Del Amitri's Iain Harvey talks about volunteering with the Cyrenians
Iain was a volunteer for the City Community back in the early 80s. The City community is a safe and supportive living space for young people aged 16-30 who are experiencing homelessness. The 10-bed townhouse houses seven residents, who are supported by six live-in volunteers. It was one of Cyrenians first services (Cyrenians started in the 60s) and thinks have evolved a fair bit since then. I’m not entirely sure how the service Iain worked in compare to what we currently do – ways of working will probably be vastly different, but the basic concept of our communities remain the same. The following video gives you some insight into how it works. https://youtu.be/KSyI6kDwpb0
Iain was a volunteer for the City Community back in the early 80s. The City community is a safe and supportive living space for young people aged 16-30 who are experiencing homelessness. The 10-bed townhouse houses seven residents, who are supported by six live-in volunteers. It was one of Cyrenians first services (Cyrenians started in the 60s) and thinks have evolved a fair bit since then. I’m not entirely sure how the service Iain worked in compare to what we currently do – ways of working will probably be vastly different, but the basic concept of our communities remain the same. The following video gives you some insight into how it works. https://youtu.be/KSyI6kDwpb0
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00:00I'm Ian Harvey, I play in a Glasgow band called De La Misie, who've been lucky enough to be playing around the world for the last, ooh, I'm not going to say how many years.
00:09When I was younger, I ended up volunteering as a year out with Edinburgh Cyrenians, which was a kind of life-changing experience for me.
00:23Got me through that early 20s period when people often don't know what they're doing or who they are. Put me in a different place, which I kind of built my life from after that.
00:33I was at the art school in Glasgow doing an architecture degree, but I started it far too young. I was like 17 when they took me into the course, to the time I was 21 or 20.
00:44In fact, 19 if I'm not mistaken. By the time I was 19 and half going on 20, I was like, what am I doing here? The art school was an amazing place to be and kind of blew my mind.
00:53I was like, how did I get here? What am I doing here? Was I going to drop out or was I going to drop out?
01:01By that time, it was quite easy to take a year out from university. Voluntary work, that was a big thing to do.
01:08Somebody put me in touch with CSV, which is a kind of blanket voluntary organisation. And I kind of thought, would they send me abroad or something, which was kind of what you joined CSV for.
01:20But I did a kind of short-term sort of one-on-one care project in London, which only lasted for a few months. And then they suggested I went up and did a placement at Edinburgh Cyrenians.
01:34If I'm perfectly honest, my reasons were very selfish. I was looking for a way to get into the world. I'd grown up in East Kilbride, then I'd gone to the art school in Glasgow.
01:44So you start to realise that, particularly in a place like Glasgow School of Art in 1979, there's a bit more to the world than you might have thought.
01:55In a sense, if I hadn't done that, then I would never have come to that watershed of moving back to Glasgow and looking for other musicians to play with.
02:06I mean, prior to meeting Justin, I just played in a kind of rubbish covers bands, or maybe they were good covers bands, I don't know, but they were covers bands.
02:15It was a different kind of thing. And coming back to Glasgow and reinventing myself, then somehow that gave me the, I don't know, the cojoness, the Aristidon advert that Justin had up looking for musicians.
02:33And having just been a guy that had played guitar in cover bands, that would have seemed like an impossible thing to do, I think, if I hadn't made that paradigm shift out of my youth.
02:46So the Cyrenians is very much a community of young people. Some of them had volunteered to be there, some of them were like me.
02:55There was people there who were, I think, had been placed there from police college. There was people from, it operated as a halfway house for people coming out of prison or people recovering from addiction.
03:07So it was like a huge mix of people, all around the same age. So I mean, it had a profound effect. I mean, prior to that, I'd been in a very coseted, I'd say, I mean, I'm sort of loathe to say middle class, I can't say it was a working class family either.
03:22But, you know, it was very much Glasgow, East Kilbride, art school, you know, secondary school. So that was, that was a complete, it was a complete eye opener.
03:31I wasn't really conscious. I mean, I hadn't really been a writer before that. You know, like I say, I'd just been a guitar player in covers bands with friends at school.
03:42So it certainly didn't change my writing because I'd never really written anything. But like I say, I wouldn't have had the wherewithal or the, I don't know, kind of groundedness, I don't think, to operate the way that I did after I'd spent time in that environment.
04:03If you come into Glasgow Central Station on a, I don't know, late at night, through the week, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of grim and shocking in a way that I don't think it was back then. You know, there was some homelessness, but it didn't feel so, it didn't feel so extreme.
04:20And a lot of the, what I do remember in the 80s around the station, and it's still there, there was, you know, there was a lot of heroin addiction. Is it still heroin addiction? Is it fentanyl or whatever? And I know that there's a methadone campaign. Did they still distribute methadone down there? Yes. I mean, people are kind of drawn to that, but it doesn't, there's a lot, it feels kind of, there's not, that feels a lot more dominant than it did in the 80s, I think.
04:48There's periods in my life where I've had absolutely no money, but I never, I was never in fear of not having a roof over my head. You know, you could always, you could always rent a shared flat for £90 a month or something, and that was, you know, it was affordable.
05:06They do an amazing job. I mean, it's not, people are taken seriously, people are not patronised in any way, people are taken at face value and allowed to find ways within themselves to help themselves. You know, it's not sort of a giving charity in that sort of sense. It's a, you know, it's a sort of building charity.
05:32The guy that was the farm manager when I, back in the 80s, I've kept in touch with since then. And in fact, if I hadn't gone down the route with Justin, I was actually thinking of not going back to art school and going to a farming college. So it was, I, guitar player or farmer at that point.
05:50So no regrets about not pursuing a farming career?
05:53No, not really. I mean, no, it went all right, otherwise.