The power of saying ‘yes’ in a sea of sanctions

Put yourself in these shoes…

Deciding whether to heat your home or feed yourself. Coming home after a long day at work but still not having enough money to survive. Benefit letters from the DWP saying payments will be cut, appointments and more appointments with key workers and social workers and mental health workers. Spending hours and hours on helplines just to change an address or ask for an application form. People looking down on you because of how you live but they don’t see what’s inside of you and what you’re capable of. Eviction letters saying you need to be out in two months but the council will not help until your landlord sends the bailiffs round and you’re taken to court. Living in walls black with mould that make you cough through the night. Worrying about how your kids are viewed at school because they’re on free school meals or what clothes they will wear during the summer holidays. 

This is just one example of the many realities for people living in our communities, living on the same streets as us, shopping in the same supermarkets, and sending their kids to the same schools. These examples exist in a world defined by the state’s ideas of who is deserving and who isn’t. It is a world full of voices saying  ‘no’, ‘you can't do that.’, and full of people and services that want to put you into categories and boxes so that they can tick you off according to your problems. In this world life is a caseload of reports and charts, of thinking ahead only to the next month or week or even day, for as long as the money will stretch. Yes, there is joy, creativity and inspiration to be found in every life, and often lots of it, but the system represses joy, and does a scarily thorough job of it.

Current services and spaces that reinforce the victim and deficit narrative creates a retraumatising echo chamber and each space that they go into (that are supposed to ‘help’) continually and oppressively reinforces powerlessness and a lack of control over your own life, as if this is a necessary evil in order to respond to people’s basic needs. It can take the smallest act to break down this pattern and disrupt the cycle. It sometimes just takes one glimmer, one person saying ’yes, you're capable, of course you can do this’ to help them see what’s inside themselves. It’s not about grandiose community or self development programmes with complicated acronyms. It’s just about saying ‘yes’. 

What if we lived in a world where instead of ‘you can’t do that’ people were told ‘yes’. And what if, as a consequence, we were more able to say yes to ourselves?. What if we stopped treating each other as victims or problems to be managed or fixed, but instead as human beings with knowledge, creativity and ambitions? What if in doing so we could help people heal from the trauma inflicted upon them by poverty and the disadvantages shaped by systemic oppression.

This is what we do at the South Norwood Community Kitchen. Our space is somewhere where people can feel empowered to get involved with something, with anything, and be seen and recognised.It’s where people can build solidarity with others who are going through the same thing; and most importantly, to see their individual and collective potential. There is no fear of failure here; we’ve seen people try out new things that have flourished into bigger projects from community gardening to supporting others. The best thing about this culture is it’s contagious. Once you start, you realise quickly the power of saying ‘yes’, and how many powerful things happen as a result, both at the Kitchen and in our wider communities. 

We always use the metaphor of the garden or forest to describe the community kitchen. Yes, there is a need for a bit of water and sunshine but it is the plants themselves that decide how beautiful they are going to be. A garden also represents the collective whole, one thing cannot exist without the other and that’s why we like to shine a light on the interconnectedness of our community and the impact we can all make on each other’s lives when we work together. Growth never exists in a vacuum, it is always defined by what is around us and if we can recognise this and use it to our advantage then that is where real growth can happen. Gardens are also healing places. After a lot of pricked fingers, painful joints and cold hands, gardens like ours take us away from our pain and move us gently towards collective recovery. 

Socco Cheta will be a garden for all of us. It will be a space where we can support each other to flourish in whichever direction we desire. It will be a place to plant all the seeds that have emerged in our wonderful community and to water them and watch them grow. We have watched many times these seeds being planted inside of someone. Some of those seeds were born from despair, but through the love of our community and finally being part of something that does not dictate the parameters of our existence, they have grown and flourished.

If transformation like this can be as simple as saying ‘yes’, why do services continue to operate under the pretense that disabling people instead of building on their capacity and potential is necessary collateral for keeping people out of danger?

We are chomping at the bit to move into our new building Socco Cheta, but it’s not because of the brand spanking new kitchen space (although that IS exciting). It’s because of all the seedlings that we know will grow into huge trees in Socco’s fertile soil. What dreams and hopes will people bring and turn into realities? What ambitions? What energy? What fight back? As someone recently said in our Good life project, a good life is nothing without imagination.