The Productive Pessimist

  In the past two days, two UK non-profits - Access Community Trust in East Anglia, and Well Women Wakefield, based in Yorkshire, have collapsed.  Access Community Trust had been in existence for 50 years.  Well Women Wakefield, for forty. Across the UK, and globally, non-profits are struggling. Many are very close to failing.  That means shut doors, withdrawn support for those basically abandoned by the UK government, and facing insurmountable barriers across every single path to even the smallest success, lost jobs, and unpaid wages. It means questions, suspicions, accusations - not just against these organisations and their Trustees, but against their service users. The most vulnerable in society. Accusations that, maybe, they "didn't really need" the help they were getting.  That maybe they were "scroungers", "skivers".  People who, somehow, were taking things they weren't "entitled" to. The slurs start, even if only in peoples' m...

  TW: Discussion of systemic transphobia, Discussion of racism "How can a trans woman be CEO of an endometriosis charity?!"  Well, the head coach of the England Women's Rugby team is a male-identified, cisgender (assigned male at birth) man. The CEO of the RNIB isn't blind. CEOs of anti-poverty charities are certainly well-remunerated enough to not actually be in poverty. Most have never  experienced hardship, having danced from Executive post to Executive post, before eventually landing as a CEO. The upside of being a pessimist is you spend so long looking at problems that you gain an intuitive awareness that, very often, the thing being presented as "the problem" isn't, in fact, the real  issue that needs a solution. In endometriosis , the (very real, for those who suffer from the condition) issues of medical fact would be fairly straightforward to address. The problem  is medical disinterest, and, very particularly, the attitude of the medical profess...