Category Stories

Welcoming workplaces for working-class people

tanya
A blog by Tanya Hawkes. I’m working class. I was raised on a council estate by a foundry worker and an unpaid carer. I spent my teenage years surviving in the benefits system and for the decade after I left school worked in factories, cleaning jobs and the mental health services. At age thirty I started work in the environmental sector as a fundraiser. For the next twenty I worked in NGOs and social movements and this experience has shown me the difficulties of being working-class in middle class dominated workplaces. But more importantly, it’s shown me that our movements have a great deal to learn from working-class people.

Experience-based policy writing

(HMM) Flower(s) in Black & White #5
At People Support Co-op we’ve been working with several organisations to introduce a radical approach to policy writing, as developed by our associate member Kiri Langmead. We call this the experience-based policy writing process because it involves identifying positive and negative past experiences of group members to explore how to create a policy that works for everyone and avoids replicating patterns of harm.