"Bronson" - special charity screening in Cambridge

Since the Willow Walker folded, a lot has been happening behind the scenes to re-establish a written-word service for homeless and vulnerably housed people in Cambridge and the people who serve them.

This culminated earlier in the year with the formation of Flack, a company registered as a social enterprise which aims to launch its first issue next spring. Their patron, Tom Hardy, is coming to the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on Sunday 9 May to answer questions after a special screeening of his controversial film
Bronson in aid of the charity. I don't think I can do better than give you the press release, with hyperlinks and pics.




Hollywood star Tom Hardy will be coming to Cambridge on Sunday, May 9 for a special screening of his film Bronson. The showing, in the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 1pm, will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the actor.

The screening is to support the newly-formed charity Flack, which was set up to replace and expand the services to homeless/vulnerably housed people and the agencies who serve them by the magazine Willow Walker. The first editor of the Willow Walker, named after a Cambridge hostel run by English Churches Housing Group, was Alexander Masters, whose book Stuart: A Life Backwards was turned into a film starring Hardy.

The editor of Flack, which hopes to launch its new magazine in Spring 2011, is Kirsten Lavers, whose tenure at the Willow Walker as Alexander Masters’ successor saw the formation of a business called Cambridge Link-Up, run by present and formerly homeless people, and Street Voices, whose double CD Both Sides of the Tracks was released in March 2009 to critical acclaim.

Tom Hardy, patron of Flack, has successfully battled an alcohol and crack addiction he acquired after the box-office failure of Star Trek Nemesis, in which he played Praetor Shinzon, an evil clone of Captain Jean Luc Picard; the film was released at the same time as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the James Bond film Die another Day and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Bronson is the story of prisoner Charles Bronson, who changed his name from Michael Peterson to give him a harder image as a bare-knuckle fighter in London. First arrested in 1974 for armed robbery, he has spent just four months as a free man since, and is still imprisoned. He has been called "the most violent prisoner in Britain", and has been moved 120 times. Hardy famously did 2500 press-ups a day for five weeks before filming started to bulk up for the role. His other films include Black Hawk Down, Minotaur and RocknRolla, while he has also starred in TV productions such as Band of Brothers, Wuthering Heights and The Virgin Queen.

social enterprise and homeless needs: the autumn issue

Politicians of all parties are looking hopefully at the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, and Spark provides some statistics that surprised me:

There are at least 55,000 social enterprises in the UK with a combined turnover of £27billion per year. They account for 5% of all businesses with employees and contribute £8.4billion per year to the UK economy - almost 1% of annual GDP.

The reason Spark attracted my attention is that they support social entrepreneurship in the field of homelessness, and a trailblazing Cambridge social enterprise which serves homeless people, their friends and the agencies who serve them in a unique way is trying to identify funds to keep going. In short, it's fighting for its existence.

In the Autumn edition of the Willow Walker magazine Gary Barrett, who has been rock-solid in overcoming his addiction and encouraging others to do the same, describes the difficulty in getting people together to plan a magazine when they're simultaneously struggling to recover:

After the Relapse Prevention Course I came up with the idea of a magazine. We got together a few of us ex-addicts, some of them are on meth [methadone], some of them are off...We had a magazine meeting this morning and I was the only one who turned up because the others have floated off because it's just taken too long.

I can sympathise with Mr Barrett because, taking over as as acting editor of a village magazine, I've seen some things move at speeds that make paint drying look hurried. But the case he makes illustrates precisely the case for a means of communication to tie together the members of disparate communities of homeless and vulnerably-housed people in Cambridge that isn't going to evaporate because things go too slowly for people who have recently been involved in lifestyles wherein gratification, when obtained, is instant.

That means of communication is the Willow Walker itself, and its prominence in the homeless community and the agencies serving it is recognised in Cambridge City Council's Single Homeless and Rough Sleepers Strategy 2006-09, where, in the section on User Involvement, the Council sets as a "medium" priority (the highest in that strand)that "results must be fed back to users via the Willow Walker or alternative communication mediums".

The Willow Walker's funding has been cut off because, as Chris Havergal writes in the Cambridge News, the the Council "'have concluded we are not going to support Willow Walker. We support a range of projects, including a contract we have with WinterComfort, and we don’t want to duplicate'." It was only possible to bring out the Autumn edition of the Willow Walker because of a generous donation from Cambridge University Press and the gift of professional photographer Suzanne Middlemass's time and considerable talents.

Wintercomfort, based in the city's Overstream House, supports those who are homeless or at risk of losing their accomodation and provides valuable services: for example, it's developing a weaving business based on social enterprise lines and using, ironically enough, willow. But it doesn't duplicate the vital role as a communications hub that is filled solely by the Willow Walker whose editor, social entrepreneur and community artist Kirsten Lavers, stands at the centre to stop things evaporating.

One of the many interesting and commanding articles in the Autumn edition was written by Dr Christine Hugh-Jones, who is the doctor in charge of Cambridge's Access Surgery, which takes on homeless clients. She was writing about the pioneering Joint Strategic Needs Assessment for Homeless produced for Cambridgeshire NHS by Drs Jeremiah Ngondi and Fay Haffenden. Click on the link in the last sentence to view this important document as a PowerPoint file. Here's a whistlestop tour of it:

Analysing anonymised statistics from the Access Surgery, one of their many grim findings was that the average age at death of homeless people in Cambridge is 44, which the press managed to garble into "life expectancy of homeless people in Cambridge is half that of the rest of the population of Cambridgeshire". Through the Willow Walker, Dr Hugh-Jones was able to explain to its readers that the Access Surgery's clients had, on Ngondi and Haffenden's analysis, a 2-3% chance of dying in the next year - "This is still much too high but it does not mean that if you are forty you have only four years to live". (Although the four obituaries at the end of the magazine are a sobering reminder of mortality on the streets.)

The projects that have budded from the Willow Walker have taken the Big Issue slogan of "a hand up, not a handout" and put it to work. I've already written about the radio show Homeless Truth's getting the police's point of view into the heart of the homeless community: in the latest Willow Walker there's a brilliant picture of one of the show's broadcasters, Laila Antoun, interviewing Tony Benn.

Dr Hugh-Jones' comment about the misquoted survey could apply to a range of issues affecting hard-to-reach communities in Cambridge: "What a pity no-one except the Willow Walker has bothered to report this".



Other posts related to the Willow Walker:

Homeless not hopeless

Catching Street Voices

Both Sides of the Tracks

Save the Willow Walker

The Willow Walker looks for a funder

Top Ten songs about Thomas

Save the Willow Walker

It sounds like a songbird facing extinction, but it's actually a high-quality street magazine produced by homeless and formerly homeless people, and it's just as threatened.

The Willow Walker began in 2002 under the editorship of Alexander Masters, who would later write Stuart: a Life Backwards, which was filmed by the BBC, starring Black Hawk Down's Tom Hardy. It's named after the English Churches Housing Group's hostel in the city's Willow Walk. Towards the end of his tenure, Masters started an occasional series of sketches of people who were homeless or living in hostels in The Guardian.

Kirsten Lavers, the present editor, took over in 2005. One of the accomplished artist's many achievements as an empowerer of people was a scheme in the city's Arbury Park whereby residents made their own signs for unmarked streets.


Kirsten acted as an amplifier to help present and formerly homeless people make their voices heard. She was involved in the inception of Homeless Truths show on 209 Radio, the only one in the world to be produced and presented by homeless, ex-homeless and vulnerably housed people. There was, of course the critically lauded double CD Both Sides of the Tracks, which showcased the sheer talent waiting to be mined in the street community. And it's doubtful whether Cambridge Link Up, a business run by homeless and formerly homeless people, would have gotten off the ground without the Willow Walker, with Kirsten's genius for building people up and her burning ambition for others to do better at the centre.

People have moved closer to or even into permanent housing through the Willow Walker and related services; they have learnt new skills - including that of daring to value oneself again - and moved into employment; and there had been plans to employ a homeless person to assist with the production of the 2000 issues which, most quarters, go to councils, homess people, and the services which those who are homeless and/or roofless access.

So I was dumbfounded to learn that Kirsten has been given her redundancy notice because Church Housing Trust, the fundraising arm of the English Churches Housing Group, has decided that the magazine's activities are in conflict with its Christian ethos, and is no longer raising monies for the project's annual £15,000 running costs, although the ECHG's Graham Haynes is trying his damnedest to source sponsorship.

I'm sure this move, which will keep media theologians in beer-money for years, is the last thing that is needed in the present economic crisis, when nationalised and state-subsidised banks are repossessing homes faster than they did before they asked the state for help. Former ITN reporter Ed Mitchell, who earned £100,000 before he landed on the streets, remarked in 2007 that "There is a tsunami of bad debt about to hit this economy...Pandora's box has been opened." His prophecy has been realised, and now is not the time to be breaking up the lifeboats to feed the boilers.

Here's a link to the Willow Walker's entire archive - make your own mind up about its ethos. If you think Jesus might have approved - and He seems to have posited Salvation as being a matter of what we do as much as what we say - please use the ECHG's contact details to tell them about it respectfully.

If you live in or near Cambridgeshire and can offer Graham Haynes information supporting the value of the Willow Walker to projects and clients, please email him on graham.haynes@echg.org.uk.



Click to read Chris Havergal's article Voice of Homeless could be Silenced for the Cambridge News

Click to read Alexander Master's series on homelessness in the Guardian:

Street Tough

Eating Langoustine in Scotland

The English Patent

And on Tales from a Draughty Old Fen:

Homeless not hopeless

Catching Street Voices

Both Sides of the Tracks

Lexie

Lexie was evicted from his flat some years ago because he allowed the smalltime drug-dealers who preyed upon his addictions to ply their trade in it, and was so famous for aggressive begging that when he was banned from two of Cambridge's thoroughfares it made the front page of a local newspaper. So why am I writing his obituary?

Because when you got to know him, you could see that substance use had not completely effaced his humanity. For example, when his banning order was published, a woman, a senior citizen, wrote into the same paper recalling how Lexie had always helped her across one of the roads he was banned from, it being notoriously difficult to cross.

There's been much opposition to individual and collective banning orders from the more liberal element in Cambridge, but it was the making of Lexie, because he had much less opportunity to bump into the people he scored drugs from. Another key component in deferring an inevitable death from organ-failure was the policy of the drug-agency he collected medication from, that if any alcohol at all was detected on the breathalyser, the medication was withheld. This didn't stop him drinking, but it meant he had to put the cans of super-strength lager to the side at a specific time so that he wouldn't fail the breathalyser test the next morning.

Unfortunately, when the contract to run the drugs-service was put out to tender, the conditions set down for bidding precluded breathalyser tests. That's another story; but the consequences for Lexie were that the complex machinery of carrots and sticks that mitigated the effects of his substance use upon himself and society was irretrievably broken, and his behaviour became much harder for the dedicated staff looking after him to manage.

What effect will Lexie's actions have on his life after bodily failures terminated the death that composed much of his time on earth? God knows. But it's very difficult to get into a situation where you're addicted to one or more substances by yourself - something the police in Cambridgeshire are showing their realisation of by differentiating less between big and small fish, and merely asking whether somebody is a fish.

In a society whose values are so topsy-turvy that smoking a cigarette in a public toilet carries harsher penalties than injecting heroin in it, I hope senior police officers will close their ears to those who enthrone rights high above responsibilities, and move towards zero tolerance of all drug crimes.

I pray that the Lord grant eternal rest to Lexie.

Both Sides of the Tracks

Expect blues, expect hip hop, expect reggae, expect rock 'n roll, expect folk, expect virtuoso musicianship, raw passion and a musical night to remember proving that homelessness does not mean hopelessness.

I wouldn't normally bring home a CD that has a parental advisory for "explicit lyrics", let alone a double one. But there are things we need to talk about explicitly: this is Both Sides of the Tracks, a compilation by artists who have experienced or been at risk of street life and their supporters, including the ground-breaking Street Voices, who can apply lyrics about loss and recovery to any genre of music and come out with complex works displaying the hard edge of having walked the walk - unlike, say, Ralph McTell's worthy but slightly patronising Streets of London, or Phil Collins' masterpiece of histrionics, Another Day in Paradise.

The professionalism evident in every aspect of the album, from musicianship to artwork, shows the degree of talent languishing on our streets at a time when the country needs all its talent at work. For instance, crossover hip-hop numbers have intelligent guitar-riffs in the background, like Psycrowe, Alchemist and Dislexya's Last Chance; Toby Peters' gentle love song It's Your Eyes benefits from a stripped-down acoustic backing, and Daniela McDermott makes percussion sound relaxing in her composition Yemonisa.

We meet old favourites here, too. Street Voices give a nod to Eric Clapton's introductory riff to Crossroads with the acoustic guitar in Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues, Stella gives a bouncy lift to traditional Irish folk tunes with the guitar and penny whistle, and one of my favourite Cambridgeshire singers, Nick Dominguez, persents an interpretation of Pink Floyd's get-well-soon card to Syd Barrett, Wish You Were Here, that I had to listen to three times.

This double-album is a stopping-off point in the often painful process that Cambridge Link-Up has gone through in setting themselves up as a business that enables present and former homeless members to climb out of the dustbin wherein society is happy to deposit human beings it no longer wants. The misery street life often entails is reflected in several poems read in the album - for example, Dean Tobias' hard-hitting Victim of the Night is about street prostitutes: "just don't look too close in the daylight...covered in bruises and sores".

Perhaps to reflect the number of former forces members that end up on the street, Malcolm Driver performs Billy Connelly's Sergeant Where's Mine. Connelly, who had been a member of the TA Paratroop Regiment, probably wrote the poignant folk-song after talking to regular Paras who had served in Northern Ireland. The song is, unfortunately, once more germane to current affairs - Connelly describes the dilemma of the professional soldier faced with young people mobilised into action against them by cynical elders: "what do you do with a gun in your hand/when you're faced with a hundred odd weans [children]?"

It's a much-needed wake-up call: around 150 British Forces personnel are discharged for mental health reasons per year. Mental illness can be one of the slippier slopes leading to the street - if it hadn't been for my family I think I might have slid down it myself - as Dean Tobiass describes in his poem Nutty Nuts and the Section Threes (Section 3 being a mandatory hospitalisation for six months). The best-known slope is substance abuse - Freeman Freebyrd's Man from the Pool describes this process in five ever-darker verses in the form of limericks reflecting the pain inside figures of fun.

If you live in Cambridgeshire, then have another look at the quote at the top of this page, which is from the publicity for a concert held by many of the artists on this album and others in Cambridge pub Man on the Moon on Friday March 13th, entry £3.

Whether or not you live in Cambridgeshire, please have a look at the Willow Walker site, where Both Sides of the Tracks is avaliable for £10 ($14/€11) plus p&p. And click the Willow Walker logo below for some more poetry readings - but be prepared for everything from Horace to some very robust talking.

catching street voices

Street Voices is a band formed by people living in hostels for the homeless in Cambridge or who are otherwise members of the street community. I'm not very good at catching them in performance.

On 20th June, I went to the Leper Chapel in Cambridge to hear the group rehearse for a memorial service for seventeen members of the street community who had died in the past year. They were practicing the first verse of a traditional song arranged by Bob Dylan, He was a friend of mine:

He was a friend of mine
He was a friend of mine
Every time I think about him now
Lord I just can't keep from cryin'
'Cause he was a friend of mine

The verse was sung six times, with band member Carolyn Perkins (Caz) intoning the name of one of the deceased in between each personal-pronoun-adjusted line.

For seventeen members of the street community to die in a year is a terrifying figure in the context of Cambridge City Council's most recent statistics on the number of homeless people (including those in hostels). There were roughly 200 homeless people in Cambridge in the quarter ending 31 December 2007. If the attrition is solely inflicted upon this group, we are looking at a mortality rate of 8.5%. However, provision of a roof, as essential as this is to moving onwards and upwards, does not necessarily remove somebody from the street scene by itself, for the same reason that somebody who retires from a factory will find themselves attending the attached social-club for a while afterwards.

The statistics show that the English Churches Housing Group's tenancy sustainment team were supporting 21 tenants who had moved into permanent housing for six months or less, 73 people who had been housed for 6-12 months, 61 for 12-18 months and 90 for 18-24 months. The figures for the tenancy support team attached to Jimmy's Nightshelter are one, four, four and four respectively. So, taking all of these into consideration, the most precise statement we can make is that the mortality rate for the Cambridge street community lies somewhere between 3.7-8.5%. (I emphasize that these are the figures from the time of the study; Jimmy's, for instance, currently supports 29 people in their tenancies, including 14 in the 2-5 year range.)

Looking just at the smaller figure and extrapolating it to other groups at national level, 3.7% represents 55,500 NHS employees, 18, 690 civil servants, 27 members of the House of Lords or 24 MP's. Or 15,891 members of the Armed Forces, whose former members can be represented among homeless people much more than those of the other categories. I cannot think of any estate in life, other than the street community, where even the lower mortality rate of 3.7% would be tolerated without a massive and government-toppling outcry.

I was gutted that I wasn't able to stay for the memorial service, but Maxima had enmeshed me in the sort of complex babysitting situation that only women can understand.

The next time I missed Street Voices was when they opened an exhibition by Missing Links called Corrugation Street - Thinking inside the Box, which featured several cardboard boxes with pictures and writing by homeless and recently homeless people on the inside describing their experiences of homelessness. There was one touching testimony of a man who had been given permission by a disabled lady to live in her shed, and in return he walked her dog, something she was unable to do.

It was facilitated by puppeteer/community artist Linton Bocock. Described as "a project straight from the heart of Cambridge's homeless community", each installation was composed of "a cardboard box, some materials and some intense experiences [to give] a glimpse of a side to medern life that most people don't see".

Minima and I were late because she'd gone over on her ankle, so we had to take two buses to get there instead of cycling. We were in time to catch artist and Willow Walker editor Kirsten Lavers and Caz, who were showcasing some of the goods sold by Cambridge Link-Up, a company managed and ran by homeless and recently-homeless people. Stock had gone fast, but there were still some items left: handbags knitted from plastic bags (Minora had two of these, both featuring the colour pink), mobile phone pouches crocheted from plastic yarn derived from aforementioned bags, hats made from videotape and presented in the original boxes (mine was in The Rain Man), and picnic bags which, when un-velcroed, folded out into ground-mats.

I started to panic a little when Kirsten started to explain the technique for ironing the plastic bags together to Minora, as the house is littered with the detritus of her hammerbeads experiments. I was mercifully distracted by Caz explaining that Cambridge Link-Up, which runs a monthly market stall and will also have a stall at the Cambridge Folk Festival, has received support from John Lewis and a visit from senior civil servant Sir Gus O' Donnell, as well as Street Voices receiving lottery funding to produce a CD which should be out around November. Personally I'm looking forward to it, having heard the samples posted on the Cambridge Link-Up audio gallery - where you can hear the concert performed at the Leper Chapel.

It's really good to see Cambridge Link-Up providing a service for the homeless community in Cambridge from within that community - in the words of one motto, it gives a hand up, not a hand-out. It is a resource that unfortunately may become even more urgently needed in the light of current financial trends - mortgage arrears were given as a factor in respondents' homelessness in 0% of cases in the quarters ending June and September 2007 in the study linked to above - and in 6% of replies in that ending December 2007, the quarter on which the study concentrated.

Some music started up - but Street voices had left; this was Rough Beast, who'd come to lend support. "Now that's real blues," I commented as they jammed but Minora, a High School Musical devotee, looked at me and blinked.

Street Voices will be performing a summer jam from 11am-1pm on 22 August in the Community Room at 82 Akeman Street. I'm going to try not to miss it. Honest.



Related post: Homeless not hopeless

homeless not hopeless

After finishing my shift in Cambridge the other day, I went to the launch of a new company. I enjoy going to entrepreneurial launches, I like the free grub.

Cambridge Link-up is a company that has been started by people who are homeless, who have been so in the past, or are vulnerably housed; it has its own board, bank-account and constitution.

It also has its own web-page, which includes information on organisations that can be contacted in time of crisis.

The Link-Up project started with a radio show called Homeless Truths on Cambridge's community station, 209radio, which can be heard in the Cambridge region on, confusingly, 105FM. It was and is a groundbreaking project, where homeless people would chat on-air with various individuals and bodies who might come into contact with them, the most famous, according to the Guardian (so it must be true), being a conversation with police officers.

It started as something for people to do - but sometimes something to do is the keystone to building a better life. Cambridge City Council tells us:

Research has shown that giving people an opportunity to
focus on regular activities, including work - offers a key route out of
homelessness. In addition engaging in occupation is seen as a central mechanism
of health (Wilcock, 1998). Studies have found that various types of activity
(including productive, educational, leisure, social and physical activities)
benefit health and wellbeing.

The citation is from a short document called "Journeys out of Loneliness" by Kim Wilcock. It was written for Help the Aged to look at ways of empowering homeless and formerly homeless older people to sustain a new way of living, but I think this short passage is worth looking at as pertaining to homeless people of any age:

"Lack of meaningful activity was a strong theme in interviews...Regular engagement in activity is vital for psychological well-being and quality of life...Meaningful activities can provide a sense of purpose and a continued role in life. Participation in activities can reduce isolation and loneliness, develop interpersonal and social skills, build confidence and self-esteem, boost morale and improve motivation. Engagement in physical or mental activity can help to alleviate anxiety and depression and distract from drinking.

...Many participants wanted to access activities within the wider community and to
expand their social networks outside homelessness provision.

"Participants were interested in a wide range of activities, including social, leisure, physical and educational activities and volunteering. [They] wanted to
participate in meaningful activities, where they would have opportunities to share
their skills with others and feel valued."



Link-up is a bottom-up enterprise where people from the above-mentioned groups, who are experiencing or have experienced homelessness or threatened homelessness, can make products from the flotsam and jetsam of settled life for sale some Sundays at Cambridge's Arts, Crafts and Farmers' Market. For example, they make various goods from recovered plastic bags. One is a shopping-bag in the old string-style, crocheted from the bags, another a mobile-phone holder knitted from the things. Handbags are ironed from layered bags, with the desired logo facing upwards (how long before somebody asks for one with the Harrods logo showing?)

Something that initially worried me was that Link-up isn't collecting Tesco's carrier bags for recycling, which led me to think "oh boy, here we go again..." but Kirsten Lavers, editor of the Willow Walker, informed me that the trouble with Tesco's carrier-bags is their biodegradability; they deteriorate faster than any other bag the project has worked with.

Other products include hats knitted from videotape, presented in video boxes. It occurred to me that if they could do anything with DVD's I'd finally have something useful to do with High School Musical, but that's another story. There are ashtrays made from beer-cans, which, when inverted, can hold tea-lights. They're somewhat non-PC, which is a point in favour of them in my book, although the sharp edges may need worked on for people taking them back to households with children.

There are many factors contributing to homelessness which have been aired extensively elsewhere. In Cambridge, the 2003-2008 homelessness strategy identifies an additional factor, "a tolerant community with a tradition of social responsibility" which acts as a "pull" mechanism for people with difficulties maintaining tenancies from other parts of the UK. This tolerance, coupled with the city's proximity to London, can make Cambridge seem a more attractive option for people who don't feel settled than it turns out to be when they get here - Jung once commented on our self-defeating propensity to run away from psychological challenges geographically.

But perhaps settled people in Cambridge are focussing too much on the problems that homeless people bring to the city, and not enough on the fact that most of these problems do not originate with the homeless. As I've chewed over before, some brewers and shops are making a killing by selling 9% lager. I've never seen these beverages at a first night, a dinner party or indeed any form of party: the players involved in its manufacture and distribution know exactly what market they are targeting and why.

Some homeless people inject heroin; to render the main variety available in the UK soluble, it needs to be acidified. Citric and ascorbic acid, when not obtained from a needle exchange, are available in various outlets in Cambridge, as they lock the flavour into some exotic foods and can be used to make lemonade, etc. When some of these outlets found out that the acids had risen in popularity and also why, they put the prices up.

Both of these practices can be found in Mill Road, where the self-appointed guardians of the city's ideological rectitude are wont to protest about the scandal of a supermarket setting up a small outlet, while the real scandals pass unremarked under their noses, perpetrated by some of the very businesses they affect to be speaking for.

And, in the last analysis, if we want drug-takers who inflict harm on our quality of life to have their potential for harm curtailed, why don't we look at the cocaine-fuelled madness in the City, then reflect on its relation to income-gobbling mortgages and the pound's disappearing value?

Then we should perhaps consider things we do ourselves that harm those around us, and decide whether we are the best people to throw the first stone. Or if that's not your thing, consider the coming storm that will be affecting credit and mortgages, and think on: if the worst should come to the worst, wouldn't you like there to be pathways whereby you or your loved ones could climb back out of misery?

The pictures of five of the pioneers of these pathways in Cambridge, who are seeking to re-engage with society by tying themselves into it through work and its associated social benefits, are above. Click on the pictures and you will be taken to their stories as told to the special edition of the Willow Walker that celebrated the launch of Cambridge Link-Up. Look at the faces and read the stories. You might not agree with everything they say - I don't - but reflect that until we engage with those we sometimes might not want to think about, we will see not people but problems, and try to impose solutions to those "problems" from the top down. And as we've all experienced in recent years, that just doesn't work.