Louis Gilbert is a Senior Mental Health Caseworker at St Giles, supporting young people who face systemic barriers to employment and progression. Many of the people he works with are experiencing deep poverty and need intensive, relational support that combines emotional and practical help.
In this piece, Louis explores the challenge of offering hope for a better future while recognising the structural issues that sit beyond any one person’s control.
Poverty means poor. But poverty isn’t just internal, it is external as well. Those with less are told to have less before they can luxuriate in choice or potential. They are asked to stretch what is already stretched. To budget on the shoestring of Universal Credit offerings while costs rise in directions they cannot control. Or to try and find control where very little exists.
We take away from what is already decimated and offer little back as part of a solution.
As a charity, we have to work through exchange beyond monetary support. We work through generosity. Through exchanges of hope, both with the people we support and within the conversations we take into spaces of power.
We can’t paper over the cracks. The cracks run too deep for that. What we offer instead is chance. And chance, set against control, brings risk.
The risk of losing again, when so much has already been lost.
We look to label people with additional challenge, to categorise need and apply it as solution. But with each new label can come distance. Another layer between the person and the problem. Another definition that risks moving us further from what is actually happening.
St Giles works holistically.
But what is the point that needs to be held so that the person does not get lost within the system designed to support them?
There are places where an answer begins to take shape.
In housing, where affordability is not left to drift but is held in place through structure. Where rent is not something that stretches beyond reach, but something that allows stability to sit for long enough to build from.
In employability, where distance from work is understood, not assumed. Where barriers are not reduced to motivation, but seen in health, in caring, in confidence, in the availability of suitable work. Where support meets the person where they are, not where the system expects them to be.
In the cost of living, where response is not only found in crisis. Where support exists before the breaking point, not just after it. Where the everyday is recognised as the place where pressure builds, quietly, consistently, over time.
They are ways of holding something in place.
Ways of reducing the distance between a person and the possibility of something different.
Ways of keeping the centre from shifting too far out of reach.