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Barry, one of our
project workers reflects with us. I have been at T.H.O.M.A.S. for 12 months now and the whole project has, in this time, undergone dramatic changes in many ways. New areas of work, new staff, new ways of working, more clients to work with, more people to offer the ‘T.H.O.M.A.S.’ hand to. Yet change is unsettling and we tend as human beings to resist it, sometimes directly, often subconsciously. So while recognising that things must change we often quietly long for things to remain the same. Yet our project seems to embrace change while seeming to stay just as it is. For many of our clients the stability they find here is the first they have experienced for some time. For the clients who visit our Drop-In for a hot meal and company it might be the only dependable event in a life that can be anything but dependable. For the clients who embark upon our rehabilitation programme they have the opportunity to replace their chaotic past with a future of optimism. So how do we maintain this stability for those we help in an environment that is sometimes like sands shifting beneath our feet? The answer could be something to do with the fact that while the organisation and it’s staff are changing in many ways, the caring, supportive, optimistic, ethos of T.H.O.M.A.S. remains a constant, underpinning the daily work of each and every person involved with the organisation. This enables us to cope within a rapidly evolving project and still offer a settled and settling ‘feel’ to the work we do here. Maybe we can cope better with change if we have underlying beliefs and ideals that remain constant, that are there for us to ‘fall back on’ when the changes going on around us leave us unsure. After the ‘changes’ have got their feet under the table, and when, before we have actually realised that everything is functioning as it should, changes and all, we stand back and say to ourselves “what was all the fuss about”; it’s then that we know that the T.H.O.M.A.S. ethos is alive and well and guiding us, as ever, forwards. |
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