15 - Conquering helplessness: ones and zeros
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
Matthew Pike is Director of the Scarman Trust, a national charity committed to helping citizens bring about change in their community, in the way that they want.
We have been asked to give our views on how money, private money in particular, could make people's lives better. An important and intriguing project!
Immediately, I imagine the various contributors to this book as a jostling throng of thinkers, writers and doers (in my case all three) thrown together in Club Class on a jet travelling at 35,000 feet, tasked with covering whole continents of social, economic and political considerations; with one eye on the clock.
Meanwhile, far below us, almost invisible under a canopy of clouds, are the people and communities that are the implicit subject of the various views and pronouncements here. These people are not going anywhere. Their perspective is utterly different from ours, trapped within a syndrome of poverty and powerlessness.
It is for this reason that I prefer to walk. Here, on the ground, the richness and the poverty of real people's lives shines in starker relief. Standing here, among the wreckage, it is obvious that while human lives elude simple nostrums, they can nevertheless elicit powerful truths that can arm us in figuring out how private money can help to make a difference.
Living in the wreckage
You could choose any one of millions of lives to reinforce this point. Over here is Shirley, who conducts her profession in the red light districts of South Birmingham:
“There have been times when I’ve had my little one in the front seat of my car when I go with a punter … it's those times I hate who I am and what I do…. But then I go home and open the kitchen cupboard, and all there is is a bottle of tomato ketchup…. I look at my little girl … and I just sob my heart out….”
Place any two lives like these together at random and you will find all kinds of echoes between them: poverty creates these quirks of solidarity.
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- Information
- The Right Use of Money , pp. 113 - 122Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2004