AN AMATEUR ANTHROPOLOGIST’S STUDY OF THE RICH/POOR DIVIDE

As a group of volunteers we have collected unwanted furniture and household goods to pass on to people in need, helped to rehouse homeless families and given support to the unemployed and low-paid.

From a community worker’s point of view it seems very simple to state that for over fifty years we've organised ourselves at a voluntary group to help others; but it’s far more complicated to explain why we've sought to work in a way so different to the norm - that of trusting everybody and rejecting nobody.

We've deliberately tried to be open and non-directive with people, i.e. without rules and without regulations; just common sense - accepting people and their situations as they are and seeing how the authoritative vacuum we create can actually draw people in as volunteers, bringing their ideas and energies into the group. This allows young people to join a team with responsibilities. As volunteers they respond enthusiastically to this way of working (helping to rehouse homeless people), proving how successful this ‘open-door'-style approach is, especially as many unemployable young people have found their work experience with us has led to paid employment.

Over the years we've built up a really good contact base and have a great reputation of responding efficiently (as many people will testify). However, we're now looking for a new team leader to carry on not just with the physical side of the work but also to continue to further develop the social, innovative way of working - that of being open and non-directive in the way we treat and respect each other as a team of volunteers.

Our work with the homeless has helped us quite naturally to think about poverty in the ever- widening gap between rich and poor. Over the years we have heard it said that Britain is a broken country and people are suspicious that those at the top are liars, thieves and crooks. This is confirmed by much professional research which reveals that blatant 'tax-loophole' cheating is running at about £120 billion annually, not to mention money fiddling/laundering/hoarding, and public apathy has allowed the richest people in the UK to salt away £11 trillion in offshore accounts, explaining why the country is being run on the cheap.

To put this into some sort of context, our GDP is under £3 trillion. Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay have imposed a windfall tax on the offshore savings of their super-rich - if they can do it, so can we! You can Google it, or use Chat-Box or Chat GPT if you want to check out these facts.

Looking back at the way we have worked over the last fifty years has helped us develop what we think is a common-sense mission statement, which you can find elsewhere on our site.