Making a Difference: Combining the personal, the practice and the academic

This presentation for the Social Students Society and Student Un ion at the University of Worcester offered a personal perspective on a career in public service supporting community members with multiple disadvantage. It starts with UN sustainability goals and their importance and discusses systematic and ideological impoverishment in UK society, with damning reports from the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights.

The presentation outlines child poverty and women as 'shock absorbers of poverty.' (Reis, 2025. It also offers a solution, for academics to combine their personal knowledge with practice knowledge and academic knowledge to make an impact, to make a difference in communities. Beverley discussed her own peer led, peer support organisation in North Warwickshire, 12 years running that makes a significant difference as a community of strength. working with Russell's notion of 'what is strong rather than what is wrong', (Russell, 2020).

The presentation finished with Beverley's PhD academic study model of women's peer mentoring based on strength, need and ethical foundations in an effort to mitigate the harms in a particular community group.