“20 years on — A Cold Winter’s Night”.
10.05.19 — As Centrepoint recognises its 50th year as a charity, this week started for me recalling my first experiences with Centrepoint 20 years ago for the communication team’s case study series. Although I have worked in the NHS for almost the past 20 years since then, you could say my whole journey as a Psychologist started at Centrepoint in 1998/1999 when I worked in the temporary Winter Night Shelter in the West End. I was a different person then; more naïve, less ideological perhaps but no less political (!) and with a strong desire to work with the most vulnerable people in our society and change their circumstances. It was interesting for me this week to spend some time reflecting about these experiences and how they were one of my first ‘frontline’ psychology experiences.
The Centrepoint Winter Night Shelter, I have since learnt, is a service consigned to history and not something that we are now commissioned to offer in London. However, its role at the end of the last century (!) was critical and I recalled many nights sitting with vulnerable young people, many of whom were intoxicated on drugs or alcohol, or traumatised significantly by their early childhood experiences and / or current situation. I recalled feeling helpless at the time, as a volunteer with limited skills and experience, and often the same age as the young people who were accessing the service, with a sense of powerlessness of “what could I actually do to help?” It was also often a timely reminder of that saying; ‘there but for the Grace of God go I’ given my own early experiences. But I also recalled this week those young people who allowed me to sit with them and listen to their stories, to try and validate their experiences and offer what safety and comfort I could, in the form of compassion, food and a makeshift warm bed for the night. When possible the paid Supported Housing Officers running the shelter would try and encourage those young people to engage further with Centrepoint and similar services to make changes to their situation, but this could be a difficult task and I recalled genuine admiration for their role and its challenges. I still wonder today what happened to some of those young people, and where they are now, as well as some of those dedicated staff.
After this start to the week looking back, I have continued my current Centrepoint journey this week looking forward, by meeting more current staff to talk about Psychologically Informed Environments (PIE). It is now clear to me that Centrepoint are more than just my previous experience of the winter shelter. The services that they offer to young people up and down the country are varied, from housing to psychotherapy to education, training and engagement in other activities and it is becoming clear that no ‘one size fits all’ can be adopted if PIE is going to work within this organisation. Reflecting on this, I think Centrepoint’s PIE will therefore be somewhat different from the rest of the homeless or third sector, because we aren’t going to have just one recipe across all our services. And as a Psychologist not a Baker, I am looking forward to getting out and about more in services in the coming weeks and talking to more staff and young people to learn more about the charity and what will be helpful from a psychological perspective. This is really important as an effective PIE is ‘co-produced’ with its users, and it is not about imposing anything on anyone. This is a journey we are making together — I may have some psychology ‘recipes’ but the diversity of Centrepoint’s ‘offer’ to YP in their different services across the country means that I definitely need to source local ‘ingredients’ to make it….
