ABOUT WELFARE CONDUITS BEING AVAILABLE, ADVERTISED, APPROACHABLE, ACTIVATING.
ABOUT WELFARE CONDUITS BEING AVAILABLE, ADVERTISED, APPROACHABLE, ACTIVATING.
To us, a Welfare Conduit is any formal or informal system that dispenses Welfare. Some fairly obvious examples are the Students Advisory Service (Uni Counselling), CUSU Welfare, JCR Welfare Officers, Tutors, Peer2Peer, LinkLine. Some less obvious examples are us and our list of Tolerant Socs, the College Parenting scheme, a Safer Space provider, or a properly caring friendship group looking out for one of its people who is down.
Now, for any particular such to work well, it is not enough for it to just be there.
1) It needs to be Available.
How might it not be? E.g. some things are down over the very extensive holidays, and yet many serious problems don't suddenly stop at term's end.
E.g. some things are effectively down through being fully booked - where demand outstrips supply.
E.g. some things are effectively down through their people being in training, or through their people having to take time off due to abuse.
E.g. of our own tolerant socs, some meet more like for one-offs than regularly, due to work pressure and/or disorganization and/or being more of a start of term/end of term/Mayweek type thing.
2) It needs to be Advertised.
How might it not be?
E.g. Disorganization, under-funding, or highly non-optimal use of what time-money-effort organizers do have.
E.g. Effectively not advertising. A heavy majority of people don't read "random" emails or flyers, or look much at billboards, and billboard adverts are often papered over or torn down. One can't just put lots of info in places that have info-overloading.
E.g. some College regulations prohibit or restrict advertising, and do so with little or no exception for welfare causes.
All in all, serious welfare officers should have a very good idea of minimum cost mass-production, advertising forms that are not info-overloading, efficient distribution and efficient procedures to bypass unhelpful College/other uni regulations. This applies in particular to the value of such as Linkline stickers in toilets. These are not info-overloaded places, and they are where many miserable people cry and even more have a reasonable amount of privacy.
3) It needs to feel Approachable.
How might it not be?
People differ and problems are myriad.
E.g. some people-problems may not be raised down some conduits because of age difference, or because university institutions are viewed as an an uncaring or complicit "Them".
But discussions with quite a number of people reveal some people-problems are not being raised with peers due to fears of genuine confidentiality - nodoubt some JCR reps are just "cool kids" with a decidedly unprofessional attitude when it comes e.g. to one of their likewise-popular close friends being accused of bullying. Others fear that all manner of things can come out when JCR reps or even Peer2Peer reps undergo heavy drinking in the presence of further "peers".
E.g. some people-problems need a face to talk to or a person to take responsibility. Then Linkline, say, is little use.
One can certainly construct cases in which all of the conduits are blocked by multiple such reasons. Same-college bullying and same-college relationship problems that have to be resolved are particularly likely to clog up the official set of conduits, not least because Colleges are so reluctant to the option of one of the parties involved in a such gone badly wrong changing College. E.g. many view relationship problems as a taboo to mention to older people or to people approximately equally connected to other parties involved; these things can easily render unapproachable the tutor, doctors and professional counsellors and the Peer2Peer. And if the stakes are as high as "I degrade if this doesn't end pretty much immediately", Linkline are unlikely to suffice, because they cannot strongly advise a college to do such as change a student's block of accommodation or accept that they are switching to Girton within a week.
This is some why e.g. using another College's tutor or Peer2Peer ought to be doable. The first is to the best of our knowledge usually Not Available, whereas the second is Available but usually not Advertised so it's less known about.
4) It helps a lot if it is Activiating.
We feel we need to define this one positively rather than by counter-examples.
A Welfare Conduit is Activating if it knows how to Advertise whichever of the other Conduits are appropriate for the problem in question. That includes ones that have official components for when prompt official action is likely necessary e.g. to avoid a degrade-or-worse. Being Activating makes a Welfare Conduit a suitable First Defense. We greatly encourage the various systems to know about each other, including Available and Approachable aspects and which problems correlate strongly with particular characteristics of these. E.g. whether the problem needs far more time than a crowded serivice can itself deal with. It's an important part of being Activating for the Conduit to understand that it and other Conduits may be partly to totally untrusted with the problem. One can still do well with partial info.
E.g. "I've a serious personal problem and I don't trust you with it" can still lead to the discussion: "would you trust any of these: The Student Advisory Service, Peer2Peer, Linkline, your College Parents".
E.g. the situation is that the person has been raped, and they cannot tell anyone about this in less than a couple of hours. This does not square well with the 5-minute end of term tutor's interview, does it. However, if the person has a close friend, it is much easier for them to tell their tutor: "A friend of mine has been raped and has great difficulty talking about it without inching towards it over several hours so they can't tell their tutor. Please tell me who to contact that knows all the helplines and procedures. And please postpone my last 2 supervisions till next term to give me the space to deal with this without having to pay a serious price academically for my time helping my friend." That comfortably fits within a 5-minute slot. This is an example of the Slaying Each Others' Dragons Principle, by which some things are vastly more easily done as favours by another rather than by oneself.
Law of Conduits. If a Conduit is Overbooked, it should be Approachable-Activating assessed for reasons why people will not get the same benefit from other existing conduits; that passing, should be amplified in attending person-hours, i.e. made more Available. If a Conduit is Underbooked, it should be Approachable-Activating assessed; the latter passing, it should be Advertising assessed, and superior optimization and/or time-effort-money should be placed into this.