What If...

This brief is a continuation of Collection 100 which instructed us to identify a problem in Leeds that affects some part of the general public. The resolution needed to be presented in the public domain and recorded in a suitable format. Fact based evidence also needed to be included to prove this problem is actually genuine.

As this is group work, responsibilities and tasks needed to be shared out equally and appropriately, and discussions and agreements needed to be reached by all members. From mine and Hazel’s past group work experience of How To... we understood how essential this is to the development of the group.

In our first discussion we tried to find a problem that may link our already existing themes. Safety was discussed especially with changing seasons, as it is now turning to winter and the nights are drawing in, and so more safety precautions are needed. From this we decided to generalise into crime in general, graffiti was a suggested topic, which would visually be a great topic to explore. However, decisions could not be reached, so everyone went home to research newspapers and the internet for some existing problems in Leeds, possibly related to crime or some sort of taboo.

I looked on the Yorkshire Post website for any news material on graffiti and did not find anything, I generalised my search to other websites, and from the lack of current stories I realised this is not a major issue, and to explore other areas. I decided to narrow down my collection of stories, including the postal and bin strikes, to two, so that when it came to regrouping, we didn’t spend all the time trawling through lots of research.

One story that caught my attention was about a gang operating in the city centre who snatch purses in supermarkets, relating back to the brief this would be an appropriate topic, it is a problem that will affect the public, the fact that the story is in the paper shows it is a genuine problem.

Another story that caught my attention was a drugs raid on a night club in the city centre, this would not affect as many people as the previous issue would, but it would still affect some sector of the general public.

Sai and Will did manage to find some stories on graffiti, but they weren’t particularly major stories, and there were probably more pressing issues in Leeds. However, one story was quite interesting about someone named Moose, who did a reverse style of graffiti, instead of adding to the walls, he took away the grime and dirt off them, here is an example:

Another idea that was brought up by Nick was the bus strike in the festive period, which could provide us a job to inform of other ways of travelling around the city. I mentioned something I had read about certain areas of Leeds being no-go areas for people under the influence of alcohol to try and control the behaviour over the build up to and after Christmas.

After we shared all our research the subject homelessness was brought up, it wasn’t an idea that fell into place straight away as I think we as a group had our hearts set on the graffiti idea, however, a few more ideas were put forward on the subject of homelessness and as we as a group lacked knowledge on homelessness in Leeds, maybe the public lacked knowledge.

Meryem joined our group today as she had been away, so I gave her a brief overview of what the group had come up with, so she was as up to date as we were, instead of catching up and missing out on voicing her opinion.

We stuck with this idea, and decided to go away and research various areas of homelessness, Will and Hazel live with someone who volunteered at a homeless shelter, so they would interview him about the shelter, what it does, and homelessness in general, Will came up with the idea of collecting personal opinions of this subject matter, so Hazel said she would create an online survey to post to people to complete. Nick’s Mum had contact with a homeless shelter, so he would question her about that, I was going to look into the causes of homelessness, and also ask my Mum about the subject, as she works for Addaction that deals with drug and alcohol misuse, and often as a result of this lifestyle choice, the ‘clients’ are homeless, or of ‘no fixed address’. Sai too was also researching this.

Before I started investigating, I visited the Shelter website, this is a well-known charity for homelessness, the purpose of this was for self-education as I lacked knowledge on what classes an individual as homeless, what causes this and what charities like this and the government do to try and combat this.

When speaking to my Mum, she said some of the ‘clients’ are homeless because they are funding for their habit, so cannot afford rent etc. and some are homeless for whatever reason and end up on drugs. She also said that some are not technically classed as homeless as they ‘sofa-surf’ on friend’s sofas, so while they have no fixed address, they aren’t sleeping rough. This touched upon an issue we already faced, what exactly is homelessness, as there are different types, and the definition varies form country to country. For example the types of homelessness we have here are:
(taken from the Crisis website)
- Legally homeless: A household is legally homeless if either there is no accommodation that they are entitled to occupy or they have accommodation but it is not reasonable for them to continue to occupy this accommodation.
- Officially recognised as homeless: Those who are both legally homeless and have successfully applied to their local authority to be classified as such in the current year. A household can be legally homeless but not recognised by the state as being homeless because they have not applied to be classified as such.
- Statutory homeless: Households that have been found to be eligible for assistance, unintentionally homeless and falling within a priority need group and thus owed a main homelessness duty by a local housing authority.. In 2006-07, 73,360 households were accepted as statutory homeless in England. Local Authorities made 159,330 decisions on homelessness applications.
- Hidden homeless: This refers to homeless households, which may or may not have applied to local authorities for homeless status, but are not entitled to any accommodation. Crisis estimates that there are around 400,000 such 'hidden homeless' adults at any point in time.

We regrouped the following day to see what each other had found out, what was particularly interesting was the responses to the survey that was submitted on http://www.surveymonkey.com/, some of the questions were not worded correctly which lead to confusion, which meant the validity of the answers were not acceptable, and therefore I chose to ignore those answers. Sai and Nick analysed the answers in an attempt to formulate some statistics as part as our evidence.

71.4% of the respondents were 16-25, however some were in the 26-35, 36-45 and 56-65 category. The quantitative answers were much easier to analyse, and from this, the statistics could be generated, however, the qualitative answers were much more complex. A total of 28 participated, the majority being from Leeds, however there were responses from Scunthorpe, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Lincoln and Wisconsin, USA.

60.7% of the respondents felt that homelessness is an issue in their city of residence. Another question that was asked is, ‘How do you feel when you see a homeless person?’ I personally did not expect the answers that were given, the majority of people, did seem to have a lot of sympathy towards homeless people. 80.8% said that when they saw a homeless person they just walked on past them, and 11.5% said they would give them money. There was an opportunity on this question to give a qualitative answer, where someone even commented that they had housed a homeless person before.

Another interesting question was ‘Why do you think people are homeless?’ the vast majority assumed that the main cause was substance misuse and family/relationship breakdowns. Other answers included financial difficulties, a fairly obvious cause, mental health issues, disability, and job loss. After research on the Leeds City Council website, one of the most common causes of homelessness is parental eviction and domestic violence.

When asked, ‘Do you think there is enough help for the homeless in your city of residence?’, 69.6% thought no, there was not enough help. Again, there was an opportunity to make a comment on this, 10 people made a comment, around half of which were unsure of what help is actually available, one comment made was ‘…there needs to be initiatives to stop people becoming homeless, rather than to help them when they are.’ I think this comment is correct, but there still needs to be a lot of help for those who are homeless, as it is not something that can be easily prevented sometimes.

Nick had taken out a book from the library about the St. George’s Crypt, which is a charity that cares for homeless people in Leeds, and has done so for around 80 years. I went on to the website to find out more information and read an interview with a homeless man called Dougie, who has now passed away, he went to university and after finishing travelled the world, got married and had children, but sadly his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and that is where Dougie’s downward spiral started, as when his wife died he began drinking more and more, which resulted in losing his house, children and job. It wasn’t until he ended up in hospital in a coma that he realised he needed to stop drinking.

As a further point of research, I then decided it may be appropriate to contact St. George’s Crypt to ask a few questions as this may help us to identify a more specific issue. I rang the crypt up and spoke to a gentleman named Martin, (who I believe is in charge of fund raising) after introducing myself and explaining a little about the brief, I asked ‘How many people of no fixed residence use the facilities?’ To this Martin replied, that on average about 60 a day come along to the crypt, and roughly 15 turn up at night. This made me wonder where the rest of them stayed for the night. Another question I asked was, ‘Without the public donating money or volunteering, in what ways could they help out’, the reason behind this question was, not everyone has the time or money to help, so it might be good to raise public awareness of how they can help out. The reply to this was that people could donate old clothes and blankets etc. which is partially the response I expected; however I was not expecting the next part of the answer, in which Martin said, that they would welcome people with skills such as teachers who could help out.

Due to the first part of the brief being about photography, we felt that photography may be an interesting point to research, 2 of my Black and White film photographs were of a gutter with rubbish and leaves which was quite an interesting image, and we felt that this may be a suitable type of image to use. I thought that may be some photographers that have taken photos of homeless people; I found one book in the library but this was from less economically developed countries, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate. I think there was an absence of photos as some sites claimed that photographing homeless people was actually illegal, however some claimed it wasn’t. It was then that Hazel came up with an idea that maybe photographing someone acting as a homeless person may be unnecessary, and I guess it is also a little inappropriate, but then she suggested that we could use an image of where a homeless person may have sat. Looking back now I realise, this was a waste of time making these decisions as we had not yet identified a problem.

For the presentation on Friday, we had 3 A3 boards to create, Will and Meryem were in charge of our first board; the problem. Nick and Sai were focussing on condensing the group’s research to ensure only relevant research was featured on the board. Hazel and I worked on the intentions board. The boards needed to be created, and from mine and Hazel’s past experience of working in a group we decided that to create the boards, one person should sit at the computer, Hazel, and the others would sit around and we would all have an equal say. This is better than the entire group going away and all creating something completely different which would then need to be negotiated. Everyone had a say on all the boards, but there were 2 main people assigned to each board, who would talk about that particular board in the presentation.

Our intentions were to have the general public as the target audience, particularly older people who may have more time, and our objective was to inform and educate them as to how they can effectively help the homeless without donating, this would be done in the form of a campaign. The boards were finished in good time, which gave us time to have two rehearsals in the tutorial room and have some lunch. We were very confident and felt positive about our presentation, this was reflected in the feedback we got from our tutor, Amber and a few peers who thought we had presented a strong presentation and had carried out lots of research. Our tutor gave us a lot of positive feedback and this boosted the positive vibe of the group even more.

Before we had chance to start the presentation one of the tutors, Fred had left the group. Because of this, we decided to get his feedback on our ideas, afterall, the more feedback we have the better. There were a few comments made from other peers about our ideas after the presentation commenting on the design of our boards, this is something we took quite seriously, and tried to aim for a professional look.

Fred had pointed out that the issue we were dealing with was too big for such a small time-scale brief, and basically told us to go away and find more problems that stem from homelessness. The group had a small chat before we went home for the weekend, and we all tried to look into issues within homelessness, that we could use as a problem. Amber was really pleased with the amount of research we had carried out, and thought the presentation was a positive reflection of the group's work.

I went home that weekend and brainstormed a few ideas based on ideas discussed previously:

- How do homeless people get into the city?

- Bus, train?

- Do they know where to go?

- Where is safe?

- How can they keep warm?

- What can they do to help themselves?

- Sell the big issue?

- Volunteer?

- Stay in a homeless shelter?

- Look into going back into education?

- How can they stay alive, especially in Winter?

- Find accommodation?

- Sheltered area on the streets?

- Visit Soup Kitchens?

- Beg?

- Charity shops?

- Harm minimisation?

I decided after the chat with my Mum I would research into if there is a drug problem among the rough sleepers in Leeds. I found an article on the Leeds Accommodation Forum website about the Leeds Rough Sleepers team, this revealed some shocking statistics including that 95% of the new clients they have had recently have drug related issues. Even more shockingly a spokesperson revealed that in the past 8 weeks, there have been 4 drug related deaths among rough sleepers. Drug related deaths seemed a little too vague, so I did a little more investigation and found out that a common occurrence is for the substance dependent rough sleepers to inject crack cocaine, which is quite deadly, and 2 years ago this activity was quite a rare thing to happen among this group of individuals.

When we regrouped after the weekend, Meryem had looked into women and children being homeless, this was quite an interesting problem that I had not even thought about, Nick had looked at education, as homeless people will not have the same access to education that we do. Will had looked further into shelters, and Sai had looked at healthcare, which linked up to a copy of the Big Issue that Nick had brought in, which said how 50% of the Big Issue vendors use accident and emergency as their primary source of care. Sadly, Hazel had not done any research which didn't look too great in front of Fred, but we had enough research to work with.

We built on the idea of encouraging older people who may free time to volunteer at homeless shelters, especially if they have skills for example, teaching, as in the phone call with the St. George's Crypt it seemed that there was a lack of volunteers with transferrable skills. Other ideas were being thought up such as getting the public to donate blankets, and clothes etc, but then again, most charities ask people to donate things, we need to do something which hasn't been done before, because if the other campaigns were that successful they would not be constantly appealing for help.

We tried to come up with ideas for Meryem's idea about homeless children who are not in education, but realised it was quite a difficult topic to research.

We then began looking at my research and I brought a question up, "Why has there been 4 drug related deaths in 8 weeks?" which brought up the question of "Why are these users not getting help?", "Are they aware they an get help?", "Do they know where they can get help?". Ideas began to flow of ways of directing homeless people to medical centres where they can get help, but the issue of how to target a campaign at homeless people cropped up again, previously this idea had been dismissed rather quickly. Soon enough the idea was sounding quite strong, as we came up with the idea of creating signs that would give a distance to the nearest medical centre that homeless people can access.

The visual would be the trickiest part, as it needed to be simple, to the point, and have some sort of urban/street feel. I felt posters were totally pointless, as posters tend to be aimed at consumers, and the target audience is homeless people, so they would probably not take notice of a poster, thinking it is an advert for something they cannot afford. We then decided we could tie in our original idea of graffiti in, it seemed like the perfect solution, we would create a stencil and spray it to places, however referring back to the brief, we could not do anything illegal, so we decided we could spray it on to college's graffiti wall and Photoshop it on to places, and create a sticker version to be placed in specific areas.

We found a place called the NFA Health Centre which is on 68 York Street, and using Google Maps we worked out that it was a 26 minute walk from there to the underpass near Woodhouse Multi-storey Car Park, which is often frequented by individual's of no fixed address, so this would be an appropriate place to display the material.

Ideas were flowing at this stage, and we decided a stencil idea could be very appropriate to the style we were trying to achieve. I came up with an idea of creating a sign that would look like a road sign with the white board and a black arrow on it, with the text. Sai created a few rough ideas, and from there the group decided this is the start of something great!

We decided that the next stage is to create a stencil to 'tag' on to college's wall, which we can then Photoshop on to places around Leeds, a printed sticker of this would also be created to test product placement. Will volunteered to photograph these various places, these are some of the images he took:

I worked on top of Sai's idea and came up with...

To be continued...