Building solutions for the growth of the social economy

Written by Joy Doal MBE (pictured), Anawim CEO

At Anawim – Birmingham’s Centre for Women we currently work with more than 2000 women a year and employ more than 70 members of staff.

We often hear politicians and policy makers talk about growth; we also seek growth, but not for profit, for social value.

The women we work with often have multiple disadvantages.

This might be substance misuse, domestic abuse, being involved in the criminal justice system as victims and offenders, homelessness, debt, or reliance upon benefits.

Sometimes they are excluded from the system by their immigration status - on spousal visas or digitally unable to navigate - so they can rely on the dark economy of sex work and shoplifting.

These women then get labelled as hard to reach, difficult to engage, resistant or even violent and this further excludes and alienates.

When you work with women who have these layers of disadvantage it is easy to solely react to the presenting crisis, and to only see the woman as she is now in front of you.

Current trauma informed practice teaches us to change the narrative from ‘what have you done’ to ‘what happened to you’, but we need to go further back to ‘what happened to you initially?’.

Child abuse and family breakdown are often at the root, but what you go on to see, as they tell you their stories, is systems that compound those issues and make things worse.

In our schools we have teachers expected to manage children with severe and often undiagnosed special needs as well as those with family issues, in a classroom of 30. Hence, children who cannot cope with these conditions – or in a mainstream school get excluded, removed, told to stay away - when they require more input, not less.

Our social services are under extreme pressure. We see children being removed from their parents and put into a system of foster care which is set up around short-term placements.

Even if the child is lucky enough to find a secure family, they will have to leave at 18 and make their way in the world alone. I don’t know about every child, but I know mine were not ready for that at that age. Why do we think children who have had a difficult start are more able?

The trajectory from care to custody is well known, but no one seems to be changing the system that creates it.

Back to Anawim. When I started there, in 2003, it was very small with only a couple of part time staff, volunteers and the Catholic Sisters.

They cared deeply for the women - at that time, the women they supported had many children - so there was a busy creche, and they put on day trips and holidays. However, they had no infrastructure, very little funding and no direction. They were tired, discouraged, ready to give up.

I started by sitting down individually with each of the 41 women who came to the Anawim centre, to learn how they had arrived, what they got out of coming and where they wanted to get to.

I had been told it existed as a sex-worker project but instead discovered that not every woman had come in through outreach on the street, some had come through Probation.

One Sister was separately doing work in the then local prison, Brockhill. I went with her and saw a totally different group of women caught in sex work and in a system which made their experience of it completely different.

They were in a revolving door: police picking them up on the weekend, they went to court on Monday morning and were given a couple of weeks in prison.

The sentences were passed by magistrates who often thought it was ‘for their own good’ but it was utterly pointless, distressing, expensive and damaging. Sometimes it did literally save their lives but was only a sticking plaster.

I started talking to Probation and we soon set up alternatives to custody and built Anawim into a Women’s Centre with other agencies co-located, such as a methadone programme.

It worked - re-offending was as low as 3 per cent.

Women changed their lives, got their children back from care, and moved on.

Hope was high, the Government adopted most of Baroness Corston’s recommendations, we truly thought we would soon see women’s prisons closing.

That didn’t happen.

Now, we have partnerships with the NHS, the MoJ and the local Police and Crime Commissioner.

We have grown from a £200,000 un-constituted project to an independent registered charity with a turnover of just over £2million. We still deliver community sentences, but nowhere near the levels we saw in 2014.

I am a visionary, practical solution person but I know I need others to implement the stuff that I find irritating and boring such as policies and procedures, HR, GDPR… the list goes on.

Not my bag but still imperative. We need to know our strengths and gifts, and bring others in.

Challenges come, systems and policies trip us up, but we must keep to our values, be tenacious and determined.

We have a criminal justice system that is in deep crisis, in need of radical reform. It will require vision and courage to focus on rehabilitation, especially while punishment shouts loud.

I think the public can be persuaded of the value of less punitive approaches, but we know politicians are scared of popularists, and the various media responses.

It is easy to exclude, alienate and ‘other’ people, but this only produces a negative, expensive and unworkable situation, compounding problems. Restoration, education, inclusion, care, upskilling, including people, creating community and social capital. These all cost less and produce far more in the longer term.

As the saying goes “When the US sneezes we catch a cold”. Let’s vaccinate ourselves now, so we do not also row back on diversity, women’s rights, welfare, healthcare or our penal system, to name a few.

For more information please contact Alice Rosenthal: [email protected]/ 07908 403 325