Attempts to mentor the less well off are laudable, but there's a fine line between helping and patronising
What makes a "family champion"? Could I be one? Could you? If you think so, Emma Harrison, prime mover behind the Working Families Everywhere programme, would like to hear from you. If you measure up, she might well choose you to work with one of more than 100,000 "troubled families" (a word of warning for would-be applicants who hesitate over that phrase, either its precise meaning or its connotations ? Harrison counts it as a significant achievement that she has persuaded David Cameron to use it in place of "problem families") and ease their passage into the kind of productive, self-reliant lives that the broken society needs in order to mend itself. Throughout that society, a discourse is taking place that has at its core notions of improvement and amelioration ? of people's circumstances, of their prospects, of their ability to participate. In that process, questions emerge. Who are the improvers? Who is to be improved? What are they being improved for? And at what cost?
There are certain qualities that you need to be a champion. In a nutshell, according to WFE's guidelines, it's all about the three Cs: if you're not Caring, Capable and Creative, then the scheme is probably not for you. But if you're not sure whether you fulfil one, let alone all three, of those criteria, then it provides further information to help you decide. You might, for example, be the kind of person who thinks: "I could sort all this out in a jiffy given the chance" (does this person exist?). You might hold the firm belief that "actions speak louder than words" or be inclined to say: "Let's try it like this and see what happens"; you might even, somewhat curiously, be "naturally nosy". If this is you, then you will be encouraged to work with not only your assigned troubled family but also a range of agencies and organisations to "help families face up to and sort out their problems", problems that encompass parenting challenges, poor health, debt, addiction, dependency, lack of motivation, low self-esteem, lack of contacts and lack of opportunities. Suddenly, when faced with a roster of issues so various and potentially crippling, having a can-do attitude and being a bit of a nosy parker doesn't quite seem enough.
Others have chosen to put slightly different constructions on the WFE manifesto. The Yorkshire Post, for example, reported last week that middle-class families in Hull, one of the scheme's pilot areas (Blackpool and Westminster are the other two), were being asked to "adopt workless families". Vernon Coaker, shadow Home Office minister, called it "gimmicky", while opinions on online forums ranged from the supportive to the sceptical, with dissenting voices either questioning the efficacy of such intervention or indignantly resisting the idea that the more "fortunate" be cast as saviours of the less.
But is it really on to be a naysayer? Is it OK to pounce on every new idea and expose its flaws, theorise about its possible pitfalls, write it off before it's begun? Does anybody volunteering for this or similar schemes deserve to be branded a do-gooder or accused of masking a lack of coherence or substance in government policy? Do we mistrust the "middle classes" to such an extent that their actions, however well-meaning ? and how freighted that word is ? are instantly seen as patronising or misguided?
Certainly Emma Harrison has little truck with such negativity: in common with many of the entrepreneurs (she founded the company Action for Employment, later A4e, which today manages �300m of government training contracts) who have become such a visible part of British life in recent years, she favours action over reflection, commitment over diffidence, immediacy over reserved judgment.
The problems she seeks to confront are clearly not imaginary. WFE is particularly concerned with families in which work has become not merely temporarily hard to come by or disrupted, but permanently absent in successive generations, leaving their members dependent on benefits and vulnerable to hardships that, although they may afflict people of any background or income bracket, are amplified to sometimes devastating effect by poverty and its consequences.
But one can be broadly supportive and still sound a note of caution. The speed with which Harrison's initiative has been mapped on to a class scenario reveals a multitude of assumptions, backed up by rhetoric that may no longer do the job: on one side, the language of loss and abandonment, of dispossession and entrapment; on the other, of professionalism and enterprise, of purpose and duty.
No communal endeavour can take into account the variousness of individual lives, but neither should we be lured into a bogus simplification that sees citizens as two halves of an equation that merely has to be balanced. As "mentoring" in its various forms becomes an increasingly pervasive part of contemporary life ? from outreach programmes to unpaid work placement ? the tendency to turn us into a nation of teachers and pupils does not come without its dangers, chief among them the belief that there exists a distillation of experience, knowledge and prowess that can and must be transmitted from one group of people to another.
We might also examine further the keystone of this idea: that work is in itself transformative, that it automatically confers identity and power and hope. "Work," said Harrison in a recent interview, "is the answer." It is unconscionable for those who have it to tell those who do not that it isn't, but they can surely point out that it is not a total solution. Having a job does not grant immunity from feelings of alienation and anxiety that have their roots in a far longer-standing process of social atomisation. Nor is it homogenous: not all jobs are equal. And do we ignore, as if they weren't happening, the disappearance of job security, the increases in working hours and the decreases in remuneration, the fragility of pensions, the lengthening of working lives? Or do we think that those who have nothing should be grateful for what they can get?
I grew up in a working-class family heavily geared towards my education; having left school in their early teens, my parents were determined that I shouldn't. Their aspirations for me contributed beyond measure to the life I count myself exceptionally lucky to have. But it came at an immense cost in their labour and effort and, alongside the gratitude I feel towards them, there is also a certain degree of guilt. Work might create opportunities (in this case, for me), but it also does something else: it takes your time and your energy in exchange for money. When my mother died, not long enough after her retirement from more than 50 years of working, one of my greatest sadnesses was that she had experienced so little leisure in her life. Beware the age-old myth that work ennobles, for it also exhausts.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/28/david-cameron-troubled-families-mentoring
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