Services based on relationships to fix our social problems
From a TED London talk
When a family falls into crisis, thanks to unemployment, drugs, bad relationships, bad luck, etc., the social services system is supposed to step in and help them get back on track. In the UK, a typical family in crisis can be eligible for services from more than 70 different agencies, but it's unlikely that any one of them can really make a difference.
In a TED Talk, Hilary Cottam, a social worker herself, asks us to think about the ways we solve deep and complex social problems. How can we build supportive, enthusiastic relationships between those in need and those that provide help? Here is an abridged version:
I want to tell you about Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening.
Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her.
When I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives. 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them.
The family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. The government say that there are thousands of families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. They also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes.
None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference. Not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem.
What can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? When the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart.
Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86% of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, discussing the forms and 14% of his time with Ryan getting data and information for the system. This kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan.
The city where Ella lives decided they had to work in a different way. They decided to reverse the ratio, so everyone who came into contact with Ella would spend 80% of their time working with the families and only 20% servicing the system. Even more radically, the families would decide who was in a best position to help them by interviewing the existing professionals. They chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers but showed their human qualities and would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them.
These new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. One of the families went out for supper, talked and listened for the first time in a long time. One mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise. In a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers.
And then some remarkable changes took place. Today, Ella's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, they've made some new friendships.
I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, an authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change.
It's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system.
The impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. It had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions have become so ingrained in us, we don't even see them anymore. In the 20th century, they were remarkably successful. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges.
I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and centre of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems - they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology - enabling approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people.
At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. In it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions, and human relationships were already withering. Today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have.
Watch Hilary's 16 min TED talk with extra stories:
Retweet about this article:
From a TED London talk, 12/03/2024