Nell Hardy is an actor, writer and theatre facilitator with lived experience of homelessness and mental health hospitalisation. Her new company Response Ability Theatre works with trauma survivors and care providers to improve communicative confidence and general wellbeing in both groups, and led our discussion on overcoming the barriers to empathetic communication with people
Homelessness doesn’t start with not having somewhere to live: it starts the second you don’t feel safe in the place where you live. It doesn’t stop when you have a roof over your head: it stops when you feel your home is somewhere you can rely on physically and emotionally. It’s a social state,
When I hear the word risk, I’m often filled with feelings of dread. I haven’t wanted to deal with it, hoping that it doesn’t come up so I can focus on the things I feel positive about. Whilst I have prided myself on delivering a truly person-led approach with individuals, when risk has come up,
Why we need to talk more about how ends justify the means In discourse around public finances and the continued, rather impressive ability, of this current government to blame a previous (but three) Prime Minister’s administration for their austere state; something you often hear is that the ends justify the means. George Gideon Oliver Osborne
Our journey with the New System Alliance. ‘Well, it’s been a strange decade so far. Buzzwords… I’m a great believer that we can judge the times we live in by looking at the words we never heard before in the last decade, that have come to us in the first few years of this
Awkward Questions In my capacity as an autism commissioner across health and social care, I spoke to the mother of a 17 year old girl with autism, who was out of school, self-harming and suicidal. She was too anxious and depressed to leave the house; she barely spoke. Soon after starting senior school, she fell
