It’s always very sad when you hear about people being made redundant. Lives destroyed in an instant, good people abandoned to their fate, no thought given to the victims. But I’m not talking about a company sacking paid employees: I’m talking about a charity, arguably the most important charity in the land, getting rid of volunteers. Step forward Samaritans.
I can think of few things – in fact, no things – worse than someone taking their own life. The torture they must have been going through, the agonies of those left behind. If ever there was a case for the state to provide support for people desperate enough to commit suicide, this was it, but because we, The Great British Public, deem potential suicide not worthy of public expenditure, we rely on charity, just like those in peril on the sea, those who need to be airlifted to hospital and those who need a blood transfusion. There’s always charity. But what happens when there isn’t?
Samaritans say they are in financial bother. Donations are flat-lining, costs are up and they need to streamline their services. Over half of their UK branches are being closed to be replaced by bigger, centralised call centre operations. Volunteers will need to travel further to branches to answer calls from the desperate, many simply can’t do it. If you are a volunteer and complain, you’re likely to get sacked.
You’re what? Likely to get sacked? How can you sack a volunteer? Well, Samaritans have. Opposed to the branch closures and the effects they will have both on volunteers and those at risk of suicide? Then you must be bullied into silence, a worrying trend in charities, with which I have become worryingly familiar during the best part of a decade working and volunteering in The Third Sector. The tone of what is going on that says it all for me.
The Guardian phrases it like this: ‘Samaritans insists it deeply values its volunteers. While it accepts the changes will be hard for some, it says its ultimate duty is to callers.’ I know I tend to overthink matters, but am I overthinking now? I read an element of ‘fuck you‘ about it. ‘The changes will be hard for some” is a bland, generic acknowledgement of the issues faced by volunteers, but ultimately your views don’t count. The CEO, salary £146,000 per annum, waves their views aside. ‘ (Don’t) think about it through the lens of saving branches, because strategic location is out of your control.’ Who are you anyway? Just a volunteer, that’s all. And I know the feeling.
Even local branches of charities are heading down the road of business-speak. The last one I worked for, the dysfunctional brain-injury charity Headway, a heady combination of nepotism and cronyism, once had a manager but now has a CEO. So do many of the Trussell Trust local branches, including the one I volunteer(ed?) for here in the mythical town of Melchester. The volunteers, always loved and valued of course, stay mere volunteers and do as they are told. If they don’t, they may end up like the sacked volunteers at the Samaritans.
My feeling is that when lives depend solely on the kindness and generosity of people who do their jobs, not for £146,000 per annum, but for the love of saving lives, or simply making the lives if not better, than less miserable, then it doesn’t take much to snap that frayed cord altogether. And then what? Rely on goodwill but then treat good people like shit and, as a result, people die?
We’re the sticking plaster society. Everyone from former armed services personnel to the suicidal are dependent, sometimes solely, upon charity. If that deep well of compassion among the public runs dry, then what?
Most, if not all, of us have been touched by suicide. Since Samaritans was launched in the UK in 1953, they have taken over 134 million calls. They take around 3.3 million calls a year, which equates to one call ever ten seconds. One in four calls are about suicide. (I have no idea what the other three-quarters are about, but I am thinking some sort of crisis must be involved.) These are not minor, inconsequential numbers. And if less calls are answered, well, you can guess the rest.
If employees and volunteers are not valued in The Third Sector, and my experience is that often they aren’t, then people will live even more miserable lives or even die. Treating volunteers like shit, to the point of sacking them, doesn’t strike me as the best way to manage them but when the corporate world meets a sector where people work not for money, but for love, then something has to give. And here it does.
I don’t know if I have done my bit for The Third Sector, but I believe I’ve done more than a bit and I recognise what’s happening at Samaritans. A society that doesn’t care about the desperate and suicidal: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
