citizenship: why its important, what it is and how its achieved

Citizens, Wealth & Outcomes

What are we trying to do, why and how?

Dr Simon Duffy ￭ The Centre for Welfare Reform ￭ 3rd October 2013 ￭ Perth, WA ￭ Western Australia Association for Mental

Health (WAAMH)

Citizenship is the right goal

At the end of the nineteenth and the for most of the twentieth century it was common for people to think that people with intellectual disabilities or mental health problems were different - they were not citizens.

The powerful eugenic movement which spread across Europe, America and the British Empire led eventually to the murder of over 250,000 people with disabilities or mental health problems in Nazi Germany.

The process of de-humanisation had seven steps:

The factors that weakened people’s grasp on their shared humanity:

1. Mass morality

2. Rootlessness

3. State power

The factors that allowed people to destroy the victims:

1. Rightlessness

2. Poverty

3. Segregation

After World War II the focus has changed. Human rights, the demand for independence and the welfare state have helped change society.

But there is still a long way to go.

Big institutions have slowly closed across Europe. But often they have been replaced with other kinds of institutions.

If you have been doing things wrong for a long time it is important to think carefully and to be confident that you know what to do now.

What is wrong with institutions1.Devalued lives - self-expression and personal

development threaten institutional thinking

2.No freedom or control - it is very hard to be heard when you have no authority

3.Impoverishment - economic power is nullified

4.Sheltered, but homeless - a home is more than a roof - vital to control privacy and security

5.‘Care’ not support - ‘care’ already assumes the passivity and lower value of the person ‘in care’.

6.Disconnected- it is other citizens who report abuse and it is structures of power within institutions that make that harder

7.Loveless - the shift to focusing on abuse not crime is a symptom of institutional thinking

This shows spending in one part of England after the institutions were closed:

Often English de-instutitionalisation

was institutions without the park

There is not just one kind of institution

we bring the institution with us

Being a citizen is better than being ‘normal’

it brings us together as equals

but also as unique free individuals

Equal and different

1.Direction - My life has meaning and value.

2.Freedom - I can communicate and direct my life.

3.Money - I have money and control my own money.

4.Home - I control who I live with, my home and my privacy.

5.Help - I help and I can control who helps me.

6.Life - I am a valued member of my community.

7.Love - I have friends and family.

How citizenship works

Citizenship is also very practical. We can use the idea of citizenship to think about how to help someone.

Citizenship is possible for everyone

it just might take some extra thought

1. Purpose

Demanding of man that he assumes his condition and not till his neighbour's field, he [Rebbe Yaakov-Yitzhak, The Seer of Lublin] said: "There are many paths leading to perfection; it is given to each of us to choose our own, and by following it with great dedication, we can make it become our truth, our only truth."

Elie Wiesel

2. Freedom

I used to think that freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom needs to include all of the lives of all of the people. Freedom is the right to sow what you want. It's the right to make boots of shoes, it's the right to bake bread from the grain you've sown and to sell it or not to sell it as you choose. The same goes for a locksmith or steelworker or an artist - freedom is the right to live and work as you wish and not as you're ordered to. But these days there's no freedom for anyone - whether you write books, whether you sow grain or whether you make boots.

Vassily Grossman

3. Money

You could no more make a city out of paupers than out of slaves.

Aristotle

Self-interest is the most powerful engine for individual and social development, in other words, social progress, in other words social justice. It is when the most disadvantaged in society have the opportunity to improve their lives in their own self-interest that change will take place.

Noel Pearson

4. Home

Then the old Vainamoinen put this into words:'Strange food goes down the wrong wayeven in good lodging;in his land a man's better at home loftier.If only sweet God would grantthe kind creator allowme to come to my own landsthe lands where I used to live!Better in your own countryeven water off your solethan in a foreign countryhoney from a golden bowl.'

The Kalevala

5. Help

There are eight degrees of charity, one higher than the other. The highest degree, exceeded by none, is that of the person who assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or loan or by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping him find employment - in a word, by putting him where he can dispense with other people's aid. With reference to such aid, it is said, “You shall strengthen him, be he a stranger or a settler, he shall live with you” (Lev. 25:35), which means strengthen him in such manner that his falling into want is prevented.

Maimonides

6. Life

True love leads a man to fulfilment, not by drawing things to himself but by forcing him to transcend himself and to be something greater than himself. True spiritual love takes the isolated individual, exacts from him labour, sacrifice, and the gift of himself.

Thomas Merton

7. Love

Resources multiply in networks created by intentionally building relationships that cross boundaries & serve people's deepest purposes.

Seymour Sarason

Citizenship is the full realisation of our interdependence - the value we bring to each other in all our differences.

The lame rides a horsethe maimed drives the herdthe deaf is brave in battle.A man is betterblind than buried.A dead man is deft at nothing.

From Viking - Havamal

How

Our real wealth is the resource

How is by working together as citizens

citizenship is achieved through citizenship

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