Emily Cretch works as a Research and Policy assistant at Centrepoint, a charity devoted to fighting youth homelessness in the UK.
Covid-19 has not been kind to society, and it certainly has not been kind to the homeless either: at Centrepoint, the charity worker Emily Cretch confides that their health team has registered a 276% increase of emergency food support actions over the pandemic.
As a Research and Policy assistant, Emily works on various projects and reports to present new recommendations to the government and improve policies. As part of her job description, she is involved in the various sections of what constitutes research work: interviewing young people and stakeholders, conducting surveys, literature reviews, writing up the reports and lastly, being in contact with the local authorities. A very extensive and concrete job, which has made Emily “a lot more passionate about trying to improve policies for young people,” whom she recurringly refers to as “our young people.”
Centrepoint was founded in 1969 in St Anne’s Church in Dean St, Soho, by the Reverend Ken Leech. Since then, it has been supporting 14,000 young people every year, aged 16 to 25, who find themselves homeless. While they offer services that range from housing, learning opportunities to health issues, Emily makes the distinction between field work – “front line work” as she puts it – and head office work, both of which she has been able to experience.
She first graduated as an English literature major, with a strong desire to go into social work and a certainty that she “didn’t necessarily want to do anything in particular” with her brand-new degree. Working in a supported housing role for a few years to get some experience, she felt herself leaning towards the policy side of charity work. She thus decided to pursue a master’s in Social and Public Policy at the University of York, despite having to spend “another 10 grand.” This degree enabled her to start her position in August of this year. Being still young, she however did not choose Centrepoint for its involvement with youth homelessness: it was the general field that interested her more than that specific age group. However, she revealed that being in close contact with people her age who had experienced and were still experiencing these hardships made her realize how “sheltered” she had been. “For somebody to be homeless, at the same time as being young, that’s just an added stress and an added difficulty, isn’t it?”
But why this calling? “Just being able to work for a company that is helping those who are the most vulnerable within our society was definitely an area that I wanted to focus on, rather than it being in a corporate, private sector.”
Emily is certainly not the only one with this drive to help those in need: a study from UK Civil Society Almanac 2020 revealed that more than 900,000 people were employed in charities in the UK, in a total of 166,000 voluntary organizations. And while almost a million people are employed in the sector, Bright Network’s 2019 study calculated that the average salary amongst charity worker was £27,000 a year. A wage that relies more on workers’ emotional involvement and motivation in helping the cause than representing an attractive monthly income.
After discussing her role in her new position, Emily admitted she left the “front line work” after 5 years not only to be able to impact on a political level, but also because “it was a lot to take on all of the time, […] a lot to switch off, when you’re in the midst of it.” What felt more like an admittance reveals itself to be quite common: even amongst her colleagues back when she was doing field work, this was far from an alien thought. As she so nicely puts it: “You go into that sort of job because you care, and […] because you do care, it has an impact on you as well.” Sometimes, caring comes at a high cost.
The emotional and mental cost of charity work has been more and more discussed along with the surge of mental health awareness. In 2019, Unite the Union came out with a survey underlying the mental health struggles of charity workers in the UK and Ireland: “The survey found that 80 per cent of respondents said that they had experienced workplace stress in the last 12 months, while 42 per cent of respondents believed their job was not good for their mental health.” Meanwhile, almost all of the respondents said that they “believed in the work they do.” A difficult position to be in, and an even harder one to leave.
Thankfully, Emily was able to find a solution in “a role that was still very much about the young people and improving their situation, but was a bit more separated from the front line work” An opportunity to find balance between still be involved and having a perceivable impact, whilst not compromising her mental health. A wise choice, as Emily plans to continue into her line of work for some more years to come.
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