Helping the helpers: it’s time to support those who hold Britain's communities together | Maeve Shearlaw

The inspirational figures fighting for vulnerable people can pay a heavy price, the Guardian’s video team has learned

Queues at food banks, schools charging parents’ mobile phones, and plumbers fixing boilers for nothing so pensioners don’t freeze have become a routine part of life in the UK: the result of more than a decade of crippling austerity and a pandemic that hit the lowest paid the hardest.

On the Guardian’s video team, where I’m a producer, we’ve spent a year speaking to individuals who have gone far beyond the extra mile to support their communities, to fill the gaps where state support is lacking. We rightly celebrate these people as inspirational, but rarely do we question what burden this puts on them.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3qwF1aq