This is Mat reporting for Listen up on the 13th of February. In the last few weeks, I’ve been asking reporters if they could try and submit a few more audio reports, as we haven’t had many recently. But I decided that if I’m asking them today to do that, I should submit an audio report of my own. And in doing so, I realized just how difficult it is to do it unscripted.

To actually just speak into a microphone, trained or untrained, it is a difficult thing to do, no doubt about it, so full respect to reporters. But I’m trying so hard this week with that one.

With my report I wanted to talk very briefly about how this project has evolved over the last few months. We’ve started to do podcasts with two reporters chatting in each one about recovery and what recovery is and how to deal with it and so on. And some really fascinating things have come up from that.

Also, we’ve been doing our own in house films and On Our Radar trained us to do and you know, we just styled it for a week. We just made film reports and then reporters have gone away, a couple of them have submitted pieces that are incredibly powerful. And, you know, we’re now working with the BBC and Comic Relief for their, you know, Red Nose Day appeal and a couple of reporters are submitting to that.

So the project is evolving and moving on. The strength of it has always been with the first hand reports and it seems to be carrying on that way. But I just wanted to, you know, a big shout out to all the reporters and all the reports and work you’ve sent in this week. It is Incredible what we’re doing here. It really is.

It’s not really been done before. We’re talking to people on the front line of homelessness. We’re sharing our experience and we are hoping to change the narrative around homelessness. We’re hoping that people will listen to us and see us as human beings, stop putting us in a box and stop seeing us as somehow different from you. We are human beings. We have been homeless. Some of us still are.

Thanks. This is map for the Listen Up project.