I am a Relational Worker

Some time ago I attended a convening on the value of relationships in the public domain. One of the speakers, Mel Smith, came up on the stage and said, for the first time publicly and with vulnerability, ‘I am a relationship-centred practitioner’. She was not stage nervous; the emotion was related to the exposure of the relational self to the hundred or so people in the room. It was as if the relational self, her way of helping others navigate through difficulty, needed to be hidden away from the public view.

There is a growing number of people, like Mel, employed by voluntary organisations and funded by public systems whose sole function is to help others through connecting with them. The system calls them ‘key workers’, ‘support workers’, ‘mentors’, ‘link workers’, ‘community workers’.

I call them relational workers.

I spent half a decade with relational workers, talking to them and to the people they helped in the United Kingdom and the United States. The work, published in five academic articles and summarised in The Relational Worker, helped me to gain greater insight into relational working and helped to frame new ways of thinking about it.

Who are these relational workers? They are people safe within their own skin. They are not over concerned about status and income. They know how to listen. They are available to the people they help. They accept people when people cannot accept themselves. They look beyond the disadvantage. They see the person for who they are, and who they can be. They don’t try to fix. They relate. Most of their ‘work’ comprises everyday conversations about life.

Core to relational work is creating a context through which people who face difficulty recover a sense of self, of being able and worthy. To get there, relational workers build relationships where people’s emotions open up, by getting some of the upsetting feelings out and making room for new ones such as mattering, mostly through everyday conversations that gently lead people into new ideas and possibilities; their cognition is disrupted by challenging past templates such as ‘everyone leaves me’ and beginning to build new ways of thinking about self and the world; and by recovering a sense of agency through constant exposure to opportunities where people can experience a sense of I can do.

Being in one good relationship - with the relational worker- often leads to a restructuring of people’s social networks. They search for akin connections, leaving behind hurtful ones.

I concluded that work feeling somehow dissatisfied. Despite its potential to recover people’s worth and agency, relational work lacks legitimacy. I wondered if its border position, sitting between civil society and the state, had anything to do with Mel and other helpers I met in my research not feeling comfortable saying, I am a Relational Worker.

So I approached Mel Smith later that day, and we began our conversation about relational workers, borders, and legitimacy.

Read here an outline of the problem we are trying to solve and the vision of the work.

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