All The Way Home
Rock Trust is Scotland’s youth-specific homelessness charity. Their aim is to end youth homelessness in Scotland by ensuring that every young person has access to expert youth specific services to assist them to avoid, survive and move on from homelessness. They advise, educate and support young people to enable them to build the personal skills and resources required to make a positive and healthy transition to adulthood. They also work to ensure that the public, policy makers, commissioners and practitioners understand the issues, make decisions and take action which will end youth homelessness. Find out more here.
Celebrating 30 years of Rock Trust, Scotland’s only charity committed to tackling youth homelessness, All the Way Home is an anthology of writing by both young people and established writers, including Kirstin Innes. Across poetry, fiction and personal accounts, the idea of ‘home’ is explored from a variety of perspectives: a thirteen year-old girl comes to terms with her unplanned pregnancy; a social worker takes a young orphan in search of his relatives; a group of immigrants from all across the world meet at a weekly Creative Writing class in Glasgow to discuss haiku. Together, this astonishing collection brings to life both the visible and invisible realities of home and homelessness, of family and belonging.
50% of all profits go directly to Rock Trust.
Review
This is a great wee book full of thought provoking stories, poems and memoirs. It really does tries to show how varied people’s experiences with homelessness are and how beneficial Rock Trust is to the community. As Val McDermid states in the opening introduction ‘this is an anniversary we should not have to celebrate, because it is an admission of failure’ and that is very true. We do live in a wealthy nation and have the resources, or the potential resources to solve this problem. Yes, as we see from the contributors B&Bs and hotels are not the main solutions, but during 2020 and the pandemic we did manage to get most people off the streets at least. This shows we have the potential and the opportunity to do more. Imagine being one of these people who were placed in a hotel during covid restrictions and then being back on the street. That must be devastating - physically and mentally. It is charities like Rock Trust that help elevate this for our abandoned young people.
This anthology reads as a who’s who of Scottish modern literature - Val McDermid, Jenni Fagan, Kirsten Innes, Helen Sedgwick, James Robertson, Ross Sayers and many more. Authors I admire greatly, so thank you for taking the time to help out here. I particularly like Helen’s story about the creative writing class looking at Haikus as it shows how multicultural our community is now in modern Scotland. I also loved ‘pluripotent’ by Jenni Fagan as it was heartbreaking. I loved everything about this collection. It did make me feel sad though due to personal circumstances which I won't go into but I wish Rock Trust had been available when the person needed them. Instead a lot of the time they are forced into emergency accommodation miles away from their home I.e. from Moffat to Stranraer. That can heighten isolation, depression and other mental health problems.
Anyway - go by this book as it helps out people more than you can know!
