Every Bee Needs a Hive to Thrive: Freya’s Story
Through our guest blog series, we’re proud to spotlight the impactful work and inspiring achievements of charities and organisations that share our mission to end homelessness across Greater Manchester.
Today’s blog comes from Freya Bibi, a Pathfinder Advocate, who has kindly shared her personal story and reflections on the support she received through the Pathfinder Project.
Pathfinder is a youth homelessness prevention service supporting 18–25 year olds across Greater Manchester who are at risk of homelessness. Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity is proud to have supported the project through our grant-making programmes, including the Winter Warmth Fund and Enhanced Pathway, which supports young single parents through difficult personal challenges.
Freya’s story offers a powerful insight into the difference services like Pathfinder can make in a young person’s life. We’re incredibly grateful to her for sharing it with us.
What's normally first to get cut is youth clubs, community projects and youth services, this shouldn't be allowed to continue. It makes a real difference and gives young people the hope and life skills to get out of difficult life situations. It helped me turn a corner and I believe a community-based organisation like Pathfinder will help prevent and get people back on track with their life. No need to progress into crisis, they catch you before you fall. I can't say that about many services I know, the criteria often makes it incredibly hard to access services for young people. The waitlist is so high, it often leaves many people in desperate situations.
When I was younger and had no support network, I felt let down by services, isolated and had this feeling of being left behind by everyone. Slowly and steadily, I am proud to say I have had many years to work on myself and to get to know myself. I had to start with changing my negative self-talk to positive self-talk. It was a turbulent journey but a much needed and rewarding pathway! Speak to yourself as you would speak to a friend. I believe that with the right support, at the right time and building quality connections and support networks it can transform people’s lives for the better. It is easy to get wrapped up into comparing yourself to others and people pleasing to be liked by everyone, we definitely need to show ourselves more compassion. It’s about showing up for yourself in the most wonderful and small ways consistently over time.
Speaking about quality support networks, I met the most wonderful set of people at Pathfinder. It felt like a very uplifting community that helped improve things for me. They helped in a practical way and in a way that I was emotionally supported every step of the way. At first, I didn't think I'd be eligible but after explaining my situation I found out I was. I'm forever grateful for them enabling me to get independence and space to grow. We need to invest in young people's futures.
Why Pathfinder?
It's a service that is flexible, accommodating to the young person and has the potential to save so many more people’s lives with the right investment! Money so they can help as many young people as they can! It focuses on strengths of the young person and develops this further in all areas, not just work. It’s unique, not many services invest in prevention. It's an extraordinary and life changing service. Many services often focus on your deficits through the medical model approach to health. Pathfinder focuses on a young person's needs holistically. I think the environment around you is so important, it can either impede growth or escalate your growth if you have a good supportive network.
Services need a way of interconnecting with other services and humanising the process of accessing help with dignity and respect to the individual. We all need people to believe in us and show us they care; we are all human after all.
When things feel impossible and tough there is help available out there. Even a friendly chat with a friend or therapist can slowly help you relax the walls you’ve built to protect yourself from the world. A fun way I find helps me get through the tough days is finding glimmers. You may ask what is a glimmer? A glimmer is small moments that can make us feel safety, feelings of connection, peace and joy in our day. For example, my glimmer is having a wonderful group of compassionate women that listen to me and understand me. Glimmers are not my invention by the way; it was coined by Deb Dana who is a licensed clinical social worker.
As an adopted Mancunian (from Rochdale), I feel as though Manchester has a powerful imagery of the working bee and what bees symbolise to me is a wonderful community working together with one another towards a common goal to make things better for everyone.
Every bee needs a hive to thrive.
This is something I made below for the mayor as a reminder of how powerful a community can be for a person facing difficulties in any given situation or context.
A safe home should be a fundamental human right. Community is crucial to survival and has been a way humans have survived for millennia. We are stronger when we cooperate with one another. A great example of that is at the Greater Manchester Mayor's Charity Gala where everyone helped raise over £30,000 for people at risk of homelessness and people who are experiencing homelessness. We even saw a very entertaining rap battle between the Mayor Andy Burnham and British radio and tv presenter Nihal Arthanayake!
Guest Blog submitted by Freya Bibi.
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