Out of lists of recommendations over 10 years ago suggested by the young people on the Lizard peninsula, very few came to fruition but the big one that did was a dial a ride bus service which was specifically asked for and which still runs and services the whole community when and where the existing bus service doesn’t. Fathers details are now asked for in Cornwall and for at least a year our biggest Maternity Hospital was giving away ‘dads packs’ designed by young dads as well as baby packs for the young mums after the baby is born. For a really good outlook on how communities might manage their own criminals take a look at Scandinavian models In SSLP and Childrens Centres the most popular and effective service we ran was a weekly pop-in where young parents could collect their veg box, put money in the credit union account, and get breastfeeding support and housing and employment advice. We regularly had 80+ attending these 2 hour sessions. We were reaching ‘the hardest to reach’ by year2 by word of mouth, by quality of services and fantastic dedicated staff and by constantly responding to local need by using a cyclical model of embedded ongoing research, development and delivery. (sorry for slipping into jargon there but hopefully you get the picture) A few other services worth mentioning that came out of the SSLP research but also my overt intention to find sustainable solutions. A local transport card for all registered families which gave them free travel on the local buses, trains and even the ‘bus boat’ into town on the Fal estuary. We piloted a now county wide veg box scheme using misshaped veg from local farmers and at very cheap price. We acted as the under writer for young families to get credit from the Cornwall Real Nappy company for families to buy a washing machine and modern cloth nappies. This self sustaining project is still going. So I want to end on 3 observations: 
Negativity is an evil
I have seen and been told of many adults, teachers and other staff and sometimes even family members who write off children, sometimes at a very early age, sometimes just because of where they come from or who their other relatives are. Children get labelled far too early by adults who see behaviour then define the child by that behaviour for years when actually children can change and respond very quickly to how they treated, either positively or negatively. I have also seen too much ‘adultification’ of children by people who should know better but that’s another lecture! Then there are the people who are addicted to energy and point blank refuse to accept the notion of the power they have as individuals. Instead they choose to live ‘I’m alright jack’ lives. I’m not sure individualism is going to be a sensible course of action when the waters start to rise! What’s important is to see what is actually there and not romanticise but the media go too far the other way. It seems to me that most of the middle class media just wants to promote fear while most of the rest of the media goes on blithely ignoring the obvious and both would prefer to just keep people where they are. I come back to Rob Hopkins on the look of environmental campaigning today: ‘what might it look like if it strove to inspire, enthuse, and focus on possibilities rather than probabilities’ he says we need ‘an immersion into the possibilities of applied optimism’? 
RESILIENCES
Is all about hope, (why not?) and effort. 
Look how effective small interventions can be if they are the right ones at the right time PWA cf large LA ones. This is because it really does only take a small number of people to make a large difference. Engage just one key person and you’re in!
Aspiring to achieve effective functional smaller communities is not to say we need to think small and become insular. Think Schumacher: think global act local
In terms of housing I hope we have finally learned that we need to go for mixed housing developments instead of building ghettos. This can be to eveyrone’s advantage in the end I think. In a Children Centre just last week I was sat quietly doing my e mails in the cafe foyer and the conversation of support for one young mum going through a personal economic crisis was open and audible, included up to 6 adults and rake of children running round and regardless of me, a total stranger being there. One had already mentioned it was cheaper being there than at home, which of course is good economic and energy saving sense. The advice that was flowing was it seemed to me good sensible advice. Most important of all maybe, she and her children were not alone and isolated.
I’m not suggesting this method of counselling would suit everyone but they clearly felt this space belonged to them and it seems to me this natural tendency to problem solving for each other is just what we do as human beings building resilience. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the Transition movement is how to overcome inbuilt fears and preconceptions of each other and to get more mixed and different people engaged.

Rural poverty and resilience

by janeacton on Oct 04, 2011

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Rural poverty and resilience — Document Transcript

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