The food bank I run is set to provide over 50,000 meals through some 41 tons of food this year, in neighbourhoods ranked among the top 10% most-deprived in England. Yet, day after day, the primary emotion of service-users visiting me is not so much hunger and thirst but shame and degradation. Man after woman, pensioner after teenager, one benefit sanction ravaged shell of humanity at a time; they never cease to astound me. Hundreds in my city are not so much craving a hand-out from the state as a lasting hand out of a great abyss of despair they have been lost to after being tripped on the cracks of a society rent in two.
Community-based intervention, especially for those suffering the disadvantages of food poverty, mental illness and any number of other financial, familial and compulsive battles, is of paramount importance. But why should this financial and material burden fall on another minority – the one that donates with a generosity capable of reducing my team to tears? I suppose I should consider a paternal hand from government as being far too much to ask; for if sea rescue were also to depend on the public coffers, these poor souls could just as easily expect to drown.
It is almost fashionable these days to condemn the benefit claimant as contributing nothing to society, but why will government not help us address the determinants of personal crises – and particularly mental-illness-related poverties – once and for all, moving beyond the provision of short-term solutions to those most desperate for change? Offering more intensive support would help people take steps in rebuilding their fractured lives and give them the tools – professional, nutritional and emotional – to retake control of their future. It would cost for sure, but would prove an investment that could reap countless benefits.
Jonathan Williams
St Catherine’s Church Centre, Wakefield
