Camerados provides public living rooms for people to find company and connection, with no agenda, no judgement – and no attempts to ‘fix’ them. It’s a model that could have some valuable lessons for other sectors, including the drugs field.

One of the most popular parts of this year’s DDN conference was the ‘public living room’, a space for delegates to relax, chat and connect with each other. It was provided by Camerados, a social movement founded in 2015 by Maff Potts and which now has 250 of these spaces across five countries.

‘There was a real solidarity and camaraderie at that conference,’ says Potts. ‘One of the things that the drug and alcohol space does very well is involve people with lived experience, and if you have a room full of people who’ve been through a lot there’s inevitably a warmer atmosphere.’

The idea for Camerados came after two decades working in the homelessness sector, including as a project manager for Crisis and the Salvation Army’s national director of homelessness services. ‘It was 20 years in traditional institutional organisations, and it doesn’t get more traditional than the Salvation Army – massive warehouses of 150-bed hostels for men on the Clyde or in the East End’, he says.

Isolation kills
It was here that he became accustomed to his Blackberry regularly buzzing to inform him of another death. ‘Some of the projects were fantastic, but with others I couldn’t find out what was going on, so I’d check myself in as homeless to stay overnight. And of course when you chat to the lads in there you find out everything.’ This led him to investigate all of the deaths that had occurred over the previous year, and he found there was one common denominator – isolation. These were people who’d ‘cut themselves off from everyone’, he says, and he began to grow increasingly disillusioned with the officially sanctioned ways of responding.

‘The single biggest reason for homelessness has always been relationship breakdown, and yet all we ever talked about was housing and benefits. We never focused on what actually mattered. From my very early days when I used to volunteer in shelters, it was obvious that the biggest thing people wanted was companionship.’

One of the key tenets of Camerados is that it’s about a human connection – being there and listening – rather than setting out to ‘fix’ people, he stresses. ‘Institutional models are often predicated on a structure where the board requires a certain amount of data to make decisions. So everyone builds services based on that, and by the time it gets to the beneficiary you’re basically saying, “Can you please have your mental health breakdown between 9.30 and 4.30?” We end up dancing to the tune of the system, and I just got hugely disillusioned with that.’

He decided the answer was to ‘cut out organisations altogether, and go direct to people in their neighbourhoods’. It was also vital not to make it about homelessness, he says. ‘Because the labels were bullshit. These were people exactly like me, it was just that they were having a tough life. That’s why Camerados living rooms are popular in places like hospitals and university campuses. There might be homeless people in them, there might not. It’s just anyone having a rough day who needs a bit of company.’

No agendas
His time in the homelessness sector also taught him precisely how not to interact with people, he believes. ‘My staff would get in people’s faces, ask them deeply personal and invasive questions, and often this was their very first contact – they’d proceed to tell them what they needed to do to turn their life around. We need spaces where that’s not happening, because people feel invaded. Wherever they go they’re defined by their problem, given a label, and told what they need to do to. So it’s about having a space where people aren’t doing that – you can talk about anything, there’s no agenda.’

This can pay huge dividends, even if it’s not immediately obvious. ‘People open up, they relax, the shoulders go down – and eventually they talk in a much more open way about the things that really matter to them, so they are making progress. But if you set out to get an outcome, you close that off. We’d be having a chat about music or whatever, and then I’d turn the conversation around to their support plan, and you could see their expression – they thought we were having a connection, but no. And a lot of these people had way more life experience than me – it was embarrassing.’

Worldwide movement
This is one reason why he’s determined that Camerados never moves to an organisational model, he says. ‘Something happens when you grow over a certain size. You start adopting institutional behaviours.’ That’s not to say the movement isn’t growing fast, however. There are 250 living rooms across the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and even Sierra Leone, with more now planned for Kenya, Rwanda and Mexico following a successful Camerados side event at the recent UN General Assembly in New York. However, at its core Camerados remains ‘defiantly small’, with just five staff – most of whom are part-time – alongside associate members here and overseas. It works on an ‘open source’ model, where anyone who wants to set up their own living room can get in touch, have a chat over Zoom and then receive a box containing everything they need.

This year’s UK Recovery Walk hosted one, and people ‘really connected with it’, he says. ‘I think that’s because the language in some drug services can be quite jargonistic. If someone comes into drug or alcohol services, the chances are they’re at some point of crisis – otherwise they’d be quite happy just taking their drugs. They’re very anxious, very low in confidence, and they come into places that can be cold and clinical. That’s not all environments, of course, but if you think about the places you’re going to end up in times of crisis – police stations, council offices – they’re not covered in fairy lights and comfy seats like the living rooms.’

Things like opening times are also often designed to work for the service, rather than the service users, he says. ‘All of it is trying to set up a process to systemise the management of the problem and de-risk it. There’ll always be some new initiative, with a new acronym and a new outcome and all that. But the only thing complex enough to handle the complexity of a human being is another human being. There’s no process system that can fully understand the baggage you bring, which is often incredibly complex and hard to unpick. So many times I’d sit with someone thinking, where do you start? And where you start is by putting the kettle on. Connection has to be the answer, letting the person unravel it for themselves. This notion that you can somehow get a system to do it is kind of absurd, because sorting out one life is a lifetime’s work.’

That’s not to say that that substance services aren’t absolutely vital, he stresses. ‘We’re not the elixir for all ills. My wife works in mental health services – we need mental health services, we need drug services. This is alongside, not instead of. It’s the connection bit, the company bit, and a lot of drug workers probably don’t have time to do much of that.’

It was in a previous project that he’d come across what can sometimes be the intransigent attitude of some services, he points out. ‘Before we hit on the public living rooms, we had this other idea which wasn’t quite sustainable. We’d take a group of ten or 15 people having a very tough time – prison leavers, drug users, homeless people – and we’d start a micro-business in four weeks.’ The idea was to galvanise them and provide the things that underpin Camerados, he says – connection and purpose.

It’s ok to fail
‘In one we were working with people who were active drug users, and we started a business dressed as Christmas elves outside Debenhams where we’d wrap people’s Christmas presents for a couple of quid. One weekend we made £750, which is a lot of presents. People would be handing over their Prada and Gucci stuff to active crack users who’d wrap it for collection a couple of hours later, and obviously they thought this was hilarious – because in their normal life you know what would happen. So it was kind of wonderful. But someone from the local drug service said, “You’re putting lives at risk, because if this business fails these guys will go out and binge and you’ll have blood on your hands.” And I said, “If this business fails what we’ll do is piss ourselves laughing.”

‘So we normalised being a bit shit and failing,’ he says, ‘instead of what they were doing which was to catastrophise failure. When people relapse it’s like the end of the world, just like how I used to evict people because they’d missed a couple of rental payments.’

Keep it human
For anyone tempted to set up their own living room, the best model is ‘alongside, adjacent to’ services, where staff and service users can mix ‘as humans,’ he says. ‘I always say that everything should start with a pizza, because if you arrange a meeting you’ll get people talking like they’re in a meeting. If you order pizza, people are in a different space. You can have a call with Camerados where we’ll talk about the principles and everything else, and we’ll send you a box for free with everything wrapped and handwritten notes. All you’ve got to do is have a space and add some furniture. Just do it once for a couple of hours, and after that you might do it once a week, and so on. Fumble through it – don’t organise the humanity out.’

Ultimately the aim is just to be ‘a space in the neighbourhood where people can go when they’re having a rough time and have some company,’ he says. ‘I want it to grow to be a thing where people say, “Get yourself down to the public living room,” because there’ll be one somewhere. If you look at Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the strengths is that there could be ten meetings happening tonight and you could find one. You pass the cup around, you pay for the room, and you’re done. I just want there to be loads of these things around the world run by people in that community. And if four or five people turn up, great.’

It all ties in with one of Camerados’ six key principles, which is ‘it’s OK to be a bit crap’, he says. ‘It stops it becoming too system-y. People connect better and drop their guard – I think it really strikes a chord that sometimes we’re a bit shit.’ One principle that can seem counterintuitive, however, is ‘if you see someone struggling, ask them to help you,’ he says. ‘When I’ve been with someone and absolutely not known what to say – maybe they’ve told me they want to kill themselves – the only thing that’s ever worked is when I say, “I’m really sorry to hear that. Listen pal, can you do me a favour?” And I’ll find something I need. The person comes out of the gun barrel of their own problems, they feel trusted, they feel they’ve got value to add. A lot of services sit in front of people as if they have all the answers, so it’s actually quite nice for someone to hear “I need your help with something.”’

Don’t be alone
But it’s the principle of not fixing people that can be the trickiest for many people to understand, he acknowledges. ‘If there’s no specified outcome they might think, “What’s the point?”

But there is a point. As much as he enjoyed the DDN conference, there was one thing that proved unexpectedly difficult, he says. ‘It was the memorial where you wrote the name of someone who’d died. I wrote the name of a young guy from the early days of Camerados, who was absolutely wonderful. He had so few people in his life because they’d all died from drugs, including his parents. All he wanted to do was outlive his parents, and he didn’t. He was a lovely guy in his mid-thirties and he’d been in and out of prison and was living in a flat with almost no furniture, but he was endlessly charming and sweet and a fantastic artist – we’d get him to do lots of artwork for us. So his death was a huge blow.

‘His name was Rhys and when he died of an overdose I thought about jacking the whole thing in. I was a pallbearer at his funeral – I wasn’t close particularly, but he just had no one. I’d been to a lot of funerals like that, working in homelessness. I remember sitting in the crematorium thinking, “Well, we didn’t help”. And then someone handed out the order of service and there were these pictures of Rhys in the park playing frisbee, having pizza, down by the seaside having fish and chips. And all of them were with the people he’d met through Camerados, him having a laugh in the sunshine – really great pictures. And I thought, “This is the right thing.”

‘Because even if you don’t make it, and you never get out of that hole, while you’re in there you’ve got company. That’s the thing that none of us likes to talk about, that some people don’t make it out. Of course we want people to come through their crisis, but the ultimate fundamental is don’t be alone. And I felt we did that for him.’

camerados.org