Beyond Resilience

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I published this six months ago on Linkedin, and think it's worth revisiting.

Since that catastrophic night there has been no national change, indeed things have become much worse for many people. The people of Grenfell and the surrounding areas, working spontaneously and cooperatively, have been the lifeblood of my community. Ordinary people not writing business plans or project proposals or  'working in partnership' but just taking responsibility for what is ours.  

We could learn a great deal by watching and listening to the people of Grenfell - particularly the women, who have a much smaller profile than Grenfell and North Ken men. They're not working with ORS or SRS, setting or measuring outcomes or goals or gathering any data. They're just producing, establishing, living a co-created very positive reality that may not be neat and tidy but in terms of mental health care, sustainability, information sharing, community cohesion and caring for particularly vulnerable people is infinitely more effective than any top down approach. And often more financially virtuous. 
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Decades ago I visited a solicitor to get some legal advice about repairs to my home. “I’ll take your case,” she said, “and in the meantime you should go to Grenfell nursery.” That solicitor - being respectable, knowing the law – got the housing trust to sort out the repairs within a month and my baby and I went to Grenfell nursery for two and a half years.

Up a flight of concrete stairs and in a poorly lit room full of toys I entered a world of support and guidance. Grenfell nursery brought me into contact with other mothers and with women who could physically handle my baby better than I could. They were fundamental for my transition into motherhood and, despite being a midwife, for teaching me how to live with a baby 24/7.

I still live 10 minutes from Grenfell and woke very early on Wednesday morning to see a huge plume of smoke in the sky over my home. The media told us everything we needed to know, what social tenants have known for years: very strong indications of corruption at every level of decision making, a total abnegation of responsibility from anyone in authority, not just dismissal of tenant anxieties but threats of force against any tenant who made too many complaints.

Grenfell is falling off the news and the fate of survivors is becoming less interesting. Profound trauma is a given, we are all immersed in it. But trauma is, to one degree or another, part of everyday life in North Kensington. The cumulative trauma of always, always being on the back foot. The trauma of being invisible at best, more often despised and treated with open contempt by people on the other side of desks who must be appeased and tamed just so that they will attempt to do what they are paid to do, on whom you are dependent for food and a roof over your head. The trauma of being perceived as a waste product. The trauma of being forced to escape a homeland with not much more than your children and sometimes not even that; of homelessness, racism, no access to public funds, total dependency on people who are more likely to abuse you than to help you.

Middle class professions including psychs are very keen to talk about resilience. The professions as a whole have no concept of what resilience looks like in real terms beyond getting and keeping a job. That has become the definition of resilience: getting and keeping a job. Psychs and other middle class professions should humbly sit at the feet of many social tenants, refugees, young and old poor black, brown and white women and men and beg to learn a little about resilience.

Not from those who have ‘made it’ by rising from poverty to financial success - not least because often what defines success in many of these cases is ruthlessness mixed with luck and contacts - but from the woman who can’t leave her abuser because there are no refuges, she has no access to any money and because she knows her abuser will hunt her down and murder her if she leaves.

Let’s hear more from the single parent who, bored out of her mind, performs the same mundane tasks year after year so that she can live in a house full of black mold that she knows she will never escape even though her children have developed a constant chest infection.

Let’s hear from the child who does her homework on the communal stairs because that is the only clear space that she has.

Let’s hear from the unemployed man who makes £50 a week on the side from walking his neighbours’ dogs, who simply cannot – literally becomes mentally ill if he tries to – do a regular job.

From the carer who has to fill in tomes of paperwork for her disabled husband and behave like a serf with people who hate her in order to receive £101 a week, while neither she nor her husband speak English. These people, and many of the people who went to school for 11 years but are functionally illiterate, and the people who find it hard to string together 3 coherent sentences, and who are overwhelmed with frustration because they have huge amounts of creative energy and no outlet for it, are the people who can teach us a thing or two about resilience, about endurance and skilful management of situations and of the maintenance of dignity against all odds.

Don’t feel sorry at them. Don’t patronise them by making them your project or becoming a trustee of a worthy charity. That’s just satisfying your needs. If you want to make a real difference do some face-to-face work with people on the edges of society. Fill in some of those forms with them. Help out at the law centre or the adventure playground, teach some children and adults to read. Find out what the needs of that ‘vibrant’ ‘creative’ ‘lively’ community up the road from you are and go there to learn what resilience means.