The Big Issue Ladder

Selling the ‘Big Issue’, for every single member of the homeless community is an open invitation, and often the first rung on a ladder that lifts you off the streets. Some are not yet ready to grasp that opportunity. Some will abuse it. Many though will indeed help themselves and climb that first rung.

By selling the Big Issue or helping yourself in whatever way after a life on the streets is planting a seed that can sprout into a future. And whilst it’s one you need to plant yourself, it’s often a seed that needs nourishment and support from others.

From experience, stood on that first rung looking back down at where you were, can be the scariest, loneliest place to be. A long climb ahead: a simple, effortless, and temptingly short step back! Consequently, this is the very moment; a finite, critical moment when that support, nourishment, is so desperately needed. Ironically, this is often the precise moment, the ‘support’ you received on the streets, is whipped from under your feet. Now I’ve never ever got that. Oh the fools!

Millions of pounds of resources are poured into ‘supporting’ people living on the streets; people who have not yet planted that seed. People who have not yet, anything to support. They’ll find you accommodation, they’ll find you a dentist, they’ll even find you a job. Eureka! But for the vast majority, it will be money wasted. Support is not, at this moment, needed. Maintenance is! Night shelters and day centres do a huge, front-line job in providing that maintenance; maintaining people’s health and well being until they too, plant their own seed, until they too, have the strength to climb that first rung, until they too discover the precise moment the support they received when they didn’t want it, now that they do, has all but vanished. I could give many examples over this. Here’s one.

I was in Totnes, Devon. I was on a very shortlist of two that were nominated for council accommodation. On the final interview I was asked, ‘how can we contact you’? “I have a mobile” I declared. “Oooh” said the young man interviewing me, “that won’t look good on the application.” Of course I could have spent that £30 on a dozen bottles of cheap sherry which would have read ‘A level, distinction’ on my ‘need for housing’ C.V. But I didn’t. So they gave the flat to a young heroin addict in the town, a young man who overdosed a week later. I was pissed off. Not for me, for him! ‘Support’ had naively placed him on the second rung of that ladder when he so clearly, hadn’t yet stepped up to the first.