What is this?

This introduces the topic of interventions designed to help access basic needs for families or young people.

Why?

There are a numerous difficulties that families, children or young people encounter that are

• Either: a direct lack of a basic resource
• Money
• Food
• Shelter/Housing
• Or: other problems which are made much more serious (or harder to help) because of a lack of basic resources. E.g.:
• Inability to afford the bus fare to get to the pharmacy to pick up medicine
• Inability to address anxiety in therapy because of impending homelessness
• etc

Anyone familiar with Maslow's HierarchyOfNeed will know how these (along with safety) are some of the most basic foundations of any therapeutic work. To try to do "therapy" with a young person who is starving is a good example of Non-contingent care! The risk is not just that the therapy is ineffective and thus wastes resources, the risk is that this negative experience of what results from help-seeking influences a child or young person's long-term Relationship to help, making help-seeking approaches later (perhaps in even more critical situations) even less likely to happen.

What to do

This is an area that necessarily involves a wider network

• Benefits agencies
• Housing Agencies
• Social Care, etc.

Recognising the limits of an individual's or a single agency's power to change things is important if we are to avoid burnout, but equally it is important for teams to develop and hold local knowledge about:

• WHO (or WHAT AGENCY) to approach for WHAT NEED
• HOW to pitch approaches to give the greatest chance of success
• Likely TIMESCALES for help to arrive

There are local variations in relation to Benefits Agencies, Charities, etc, so this is an area that local teams would do well to Manualize as part of their local resources ( Our Resources )

Manualization task for local teams

Use the + Manualize our work page (make sure you are switched to Edit mode before you open it to reveal the Editing buttons!) to generate new pages as Sub-topics under the heading Our Resources to build a database of local contacts, workarounds, etc that team members can use to help access the kinds of subsistence needs that families, children and young people require.