An organisation that says 'yes'

Pleased to welcome a group of students from Lucerne and Zurich, Switzerland around Local Solutions. The Master students are in Liverpool for five days and are with us to see how charities are meeting the needs of people. The group are wonderful guests, polite, interested and seem very interested in our work.

Local Solutions tends to be an organisation that says ‘yes’ to such opportunities for a cross-cultural exchange. In the last two years we have welcomed groups from the USA, Japan, Belgium, Malawi and now Switzerland. The Swiss visit creates some serious reflection; their country is, by our standards, pretty rich, and scores beats the UK in all the measures of wealth, standards of living and has seemingly very low unemployment and social deprivation.

As we tour around our programmes to support young homeless people and services for those affected by domestic abuse, the questions flow both ways. The students inform us that they have similar social issues such as homelessness and degrees of state intervention and welfare to alleviate those who are struggling, but it is evident that those requiring help form a very small minority of the general population. It is difficult to put into a few words why we seem to face so many issues and the words ‘inter-generational’ keep coming to mind. So we go on, trying to break those cycles.