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Radical Help

How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state

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Radical Help

By: Hilary Cottam
Narrated by: Hilary Cottam
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How should we live: how should we care for one another; grow our capabilities to work, to learn, to love and fully realise our potential? This exciting and ambitious book shows how we can re-design the welfare state for this century.

The welfare state was revolutionary: it lifted thousands out of poverty, provided decent homes, good education and security. But it is out of kilter now: an elaborate and expensive system of managing needs and risks. Today we face new challenges. Our resources have changed.

Hilary Cottam takes us through five 'Experiments' to show us a new design. We start on a Swindon housing estate where families who have spent years revolving within our current welfare systems are supported to design their own way out. We spend time with young people who are helped to make new connections - with radical results. We turn to the question of good health care and then to the world of work and see what happens when people are given different tools to make change. Then we see those over sixty design a new and affordable system of support.

At the heart of this way of working is human connection. Upending the current crisis of managing scarcity, we see instead that our capacities for the relationships that can make the changes are abundant.

We must work with individuals, families and communities to grow the core capabilities we all need to flourish. Radical Help describes the principles behind the approach, the design process that makes the work possible and the challenges of transition. It is bold - and above all, practical. It is not a book of dreams. It is about concrete new ways of organising that already have been developing across Britain. Radical Help creates a new vision and a radically different approach that can take care of us once more, from cradle to grave.

"Packed with moving vignettes... Cottam's ideas could help transform the way we all live (New Statesman)©2019 Hilary Cottam Politics & Government Social Policy Social Sciences
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Starts brilliantly like she was reading the writers on my soul. Then I thought, there's a thousands projects just like those. The conclusion is rubbish and there's something creepy about a rich educated voice, flogging yet another set of tools and rules, for poor people while barely mentioning poverty and inequality. Then right at the end gives everything away to Leadership, the antithesis of the initial sentiments. Nothing going to change - even if the tools and rules are a more participative and humanistic - while all the power and money is in the hands of a few people, who don't do the work and are overwhelmingly interested in maintaining the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. I'm just frustrated, as I love the sentiment and the humanity of the collaborative work described, as do almost every health and social care worker, who also know the right way to do things, but are as disenfranchised from their own institutions as the people they try to help. There's nothing radical about investing in people to live a good life.

Lovely Sentiments

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A truly inspiring vision of transformative change, tapping in to what is truly abundant in human nature - a desire to thrive, to have agency, to be embedded in a network of relationships. I would recommend this book to anyone, unreservedly.

Hats off to a courageous visionary

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Great to hear my frustrations with hope of welfare state is organised to fail put into such eloquent words

total inspiration

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The author presents an abundance of ideas and her documentary of the experiments she has run using these ideas is humbling. She has managed to achieve so much, to clarify our thinking and to prove without doubt that we can improve and change our systems of care and health.
It is a cliche to say that everyone should read it but I pray that everyone in governance does.
Very enjoyable, truly inspiring, easy to listen to, and beautifully read.

Brilliant and visionary.

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I'd recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how we can make our public services work better, and how we can relate to one another. Cottam emphasises relationships and about starting from a different perspective of scarcity and resource.

Cottam is a social designer, and this is not just a theoretical book about how things should or could work better, but the story of someone who has tried to do so. The problem is its just Cottam's viewpoint of why something did or did not work. It's a book written by the protagonist of the story. This makes it frustrating, it would be great to understand better other people's perspectives, and have an independent view.

However, such a more balanced less passionate view, would probably be a much less interesting listen.

Fascinating but leaves you asking questions

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