Can Fundraising Change How People Think About Homelessness & Poverty?
Stephen Robertson
Traumatic brain injury survivor. Helping business leaders engage with people, purpose & real world issues in the workplace & beyond.
New research from non-profit organisation FrameWorks Institute, sponsored by Crisis, is raising some interesting challenges. The frameworks project is scanning the horizon, seeking to shift the language and the portrayal of issues attached to ‘homelessness’ and the exclusion bought about poverty. This is a bold sector wide initiative. If successful, we will see a new landscape emerging; one which more accurately reflects the challenges of creating change by highlighting the social and political drivers that produce generation upon generation of disadvantaged people; people who are more likely to experience the tragedy of homelessness and more.
The initiative seeks to promote debate and galvanise the sector into heroic action. The problem is that we have to unpick the stereotypes and identify new language and imagery that will underpin the efforts to change minds for good. And this is where one of the challenges rest; it risks costing the sector money, the very money we need to deliver the life changing work to which we are all committed.
Our efforts to raise cash, consciously or sub-consciously, can promote the very stereotypes we wish to overturn. So let’s think about where the stereotypes exists because we are all stakeholders in this.
In both our professional and outside of work capacities, however well intentioned, our stereotypes lurk in the corners of our brains, feeding our thoughts and our responses to what we see and to what we believe we see. A desperate image, some emotive words and hey-presto, we hope that someone will dig deep and fund our collective fights for better lives. All of which are undoubtedly worthy ambitions for sure. So what are we to do?
The Big Issue occupies a fairly unique space in the landscape. As an organisation it is defined by the very people who are on the street, taking part in society, seeking to trade their way to better futures. Most people who are reading this article will not have encountered a paid member of the very small team whereas no doubt nearly everyone has seen, interacted or traded with a Big Issue vendor. With an average circulation that heading well north of 88,000 copies a week, the magazine is a great British institution, with a track record of impact unlike pretty much any other publication that comes to mind.
Imagine for a moment losing the things that are most important to you. That may be your home, your friends, your very sense of yourself. For many it would be a time to retreat into yourself, withdraw from the world and slide into the abyss. Not everyone would make the decision to become a newsagent without a shop.
And hereby rests the first challenge. When a person puts on the famous red tabard and holds up a piece of A4 paper with the words ‘Big Issue’ emblazoned at the top, suddenly they are not a newsagent without a shop, they are a member of the ‘homeless community’, the idle, the feckless and generally worthy of suspicion and disdain. It is not uncommon for vendors to be told to ‘get a job’ by people who are late for work themselves.
People can and do complain if they see a vendor with a mobile phone. The irony being that they use their own phones to complain. The underlying belief is that a person should not have the same things that the rest of us take for granted. The truth that unites the many different people we work with is that they wish to have the same things as the rest of us, their collective spending power is just lower. When you are competing in the market place, just like everyone else who goes to work, if successful you want the things that you want. The exclusion bought about by poverty often does not change the desire to take part in normal society and buy things.
Add to this the fact that many people do not understand that vendors buy their magazines with their own cash, that there is no sale or return policy, that the Big Issue is not a charity but a social enterprise and that a purchase does not fund our charitable work as The Big Issue Foundation, then we have even more challenges to overcome.
As a charity we have to fight through this to get heard and get funded. Our objective here is to cultivate, to educate, to motivate to donate alongside trading. Donations are our life blood and we took the decision a long time ago to not adopt the stereotypical approach of promoting the guilt or pity based approach in our communications. Arguably this could be more financially beneficial but we would not be supporting vendors in their work. We would be sitting somewhere within the negative space that vendors encounter on a daily basis. We would be reinforcing the agenda that frameworks seeks to change.
We have placed vendors at the heart of our work, providing a platform that means that their agendas are front and centre of what we say, creating opportunities for them to take the lead in much of what we do, take part in events, write, speak and be themselves. Big Issue vendors are at work in the day and people often have a laugh at work. Laughter is often left out in more typical communications. We talk about the poverty of peoples’ experiences and not ‘helping the homeless’ as though it is something we should be doing to others. We talk about people who have taken the most important step in life, helping themselves to bring about change and what a little more help can do to secure the vital next steps that take you forward in your own self-determining journey. Big Issue vendors are very much part of our fundraising strategy and we are the better for that.
We are not perfect and need to work harder to align ourselves with the frameworks agenda as it emerges. What I can say is that you should look for the work that illustrates how you are an enabler of change, place the people you work with at the heart of that change and use every available channel to level the playing field and help liberate people from a few of the stereotypes that hold back. Be consistent, drip feed the informed insight, the positive imagery and think about how you might feel if someone is peddling stereotypes about you.