The Environment

Rural Issues

Rural resettlement workers face a number of issues that challenge the way in which they deliver a resettlement service: Bury St Edmunds Seminar May 1998.

• Transport in rural areas is not very frequent - what would be a couple of hours work for an urban worker will take a rural worker the whole day.
• Communication is much more difficult, especially if the client does not have a telephone, and both worker and client have to rely on the postal service.
• There are changes in the social structure- communities are more mobile, and people generally do not stay in the 'family home'. Rural homelessness is often hidden, only coming to the surface when a crisis point has been reached. It is a different culture, where people live more private lives. People with substance dependencies often are excluded, living on the periphery of the community. In cities they can live in a sub-culture; in a rural environment, these cultures do not often exist. There is a need for preventative work, to try to stem the movement of people into the cities, which country people often see as an alien culture.
• lack of accommodation - the traditional tenures are changing, making access more complicated. It is a 'housing maze' that people have to be really clever, or have to have help to get through. There has been a massive increase in rural housing need, with more 'sole adults' living in accommodation. Areas like Norfolk have a mismatch between need and availability. There are often 'empty properties' where they are not needed. Building has not kept pace, and has been driven by the market. Accommodation is often too expensive, both to build, and to rent. The benefit trap for the under 25s means that it is difficult to afford to pay the rents asked, and is generally so for 16- and 17-year-olds, and tenancies are not offered. The onus is on the statutory authorities to make the best use of limited resources. Often people will have to move from a village community into the nearest large city. People often lack the confidence to leave the community they know, not wanting to go, and some leave 'shaking with fear'. They lose their local 'interdependency skills' e.g. knowing where to get cheap food. Take them out of their environment, and all that knowledge around interdependency goes. If people miss appointments, the progress is so slow that the resettlement process is held up for months.

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Stakeholder analysis

This final approach involves identifying all the organisations or individuals who are 'stakeholders' in your organisation. A stakeholder is someone who has a direct interest in your work, either as a beneficiary, a partner or as someone who experiences a cost as a result of your work. This would include funders, clients and other organisations. You could try drawing a 'stakeholder map' with lines of influence in different colours designating the kind of relationship they have with you (financial, political) etc.

Focus Future's SQS Scheme Quality System includes a comprehensive stakeholder review by clients' stakeholders, such as friends, family, professionals engaged via other agencies such as mental health or substance misuse workers. Focus Futures is part of Midland Heart, who won a Housing Corporation Gold Award for excellence in tackling homelessness. For more information see the Midland Heart toolkit website.

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Mapping the local environment

Mapping your local environment is another approach to understanding your immediate environment. It is an exercise to pinpoint organisations, people and services in your area that are relevant to your clients and the work you do. It is a process whereby, having identified them, you can make decisions about whether you need to contact them and, where appropriate, begin to build a working relationship with them. The mapping falls into three categories:

• referral agencies available to the client
• agencies and people with whom you can undertake joint work
• services and places in the community that the client can use when they move into their own home.

Aims of environment mapping:

• To develop a comprehensive bank of information about services in your local area that your clients use or may need access to.
• To understand each other's services, roles and responsibilities.
• To develop collaborative strategies to minimise overlap and maximise synergy, so that working together achieves results greater than the sum of the results achievable by organisations working on their own.
• To develop an approach towards working with clients that is consistent between organisations.

Things to consider:

• Do all the organisations in your local area know who you are and what you do?

All the businesses and services that physically surround your project should know who you are and what you do. Your service operates in the community and should make every effort to be a part of it. This will help prevent hostile attitudes borne out of ignorance and lack of communication. The local community can also be a valuable resource for such things as fundraising and supporting campaigns. If your service is run from temporary accommodation or a day centre, see more on Community Liaison (in Creating a Positive Environment) in those handbooks.

• What are the organisations that may be useful to your clients at some time in the future?

There will be services that immediately spring to mind when you think about who you need to contact in your local area, particularly those that you work with on a regular basis, such as the benefits agency, or a drug and alcohol project. It is very useful, however, to also build up information on services that may be useful to your clients in the future, from the Citizens Advice Bureaux, to all minority and ethnic support groups and mentoring schemes, to vets (see more on Dogs and resettlement), mental health advocacy projects, substance use support agencies (such as AA or NA), centres of training and education, community or religious services.

• What are the organisations that work with your clients on a regular and recurrent basis?

These will be the services you most need to work in partnership with. They will be services such as the housing benefit office or housing associations, or the community mental health team. If you do not collaborate with these sorts of organisations, you risk:

• duplicating each other's work
• lack of clarity over the responsibilities of the various organisations
• the client becoming confused about who is doing what for them
• not having a complete picture of what is going on for your client
• not knowing when things are going wrong
• the client playing you and the other organisation off against each other - the other organisation not fulfilling its responsibilities towards your client.

These problems, which arise from working in isolation, ultimately result in your client not getting the most effective and efficient service. They can be most easily avoided by setting up some form of agreement with the other organisation as to how you intend to work together with clients. This will include agreeing what both organisations' responsibilities are towards the client, what each organisation will and will not do, how you will both communicate, how much information will be exchanged between you, how you will deal with problems with clients, and how you will deal with problems in the partnership. These partnerships can be:

• agreed between individual workers, if contact between the organisations is based around specific clients on an ad-hoc basis
• agreed between organisations that come into contact with each other a lot and that have a number of workers from each working with the same clients.

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Checklist of local services

• Local authority services - the Housing department
• Social services
• Statutory agencies - Benefits agency, Probation service, Local councillors
• Health services - Primary care team, Community drugs team, Needle exchange, Detox centres, Hospital, Dentist's surgery, Chiropodists, Opticians, etc.
• Voluntary organisations - Outreach teams, Independent advice centres, Day centres, Women's refuges, Other homeless agencies, Volunteer bureau
• Support groups - Peer support groups, Mental health support groups, Mentoring schemes, Alcohol/drug support groups, Mother and toddler groups Lesbian and gay groups, Eating disorders group, Dyslexia support group, Black and minority ethnic groups, community or religious groups, Young people's groups, Sexual abuse support groups, Domestic violence support group HIV/AIDS groups, Disability support groups, Refugee support group Specific health support groups, Helplines etc

N.B. This list will vary from area to area according to which services you have available locally. You should try to locate all the support groups you can access in your area.

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Local facilities checklist:

• Launderette
• Pay Points - gas card/Electricity key
• post office
• Bank
• Cafe
• Local transport
• Day centre
• Places of religious worship
• community centres/colleges
• Sports facilities, swimming pool, sports clubs
• parks and open spaces
• Cinema/theatre
• Drama/arts/music group
• Bingo hall
• Colleges
• library
• internet cafe
• second hand shops,
• supermarket/market
• night shop
• Volunteer bureau
• Museums

This list will change a great deal from client to client, according to their hopes, interests and plans. It is vital you establish with your client what their interests are, and where they will fit in to their new surroundings and new area.

back to top | See also: The journey - preparation for the move | Next section: The Relationship