My reflection of the week this week is about how freelancing has made me an advocate in so many incredible causes. Coming into freelancing, I brought specialist knowledge in certain areas \u2013 like local government (how I tried, and mostly failed, to be part of the revolution of local government through the national graduate development programme), charity infrastructure organisations (supporting new charitable organisations to start up, develop and grow) and hospices (talk to me about end of life care any day). What I hadn\u2019t appreciated is how many more specialist areas I\u2019d learn about through my work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While you might be supporting an event or a process for a new organisation, you can\u2019t help but learn about their cause in the process. In the last year alone I\u2019ve worked within employability, disability, hospice care, child development, community development and debt campaigning. Here\u2019s a just handful of things I\u2019ve learnt:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is significant work to be done improving the recruitment and retainment of disabled people in the workplace \u2013 with schemes like Disability Confident needing reform, more robust organisational policies, better awareness and understanding of rights and a cognitive shift to understanding that people are disabled by the barriers created by society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Child development is a fantastic example of the power of prevention and early intervention. As Desmond Tutu once said (roughly) \u2013 we have to stop just pulling people of the river, and go upstream and work out why they\u2019re falling in in the first place. So many organisations are doing amazing work, but children deserve significant systemic change across health, welfare, education and criminal justice to name just a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The amount of unsustainable debt in the UK is staggering \u2013 and more and more people are having to borrow to buy food, heat their homes and pay for essential bills. Aggressive and poorly regulated debt companies offering inappropriate solutions, alongside the irony that a lot of debt management options involve further costs, means locking people into a debt spiral that they cannot see a way out of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All three of these examples have created an advocate of me. All are social justice issues – all need a better understanding nationwide, all require putting those with lived experience at the core of developing solutions and all deserve substantially more investment to support long overdue change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photo by\u00a0Ian Schneider<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My reflection of the week this week is about how freelancing has made me an advocate in so many incredible causes. Coming into freelancing, I brought specialist knowledge in certain areas \u2013 like local government (how I tried, and mostly failed, to be part of the revolution of local government through the national…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37],"tags":[13,11,12,21,10],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal-development","tag-charity","tag-consultant","tag-freelance","tag-non-profit","tag-start-up-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t