by Alice Tucker, Third Sector Human Rights and Equalities Development Officer (East region) 

Earlier this month, I embarked on the 6-hour journey from my parent’s home in Cambridgeshire to Edinburgh to begin my role as a Human Rights and Equalities Development Officer with EVOC.

My move-in day marked only the second time I had been to Edinburgh, with the first being a month before to view flats. To the outside observer, this may have seemed like a radical decision. I was moving to a new country, hundreds of miles from my friends and family with very little knowledge of the city that was about to become my home. But, when I saw EVOC’s advertisement for the Development Officer role, it was too good to let fear get in the way. EVOC were looking for a new member of staff to support a project entitled THRE (Third Sector Human Rights and Equalities) that was about to be launched in partnership with two other Third Sector Interfaces across Scotland – the project’s goal being to support the third sector in putting human rights and equalities at the heart of what they do. For me, this sounded perfect.

I recently graduated from a Master’s degree in human rights and was looking for an opportunity to put this knowledge into practice. Being able to do so within the context of the third sector was ideal, as I have been involved with charities, volunteering and fundraising for the past 4 years in both paid and voluntary capacities. So, this role felt like the perfect fit for me…even if it was 300 miles away! 

Familiarising myself with how human rights are being tackled in Scotland was a reassuring experience. Whilst there have been prominent challenges to human rights in the UK in recent times, it quickly became clear to me that Scotland genuinely cares about human rights and equalities. From the Scottish parliament’s unanimous vote to incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to the various training and events on equalities being hosted within the sector, human rights are being made a priority at all levels. This was a very welcome discovery, but I knew that this doesn’t mean things are perfect in Scotland, or anywhere for that matter. Rather, it was now my job to support the third sector to improve their own work on human rights and equalities. This will range from delivering training on what human rights and equalities mean, to creating resources and checklists highlighting what can be done, and what is already being done, by the sector.

So now, after fitting my life into my parent’s 7-seater and journeying with them up almost the entire length of the A1, it’s time for the work to begin! 

Find out more about THRE here.

Look out for more details and opportunities in EVOC’s e-newsletters and social media. 

 by Olga Wojciechowska (EVOC Development Worker)

A little over a month ago the world stopped breathing… hoping that what they were hearing and seeing wasn’t real.

Poland (where I live) began welcoming people from Ukraine almost as soon as the war started.

My friends and family were rushing to help people at the border, taking complete strangers into their homes. Within a day, my Facebook feed was filled with friends asking for clothes, shoes, and food – any supplies that anyone could spare to support their new guests. I remember being on the phone with my friend and her telling me that she had taken in a mother and her family.

I wanted to do something too.

Enter EVOC.

I was asked if I would like to support Scottish efforts to prepare for and support Ukrainian refugees and welcomed the opportunity with open arms. 

I got in touch with the Warsaw Hub and was invited by Agata, the Co-ordinator there, to visit the 100 women and children they were accommodating. On the day of my visit there were 40 to 50 people expectantly waiting to hear about preparations, information, and opportunities awaiting them in Scotland. It was an emotional meeting. The reality kicked in that this could happen to any one of us, at any time. Most of them had less than an hour to pack their belongings and leave. Some had already heard that their homes had been flattened in the bombings. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the stress that they’ve gone through. It was completely different to hearing, reading, and seeing it online or on the news.

At that point, 400,000 Ukrainian people had fled to Warsaw, an increase of 23%. I started to hear and see Ukrainians everywhere. Going about their lives, on buses, in restaurants, walking on the streets. I still can’t believe it’s happening and there is a big knot in my stomach because, as I’m sure many of you do, I feel helpless.

I am grateful that I can help through the work I’m doing for EVOC.

I am proud of the Polish people, my family, and friends for helping the people where they can.

I am moved by the effort that Scottish organisations are putting in to prepare – everyone is hands on and it’s amazing.

 by Maria Arnold (Senior Development Officer – Adult Health and Wellbeing). 

How to best spend public money is a topic fraught with tension, and for good reason. Too often the processes used to decide how to use precious funds seem so bureaucratic that they feel like they are missing the point. The various qualities of a written submission seem to become more important than… whether or not it’s the best thing to support the communities in question. Small organisations often lose out, and high level commitments to tackling health inequalities often fall short. It’s all done in the pursuit of transparency and accountability but many people in the voluntary sector have for a long time (loudly) wondered if we can’t find a better way. These discussions have certainly been a consistent part of my 6 years at EVOC.

So now we have a really exciting opportunity to put our (well, actually Scottish Government’s) money where our mouth is. £1.255 million to spend on community mental health and wellbeing in Edinburgh. An emphasis on supporting those communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, and those experiencing multiple marginalisation. A focus on upstream initiatives – early intervention and prevention. A recognition from Scottish Government that people with lived experience need to be at the centre of the process and that there is a role for community commissioning. Definitely exciting.

But it’s also pretty nerve wracking too. The hardest thing is that the timescales are very tight and not ideal to have this kind of conversation in the way we’d like. We’re going to try our best but I’m worried we won’t be able to be as inclusive as we could be with more time, and I’d appreciate any support with this. It’s also really hard to prioritise early intervention and prevention when we are so painfully aware of so much need at all levels, and there is so much crisis to respond to. But we all know the strength of evidence in terms of early intervention and prevention being the way to address health inequalities.

It always feels much safer to continue with a known (even if known-to-be-flawed) system, rather than take the risk to try to change it. So I’m really putting a big plea out to all our partners to have a leap of faith, jump in, and see how much we can improve things this time around. Let’s see how far we can go to replacing competition with collaboration, and devolving decision making to communities. I doubt we’ll achieve the perfect system but I do think we can make progress, and keep building on it each chance we get.

Some things are set by Scottish Government, but there is a lot left to decide locally.

Here’s the full briefing document (Tue 2 Nov)

Partnership Plan (Mon 15 Nov)

Evidence appendix

There are 4 meetings* set up in the second half of November, please register and contribute if you can:

• Tue 16 Nov, 9.30-11.30am (MS Teams)
• Wed 17 Nov, 1.30-3.30pm (MS Teams)
• Tue 23 Nov, 1.30-3.30pm (Zoom)
• Thu 25 Nov, 11am-1pm (Zoom)

Please get in touch if we can support you to contribute to these in any way, find different ways to get involved, or support people with lived experience to contribute: [email protected] 

These events are just the first step in the development process, so make sure that you sign up to our e-newsletters and keep and watch out website news page for the latest updates and further opportunities. 

^{*Please note there is 1 event with 4 different dates – choose the ticket option with the date and time of your choice.} 

by Stefan Milenkovic (Senior Development Officer, Older People’s Health and Wellbeing at EVOC). As we publish a new report that explores the The Future of Older People’s Day Care Services in Edinburgh, Stef reflects on his experiences in the sector and how he hopes this report can inform the future. 

On the 18^th October 2021, I will have been working for EVOC to support older people’s service providers for eight years. I was initially recruited to deliver the Local Opportunities for Older People (LOOPs) Programme. During that time, I have come to know organisations and their teams well and have had the opportunity to explore a number of different ideas. Some successful, some less so. All the way though, this has been a learning experience and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Though I will say – when I started my beard was not white!

Day Care Services within the city offer support to some of the city’s most vulnerable people so, when I was asked to try to find a way to help restart the support after the lockdown, I did my best to pull out all the stops. That has included work with Edinburgh Health and Social care Partnership, directly with Day Care organisations and the Care Inspectorate to try to make sure that any return was as quick but also as safe as possible.

The report that we have provided is based upon the lived experience of 200 people who attend our Day Care Services: the experiences they have shared show that their concerns when they go along to ‘the club’ are quite a long way from my own, I frequently find myself concerned about ‘increasing the use of preventative activities’, ‘building resilience’ and ‘reducing the progression of illness’. Their concerns are about seeing pals on the one or two occasions that they are able to get out of the house.

People really enjoy their time at the club and the relationships that they are able to build both with pals at the club and with staff are invaluable to the members who might otherwise be unable to get out and about and to their friends, relatives and carers who rely on the services. 97% of people who responded said that they wanted to get back to building-based services.

The report also looks at some of the longer standing issues which are now being addressed across the city:

• How do we work better together to strengthen local communities?
• How can we improve commissioning and procurement to reduce competition and improve services?
• How can we ensure that the assets we all bring to the table are put to best use?
• How can we make sure that an investment into a local community is retained by that community in the form of local community wealth, local jobs and local intelligence?

EVOC has been working closely with Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership to explore many of these questions through our Edinburgh Wellbeing Pact programme. If you would like to be involved in that work please register for our event on 28^th October 2021

Looking forward we know that providers are ambitious for the future of the support they can offer to their members and the support they can offer in their local communities. The next few years should be exciting as we move toward the development of a National Care Service. If you are interested in the development of this work – we will be hosting a consultation event on the 27^th October 2021 – please come along and make your views known. Register here.

For those of you who are not yet a member of our Older People’s Service Providers’ Forum, you can find further info here and I would be delighted to hear from you: [email protected]