Partners4Change talk a lot about ‘Stories of Difference’ which help illustrate how innovators (staff) work with people in a Three ConversationsTM environment (we call it an innovation site). 

We’ve been working with Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council and wanted to share this particular story heard in a ‘Making it Happen’ meeting.  Jonathan from P4C spoke to the innovator Meg afterwards to go through the details.

Meg: The team received a contact about BC and when I had a look it was from a housing association and they were worried about ‘hoarding in the property’ . There’d been a number of attempts by different workers to contact him, but there was just no answer on the phone.

I tried to contact him by phone but then I also sent a text message. I sent a letter out and then I did a doorstep visit and I posted a note through his door just saying “please get in touch with us – I just want to make sure that you’re OK”.
And he did, actually, emailed me back a few days later.
And it turns out BC doesn’t really talk to anybody.
I’ve been a social worker for about 15 years and it was one of the worst properties that I’ve been in. There were probably around 400 milk cartoons in the house. He was an avid reader but there were piles of books from floor to ceiling in most of the rooms. His back door was inaccessible. You couldn’t get out because the pile of rubbish was from floor to ceiling. He also had, like, a broken cooker. There was no clean space to prepare food. There was glass all over his cooker and all over the kitchen and piles of medicine wrappers as well as broken TVs – I think there were about four or five TVs and some other clutter. There were an awful lot of plastic bags that he believed he couldn’t recycle and so he was just keeping hold of them.

BC had some mental health problems but he also had quite strong beliefs in Buddhism and recycling, helping others. So some of the things he couldn’t put into his recycle bins. He didn’t want to put them into general rubbish.

It became quite apparent when I was speaking to him that he struggled to socially interact with me. If he went to the local town to buy food he would access it via the canal routes so that it was very peaceful and he didn’t bump into other people, usually quite early in the morning or late at night. He would struggle to maintain eye contact with me and move his head away and at some points when I used to visit – he would say “that’s enough now, please can you go?”
I feel that he was just completely overwhelmed with the property that he didn’t know where to start himself and we spoke about this.

It took a number of weeks to build up a relationship with him to address how we were we going to move
forwards – he wasn’t on the right benefits, he could barely afford to buy food, he was eating cheesesandwiches, didn’t have a fridge or cooker. He was washing his clothes in the bath and he didn’t have a bed – but he was a very humble man and he didn’t want to accept any help either. He would say that there were people more deserving than him.
I have some experience of autism in the past and this was something that I queried. I convinced him to go and see his GP, which he did and he had a mental health assessment and he was placed on the waiting list to see the autism team. And the more we talked about autism, the more that he could relate with that.
What we did after that is I would go and see him each week and we would identify a task. It was very important for him to be involved and to do things for himself.

So it was like “Do you think this week you can clear this bit on your sofa?” and I would go the next week and he had started on his sofa. If it was something that couldn’t go into his recycle bins he would box that up for me and I would take it to the tip. They have different recycle areas at the tip for different items, so as long as it was being recycled, he was happy to part with it. At one point I went on holiday for two weeks and I said “when I come back, do you think you can have cleared the area around the door?” which was a huge area near the back door in the kitchen and when I came back off holiday he had completed that.
I contacted a local scrapman and asked if he would be interested in taking away the cooker and the
washer which he did – from inside the property. The guys were really great, they came in and they disconnected his washing machine. While they were doing this BC was at the side of the house. He was pacing. He had his head in his hands and he was quite visibly distressed by people being in his property and the social interaction. And I would say “do you want me to ask them to stop?” And he was like, “no”, but you could see that it was a really big thing for him to deal with.

We made connections to other organisations, housing association support. And I introduced those people to him. As the weeks go on the items in the house are being reduced and he’s engaging with other people.
One of the issues was the lack of food that he was eating and I spoke to him about a local food pantry,
which was where you pay, I think it’s £4.50 a week and you pick the items you want. At first, he was very reluctant to accept this. He wouldn’t accept a food parcel or anything like that. But when I explained about this food pantry and said that the food is probably surplus stock for manufacturers and if people don’t take it then it ends up in landfill, he was quite happy then to support the environment by going to the food pantry every week and getting his shopping from there – and he still does access the food pantry.

I then tried to get him to have a grant for a new fridge, a bed and an armchair but he would not accept a grant. He believed that there were people more deserving than he was, so I then said, “what about if I can find things that are free? And recycled, would you accept them?” And he agreed. So I went on recycled pages and sourced a bed for him, a bedside table, a fridge and an armchair so he had somewhere comfortable to sit.

About this time, the CCOs (Community Care Officers in Tameside MBC) also started working with him. They did actually manage to apply for benefits with him and which he was very reluctant to accept atthe beginning. They also supported him to clear through his books – which books he wanted to keep, and the other books the CCOs took to charity shops, which again he allowed them to do because it was for a good cause, helping charities. By this time the property is more or less clear, but there were a lot of repairs that needed doing. The toilet was leaking. And so we worked with the Housing Association and they did a biochemical clean of the property. And then they did some repairs. He’s now awaiting a new kitchen and a new bathroom.

He’s now accessed some grants so we can get some new carpets.
He’s joined a bird watching club, which he enjoys doing and he also accesses a community project which is like an allotment group. The CCOs are out and about in the community and they now say they see him out and about everywhere – he’s walking throughout Tameside.

Jonathan: I was wondering how you worked with him might be different in your opinion from a more traditional approach?

Meg: It would have been very easy to go into the property and put those services in place for a deep clean in one go. But he was very reluctant to engage with with any services or accept any help at all. I think the way that we worked together over a number of weeks and months was part of his – kind of, healing process – and him working through those belongings and the way that he wanted to dispose of them was part of that, to support his own mental health. And I think that if we had gone in and just cleared the property in the first place that by now, which is probably 12 months later, he would be back to square one – I don’t think we would have got very far.

Jonathan: Sounds like you’ve got to the real heart of the issues, whereas a more traditional response might just treat the symptoms. It sounds like a lot of time and resources were needed but do you think by working it that way you might have actually saved resources for others in the system, whether that’s in Tameside Social Services or beyond?

Meg: Yeah, I think so, because when you look at the time, it was like an hour a week or an hour a fortnight – it wasn’t that much of my time. if we if we were to go in and clear the property it would have been a lot more time consuming at the beginning to do that and then we would be doing that again later on – maybe six months later. There would have been more people involved and there would have been more cost to the authority. BC would have just been in a cycle – like a revolving door – of us coming in and requiring services. But now he’s now built his own social capital. He’s got his own social network. He’s supporting himself now.

Jonathan: For someone that couldn’t look you in the eye, that’s a pretty amazing result. I loved what you said about the bird watching as well. I wasn’t expecting you to say that.

Meg: He’s kind of embraced his life and he’s living his best life. And I’m just thinking, you know, that’s really good. That’s amazing.