TEXT FROM AUDIO

And as I was saying, when you’ve been out of work through homelessness, rough sleeping hostels, addiction, mental health problems, you’ve been off work for quite a while. And when you try to get back into work, there’s a fear. There’s a fear of failure and there’s a fear of being turned away.

You worry that you go to interviews and you’re going to get knocked back and it’s going to knock you back into your addiction or into your mental health problems or whatever. And also, if you do get the job, you fear and it is a real fear that you’re not capable of doing the job, that you’re going to fall down. You’re going to let them down and you’re going to let yourself down and you’re just not going to be able to do it.

There’s a real fear, and when you’ve been homeless and that kind of thing, you lose that perception of being on time for stuff and you lose the importance of what that means for working. And so it has to get re instilled in you and going through volunteering, that rebuilds you because they don’t put the pressure on you to to be on time, to be there at the start of it.

And they build that up slowly so that you become used to it again, it becomes part of your makeup. And then once you’ve got that, you can get to a point where you think, Yeah, actually I can do this now. I can actually work. I can actually support myself. I’m going to actually get back into life and actually be proud of myself to actually do something. But if you don’t get that help getting to that point the fear is so bad, it is so instilled in you just can’t go for those jobs. You cannot, you just can’t turn up.

You can turn up for an interview but you get to the place where you got the interview but you can’t cross the threshold because you’re so frightened of being turned away and rejected. Or if you get a job, you get to the factory, the shop, the office building or whatever it is, and you just can’t cross the threshold because of that fear, that pure fear of failure.

So if you use a volunteering system so that people can build their confidence back up, build their abilities to be on time for appointments, know the importance of not letting people down, all those things, then you’ve got a much better chance of going into a job and staying in that job. But also when you’re into that job, you still need support for a period of time. I reckon a year or 2 years.

 

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