How an engineering mindset and a passion for equality led Steve to focus on small but mighty actions in temporary accommodation
I’m Steve, I’m a retired engineer and I’ve been volunteering with Cranstoun over the last year or so. Once you retire, it’s nice to step off the treadmill and look around. The main thing that drove me to volunteering, is that I don’t like inequality. I thought I’d like to do something about it.
Collaborating for change
Recently, I got involved in a collaboration between Cranstoun and The Active Wellbeing Society to get hot food to people in temporary accommodation. It’s definitely needed. The conditions people live in are very difficult: a whole family in one room, how do the kids study for school? There are no cooking facilities, so that’s where the hot meal comes in. So I just thought, well, if it makes a bit of difference, great. It was a chance for me as well to see collaboration in action.
I always think collaboration’s better because I honestly do think that no matter what you do, you’re always better, including others. You work better as a team than an individual any day of the week. You’ll get more accomplished. One charity might be doing something and another charity doing something else. If you do it together, you can halve the costs.
Getting stuck in
I was immediately made welcome by the chefs in the TAWS kitchens. It’s very pacey but getting to know the people in the kitchen has been really lovely. I tend to go in early and pick the van up. Next thing you know, I’m dropping the van back and I’m driving home. I had some very simple tasks, fetching the food, clearing space, emptying bins. I get the food containers ready, label the food, put them in a hot box, load the van up. We also bring fruit, so I separate that between the two venues. I’ve learned some good things as well about the different food suppliers and how the meals are balanced with protein. You think, that’s good that is, they’ve got a healthy hot meal there. We get about two hours on the hot box, so it’s it is nice the food is still hot when you get there.
Then I deliver to the two locations. If we take the first location, people do come out to the car park, where I distribute the food. People are used to me now. I’ve met lots of lovely people, that come out now for a chat as much as anything. You kind of think humanity isn’t all that bad, there are some good things. There are still some good values out there.
At the second location, they are operating as a hotel, so I have to be a little bit more discreet and speak to the receptionist. So, you have to gauge the take up of meals. It’s a little bit more difficult and I’ve only met a handful of people there.
Right down to the last spoon of potato
The food has always been tasty. I’m so impressed with just watching how they cook. It’s an art, it really is. I’ve watched how the last spoon of potatoes goes into the last of the 100 meals and there’s nothing left. And you think, wow, you know there’s no waste. I’ll never find that I’m stuck with a load of food at the end of the day. Some of the young people will have two meals or we’ll leave some portions for families that happen to be out. So, it all gets used.
We look out for each other
You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops. Some things should be a starting point for everyone. We all want the same things ultimately, we all like to connect and to be involved. None of us want to be isolated. Treat people the way that you’d want to be treated and it seems to work.
When I was growing up, we lived in the back to backs. I loved it. The sense of community that I had as a child was phenomenal. I thought it was like that everywhere. If I was at somebody’s house at a certain time, I’d expect to eat there and the same if they were at mine. Everybody was in it together.
The communities that met through this project, have come together when times are the hardest. I was chatting to one of the residents yesterday, I said, “what I’ve noticed here, just getting to know people, you’ve got a community here.” She said, “oh, yeah, we do. We all look out for each other.”
Grasping the root
My background was engineering, mostly on the managerial side, making big savings. If you adopt some engineering strategies, you’d be blown away by the difference it can make. It’s about everyone having a continuous improvement mentality; recognising “I’m going to improve that” or “we could do that better.”
On a personal level, I find the best way get to the root cause of issues is follow the money. You usually find out that the reason it’s not changing as quickly as it should, is because somebody, somewhere, is making money out of it. When you look at what it costs to put someone in temporary accommodation, it’s more than the cost of a hotel room.
This is where you wrestle with it and go well, I’m helping continue that. But if you don’t, the people in temporary accommodation are suffering. So that’s my reasoning as to why we should do something about it.
The Japanese have a saying, poka–yoke which is about error proofing. In Japan they see it’s the process that’s wrong, not the people. Ultimately, temporary accommodation is a process we desperately need to fix.
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