25/12/2024
“It’s about helping people carry on”
A Christmas gift
As is tradition for us now, our Chair of Trustees Nick Hopkins has written about his reflections of the past year and the work of the organisation. He shares this with you below:
We tell each other stories, human beings. Ourselves and each other. About ourselves and each other.
Christmas has its own set of stories. The story of a journey and a birth. Ghost stories to send a shiver. Stories about family Christmases past. Stories in Christmas films, whether interwoven love stories or pursuing hostage takers in downtown LA.
Glasgow kind of fancies itself as a city of storytellers, with some justification. From Billy Connolly to Kevin Bridges, to the bloke in the pub sharing his life story, to the chats over the counter and on the bus, we (I think I can say that after 29 years) are constantly telling stories. Often loudly.
The last couple of weeks had me thinking about stories and whose we hear, and what they are for. A chunk of my work time is spent with spreadsheets. But a chunk is spent on the phone or in the flesh listening to and noting down people’s stories, and using them to tell another one about their collective experience.
Last week I was hearing from people getting home care trying out a new bit of tech. The stories of the people I was talking to aren’t generally heard. Only a bit of them by me in that half an hour in their home, and in our wider culture, local and national, hardly at all. The people with them are invisible.
I think the same is true of our Foodbank Centre users. Yes, Glasgow tells itself stories of hard times, its past poverty is something the city sort of celebrates and runs from at the same time. It’s certainly a story others tell of us, often for worse, not better.
But I’m not convinced we really hear the stories of people in poverty, right here, right now. The people coming to us don’t tell people they know. They don’t appear on TV or radio. Others are sometimes happy to create stories about them. Pushing their voices and their real stories forward would feel as counter cultural as the Christmas story of love and low birth would have felt in Imperial Rome.
Some of those stories will shock, but offer hope. I’ve spent time this year speaking to people who use the Money Matters advice service. Some of whom get to it through using our Foodbank Centres with us. Some were very clear. Without the help of that service, their story would have stopped, and they would not have been here to tell it. Our work, and that of our partners is about more than food and money. It is also about helping people carry on.
We tell stories to generate a connection, to share an understanding, to create a moment of shared emotion. To provoke action.
It’s above my pay grade to knit together a vision, a future story, of how we get to a society in which stories of poverty only reference the past. There will be spreadsheets as well stories involved in that effort.
But there will also need to be the stories of the people who come to us. And next year a bigger part of our work will be amplify those voices and stories, with permission of course, so that they connect with people, create a shared understanding, a moment of shared emotion. And provoke to action in a way that perhaps can help build a new story.
I’d like to wish you a wonderful Christmas, in which your old stories warm you, and a New Year in which the ones you write and share are what you hope they will be.
Our donations have been lower this Christmas than previous years and we could very much do with your help.
If you would like to help us continue our work and our story, please consider donating here
https://glasgowsw.foodbank.org.uk/give-help/
Nick Hopkins
Chair of Trustees
Glasgow South West Foodbank
