Women Life Freedom

With this year’s International Women’s Day’s focus on inclusion, I want to highlight the ways that supporting women who are excluded from the benefits system is at the core of all I do – my work is heart-led & very much grounded in connection & support.

I’ve always been hugely uncomfortable about big hype about the work I do – self-promotion always makes me cringe & so I’ve dithered about making this my International Women’s Day blogpost because I hate the taint of ‘me, me look what I do’ but advocacy work for women is so close to my heart & it always makes me feel like I am doing what I’m meant to do.

You could say when it comes to my advocacy work, it has always operated on a ‘those who know know basis’. This was true even when I worked for local authorities – I never needed to advertise & it is certainly true now I am an independent advocate. Those who come to me tell their friends & those they connect with & from this more women find their way to me. I love the grassroots groundswell nature of this – it just sits well with my heart & I am honoured to share connection with each & every woman I support. On the other hand, not  telling others about what you do in truth creates a barrier & someone who might want & need support right now could miss out simply because they didn’t have that connection to tell them.

& so here I am, on International Women’s Day speaking about advocacy & inclusion & the work I do. In my experience I find that when it comes to women, supporting inclusion is a two-way street. If you dedicate your time to supporting others - to making inclusion your priority - it’s been my experience that it’s going to come back to you when you need it most.

I think growing up feeling like you never quite fit in leads to an instinctive sense of what is feels like to experience exclusion which stirs a natural desire to stand in solidarity with those who feel excluded - I know that this is what happened with me. Add to that a family story about the importance of justice & doing the right thing & I guess my trajectory as an advocate who cannot tolerate exclusion was kind of set.

The origins of the advocacy support I currently offer to women who are all too often excluded from the benefits system began with what became a very long & impassioned campaign to win DLA for a very lovely woman whose son suffers from Sickle Cell Disease. Sickle Cell Disease is an inherited blood disorder that can affect people from many countries across the world. It is a very serious illness & its impact on daily life is enormous but when it comes to the benefits system it can be very hard to get an award of DLA or PIP.

When we first met, I didn’t have such an in-depth knowledge about Sickle Cell Disease, but we had son’s the same age & this gave us a quick connection. As we explored the impact of the illness of her son, I knew that DLA simply must be awarded, & so we worked together to write a thorough & detailed form & submitted it – only for the application to be rejected. I just knew that this was clearly the wrong outcome & so we challenged the decision & we won an award at appeal. Only to have to immediately reapply for DLA as the award date ran out & to find the award was rejected again. & so began a 4-year campaign to ensure that DLA was awarded at the right rate – we would apply, be refused, challenge & win, over & over. In the end DLA was awarded at Higher Rate & it was both backdated for years & forward dated for another 3 years, That was an amazing moment for both of us – one that will stay with me forever. When it comes to stories on justice prevailing – that one sat deep within me that I fulfilled the Bruce narrative that ‘if at first you don’t succeed try & try again’.

In those 4 years however, I witnessed so many of the ways that women are judged excluded & humiliated by services & my stories around the need for justice & doing the right thing were triggered at an ever-deeper level.  

When it came to benefits, it was not just ignorance about the condition. Those who suffer from Sickle Cell Disease experience crises & so the reasons for refusal were generally based on the condition not affecting the claimant every day. Its was more insidious than that – along with the downplaying of need we experienced a persistent undertone & array of microaggressions– assumptions that the parent didn’t work, questions about how many other children the parent had, assumptions about the family’s immigration status - that were very uncomfortable for both of us to witness.

The more my caseload of women with children with Sickle Cell Disease expanded, the more I witnessed the same thing. These were children struggling with mobility; children whose learning was affected by silent stroke & in one case a child who died just 9 months after DLA was finally awarded & yet in each case, during the whole claim to appeal process, families had the strong sense that they were being perceived as ‘playing the system’, exaggerating their children’s needs for payment.

The more it happened the more I felt myself drawn into the struggle to win – driven by an impassioned desire not just to win but to get the right award. The more women I supported & the more trust I built the more I learned about so many of the other microaggressions that were part of daily life when trying to access services, particularly when it came to housing where I witnessed women being spoken to in the most patronising manner & not being told about entitlements they did have etc.

In those years I would do my best to be an ally – to keep pressing to ensure that claims were awarded; to expand my knowledge so I knew about all the entitlements I could & to accompany women, standing alongside them when they made claims for benefits or housing to challenge & block those patronising attitudes & micro aggressions.

Cut to my unscripted redundancy & my abiding feeling of being cast adrift & pushed aside by a system I had worked within for so long. Honestly one of the things that hurt me most in that experience was finding I no longer had a natural waiting list women I could support. Although I’d always had a huge client-base of women who needed support, when I left my job that list remained with the local authority – data protection meant I couldn’t even contact women before I left & tell them that I would be offering support as an independent advocate. I felt so excluded from work that meant so much to me & it broke my heart.

& yet the lovely woman who I’d helped with the DLA form for her son stepped in. The long period work we had done together to win that award for her son meant we’d always kept in touch & when I told her I’d been made redundant she knew how much advocacy meant to me & slowly but surely, she told her friends & connections & brought me women who needed help. Slowly but surely, I began to build back a base of women who needed my support & I began to feel valued as a woman, as an advocate once more.

That is the beauty of living in a mindset of inclusion. When we work to make sure others are included & supported & represented it’s a connection that is felt soul-deep & becomes a connection that is shared.

I know my lovely friend couldn’t bear to see me struggling & knew that my skills as an advocate shouldn’t just be cast aside & when she saw me feeling vulnerable & excluded, she found a way to make sure I felt included, to make sure my skillset in the world of advocacy found its place once more. For that I am eternally grateful.

So, to all the women that I have supported to access benefits, to fight for entitlement to housing to challenge the injustices of living with disrepair – thank you so much, you really don’t know how much it means to me to feel included as part of your struggle to get justice for your family.

& if you are a woman with a child with additional needs – whether sickle cell disease or any other condition where you are struggling to have their needs heard & accepted & you’ve been turned down or you just don’t even know how to apply for DLA or PIP – let’ s talk.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx