[0:09]Uh, you might have guessed, I'm Vicky Butler. Um, I've been a a creative and participatory researcher with large charities and small charities for the last 13 years. And I'm not going to talk about one particular piece of my research. Um, I work with communities and people that are at risk of social exclusion. And what I'm trying to do in this presentation is pull all of that together to make some points about what social inclusion is and why it matters. So that asks me what is social inclusion? And weirdly, I can explain that best by looking at its opposite, which is social exclusion, a bit like the opposite side of the same coin. And social exclusion happens when we have discrimination or very low incomes, pushing people to experience different types of poverty. And I'm going to look a little bit at discrimination now by playing the numbers game, and I need you to play ball with me here. Shout out a number and I'll tell you why it's significant in Wales today. 50%. 50% is the number of single parents living in poverty in Wales now. Almost all of those are women and they're in work as well as out of work. £310. 310 pounds is the gender pay gap per month between women and men. And regardless of whether you have a degree or not, it still works out as roughly 2 pounds an hour. 46%. 46%, that's the number of Bangladeshi and Pakistani people living in Wales that aren't in full-time employment or education. I'll take one more. Sorry. Which one? I didn't hear, sorry. The question mark. The question mark is for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. We know that they experience discrimination, but we don't collect statistics on it at a national level, either in Wales or elsewhere in the UK. And the reason for this pretty horrible numbers game is the point that discrimination and poverty doesn't happen randomly through society. It's not something that just comes along and happens to pick out individuals that aren't trying their hardest or aren't up to scratch. It affects groups. And if it affects numbers to that extent of groups of people, then that does suggest that our social systems exclude and discriminate in a very, very patterned basis. So I want to go on to look at what social exclusion is in terms of poverty.
[2:44]Absolute poverty, you might, all of these definitions, by the way, come from the World Health Organization, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the poverty site up to 2011, so you can go there and find out more about them. Because I'm just giving a broad brush kind of introduction today. Absolute poverty is an income line below which people are facing major survival situations like food and shelter. Um generally we hear about absolute poverty in terms of people living on $2 a day or under, and that's what we use globally. Within Wales, we use the concept of relative poverty, and this is people that are living on a low income relative to the majority population of the country and it within which they live. So although it's relative, it means that you're living well below the living standards of people around you in the same society. Currently in the UK, that's taken to be 60% of median income, that's a 60% of the average. They're discussing whether that's right or not in the UK government at the moment. These other ones you might not have heard of, but they're really useful for thinking about poverty, different types of poverty leading to social exclusion. Participation poverty, when people experience social discrimination, or if you have a very low income, you're much less likely to be participating in economic activity, which is work, and also in social activities and having hobbies. And social activities might be things like having a day out, going out for a family meal, being able to follow your hobbies. And it's not any one of those, participation poverty is not having any of those. And not just for a couple of weeks, it's month after year after year. So it's an extended experience. Another side of participation poverty is that we tend to make decisions in our lives either through our workplace or through our social activities. So if you have neither of those, then actually you don't feel like you're making decisions in your life, so you can feel really quite powerless. Poverty of aspirations is about educational attainment, but also what you believe yourself, what you're capable of. And a seven-year-old summed this up for me when I was looking at um how children perceive their own um participation in society and where they see their place. And she said to me, there's no point in having dreams because nothing comes true anyway. And for me, that is the most stark point of aspirational poverty. And lastly, there's environmental poverty, and in Wales, environmental poverty is about our physical environment around us. It can be seen in the quality of our housing, the difference in our health statistics, it can be seen in the the upkeep of our communities. And I was doing some research in East Wales with families with disabled children and some of the hardest things they were facing was environmental poverty due to their housing, where their housing was so damp that they couldn't actually use certain rooms. So although they got a house, it was pretty much unusable in parts. Now discrimination and very low income push people to be in these circles. And it's not any one circle, it's all of those because they interrelate. So for example, if you have a low income here in relative poverty, the chances are you haven't got the money to be able to have many social situations. That in chance is going to affect your aspirations. If you have a low income, you might well be in environmental poverty if you're waiting for a landlord to sort out your housing repairs. So actually social exclusion is in the middle here. It's the experience of being amongst all of those, and discrimination can cause that as much as low income can. So that leaves me to think about coping mechanisms. We all have coping mechanisms that we use to deal with the stuff that life throws at us. And I want you to take a minute to, everyone here, to think for a moment about a time when you were excluded. Just personally in your life, reflect back to that point where someone didn't let you join in. Someone didn't listen to you. You weren't valued and you were shut out. I want you to take a minute and think about what that felt like for you personally, and also how you felt towards the people that were doing that to you. Now I can guess you didn't feel valued, you didn't feel empowered. And I can also guess that you might have felt quite alone, quite angry, resentful, or just wanting to get out of that situation. So it's no surprising when we look at social exclusion, that there's a little bit of negativity. Because moving from the personal experience to the social experience is the same emotional feeling. So the consequences of social exclusion can be negative behavior, and we know about this from our papers and in our social discourse, we're hearing about antisocial behavior. We hear about crime, we hear about substance misuse. We also hear about mutual disrespect. We also hear about negative emotions, social isolation, depression, low confidence, anger. And I was doing some work on the impact of poverty on family life. And someone said to me, rich people have a snobby confidence. You lose confidence when you're poor. That to me sums up some of that negative emotion. But the other thing is, we never hear the positive coping mechanisms that people have. We don't hear about the positive way in which people cope. We can focus on the negative, we know the negative, I'm not saying it's not there. But there are also some positions of strengths. If we start looking at the strengths that people have, it really is the elephant in the room. And it really is a different way of looking at how people can really look at the circumstances they're in. And I've pulled, look, I've done research with very older people, people with learning difficulties, young children, black and minority ethnic communities. And all these people, which is a massive diverse group of people when you start thinking about it. All these people are at risk of social exclusion because of those statistics I showed you at the start, and they all have strengths that I've kind of tried to pull together under three banners. The first one is resourcefulness.
[8:52]And I'm amazed at the level of resource, resourcefulness that different people can show. And I just want to read you a quote that I have in my pocket. I want to read it because I want to get it right from the person that gave it to me in research. And it was from a father, I was talking about poverty and family holidays. And it's just to me sums up how resourceful people can be. And this father said, I was talking about holidays because that's a social norm. Even if it's camping for a week or staying with people, it's a social norm. This was a father with four children, and he said a holiday was a holiday. You look at it as a break whenever you can. He had no money for bus fares. He didn't have enough money for petrol. He lives in Swansea. He was going to borrow a car and take his four children to Mumbles for the day and he stated, it will be a good day out. We will all have big ice creams on the beach, and that is a holiday. And that to me is resourcefulness. The second banner is resilience, and that is the quote I gave you also shows the resilience that people have. I worked in Scotland on the long-stay hospital closure programs for people adults with learning difficulties, and the resilience I was looking at housing options. And the resilience that some of those adults, one man had been into the hospital at the age of two, he was coming out in his mid-fifties, having been told he'd never be able to live in the community, he would always need 24-hour support and care. And at that point, he was coming into the community, and the resilience he'd had from moving from an institutionalized life into community, and actually he had his own house. He didn't need 24-hour support, and his resilience in just living his life to the full, is just an example of how people can be resilient. And the last banner is gifts, and gifts is um the unique attributes that people bring to their social relationships. And gifts is um it's not my my idea, is put forward by a fascinating Canadian disability activist and uh philosopher called Judith Snow. But when we start looking at the gifts people have to bring, that actually we start thinking about people in a completely different way. And what we know that social exclusion have those negative things, but actually people who are excluded have loads of poverty, positive things. And I don't think people with these skills actually should be excluded because we need those skills in our society. So that brings me to look at why we should include. Mutual feel good factor. You know how it felt to be excluded because I just asked you to remember it. Inclusion is the opposite of that. Inclusion is the opposite of all of those exclusion things. So inclusion is about living on 60% or more median income. Inclusion is about having a decent environment, not having to worry about your housing repairs. Inclusion is about making choices and having being able to have a social life. That doesn't really sound like I'm asking, I'm sort of advocating for much really. There's also a financial cost. Exclusion costs society more. If we're having to, uh, find money for that environmental poverty, for the health poverty, for the crime and antisocial behavior, actually, I think social inclusion is actually the financial option. There's a social cost. Social exclusion causes a divided society. It causes mutual distrust and that causes disrespect. And we can see that in our newspapers at the moment with regards to unemployed people, the myths and fears that are being generated. And we saw it in the 1980s with regards to single parents. There's actually a big reason of selfishness. We will all get old one day. One in four of us will have a mental health difficulty or illness at some point in our lives. 17% of disabled people were born with their disability. Any point we could have develop a long-term illness. Any point we could lose our jobs. There's actually a good selfish reason for advocating social inclusion. There's also a rights base, I haven't got the time to get into rights. There's a lot of debate in the newspapers about rights and people having too many rights. I think my point here would be actually, the ancient Greeks were talking about rights many, many years ago. They were talking about women's rights in the 18th century, so it's really nothing new. We've always had concepts of fairness and ways of being with each other through history. There's also morality, it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do to treat people with respect. Lastly, we're missing out. One of the big reasons for social inclusion that we don't hear about is we're missing about, we're missing out personally in our relationships and also socially. But if we're talking about inclusion, that actually makes us question our social values. And I want to leave you with three challenges. The reason I've got a herd of goats here is that goats are interdependent animals. If you take it, I've I've had a goat and they don't get on well by themselves. And it's not saying that we're heard animals, I'm just using it as an example, as an analogy to make my points. So the first challenge I want to sort of leave you with is the idea of codependence. And codependence questions our notion of independence. I don't know where we get this idea that we're independent people. If we look at our lives, I'm really quite codependent on my friends. I'm codependent on my work colleagues to have a positive experience in work. I'd be very codependent on my family. And I think we're all codependent, we all need support. And some of us need support more than others, and some of us will need more support at certain times in our lives. I when my child was really very little, I was really grateful for the amount of support I had because I found it really quite difficult. But if we're codependent, then that questions the nature of the stress we put on being independent because it's actually a bit of a social myth. I want to challenge the language that's currently in our media of shirker and strivers. I want to question are we really placing our social values on financial contribution? Everything that we do in our lives really is the most important thing our financial contribution. I'm not saying it's not important, but actually there's plenty of people that contribute a huge amount and not necessarily financially. First of all, there's a number of people that might not be able to work, and when you start listing them, it sounds quite incredible that we place so much emphasis on the idea of shriver. People that can't work include children and young people, very older people, people that maybe have a long-term health problem or condition. People that are unemployed and trying to find work, young mother, mothers with very young children. That's quite a long list. Does that mean we're going to write people off because at that point in time, they're not able to financially contribute? And I want to challenge as well by saying about active citizens rather than passive recipients. Now, if we just ditch the shirker idea, we actually begin to see people as active citizens. We begin to see people for those gifts and those skills that they have, and we see people then as active citizens rather than passive recipients. We stop seeing people as burdens and start giving a bit of respect. And there's some organization, this sounds all a bit fluffy maybe and a bit pie in the sky. But there are organizations that know this, that are doing this, and there's people first, which is a really good advocacy movement for adults with learning difficulties, who are doing amazing stuff in policy, talking to government, talking through social care, because they need those changes to happen. There's the big issue starts from a position of dignity. There's something called studio schools that were started by Nesta and studio schools works from providing schools that children, that young people will run into rather than run away from. They've got 100% attendance rates where they were working with young people with high levels of truanency. There's a whole load of social firms that are working with people that are socially excluded, and the reason they're social firms is because people have things they can contribute and offer, but mainstream services, public services and our businesses currently aren't giving them the opportunity. And I think the last thing for social inclusion is although we avoid all those horrible things that social exclusion causes, if we have social inclusion, we've actually got a much, much smarter society.
