We love this powerful, distressing and inspiring talk from Hilary Cottam. Thanks for sharing Madeline (NDTi).
Here is just one message … ‘Care is an art, a craft, a relationship. It is about entanglement in the lives of others and in emotions that are not always comfortable. Care is not an activity that can happen by the clock… Care belongs in the world of kairos time (measured by flow and connection) as opposed to chronos time (the industrial time measured by minutes and deadlines). Care is not the same as cure – yet it so often seems we have confused these categories.This is why our care systems ‘think’ in terms of an activity that is costed, rationed and meted out in response to a specific need or life moment, as opposed to an ongoing human activity.’
30 mins and then a panel debate – grab a cuppa, listen and act! You can also download the lecture as a PDF.
Click here to listen: A Radical New Vision for Social Care
At the end Hilary talks about 5 aspects that we could all work on now to ‘Make it happen.’ Here is the first one:
1.The imagineers
It is those with experience of caring and being cared for who have the ideas, the stories, the imagination to help
us think again.This work is not about consultation or simply about ensuring a (critical) representation of lived experience. It is not about those with power deciding too late in the process to let others in. It is about shifting the frame, starting from the perspective of those who are knee high, or who at a particular moment in time need extra support, or who like Kelly have suffered from working in the current system and have ideas about alternatives. This is where we must start: with the invisible wiring of the system and the everyday stories that we shouldn’t try to flatten but rather hear on their own terms.This way of working takes time, something I will return to, but it is where we start.