This is an interview with Judith Vickers exploring a series of questions about outcomes and measurements aiming to get nuanced views from people as what started as a part of an action research project.

Below is a transcript of the above recording.  Special thanks go to Judith Vickers giving the time to share her seasoned experience in reflecting on these questions.  I am grateful to her participation and giving of time to share her thoughts through this project and the support of Lifeshare.

For more interviews please visit: https://www.raggeduniversity.co.uk/outcomes-and-measures/

Alex Dunedin: Can you talk a little about your role and who you are and the work you do, please?

Judith Vickers: Well my name is Judy Vickers, and I’m the Operations Manager for Lifeshare in Manchester. Lifeshare is the oldest homeless charity in Manchester; it was founded in 1984. Charitable status came for the organization in ’89. Originally we were sort of like a seven-day-a-week sort of soup van style, going out every night, feeding from the van, doing hot meals. By the start of the ’90s, we realized that people needed more dignity rather than just a bacon butty on the street. So, we took our service indoors into the Charter Street Ragged School on Saturdays and Sundays where we could offer more services, still doing the soup meals down on Tower Street and Piccadilly Gardens.

Around about the mid-’90s, we had a big resettlement project. We brought the Bond scheme to Manchester and introduced a needle exchange onto our vans, health foundered by the Booth Centre and Manchester Action on Street Health, so a lot of support from other organizations. By the end of the ’90s, the outreach teams identified a very small pocket of young men in the city that were selling sex; it wasn’t about sexuality. They approached Comic Relief, and the MSWAP project was born, which was the Male Sex Workers Outreach Project.

And so, they worked with the young lads. Again, it wasn’t about sexuality; it was about survival sex. Um, Manchester didn’t really accept that there was any issue around male sex work. Nobody believed Lifeshare that there was this small pocket of young men in the city selling sex. At that time, around 2000, I was working for Lifeline as an under-19 substance misuse worker specializing in child sexual exploitation, sex work, and things like that. So, I was seconded by the D.A.S. to go and work with Lifeshare to see if this was true. Did we have these pockets of young men? What kind of provision did we need to improve it? And that’s sort of how my journey began with Lifeshare.

Around 2003, I was in my last year of my BA in Social Work, and I did my dissertation on the hidden population of male sex workers in Manchester. My friend Mary Lange—well, Mary Wowell at the time—was doing a PhD on the geographical macronomics of sex workers. She was going to go out to Asia to do the Triangle, and I said, “No, no, no! You need to keep this more like Europe, cities, and things like that, so we can build a solid evidence base.” We could then hit the council with public health evidence and show that we had this group of men in the city.

So, both of us passed; she passed her PhD, and I got my BA. And then, you know, we went. So, I’m a bit of a whistle-top, to be honest, but we then… that was running great. As I say, I then came into employment with Lifeshare after leaving Lifeline. Around that time, I was a full-time sort of support worker with them and then… let’s get going. Yeah, so share emails! I’ll link in; I’ll do you an intro. Thank you very much.

Yeah, so at that time, there was quite a tough rhetoric in the city around truancy officers that were coming in and sweeping young kids out of Piccadilly Gardens and Nobles and things like that. So everyone on the outreach team was finding very small pockets of young people drinking, smoking, doing drugs—doing what they do. My young men were heterosexual young men, so there were lots of relationships forming, lots of pregnancies, and Lifeshare worked with risky behavior, and I was finding myself going on pre-birth assessments to Huddersfield, Leeds, and different places.

I went back to Comic Relief and said, “Look, we need to go more generic; we need to work with any young person and any form of exploitation in its many ugly forms.” I came from a crappy background in the ’80s, so I came up with the acronym CARDS, which stands for Crisis Assessment Referral Diversity Service. Your cards on the table: how are you dealing with those two different things in my friend’s life? So, Comic Relief then funded the CARDS project, and I was the team leader over CARDS. Around about 2012, we had real issues with our young people not wanting to go to probation. There was this rolling door of short sentences coming back out, accommodation loss.

So, we set up the Meaningful Use of Time program, where young people could come and do their actual probation with us; they could do their appointments, looking at perhaps risky offending behavior, drug use, or filling in applications on Manchester Move, things like that. So, that service then added a criminology aspect.

Our mission statement is: “Lifeshare works to break the cycle of homelessness, offending, reduce harm, and promote health.” We added the offending bit into that statement around 2012 and then proceeded to take over as Operations Manager for the whole service. So now I’m responsible for Lifeshare as a seven-day-a-week provision. We do weekend breakfasts, and we became homeless. We would have been in the Charter Street Ragged School for about 33 years, but the gentrification of the city pushed us out.

So, the homeless charity, even though we held on by the grit of our teeth down at the Ragged School for as long as we could, found ourselves homeless. Even though we got Andy Burnham, who is wanting to do x, y, and z, nobody seemed interested in our cause. We ended up out in Trafford with our weekend breakfast service, but I’ve been fighting, and now we are back in the city center.

We also do a Christmas project because another thing that Lifeshare identified 33 Christmases ago is that everywhere shuts, even the Christian organizations, and closes their doors. So Lifeshare opened the doors from the 23rd through to the 29th, all run by volunteers. We have three meals a day: doctors, nurses, and podiatrists brought in. COVID-19 nearly stopped it last year, but we had great plans to do a joint project with Naimos and the Hippodrome, which was under threat of being knocked down and turned into an apartment block.

I said, “Right, we’ll do a big campaign to save Naimos, do our Christmas projects in there, and get our patron, Maxine Peake.” So, Plan A was opening at two o’clock on the 23rd, with circus performances, speeches from Maxine, and “Home Alone” movies. Plan B went to the road next to Naimos; we ended up on Plan D, which was serving from the doorway in the city center—a Christmas dinner—but Christmas still went on.

COVID did not stop Christmas! So, yeah, just so you know, my job is just to try and bring in all the funds, keep the service running, and adapt as well to the needs of the city, which has always been my catchphrase: adapting to the needs of the city. Now we’ve had to look at digital platforms, so I know that’s a bit of a witter. I’d say it’s amazing—it’s important to just be aware. You know, so many people just aren’t, and they have no idea how much things change, how much goes on behind the scenes.

Yeah, so, well, it says it, and I think because Lifeshare has built so much trust among the—what we call them—“Manchester’s finest” within the homeless community, you know, we have a lot of respect really out there on the streets. And we always hear things, like the trends in drug use and things like that.

I remember, I think it was about 2013 when the issue with spice started coming. I remember, again, there was quite a tough rhetoric in the city around cannabis and people smoking. They had the three strikes: if you got stopped once, you got it confiscated with a warning; the second time, confiscated and a warning; and the third time you were going to get yourself, you know, spun.

Depending on what you were carrying, whether it would be intent to supply or whatever. At the time, we were just about to change over from MSWAP, and one of our lads came into the office. He’d been to Dr. Herman’s, and he had, you know, this thing—I think it was Pandora’s Box—in this shiny packet, and you know, at that time, the shops weren’t allowed to give any harm reduction advice.

So, they couldn’t tell them, “You only need a tiny little bit of this, you know?” In the minds of the young people, it was “Well, it must be safe because I’m buying it in the shop and paying my taxes on it,” so it must be sort of all right. So, this lad, his normal routine was to start at the back of Mitchell Street Courts, roll himself a spliff of normally cannabis, set off cruising down underneath the towpath up the canal, and by the time he got to Tarasley, if he hadn’t met a punter or whatever, he’d think, “Oh, I’ll have to roll another spliff,” and sort of cruise back down around the things.

So he said that all he can remember from that night is being at the back of Mitchell Street Courts, thinking, “Oh, it’s synthetic; it mustn’t be quite any good.” So he builds a nice big spliff, and then the next thing, the sun was coming up, and he was in Sackville Gardens, his trousers were around his ankles, and he knew something awful had happened to him! So at that point, I was like, “What is this stuff?”

Although we knew by lobbying and raising awareness of it, because even the drug services hadn’t heard about it, me and Julie Boyle, the team leader at the time, ended up training school nurses and talking to all them because we then started doing our research about what it was. We knew by criminalizing it it wasn’t going to stop it; it’s not going to save it—what it would do is take it away from easy access because we were having ambulances at the service every day bringing people around. It was horrendous because you could literally get it in four shops between our office and Piccadilly Gardens where you could buy it.

One day I remember, we were supposed to be taking a young lad to the hostel, and I asked, “So, he turned up and we’re having a look at him, looking a bit sheepish. I said, ‘Have you got your ID?’” He said, “I left it in one of the shops.” It wasn’t Dr. Herman’s, it was, um, Radar or something. It had security on a 10-pound bag of spice.

So, I’m on the phone to the police, absolutely fuming, right? Yeah, you know, because it was like, you know, he’s giving him mixed signals about this drug as well, you know. Now, the copper I used to call Big, and bless him—Big and Daft—did go around to get the passport, but there was no offense on the show because he was just like going to a petrol station, and he forgot his thing. So, yeah, I’m like, no it’s not, you know. But yeah, this is what we were dealing with on a daily basis.

So, we got Vice up from London, and we made a documentary about Spice Boys in Manchester to raise awareness. We were then getting calls from America, we were getting calls from Portugal, all over the place with different people. So, yeah, there’s been lots of things just in my short journey with Lifeshare that we’ve seen. When we were in Stockport as well, we put down two pedophile rings, you know. So, it’s like there’s great stuff that goes on, you know, yeah—fantastic.

Do all of your successes get recognized and remembered? Sometimes, or maybe not. It’s like the Coalition of Relief formed in 2015 for Manchester, which is still going to this day. Although COVID has stopped us from meeting on a monthly basis, it set off with me and Mikey, who worked for Cambridge Community Action at the time.

There were lots of small groups feeding in the city centre, falling over themselves, going around feeding street sleepers. We had Tent City in the place. A lot of these small groups didn’t have policies; they just had their goodwill to want to go and do something and make a change. Even Dance 4 a Change, an organization that came out of that coalition, came about because me and Mikey sort of brought them all down to Danzig Street. We had monthly meetings and helped them with policies.

Now, Coffee for Craig started off as two of my Sunday volunteers, who when I reached, Risha’s brother passed, started going out giving brews and feeding at Piccadilly Gardens. So, I helped Coffee for Craig to then become their own organization in their own right with their own building, the same with Reach Out in the Community. They were a family group, and they were working, and Mad Dogs, the family, all fell out.

So, I chaired the split-up of those things and helped money that had been raised for those organizations and breaking that down. Same with Spin and Wellspin, which has now been taken over as Anaben. So, all these things—the big change for Manchester, which came out of those coalition meetings—I’d say, not that it’s recognized that that was out of them, but it’s not why we do it. You know, we know that that came out of our meetings, but we don’t need anything to say it did.

But yeah, most of where you’ll find will be some form of Lifeshare connection in anything. I will be very vocal. I’ve started strategic groups for 15 years, like Crime and Disorder, Modern-Day Slavery, for about eight now. And Andy Burnham, uh, I’m sorry, Andy, this is not going to work; this is jobs for boys! That was his Mass Gateway. So he came up at the meeting, and I stood up and said, “This is not going to work. Any of our really hard-to-reach clients are not even going to get past question six; they’re going to be flung out! It’s not going to work, the only ones are going to be making money are the ones that you’ve implied to settle this system.”

Mass Gateway came in, it rolled anyway, even though I was up and saying it wouldn’t work. And guess what? It didn’t work! You know, so it’s still there; it’s being tweaked and things like that, but all you can do is still keep putting your two pennies worth in. Sometimes you’re… yeah, and I’m just like a dog with a bone; I don’t just go away with it.

I’ve still got African Container Village on my mate’s farm. All I wanted was a piece of my idea; because, like Burnham came in and the gentrification of the city, so you’re knocking down an old pub and putting a big high glass tower on it. Yeah, but you flatten that ground now, but you don’t actually plan to build on that for another eight to twelve months, maybe—or even six months.

So I come along with my 10 or 12 containers that have got showers in them, they’ve got sleep facilities, toilets, healthcare, everything. So we could put that on that land; my mate’s got a haulage company, so we’re not even asking anybody to do that. Bring them, put them down, and then about the month before they’re due to build on that site, we move the containers to the next site that’s just been flattened.

That way we hopscotch around the city because what I was finding before, I also had 3.3 million and a property developer who was going to make a big gateway to the North. We had St. Cuthbert’s church who wanted to redevelop their site; they had the land and everything, I had the 3.3 million. I was going to do it on the Burnley model, put all the proposals together, and then when we got to save one of the council workers, she said, “Judy, I’ll be honest with you, don’t put any more time or effort into this,” because I had the bishop looking for who divides to the land, because apart from the land there was an old nunner.

So the front of the first actions were finding the nuns on the run. Because we had the permission of the congregation of Cuthbert, but this one bit of land within Cuthbert still belonged to these nuns. So I had an Archdeacon in London trying to find these nuns and huge pieces of work. Then Donna Crimson, I think it was, said, “It’s part of Andy Burnham’s Gateway to the North.”

So you are not going to get permission there to build on that, even though it’s a wonderful thing because, within a mile and a half, you’ve got Woodward Court, another supported accommodation—within half a mile you’ve got a food bank and apparently, if you have these things, it lowers the value of the real estate that’s going to be built because these services for people who are marginalized on it make the area look marginalized and poor.

So, even though we had this money, they weren’t interested in it. But again, not going away with that idea, the container idea would be a perfect solution against, um, so you’ll see you’ve got the politicians who want to look like they’re doing, but they’ve got another agenda. I think I made national news; I think I ended up on the front page of the Mirror because I told Andy Burnham and he took the Homeless Charter for Business thinking he’d put him head of it, who’s the biggest property developer you know, who’s actually taking other things. So I said to him, “Don’t you think that’s a little bit hypocritical?”

Yes, Manchester charity worker criticizes Andy Burnham telling me, yeah. So, yeah, but this is sort of some of the obstacles that you’re dealing with. I mean, you sat in this office today, we moved in here in 2007; nobody wanted to rent in this area. The first gentrification was in 2006 when we had to move out on Mount Street because that building had been sold and it was going to be turned into an old singing, dancing apartment block.

The music studios and Lifeshare were in the basement; yeah, that’s now the car park. So I found this building, and as I say, nobody wanted to rent it, it was at a reasonable price, and you know, that was 2007. I’m still here today. Now, bless the landlord; he keeps trying to put my rent up, I keep saying, “Oh well, you know, you can have an extra hundred pounds a year, that’s about all I can afford,” bless him. And you know, I was this your dad’s baby now, you know your dad really wanted me to be here with this charity, so bless him. I keep blackmailing him on his dad. But I know that what I’m paying for two floors, he could rent out; he could get that for each floor in this building, you know.

And again now, we’re… because it’s so gentrified, they don’t want… they don’t want people coming into the services. When we were here originally—oh, I hope I’m not diversifying too much—when we got this building here, as I say, we were the M Swap, so it was literally five minutes to the male beating there, and then we go five minutes the other way, you had the needle exchange; you had ABS, drug services; you had other charitable services that we needed—now all those have been moved out; they’ve gone.

Yes, the needle exchange got closed down, and as soon as the needle exchanges went, that’s when we started having needles in the car parks again and things like that. So yeah, I’ve seen lots of different changes, and for me, things are going backwards a bit, if you like.

You know, because we had to then go, I’d say around about 2017, again to look at doing a lot of it from— I mean, Universal Credit coming in and things like that in 2015 when the welfare reform was beginning to stop. That’s when I knew sort of thing we’d have to start doing a digital element because everything was going to go online, and you see people waiting, you know, seven weeks for their food, social workers on the phones with families, you know, in absolute dire straits.

I had to go back to being a food bank, really. When we moved away from that, we were never, like, a trusted food bank; we were a food bank that specialized mainly for social workers, hostel workers. So it wouldn’t be where people could come. The worker would phone up; we’d do three days of food specific to that family, so you know if it was halal or anything. But, we were maybe just doing 10 parcels a week or something like that. Suddenly, when UC came in, we were going up to sort of 20-30 parcels a week and things like that.

So, and then numbers went up—our breakfast project when we was at the Charter Street Ragged School—we used to think, like, at one stage, a busy Sunday would be 74, you know, 75, you know, 80 maybe on a Saturday. We were seeing regular numbers of, like, 125, you know. Because I’m not saying everybody was a rough sleeper that came through the project, because we dealt with people who were living in food and fuel poverty. If you came to Lifeshare’s door, you were welcomed in with all demands, so there’s no asking, you know, or ticking boxes, if you like, because some of our clients say they go to another service and they’ve got to do a workshop in order to get a meal.

So, you’ve got to take part in an activity that ticks a box for a funder or something like that, whereas for us, there were no rules. If you were there at the door, you were welcomed in, you know. Um, yeah, so things have adapted, but yet things are still looking like they’re going, you know, backwards. We were demonized a bit by the council, and we were accused of—this was probably around about the time we could still get the crisis loans—so before the welfare reforms and systems changed.

When they could get crisis loans, at that time the council had a bit of a view that we were enablers because we were giving people free food and we were giving people clean clothes and stuff like that, we were enabling them to live on the streets. The minute the crisis loans stopped and then they had to contact their local council for an emergency payment, suddenly now the council wanted to know us because they wanted to refer people to our food provision because they didn’t want to have to give out the money or the vouchers.

So, even just seeing changes in mindsets on, you know, councils. I mean, I have constant arguments now with the sleepers team and things like that because, um, you know, they’re not allowed to give out somebody a sleeping bag or a clean pair of boxer shorts or things like that because they are seen then as enabling somebody on the streets. But to me, it’s humanitarian rights, you know.

Even to the point where—oh this still drives me insane—I sent one of my workers out on the count, now they counted 40 rough sleepers. But the matter of fact really, my worker said to me we should have counted at least 46. He said, “But one guy didn’t have a sleeping bag; he was clearly asleep.” He said he goes, “Clearly, because he was a real sleeper, not a drunk passed out on the street.” But because he wasn’t in a sleeping bag, and he wasn’t “always”, he doesn’t quite fit the criteria! You know, you’re slapped in a bus station, you know, then you’re on the bus bench, and it’s like you’ve got a roof over your head, so we’re not counting him either. So again, the way that things are counted is very dodgy, and, but yeah, sorry, next question!

Alex Dunedin: So can you tell me about the structures you work in and under?

Judith Vickers: Um, structures within our organization? Well, you know, there’s lots of policies and ways to do things: organizations, bureaucratic structures—what structures do you have to respond to in order to achieve the work?

Well, my structure was structured for me within my own organization, and sometimes it’s the biggest battle, actually. Because sometimes if I’m going out and I’m speaking on a strategic board, you know, and I’m talking about policies or changing things, and you know, there might be council workers, police, health, and everything—they listen to me and get it, and then sometimes my trustees, because I am answerable to a board of trustees, they don’t quite get it.

So motivating sometimes change within my own organization is sometimes the hardest thing because I think, “Well, we’ve always done it this way for this long,” and you know, I’ve been here 30 years, and we’ve always done it this way and this that and the other. So, that can be a little bit of frustration for me because I’m trying to get my whole board to agree on something.

So, you know, sometimes you’ve got to nobble a couple of the trustees prior to a board meeting and get until they know that you’re on their side, you know? And then sometimes a little bit really destruction is, for me, it’s a very small pond in Manchester really. Sort of all the social… everybody sort of knows each other within the social care system.

And you tend to find sometimes that the certain agencies tend to get the funding all the time because they’re in the little clique, if you like. So sometimes getting yourself to be accepted in a clique can be very, very difficult even sometimes that, you know, if you’ve been doing something for years, but somebody’s come in now and you know they’ve got friends of friends, so they get that job or they get that contract.

So that can be quite a little bit frustrating. I mean, we don’t really tend to go for tender contracts or things like that because the hoops and things that you have to go through to get that and the time doing for those bids that kind of structured them can be too problematic because there’s only me doing the funding bids, and me trying to do everything.

So that can be hard where you just can’t get through all that sort of red tape and things. And then all the amounts of monitoring and evaluation would need a full-time monitoring evaluation evaluator just for, you know, some of the funding that you get from the council. So the bureaucracy and the paperwork that might come with ten thousand pounds from a council actually isn’t really worth it because it’s just cost you sixteen thousand and I’ve been working to get through the feedback on, you know, so that can be quite difficult really.

But we’re getting better. I mean, I’m just going to be getting the informed system in for casework and things like that, which might help with reporting back on numbers, and now looking at more collaborative working—that seems to be the sort of the key at the minute that because, for me, and I’ve always said it that, you know, no one organization can solve the problem of homelessness or solve one client’s issues; you need to have a signposting system in different ways.

So, working in collaboration and doing joint bids is a new different way of doing things for us, but again sometimes finding your collaborative partners is not always the easiest of things. And then another one sort of thing is—we have our bank account but then sometimes if you get in a council fund, they want you to have a separate bank account just for that fund going in and, you know, at the minute against another bank account is not really the easiest thing to do.

With the minute opening a bank account, those kind of structures and requests, for a small charity, are harder to do than maybe Shelter as a large national charity. They’ve got people who think you do that, so as a small little charity, you’re sometimes left out of the big game because you haven’t got the hours or capacity to do all those structural hoops that they want you to do.

Alex Dunedin: So, can you talk a little about the successes you’ve had in the form of clients or in the form of changing service? You know, what do you think is important to talk about?

Judith Vickers: You know, both, you know… um, what I would say was the successes was identifying the male sex workers in Manchester and then going from MSWAP to CARDS now. When we were MSWAP, the Male Sex Workers Outreach Project, we worked with an organization that was like an arts-based organization called The Blue Room. So we made films; we did videos, all different things, art stuff, plays and things like that.

So, when we decided to go more generic, the Blue Room decided then to turn—you know, we went with The Blue Room to go into the men’s room. So the Men’s Room now is operating as MSWAP used to do, so they’re doing the services directly for that client group.

So, for me, getting the male voice onto the prostitution forum, getting sex workers to fall, sorry, getting them onto primary health needs and things like that—that was an amazing piece of work. Again, the stuff around modern-day slavery and trafficking for Manchester, because it was probably… oh, it might have probably now—forget, but might have been about 2003, 2005 when I first worked with my first client who was trafficked out of Nigeria into, um—well actually, he came from Nigeria, his mum and dad, and his sister, then he got abandoned in London.

He got picked up by a street gang; he never saw his sister again. He believed she got taken off to work in a brothel. He was then trafficked around. When he was about 15, he got picked up in Manchester during an immigration raid because at that point, he started trafficking around the country for sex work, and then that’s when he came across Crossover sort of thing, and we started—well, he started working with him.

And now, you know, he’s got his rights to remain; he’s engaged to be married; he’s a third-year in university; he’s 28 now, you know—has a beautiful little girl from out of the work that we did with him and a few other young men. Then the modern-day slavery forum started; I helped the co-op start the Brighter Futures program to give people who’ve been victims of modern-day slavery and trafficking a real job, something—so they have a month’s placement where it’s a paid placement with the guy, an interview at the end of that—not going to eat the job, but you’ve got good things, you know?

So all different things that came again from us raising that voice. Um, so I now, at the minute, um, on my dissertation, I put a working model through for multi-disciplinary teams to go out to work. So you’ve got multi-year until you’ve got GMP, you’ve got CGL drugs workers, Lifeshare, sort of being in the site. That framework’s now being used where we’re working in that, so I’m quite pleased on that one that, you know, but it took a long time.

One of my other things, um, Sue Murphy, God rest her soul, councilor Sue Murphy, she’s passed now, but I always remember going into the Sex Workers Forum, and she said to me, “Judy, you are going to be so pleased today.” I said, “Why is that?”. She said, “It’s only took 10 years.” I said, “It’s only took us 10 years of you constantly…” Yeah, and it was to get the undercroft locked at night and the lights. Because where they were doing the cruising and things like that, to get gates and lights down on the undercroft took 10 years of lobbying the water board, the council, and everything. We finally got what we asked for, and that was 10 years later. But that was a result 10 years later.

Um, but yes, yeah, so those are sort of things I’d say I’m quite pleased. I think when the service income has gone up since, you know, I’ve been, but then you can be a victim a bit of your own success because pots of money that may have been smaller pots of money that might have funded Lifeshare then, now we break over the income bracket.

So, you know, I think Lifeshare was pulling around about 76,000 maybe when until I joined, and now, you know, we’re just around about 250,000, which was one of the best people we’re pooling around about 200,000 now, which again then cuts you off from smaller grants you may have gone to because you’ve gone over the 150,000 bracket.

So, um, yeah, but raising the income of the charity in the team, um, and like not giving up, um, although I advocated against street feeding, and when the pandemic hit in, we did go and serve street fed from Piccadilly Gardens on the weekend, humanitarian breakfast, and then I managed to talk the Methodist church to give us the shop on Oldham Street.

There was—used to be the old pawn shop. So we used that space with Audacious, Barnabas, and Mind, and we did a seven-days-a-week humanitarian breakfast all the way through COVID and did the Christmas project from there. We’re now still serving weekend breakfasts from there, and we’re doing a well-being event in July to raise awareness around homelessness and harm reduction, and we’ve got corporates involved with us now.

And yeah, so yeah, there’s quite a few successes. Uh, I still—we’re now under threat here, so this building that I’m in, you know, I got this in 2007, we’re now under threat of a compulsory purchase order on our block and the block behind us that holds the brothel in it because now Tim Healy’s Capital Center of the new anchors and the new trendy place for your 25s to 35s to live and cohabitate—community where it’s so hip and cool to live, you know, our little old Victorian block doesn’t look really good in the middle of the glass.

So at the minute, there is a thing to get rid of our building and the building behind, and so I’ll just have to see, well, you know, so it is a constant, you know, neither. Um, also as well, I’ve not got disabled access here, so that’s one of the little things. So, but where, you know, if we’d have gotten permission to build the Gateway, which is a 10-minute walk up the road to Cuthbert’s, you know, that that would have been built in there now and have been an answer, but we weren’t perhaps in the right club, if you like. So Riverside got the contracts for various things and others again. So, it sometimes depends who you are as a player.

Alex Dunedin: Do the current systems of administration help you achieve these successes?

Judith Vickers: Again, administration within our own organization or in—you know, the administrative systems that you have to work through? Well going back to, if we’re talking about administrative systems of referral for people to go into the count, you know, for things—so like I said to you before about the Mass Gateway—that’s an administrative system that throws out the most hard-to-reach, you know, people that have got really multiple disadvantages on the streets—they don’t get past, you know, the six or seven first questions; they’re too high risk or things like that.

So, yeah, I fed into that system that is not going to work because then what happens when you get thrown out of that system without—back in the day, before, I had somebody who on paper looked an absolute nightmare; you know his offending history is like, you know, sort of a War and Peace document or whatever. But yeah, he’s a really, really nice person; I know that that person can turn around, he’s just perhaps had really bad life choices or he’s been through criminal exploitation or what.

So, I used to be able to pick up the phone, yeah, phone up NACRO or one of my other, you know, hostels that I know that I’ve got a working relationship with the manager with, I’d say, “Barbara, I am going to send you over this referral; you’re going to fall off your chair when you read it!” Yeah! But trust me, can I bring this young person up to meet you? Yeah, have a chat, we’ll set in boundaries, we’ll set in some ground rules, we’ll think it, and let’s give this young person a chance.

Yeah, and that would work! Now, with the administrative systems where you’ve got to do an A Ben referral, so it’s got to go… so you’ve got bed for every night in Manchester, something—but again, it’s a high-risk thing if the Bed for Every Night now will throw everybody in together. So, this young person who looks like he’s, you know, Ronnie Cray but not actually… he’s been grooming his butt, is really not this person; he’s suddenly now shoved in with class A users and people with alcohol issues, 55, 65, who just then see him as somebody who they can then bully and victimize.

Whereas if it had been a point where there wasn’t these administrative systems where you’ve got to go through this pathway, yeah, these pathway systems, they just put obstacles. So the pathway to accommodation now might be Centre Point, but I like the improvement… I wonder why it’s Centre Point! But now we’ve got to refer that person to Centre Point because they’ve got the key to the door to DePaul, whereas before I could just ring the palm and go, “I’ve got little Johnny here.”

Yeah? Or if he’s somebody who is offending, I could ring Barbara at NACRO. Now all that has gone; I’ve got to go through these systems, and the administrative systems throw out the multiple disadvantaged people with the highest risks and offending behaviors and they sort of then end up in this weird sort of cosmos because nobody knows what to do with them.

So now they’ve brought in navigators—so there’s a navigator team now to help navigate these people who’ve been booted out of these systems, yeah? But still there’s nowhere really to move them. So right now they’re just like with the navigators, but then they’re still not really moving anywhere; sometimes they’re actually on the streets for a while because they’ve got to prove to the navigator that they’ll engage for three appointments to show that they’re being serious.

So, yeah, the systems that are now being put in place just cause more problems. There’s not that human element where you can have that conversation with accommodation providers. So yeah, that’s pretty um—systems not working sort of, really. And then again, getting through if you’re trying to get through to PIP or on the telephones or go through different things, those systems I’m convinced are geared up so that your head falls off because you’ll be on 45 minutes on hold, and then you’ll get the line cut off for some reason. So sometimes I think systems and administrative processes are there to stop you getting in, if that makes sense. [Laughter]

Yeah, you ain’t getting this golden ticket because you know! Um, so yeah, I think so; things like that for me have made life more difficult because, you know what I mean, and also as well, we’ve got all these people who are stuck in the bends at the minute, and there’s nowhere to move them on to. So, there’s no one-bedroom accommodation within affordable prices. So again, the identification of Manchester sort of thing—before we didn’t have anybody really living in the city center now, you know. You’ve got all the prices on the edge of the city center, which used to be sort of your own culture, little off, little Italy and things like that, where again nobody wanted to rent or buy.

Now they’re the up-and-coming affluent areas. So, perhaps where people might have been able to afford to rent in an area or look for, they can’t do now. It’s like we were looking for private landlords before. We might look alongside Levenshulme, Wally Range—now those areas are all up and coming fancy areas because of the spread of the city.

So we can’t look to those areas now because the private landlords who would have let to us now know that there’s this different group of people coming in they can let to. So yeah, and then another one, so the council might say oh there’s a list of, you know, you know letting agencies or whatever you can use, but they want guarantors. Well, I was a young person going to get a guarantor who’s got their own house and access to get their own; yeah, don’t they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now even getting to the doctors is… I think that’s an online form; that’s another, you know, system within itself. You know, you gotta apply online for the doctor’s and everything now is—everything’s got to be done through a digital portal. So, you know, your Universal Credit journal sort of, you know, your bank account opening or getting a GP appointment, you know, Manchester Move, everything’s got to be done through that digital portal.

But those digital portals are not available to everybody, you know. Not everybody has access to or wants to. Yeah, you know. I mean there must be lots of, there’s lots of people who… I mean, even perhaps, you know, my own dad, for instance, um, where Mike might be entitled to, you know, he’s on a low pension rate.

He might be able, you know, his health is not getting very well, good. He might be able to get something… I’m not filling in one of them online farms; I’m not doing that thing, you know, to me. You know, I’ll do it; I don’t want a—I’ll do it for you—no, no, no, no, you’re not bringing it! So, you know, there are people who are probably excluded from these administrative systems and are now suffering because they don’t know how to negotiate these systems.

Alex Dunedin: Yep. I mean, it brings true to my experience. Can you talk about the difficulties of measuring the outcomes of your work?

Judith Vickers: Yeah, now, this was sort of one that I used to again when I was always with Comic Relief with their little boxes and things like that, you know, um and say, you know, somebody who’s perhaps been selling themselves on the streets saying, I don’t know, 15 punters, 15 punters a night or whatever—maybe rough sleeping, staying in a hotel.

Six months down the line, he’s now only seeing two or three people; he’s on a tripod script, and he’s living in a hostel. For us, that’s a positive outcome, yeah? Because of the harm reduction side of things. I mean, for Comic Relief, he was still selling sex! So sometimes what might be a positive outcome for us—for that young person—is not necessarily a positive outcome for a funder. So, sometimes that you find that, again, people don’t fit into tick boxes of things.

Um, again a little bit sometimes, um, change doesn’t always come right away, or so, you know, so if you’ve done sort of workshops with somebody or, you know, putting the… you haven’t got evidence of how that has changed somebody right away. But that person coming back to you and saying, “Well, actually, since that I don’t go out and do that anymore, I’m not robbing,” or I’m not, you know, it’s sometimes difficult to try and put that into a box that you’ve got to tick on things.

And again, because we didn’t really have—we, you know what I remember, around about 2012, I wanted a CRM system that would monitor everything, but we couldn’t afford to get one as an organization or things like that, and again the trustees didn’t back that, even though I put in a bid to the Big Lottery and they said, “We love you, big Judy, but you need to, um, have a 10-year lease.”

Yeah? Now this is in – I’ve only mine right with 2021 now, I got this feedback in 2010. Eleven years later, I’m still sat in this building; my trustees wouldn’t let me have a 10-year lease. Yeah. Um, and they said you’ve got to have monitoring and evaluate—value better system, so since 2010, I’ve been trying to get the informed system outcome star. I wanted a 10-year lease three years ago; yeah, my landlord was willing to give me a—enough after advice from two funders.

So from Lloyd’s and Tudor negotiate with your landlord a 10-year lease with a two-year get-out clause for you and the landlord. That way, your funders look good that you’ve got a 10-year lease, but you’ve got—it’s not really a 10-year lease because you’ve got your two-year get-out clause. My trustees, my landlord was happy to do it so I could get the bid and resubmit my trustees, wouldn’t do it and let me do that.

Yeah? And 11 years later I’m still sat in the same bid and the trustees are still going, “Why don’t you go for the big money?” Because when I was at the 250,000-pound bidding, you wouldn’t give me a 10-year lease, and you wouldn’t give me a monitoring and evaluation system, and yeah I’m still in the same building, and I’m still begging for the system.

So, I am hoping that, you know, when we get this informed system and a better way to monitor and evaluate what we do, um, then that might give us a better stance for funding bid sort of thing. At the minute, um, we tend to use case studies and examples and things like that to, you know, as successes and things, but it is very difficult and then you monitor and evaluate enough or input and it’s only as good as what you put into the CRM system.

So then if you’ve only got a part-time admin worker and a part-time finance worker, then you can’t always, um, get everything done and implemented that you want to, and again that sort of was something that, you know, I’ve said to my board, you know, I need to invest in. I got a private philanthropist to invest a few years back to give me a full-time administrator, which I had for about a year, which was great. And then she decided on Christmas Eve that I’d just started training, done all the training, she was brilliant running absolutely.

She said to me, she’s going to GM CVO where they don’t do about biscuits and dogs! So I wanted to jump over the table and throttle her because we just put her through accountancy and everything, yeah! So, she was with me for a year, and then the trustees split the full-time post—16 hours finance and 16 hours admin—instead of me having the full thing. So again the frustrations go with the board; mainly if they’d give me the back-of-house support that I needed, I think that the charity would have grown more, you know, not sort of, yeah.

And then trying to do that, and sometimes like some of these, some of the funding bids that you get might not even be a lot of money, but they won’t evaluate it at three months and then, the next three months, and you know, it’s when you’ve not got much time to do stuff, trying to feedback and evaluate that is too much.

Alex Dunedin: Can you think of helpful and unhelpful examples of bureaucracies in relation to your work?

Judith Vickers: Um, there’s levels of bureaucracy which are only helpful sort of a little bit. Sometimes, like, you’re dealing with the council, and you might be wanting to get an answer on something, um, at the minute, and nobody, like, wants to give you an answer because it’s not their department or such, you know.

There’s levels where that… yeah, like for instance the Christmas project, um, Manchester City Centre shuts on Christmas Day; there’s no buses going down Oldham Street. There’s a loading bay outside the shop that we turned into the humanitarian breakfast; there’s no buses on Oldham Street at all Christmas Day.

I wanted to put a catering van and serve from the van with some carol singers instead of it being just in the doorway of the shop and just handing over this. I wanted the proper catering van, and I wanted it in the loading bay, and I could not get through the bureaucracy of the council or somebody to give permission for that to happen.

Yeah, I went to Councillor Lambert, who then passed me on to somebody else—then I went to the Roads and something—and I could not get anybody to give permission on Christmas Day to put that van down, which you’d think it’d be the easiest thing in the world, but no.

Um, so doing an event on Piccadilly Gardens, you know, before now, you know, you just go and do the event, or you might just speak to a PSO, a police officer, and say, “Oh, I’m going to be on the gardens two till four; we’re doing a stuff with the national citizenship.”

We used to do things with some students; now you’ve got to apply to the strategic lead to the city center. Yeah? Well, I’ve emailed the strategic lead six times in the past six weeks, one a week because I want to do a two-hour event on the 18th of July, which is going to be some food.

I wanted to do the COVID vaccination van with the Urban Medical Center and then come back on World Homeless Day, which is October the 10th, which is just around about the 12-week period for the second job. Anyway, we can’t get the COVID van, but we can do harm reduction advice and things like that, so the Urban want to be involved; we just can’t do the vaccines.

So trying to get the strategic lead to answer me is another thing. Again, I emailed him again on Monday, um, you know, it’s a harm reduction event and whatever, and I’m just not answering. Uh, and you’re having to go and now because they’re going to enforcement; you can’t just turn up and do it because you’re at risk of enforcement action on you because you brought your vehicle onto the gardens and x, y, and z.

So yeah, just wanting to do something that you think is for the greater good, sometimes I don’t know as a strategic lead is now, but it took me before Christmas when I was trying to find out about the Christmas, getting the catering van.

Actually, finding out who she was, who I had to go through took weeks actually. And then you go through onto the council website and you look who’s a portfolio holder. And you think that person’s in the portfolio holder for something, so you kind of contact them—oh no, they left two years ago! You know, so, yeah, this and again, I just feel that it’s there to muddle in their things.

But funnily enough, when I did the posters, the strategic lead for the city center was the first one to phone up, bollocking me. “Manchester, where… where was it? We know… they… we went on the Tony Wilson. We did a twist; did you see it? Did you see the phone?

No? No, that’s excellent! Yeah, so we used the Tony Wilson thinks that Manchester’s where they think tables are for sleeping on—24-hour party people was too 24-hour poverty people. And whatever, you saw? I’ll find it on my iPad. So we’ve done so and they were really massive; once as you go down to the tram down to the print works, the two big boards there at the poverty people, and it’s something like Lifeshare battles poverty; we need your help more than ever.

So, I think… but then there was the run of the Manchester where they think—pavements are for sleeping on. Yeah? So I said to Mikey Swain, I said, “We can’t get away with them; I said they’ll kill me.” I said, “We’ll go with these two, yeah, and we’ll put them on the big billboards; we’ll pay for them.”

I said, “I’ll pay for the billboards.” So we have these massive billboards shoedill tramstar Oxford Road thingy great all framed and all lovely, but then the lads who did the printing loved… they were thinking, so they went and fly posted 52 of the small posters all around Manchester.

Oh my God—did I get in! But I thought they were great, you know what I mean, but I was like out to Kate, “Well, this is what happens when you take your eye off the ball, Kate.” I said I’m ready—okay, I said—these are the ones, look. Look at the ones, lovely frames, I’m fine—she said there’s not a problem; it sees the fly—we’ll have you down third fly posted or whatever.

I said, “I’m really sorry. I said the people who printed them took it off their own back and thinking, I got… oh well, they will do it.” But yeah, they were all over the place; I could have throttled them, Mikey Swain! So the way I got—yeah, Manchester United, anything, pavements, sleeping on, yeah.

Um, so yeah, it’s funny if you upset one of them—funny how quickly they can find you! But when you want to know something or do something or get any help, you know, it’s another thing. Um, you know, even getting back—trying to get sort of community asset transfer buildings or anything like that, the bureaucracy around that… you know, and yeah, it’s just levels and levels of it.

Alex Dunedin: You know, I’m curious—have you come across any helpful bureaucracies?

Judith Vickers: Um, nothing’s springing in my mind that’s helpful. I could say, um, and another thing with the problem with the budget IRA; you can build a relationship, like, say, it’s with the police.

So, you’ve got Chief Inspector, who’s the Chief Inspector over the city center; he can be really great. He could be into harm reduction; he could be against enforcement; he could be working with you and getting you to know and then the Chief Inspector changes—then that changes the tip on the—I mean, suddenly now it’s gone through enforcement and things like that.

So it depends on who’s the lead on things on whether you get through that level of bureaucracy. A lot… um, I mean Burnstein, a lot of people didn’t like but, um, who was…his first name when it comes to Burnstein? Um, but again, I could phone him, you know, and so this time they even came down to breakfast and met me at half-seven in the morning down at breakfast to see the issue and raise the voice.

But I don’t know whether his voice then wasn’t welcome because suddenly he’d gone from the council, you know, so whether he was like he wanted to keep the Charter Street record as a community thing; he wanted to keep Lifeshare within that building and keep it as a community asset. But then, of course, the other powers that be didn’t want it because they wanted that to be the gate—it was the start of Andy Burnham’s gateway to the north.

So, I don’t know whether he was too much onto our side, and suddenly he just completely went, and he was the one who promised me that you will be looked after, and then he was gone, and then nobody was looking after us. So that might have been a pathway in which I thought might have been helpful but then ended up being helpful because he just got rid of him!

Alex Dunedin: Yeah, well, that brings us on to the next question: how often do the funding administration systems change, and do they have continuity?

Judith Vickers: No, well, it’s… as I said before, again, this sort of—when we had a smaller income, there were sort of certain streams that you could go for that you knew that would sort of fund your course, and a lot of them was. Now, because we’re in a bit of a higher income, it’s harder to find the full funding pots, if you like. Sometimes it’s really that you can be reading the criterias on a funding part which is dreams and reading to read the pages, and then just something in the last box excludes you.

So that’s not easy to find now for me being dyslexic. Now I find these funding portals that they all— you’ve got to do them on a portal, and you’ve got to do it right, and so, but that for me, they’re not as easy to fill in, sort of thing. Um, and then funders sort of have their outcomes and agendas that they’re looking at, um, you know, like Lloyd’s—Lloyd’s might have…but the only—perhaps the only one car costs is a really hard one to get funds for as well, you know, or getting funds for your finance or your administrator.

That’s sometimes always really, really difficult to do. Um, I mean I was on some fun funding, um, then yesterday around trauma and looking at sort of delivering on that and they didn’t want to— they didn’t want to fund the delivery of the project. They wanted to have like, I still can’t get me on their own actually what they wanted, but they didn’t want to—they didn’t want to really do.

Yeah, some of it is really—it’s hard to work out; sometimes they’ll pick they want to fund parts of it, but then they don’t want to fund the back of house to support it, and if you haven’t got your financing and your admin costs and you ain’t covered, then you know, it’s very difficult. Or they want to do a proportion; like Lloyd’s only pay like 25,000 towards the team leader’s salary; but we spoil the team leader at 50,000, you know, so then you’ve got to find the shortfall on that money.

So, um, yeah— We’ve gone down the road a lot of caught looking at corporate funding now. So looking at snoozing corporates and things like that for their corporate–uh responsibility and things like that, but then the pandemic is a bit, so there’s not as much money around on the corporate front as what there was before.

Um, so it’s just real difficult all the time to look at the best ways to do things and donate buttons on sites and different things, you know, and it’s, do you have just giving, do you have this one, do you have that? You know, every click or, you know, or do you have different ones, so people have got autonomy of choice, you know, because I’ve got one trust because we’re on all kinds.

When I had me full-time admin, I’ve been working, we went on all kinds of random little things that people could donate. It didn’t cost us a penny to be on it; might have only brought us a fiver through the scouts or something, or we might have got 50 pounds through it, but no work from that initial setting it up on that site.

Some might have spent 20 minutes putting a profile on it and a donate but nothing! Happy days! And randomly you get a bit of money. So, we’ve now got trustees saying that we should get rid of all these individual different mad things and just go with one particular one. But to me, that’s then… although that doesn’t make sense because that little button that was on the scouts thing that would get the odd, didn’t cost us anything.

Doesn’t think, you know? So, for me, I prefer to have a lot of choice on different things. You know, rather than people saying, “You’ve got to deal; you can only donate to Lifeshare through every click or JustGiving.” You know, that’s… people want choice. Yeah.

Alex Dunedin: Do the funding structures allow you to plan long-term?

Judith Vickers: No, not really—we’re not long enough, really, because things—they’re looking to vote maybe for you for a year.

So, like Jamie’s salary for the Make Some Noise funding, I’ve got that for a year, so more or less as soon as that lands, I’m now going to look for funding to how do I continue this role on. Um, I got the Mayor’s Fund funding again from a multi-disciplinary, the Andy bought Bartma bid, and he also put in the same framework in four other organizations to work in that pathway.

Yeah, but only funded it for a year. Yeah? So again now, I’ve got to start looking at well where do I now find that because we’ve proved it works; it’s a pilot sort of thing. Yeah, but then will that funding then go to somebody else in a different framework? We’ve proved the pilot; I designed it; we’re all working on it now. Is that now going to be taken away from us and that funding part now suddenly won’t be available for us, and it’ll be… I don’t know, but yeah.

No, three years—and even three years’ funding is not really that great a time to plan, you know, because you string your three years before you know it’s like I’m up to three years now, and I want to—I should have done my letter of inquiry at Christmas to Tudor, um, and my board said they want to change my job description, so told me to hang fire doing this.

And it’s a two-stage application, so you have to put your first stage in, which is sort of the basic of your idea and what have you, and if you buy on that, then they invite you to the second stage application that you fill that in. Then you might get a third one where you’re asking for extra information and what have you, so the process just to get in that fund could take nearly 12 months, you know, so no it doesn’t really give you that much security.

And that’s why the Big Lottery, you can do two 10-year projects—you know, get a 10-year lease; get your monitoring system. That was a 10-year grant. So that gives you the time to develop and grow a little bit, whereas your small little pots of money is not—you could have the figures at the end of it but you know what then you’ve when you know you’ve just done a year, you’ve got this worker, he’s singing, dancing, rolling on it now—it’s all being good, but you cannot find anything to continue those.

Yeah! Oh, who funded it? Don’t want to fund criminal justice anymore; they don’t want to—you know the only one to, you know, the key word now with, um, Homeless Link is transitional. So how is that transitional? How is that making somebody transition to something? How is feeding somebody transitional?

Yeah, I’ve had this massive argument the other day because Manchester, for the cold weather provision—yeah we’re putting in the homeless link bid out, and your bids have got to be supported by Manchester City Council, yeah? So, um, but without a food element into it and without… think, people are not going to transition if they’re hungry.

They’re going to be ratty; they’re going to be, you know. So it is still your Maslow hierarchy, you know, and you still need those basic ones. And without those basics you’re not going to transition to anything else until you’ve got something in your belly. So, yeah. You know, so ours is the weekend out-of-hours part of this. And we were putting in five bids in on the city. So it was, where does Leicester’s breakfast project sit? And whose collaborative bid?

You know, uh, and then what, how is that transitional? If you’re feeding somebody, so now we’ve got—although our breakfast project is key to the weekend provision because we’re food signposts and things like that, it’s not seen as transition. But everybody needs basic food, hygiene, clean! Yeah? And without that, you’re not going to transition to the next stage. So, sometimes, yeah, the wording on these funding things and what they’re looking for is not really realistic.

Alex Dunedin: Do you feel you have the latitude to implement the policies you feel are important?

Judith Vickers: Well, yeah, if every… are you talking about a policy sort of around sort of safeguarding and things like that? Yeah, we will, I guess. You know, you’re on the ground; you’re looking at how the city is changing, people’s needs are changing. Uh, I guess the last you to do what you think is necessary and appropriate at the time.

Um, yeah, I mean we… What probably she wants to speak to me about, and then at the minute, we… with the policies and following these flow charts that they have now, yes, everything’s a flowchart into accommodation, a flowchart into safeguarding, and at the head top of this safeguarding flowchart, yeah, is this portfolio holder or that…

This mystery safeguarding lead—can anybody actually find or get to them is a different matter. Yeah? So at the minute Sue’s got the thing where the safeguarding might be sat here with this mystery safeguarding lead person who’s not actually met the person that’s supposed to be safeguarding or not even, you know, hasn’t got time to come to a meeting.

But yet, this person’s on the streets, and so we’re working within that policy; we’ve referred them through; we’re asking for the safeguarding meeting, but this actual lead is not there to follow through the things. So sometimes you can have your pathway and your flowchart of how this policy is supposed to work and support somebody but then it’s lost when it gets to the top ranking stage of it because you can’t find who this head of this safeguarding lead is, and you can’t get them to the meeting, and they’re the person who does the final decision on it.

So sometimes, um, you know, you could have got a person all the way up ready for detox, but it needs this mystery person to sign the finances off that you can’t get a hold of. So now this person is ready—Eddie, today I want to go; I want to go today! Well, no, we’ve got to work… well, Barbara comes back in on Monday, and she’ll look at you… I think, and if Barbara thinks that you’re ready, then she’ll release the funds because Barbara’s the lead on the…

Yeah? Well, that’s no use to Fred, who’s now ready; while he’s waiting for Barbara, he’s just going to score 120 quid worth of rock, and he’s back on the roller coaster again.

So sometimes, yeah, you could try and work within the policy and flowchart guidelines but then it gets bureaucracy; it doesn’t match up or doesn’t really work. Um, so city-wide, again, sort of thing, although like, you know the policy was, you know, no street feeding in Manchester; enforcement will come on anybody who tries to do it, but then we had a pandemic.

So although I did to the policy before the pandemic, when I was kicked out of my building, I ripped the policy up and went on the street. Ah, don’t go anywhere! Never signed that in my life! No, yeah, so, um, so is that sort of around things like, um, yeah?

Um, is there anything else on that that you wanted? I didn’t want to cut in there. No, if it seems… Oh, oh yeah, well, I’ll tell you what, one thing you wrote, so another one that might be… so going back to, like, sort of the rough sleepers are the… you, like the council team, yeah? If you weren’t funded by the council, you weren’t invited to the meeting. Yeah? But the charity organizations have the information about the client that they’re all meeting about, but you’re not welcome because you’re seen as other than them.

So we’re the charity; although we know the person, we know what’s happening, we can’t go to that meeting because we’re not funded by the council, but then they want us to give them the information before the meeting so they could sit in that meeting and talk about it off the information that we’ve given them. Sort of things, so that policy and sort of thing where you feel it’s a bit other than them—you’re not funded by us, so you can’t come and sit in the same room with us.

But yet you’re working with job logs on the street, and you’re the one with the thing because, like, she’s the safeguarding lead on one of the girls, and she’s been safeguarding lead for two years, has never ever met the girl, but yet is wheeling the axon decisions on this girl’s life but has never met the girl. So, yeah, so sometimes policies and things can be there in an ivory tower if you like, really, that don’t really transgress to Joe Bloggs on the streets living in the doorway or something like that. There could be a policy there to protect him or whatever but really, in theory, it doesn’t work.

Alex Dunedin: Are you able through existing structures to forge the connections with outside organizations that you think are important?

Judith Vickers: Yeah, I think in Manchester, we are quite lucky because we have, like, um, MAC, um, we have that GMCVO, we have NCVO, um, so we have sort of a community, you know, sulfur CVS and things like that. So sometimes if you want to forge relationships with some people, you can go to, like, MAC and ask for advice from them and link in with sort of groups that you might not have known about. So it’s rather trying to get a yellow pages out and trying to sing who’s in the same kind of field as us, so there are sort of places that you can go. Is that what you mean?

Alex Dunedin: Yeah, well, you know, it’s… you’re working in this organization; there’s an organization over there, and in your mind, with all your experience, you’re a good fit. Yeah? Can you walk over there? Can you pick up the phone?

Judith Vickers: Uh, you touched on this earlier—yeah, now, me, because I’m thinking I would do it. You know what I mean and sort of thing, but um, it’s not always as easy because sometimes you get something “Oh, I don’t need to deal with that” or, you know, especially if it was Centre Point or Shelter; we can’t make a local particular decision without running it by their head office in London or something like that.

So, although you might want to do something, you know, you’ve got to run it through their main office. Even though the people who work at Centre Point—which is who it was called before that—um, you know, they’ve known me for years, but the policy person in London or the person that you want to, you know, they don’t know you from Adam! So it’s a bit difficult. But it’s a bit more local, yeah.

Then you’re not afraid to, um, and I think at the minute, now we’re on some funding bids like I was saying about that trauma one that you know you’re saying you need people to collaborate with you, so a bit now, people are realizing they’ve got to collaborate with other organizations. Whereas before, everybody was a little bit, “Oh, they’ll be going for the same funding” or they might not cooperate with them or tell them too much because they like the car funding and things like that.

Um, so, yeah. If I wanted to go within you, somehow, because I might just as I say, use MAC maybe and say, “Can you introduce me?” or suggest anybody you know, so they’ve got a bit of funding to match people up for different grants as well depending on where the money’s coming from. But um, I miss a lot of stuff because I just haven’t got the time for a bid writer to read and look at all the different portals that are there and up.

You know, and then sometimes what I find with the council or even with Crime and Disorder and things like that—if there’s a funding part, they’ll sell out—tell the voluntary sector the week before the deadline, but the boys they wanted to get it knew about the part three months ago.

So I’ve noticed that happening quite a bit, to be honest with you—that things… I’m like, “Oh my God! I’ll contact,” and then somebody will go to me, “No, I knew about that two months ago; I’ve been working on that bid for as well.”, “Did you know about that two months ago?” “Because that’s only just come out now.” Because they already knew they wanted to go for it, so I’ve found a bit of that.

That sometimes things are only released, or I remember me being paranoid. But I don’t think, yeah! Because I’ve noticed a lot recently that you’ve only got like a short window to get your bidding but yet you find some people who’ve got, you know and knew about the bid already. Yeah, so I think again it depends on your networks and, you know, a bit really.

Alex Dunedin: Do you feel the language used in administration and outcomes and measures—uh, adequately represents you and the work you do?

Judith Vickers: So that again? Do you feel the language used in administration and outcomes and measurements, like you mean you were speaking, talking about…Transition? Yeah, you know, there’s always… I think there’s always these buzzwords, if you like. You know, now, that’s the new buzzword, so it seems to be the buzzword floating around, and it’s not necessarily always helpful, you know, sort of, um. Again, it goes to that—not clients not fitting in boxes, you know what I mean?

So people can’t be put into a box for this in a box for that. Um, so some of the terminology and the don’t identify, and then they’re saying to get people with lived experience and things like that, which is absolutely great. The voicing—but then you get them, and they’re like, “Well, what’s that word mean? You know what they’re on about?” Like that, so sometimes they want the people who are, it’s happening, and they’re living through that, but yet the terminology that they’re using, they want them to describe it and is not their voice. Does that make sense?

Yeah, um…

So that, that can be sort of a bit of an issue really, and again, looking at the expectation of an outcome, you know. So, somebody, you know, for somebody who might have been using, I don’t know, three grams of heroin, four rocks—and they’re now suddenly using one bag and one rock, and then, you know, going down then to have the bag.

So that’s a massive change and an outcome for them, but it’s not necessarily the outcome that your funder wants to share because they want to see somebody set straight, not using. But, you know, somebody might not want to go on a methodology text; they might want to do it on a gradual reduction on their own.

So again, that takes away the personal choice of the person that the issue is happening to, if you like. So, um, you know, and boxes with things like you know—so it’s LGBT or bisexual; no, it’s just many of our sex with men—it’s not sexuality or anything like that. You know, sometimes getting people to put the, you know, what it is down. Um, so yeah, sometimes the wording and things, you know, blocks you away from it. Yeah, are you thinking, what do they mean by that? What are they looking for in that?

Alex Dunedin: Do you feel the sector or your work is adequately funded or resourced?

Judith Vickers: No. Uh, no, because it’s not really, no. I mean, I don’t know. Because getting, like, for instance that trauma training, yeah, there’s £75,000 up for grabs, but that’s got to be spread over five bids. And there were 40 people on that, just the one car, on the one webinar that we were doing about it. You know, we’re all chasing a slice of the pie that would be £10,000 to £15,000. And again, that £10,000 to £15,000 comes with three months of monitoring sort of things. So, every three months, you’re going to have to do the monitoring, but you’re only getting £10,000 to £15,000.

And so, yeah, I go into it, and like, sort of if you look at council funding or things like that, you know that it’s not always… they might want you to change the way that you’re doing things. So, we give out sleeping bags, but it might change.

Alex Dunedin: What role should broader society play in facilitating your work?

Judith Vickers: What role should… well, then everybody should have an element of sort of social conscience, if you like, or think more about things. So, for instance, like we’re looking for devices for people to redistribute devices. So, if society as a whole thought, “Right, I’ve now finished with this phone, yeah, I’m going to get a new phone,” so I’m not even going to think twice about that, I’m going to put that in a bag, I’m going to send that to the homeless child or someone thinking, “Oh, isn’t it right, I will contribute.” You know, imagine if everybody said, “Right, I’ll contribute 50p out of my wages a week, yeah, into a pot for the voluntary sector to be able to, you know, pop into sort of things.”

So, maybe, I don’t know, is that the sort of thing? If you’re looking at wider society, how… very open questions, yeah. How do I… why should society be more… sort of… but that goes down to the humanity of the whole, really, about things not being disposable all the time, and what… what… what one man’s rubbish is another man’s, you know, livelihood sort of thing, if you like.

So, I think society as a whole does have a good sort of element of giving to charity, but I think it should be more… more ingrained in us, really, from a younger age or volunteering or giving something back. I think it’s too much in society now; everybody expects something for nothing, yeah, whereas there should be that thing where, you know, there’s an element of giving back that is instilled in you from day one, sort of thing.

So, I don’t know… yes, it’s like that really. Maybe making more companies ethically mindful about getting rid of stock. Instead of, like, you know, sending a load of stuff that might just have a little bit of a flaw in it to a landfill because it’s not good for the shop, then, you know, companies thinking about that needs to go to charity or, you know, goods instead of going to landfills, looking at who they could go to and things like that. So, um, that would help.

Alex Dunedin: How am I, uh, Manchester’s finest, I think you called them? You know, lots of words get used: clients, users.How do you think they might best support you in delivering support?

Judith Vickers: I mean, they advocate for us, and we use two-year people that come back who’ve been through services and then come back as supportive volunteers and things like that. So, coming back and giving back… and when we had Danzig Street, we were able to do more supportive volunteer placements and things like that before Matt passed. You know, clients would like… they’ve been through and gone back, and they’d come back a couple of years later and help in the stores or help in the kitchen at breakfast and things like that.

So, and a lot of… quite good ambassadors, you know, because some people on the street, “Oh, he looks like I’ll like share me a rock on.” You know, so we’d have good word of mouth from our clients. But, um, sometimes I would like, um, the young person’s voice on the board. So I would like, you know, um, being on interview panels. That would be good if you actually have somebody who’s been through the service or is in the service.

Um, and they usually, if you ask them, you know, “Will you take part?” and things like that. So, being involved in service delivery, I mean, we have… we use suggestion boxes, but some of the suggestions that I used to put out by, “We’re not doing that,” yeah, I’m not even reading that one out.

You know, um, but yeah, I’ve been having the ones who use your service involved in the service delivery and development I think is important. You know, and asking what you want and what they want to do. It’s like when we’re doing the digital things that we’re like, “Pat, when you’ve done the basics, the boring stuff, what other programs do you want us to get?” and we’ll look at doing those.

Oh, yeah, we want, uh, video making things, 3D modeling. I was like, “Yeah, we can have it, but no guns being made, no guns, you know.” And so that voice is sort of good to have them. Yeah, and then I’ve got one lad who now, it equals doing the battle of the bands, you know, where basically two people slag each other off, “Your mother,” yeah, yeah, but he has “Deviant” on the front of his Audi and “Live Share” on the back, and he goes all around the country, you know, because he comes through Live. So he does that, but he does it wearing a lighter hoodie.

Alex Dunedin: Yeah, awesome. Um, and the last question is, what questions do you think are important in working towards better understanding?

Judith Vickers: Asking us… asking people to share their stories, and I… and asking people what they want and what would help them, and, you know, getting the vote… asking people really, um, and having that voice and taking into consideration that voice, not doing something. I think that, again, going back to that mass way. You know us, it wasn’t just me who said that system was not going to work. I was the one who actually stood up in front of all of them and told them right off.

But so, what was the point of a consultation on something if you’re going to do it anyway? So questions are asked: “This is the way that this is going to be a pathway. What do you think now?” So everybody puts in, “That’s not going to work,” but if the government or the local council have already decided to do it, yeah, and it’s a tokenistic consultation.

Yeah, and so no more tokenistic consultations. Basically, you know, looking at, you know, what people—I mean, I remember how busy they were when the, um, where the City Ground is. They spent somewhere like one and three-quarters million pounds or maybe a bit more than that on the beer that… on the B of the Bank. Remember the sculpture? Do you remember that with the spikes off it?

Yeah, requests have gone in for an extension to the eye hospital that was like one and a half million, so it was less than that the B of the Bank won it, got the money, not the eye hospital. Yet, and we all know the story about that, about the spikes falling off. But did they ask that basic people, did they want to be at the Bank? Statue, you know? Would they prefer the community center that the young people could have gone to? You know?

So having proper consultations with people that are affected by it, not tokenistic things. You know, I mean, going back up to the gateway in the north where you go… did you watch Mantopia? The Snow, you know, those women who bought their houses—30, 40 council houses, little small things—they’ve all gone now, they’ve lost them. Now, why did they not put new cladding or change their houses so it fitted in? So it… because it was only because they, um, it didn’t fit in with the other buildings, what the other buildings look like.

Well, why didn’t they make them fit in? Why did they have to move them? Yeah, you know what I mean? And move out those people. And nobody listens. You know, I mean, you know, everybody’s going, “Oh, it’s really sad.” But then people… they’ve got pets buried in the gardens that have been, you know, the pets have been there for 30 years.

Did they… how proud they were that they’d gone from renting to being able to buy their own house and then just to be tossed aside and sold off so easily? Yeah, so, yeah, not ‘doing at’ people, ‘doing with’ – not at.

Alex Dunedin: Yeah, uh, Judy Vickers, thank you very much. You know, I really appreciate it.