Humansolutions Bulletin - February 23rd 2017

Watch Neil being interviewed about the course by clicking here  

We live in a society that seems to value youth (although not necessarily young people!). A fortune is spent on various ways of trying to make us look and feel younger. Whether or not that is money well spent is questionable, of course. Is it mainly another way of consumer capitalism getting us to spend our money? Well, it certainly fits with the idea that, if you want to make a lot of money, sell people things that they have to keep coming back for more of. Trying to hold back ageing is like Canute trying to hold back the tide. Wouldn’t it make far more sense to just accept that every day we create a new yesterday and therefore…

The poorest areas of towns and cities do not always benefit from economic growth. They can remain disconnected from the prosperity experienced by residents of wealthier neighbourhoods in the same region. This research looks at these issues from the perspective of housing and labour markets in the 20 per cent most deprived neighbourhoods across the UK. It finds that there is a need to reconnect economic growth strategies with poverty alleviation initiatives. The research includes an interactive map which reveals how disconnected regions are spread across the UK, and also shows the areas affected by ‘double disconnection’, across both housing and labour markets. Click here to read more

It started when my son was only a few months old. I had taken him downtown with me, for my weekly therapy session with the social worker I was seeing for postpartum depression counseling. There was a chill in the air, and I worried that his little cotton pants would ride up and expose his legs while I wore him, so I decided to put on his sister’s old baby leg warmers. They were mostly white, but had small pink and purple hearts scattered across them, Who would care, though? He was a baby, after all. I stopped by a friend’s house before my appointment, and she immediately commented on it, laughingly telling me she would buy him boys’ leg…

So answered a staff nurse, one of the 3,700 public and voluntary sector workers who responded to a Guardian survey on wellbeing in the workplace, when answering the question: when you feel stressed, what do you do to relax? From playing heavy metal music on full blast to crocheting furiously in front of the TV, respondents had developed a wide range of ways to unwind. With 93% saying they suffer from stress at work, and more than half saying they are more stressed than this time last year, learning to clock off and manage stress has never been more important. Alongside the positive and charming “I use adult colouring books”, we received frank responses that detailed the daily struggles some…

A series of animations has been created to illustrate what it is like to be LGBT in the workplace today in the UK. Until legislation was changed in 2003, it was legal in the UK to be fire an employee for being LGBT. Later, The Equality Act 2010 consolidated many protections in law for LGBT employees. Author of Straight Jacket, Matthew Todd, told totaljobs: “Although it has never been easier to be Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender, a significant number of LGBT employees are still afraid to ‘come out’ at work because they fear this will lead to harassment and damage their career opportunities. “People who are not LGBT might dismiss the need ‘to be open about your sexuality’ as…