How will Devil in the Detail help you?
Emily Hewson, CSM member and youth worker sets out her experience of economics before our Feb 26th event.
I'm someone who has always avoided business, economics and accountancy. Mainly because of the bad experience I had in maths lessons when working towards my maths GCSE and the fact that accountancy was always portrayed as being boring when I was at school. It was quite a while until I realised that economics was about a much wider context than just maths, and by then accessible information and understanding about it wasn't as easy to come by. My degree is in Music and I'm a youth and community worker by profession, so the arts, education, local government and community issues are where my knowledge-base lies. My comfort zone is more towards grants, funding and either spending or assisting in the allocation of funds to small community groups.
Having worked in the public sector for 10 years, I value and appreciate the role of the public sector in people’s lives. I was aware of different funding streams and how government policy related to grants being given to local authorities for use with young people, and how my own management of small budgets within the local authority allowed for more freedom with regards to providing positive activities for the young people I was working with. But I'll be honest with you, that was as far as it went until the cuts began to be made. And that's because I only lifted my head above the public sector parapet when it started directly impacting frontline service provision. 
I'm sure I'm not the only one. When it started to directly affect the day-to-day lives of the general public, was when we all realised things had gone badly wrong. We had been lulled into a false sense of security and took much of this for granted, whilst getting on with our jobs far away from the banking sector.
With recession and very little growth in GDP, I now realise that more of us need to have a better grasp of economics and how jobs, finance, manufacturing, retail, house prices and the public sector are all inextricably linked together. Only by understanding where we are now, and what got us there in the first place, can we hope to work together for a solution and a new economic model which will both serve the public, private and voluntary sectors fairly and sustainably.
My passion has always been around fairness and equality and the distribution of wealth fairly. I believe in the Living Wage and also that people should have "living" pensions. But although I know how everything links together in a general context, I’m not an expert. I don't know much detail when it comes to economics, and would certainly benefit from being taken through it in more depth. That’s why workshops like “Devil in the Detail” are really vital for equipping us with the relevant information and guidance for being able to effectively debate and discuss the need for justice and fair changes to the economic system.
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