Mobile Caring-Work: Volunteer homelessness outreach on the streets of Brighton & Hove (UK)

ABSTRACT

Smith and Hall’s typology of movement and work offers a useful starting point for considering varied aspects of mobile work. However, this typology does not account for the multiple mobilities that comprise voluntary homelessness outreach projects. Soup kitchens, redistribution networks and grassroots outreach are an under-researched area, yet they are complex spaces of care operating within uneven geographies of homelessness. This article argues that informal care practices and conditions are significant in constituting this type of mobile work, which can be usefully contrasted against formal state-commissioned services. It does so through presenting findings from participatory walking interviews undertaken with volunteers providing informal care and support to people living on the streets of Brighton & Hove (UK). It argues that understanding volunteers’ experiences of the relationship between movement and work requires a relational understanding of care, which can be found in geographies of care, namely the care ecology framework of “caringscapes” and “carescapes”. The intersections of mobilities, work and care shaping volunteer outreach challenge existing frameworks. A refined conceptualisation of mobile caring-work is therefore needed, bringing together carescapes and mobilities literatures to open up interpretative possibilities and further advance our understanding of mobile work on the move.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilities
• care
• labour
• volunteer
• homelessness
• outreach

1. Introduction

Voluntary outdoor relief projects provide a vital lifeline for many by providing care and support to people living on the streets, however, they remain under-researched (Johnsen, Cloke, and May 2005; Evans 2011; May and Cloke 2014). Their persistence within spaces of homelessness is evidence of “the continued and widespread public response of goodwill” towards a highly marginalized and excluded group of people (May and Cloke 2014, 909). Soup kitchens, redistribution networks and grassroots outreach projects constitute outdoor, transitory and mobile care, which are more complex than fixed indoor spaces of care (Johnsen, Cloke, and May 2005). Yet these voluntary projects are likely to be considered static when positioned in relation to other forms of mobile labour, in particular, professional outreach and welfare provision, which is the subject of existing research (Smith and Hall 2016a, 2016b; Disney et al. 2019; Ferguson 2016; Roy 2017). This article argues that investigating the micro-geographies of these voluntary projects reveals significant ways that mobilities, care and work intersect to constitute a distinct set of practices and conditions of mobile work. Based on walking interviews with participants volunteering in the seaside city of Brighton & Hove (UK), a conceptualisation of mobile caring-work is developed that opens up interpretative possibilities in these three realms.

The article begins with an overview of the literatures on homelessness, mobilities and geographies of care, reviewing existing research on voluntary outdoor homelessness projects. After outlining methods and findings from the study, it draws on both Smith and Hall (2016a) typology of work and movement and Bowlby and McKie (2019) care ecology framework to articulate a distinct understanding of informal care and mobilities through this case of voluntary street-care. Discussion of the research findings demonstrates the multiplicity and variety of mobile work, taking up Smith and Hall (2016a, 147) offer of their typology as “something to be tried out, put to use and shared across different work settings”.

These voluntary projects are comprised of multiple im/mobilities of bodies, materials, objects, ideas and resources, contributing to the unevenness of spaces of homelessness. The unpaid nature of this work brings to the forefront the different meanings, visions and values that volunteers ascribe to their caring-work and use to negotiate their identities as mobile care-givers. These mobility and care dynamics significantly impact on the physical and emotional labour experienced by volunteers, which includes strategies for physical resource distribution and the emotional challenges of negotiating homeless survival practices in urban public space. Our understanding of these processes is aided by the care ecology framework as part of an individual’s care journey, “caringscape”, and the wider service context, “carescape” (Bowlby and McKie 2019). Shining this care spotlight through a mobilities lens reveals valuable distinctions between formal and informal mobile work. Consequently, this case interlocks mobilities, care and work into a distinct set of practices and conditions, which can be conceptualised as mobile caring-work, offering new understandings of what happens when care and work go on the move (Wood, Smith and Hall 2016, 145).

2. Homelessness, mobilities & care literatures

2.1. Homelessness

The rapid growth in homelessness across the UK has gained attention as an urgent crisis; reports pre-pandemic estimated 320,000 people were homeless in Britain (Reynolds 2018). Rough sleeping is the most visible type of homelessness and calculated to have increased by 135% since 2010 (Fitzpatrick et al. 2019, xvi). Brighton & Hove features prominently and in the most recent regional reporting topped the South East list with 1 in 69 people experiencing homelessness (Webb 2017, 5). There are long-standing debates over the ways in which state and society respond and deal with people living on the streets, which have taken on a revived public health dimension during the global pandemic (Casey and Mohan 2020). A dominant narrative, developed in the Global North, tells of a dystopic urbanism and punitive policy regime aimed at sanitizing the city and excluding problematic homeless people from urban public space (Davis and Morrow 1998; Mitchell 1997). A counter-narrative advocated by some scholars (Murphy 2009; Cloke, Johnsen, and May 2010; DeVerteuil 2014; May and Cloke 2014) advances a reading of more complex mixes of care and control that make up uneven geographies of homelessness. In the UK, austerity urbanism has seen the rise of voluntary spaces of emergency care, such as food banks, in response to the retraction of state welfare provision and an increasingly fragmented landscape (Cloke, May, and Williams 2020). Voluntary and community sector (VCS) responses have been used in these debates to point to spaces of compassion and “emancipatory currents in contemporary responses to urban homelessness” (May and Cloke 2014, 894). Positioned within these spaces of care, volunteer outdoor relief projects have a long history within homelessness provision (Johnsen, Cloke, and May 2005, 323).

However, compared to their indoor counterparts, soup kitchens have received very little academic attention and remain peripheral to policy and service delivery (Evans 2011; Bond, Wusinich, and Padgett 2021), perhaps as a result of their mobility. A unique study (Johnsen, Cloke, and May 2005) on soup kitchens across Great Britain reveals how these complex spaces create “momentary encounters … that, of all service-related encounters, are the least likely to involve the (re)construction of ‘other’” (334). Their research focuses on the spatial and temporal dimensions, in particular, the way volunteers temporarily convert “seemingly insignificant outdoor public spaces into spaces of compassion” (330–2). Projects are simultaneously fragile, relying solely on volunteers and minimal resources, and resilient, showing an ability to overcome resource shortages and persist in long-term provision (330–2).

2.2. Mobilities

This research extends investigation of soup kitchens to include other outdoor relief initiatives, namely, resource redistribution networks and grassroots outreach support. It underscores the mobile dimension of this care by framing the phenomenon as mobile caring-work. Understandings from the “mobilities turn” (Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2008) are embraced ontologically and methodologically. Welfare practices are often typified as static, yet, as argued by Ferguson (2016) in the case of social work, attending to movement can get to the heart of care work practices and how they are experienced. The recent use of mobile methods within social work research demonstrates the value of accessing different research-able entities, making social life intelligible in new ways (Roy 2017, 3–4). The work of Smith and Hall (2016a, 2016b) is highly relevant in its exploration of work and mobility. Developed from ethnography with a professional, state-commissioned, homelessness outreach team, Smith and Hall (2016a) have developed a fourfold typology of work and movement. This distinguishes between functional, pragmatic, peripatetic and mobile, as seen in Table 1.

Table 1. Typology of movement and work, based on Smith and Hall (2016a, 153–8).

Type	Detail	Combination	Environment
Functional	Workplace journey, destination-oriented, unremarkable	Sequential: movement antecedent to actual business, preliminary task	Environment is a burden or complication
Pragmatic	Work on the move, affordance and necessity	Simultaneous: concurrent activities	Environment and movement traversed, dampened down so as not to distract from the work
Peripatetic	Work enabled by movement, movement enrolled in service of work, work gets done because of it	Simultaneous: concurrent activities	Environment may play a part but need not distract
Mobile	Work as movement	Amalgam	Wholly engaged with environment, not seeking to traverse it

Focusing on work as movement, Smith and Hall (2016b, 501) examination of pedestrian mobility practices shows that movements do not simply precede work but are operative and generative. Thus, their illustration of the “mobile work” category, from their research with outreach workers, identifies the mobility practice of “searching” (Smith and Hall 2016a, 158). Using this notion of “searching”, Smith and Hall (2016b, 159) describe outreach as “extra-institutional, compromised, negotiated and essentially mobile work”. Their analysis, orientated at the street-level bureaucrat level, reveals how the “organization of (im)mobilities of bodies, materials, objects, ideas and goods” that constitute outreach care produce “the contours of the landscape, territory and consequent urban politics in which outreach workers move and are entangled” (504).

Although generated from their case study of state-commissioned outreach work, Smith and Hall (2016a) typology is a useful starting point to understand the conflation of mobility and labour in this case of volunteer, “unprofessional” outreach work. It offers a way to unpick how volunteers utilize movement in different types of project activities. It allows us to analyse the particular ways movement and work are ordered whether occurring sequentially (functional), simultaneously (pragmatic and peripatetic) or becoming an amalgam (mobile) as well as the relationship with the physical environment. This categorisation hinges on the degree to which the movement enables the completion of work, which corresponds with Kesselring’s (2006) definition of mobility as “an actor’s competence to realise specific projects and plans whilst being on the move”. Therefore in Smith and Hall (2016a) approach work only becomes mobile when it is completely integrated with movement.

However, their analysis of professional mobile work fails to capture particular aspects of mobile caring-work that are specific to non-state outreach projects. As will be demonstrated in the findings and discussion sections, when mapped across the typology, the narrow category of mobile work renders most of the voluntary project activities as non-mobile (see Table 2). Yet informal voluntary street-care is significantly comprised of multiple mobilities and simultaneous mobile practices. Applying the typology thereby brings to the fore the key distinctions between these two types of outdoor services and points to the absence of the impact of wider work conditions in Smith and Hall (2016a) categorisation. The urban spaces and places of homelessness within which both professional and volunteer outreach workers are entangled must be recognized as uneven, which shapes the nature of the work and its mobile dimensions.

Table 2. Projects types of movement and work (based on Smith and Hall (2016a).

Projects/ Activities	Type	Detail	Combination	Environment
Street Kitchen	Functional	Workplace journey, destination-oriented, unremarkable	Sequential: movement antecedent to actual business, preliminary task	Environment is a burden or complication
Resource distribution	Pragmatic	Work on the move, affordance and necessity	Simultaneous: concurrent activities	Environment and movement traversed, dampened down so as not to distract from the work
Resource distribution	Peripatetic	Work enabled by movement, movement enrolled in service of work, work gets done because of it	Simultaneous: concurrent activities	Environment may be part of but need not distract
Outreach Support	Mobile	Work as movement	Amalgam	Wholly engaged with environment, not seeking to traverse it

Table 3. Caringscapes framework (based on Bowlby 2012).

Number	Proposition
1	Informal caring is a social/relational activity embedded in notions of obligation and reciprocity
2	Informal caring is an ethical activity involving notions of normative behaviour and desirable or “appropriate” social relationships
3	Informal caring often involves relationships of unequal power – especially inequalities of class, gender, race and (dis)ability
4	Informal caring is an embodied activity in which co-presence, bodily separation, and mediated forms of communication affect the caring encounter
5	The performance of informal caring necessarily involves processes that connect across time–space
6	The performance of informal caring involves a person using resources – people, ideas, material objects, as well as time and space to care – accessed through particular places and spaces at particular times
7	The performance of informal caring involves a person reflecting on or enacting aspects of past informal caring relationships and/or anticipating future caring relationships
8	The performance of informal caring involves a person reflecting on and/or anticipating how informal caring relationships link to other actual or anticipated aspects of their lives

2.3. Care

Smith and Hall (2016a, 158) identify that “outreach work requires a tricky combination of care, concern, reassurance, encouragement but also stratagem and subtle pressure” because workers are ultimately tasked with engaging clients into programmes that entail a degree of conditionality. State-funded programmes are subject to a range of social control measures, administrative burden and funding targets stemming from current poverty management policy approaches (Johnsen and Fitzpatrick 2010; Ferguson 2016; Disney et al. 2019). Smith and Hall (2016a, 148–50) position care workers as “repairers” and draw on Goffman’s “tinkering trades” and notions of repair to understand outreach care. But volunteer outreach projects stand in contrast to these notions, commonly operating an open access policy and providing unconditional support (Johnsen, Cloke, and May 2005, 323). Unconditionality and reciprocity can be viewed as ethical and progressive sensibilities of solidarity and mutualism against neoliberal austerity through a post-secular reading (Cloke, May, and Williams 2020). Although these projects also operate in the “messy middle ground” of VCS provision, with mixes of care and control, varying degrees of funding constraint and poverty management institutionalisation (Bourlessas 2021).

This article argues that a relational understanding of care offers an enhanced understandings of mobile outreach work that can be applied to both state and non-state provision. Johnsen, Cloke, and May (2005) research into soup runs frames care as “an interest in the wellbeing of others in practical ways” (326) and a relational practice involving both giving and receiving (327). This form of open and unconditional care is not without controversy in the homelessness sector, with many claiming that the provision of food contributes to the persistence of street homelessness (323). However, others maintain that this care sustains life and is integral to the everyday geographies of homelessness survival (330–2; Evans 2011, 24).

A valuable reading of care is found in the geographies of care literature that draws on a feminist ethics of care (Lawson 2007; Milligan et al. 2007; Conradson 2003; Pols 2016). The recent attention to care ethics can be seen as a response to the “relentless extension of market relations into almost everything”, which values profitability over social good and personal responsibility over public (Lawson 2007, 1–2). In these new geographies of inequality, Lawson (2007) argues that care becomes a pressing concern, yet is simultaneously marginalised from view. In contrast to the neoliberal notion of care as a private affair, feminist ethics of care assert the centrality of care work and relations in our lives and society, giving attention to emotions of love, concern and compassion (3). Care can therefore be conceived as physical labour, caring and tending for someone, and emotional labour, caring about the wellbeing of another (Conradson 2003, 451; Bowlby 2012, 2102).

Recent work on the care ecology framework puts forwards “caringscapes” as a way to understand the temporal and spatial dimensions of care relations and calls our attention to the multi-dimensional landscape of past, current and future caring activities that a person may traverse in their life-course (Bowlby 2012, 2110). Eight propositions are identified within “caringscapes” (see Table 3), which is intended to guide analysis of informal care, conceived as unpaid and not formally organised (2102). To help bring in organisational and institutional aspects, Bowlby (2112) further develops this framework with the concept of “carescapes” to refer to the resource and service context that shapes the “caringscape terrain”. Combined under the care ecology framework, an individual’s “caringscape” dynamically interacts with the policy, service and infrastructure context that makes up the “carescape” (Bowlby and McKie 2019, 536). This framework both helps to situate the case of volunteer street-care and enhance the conceptualisation of mobile caring-work. It brings in a multi-scalar consideration of the interaction between individual worker practices and the wider work conditions which are missed by Smith and Hall (2016a) typology.

However, although this approach encompasses the significant relational, temporal and organisational dimensions of care dynamics, it does not account for the mobility of caring-work. In their latest development of “caringscapes”, Bowlby and McKie (2019, 533) make note of the mobilities of people within the many spatialities that create and recreate individual caring practices, but this recent adjunct is not sufficiently developed. Therefore, inspired by voluntary street-care, this paper advocates for developing an understanding of mobile caring-work that draws from both the realms of care ecology and mobile work practices.

In sum, it is clear from a review of existing research that volunteer outreach projects have been overlooked by academia and yet provide opportunities for expanding our understandings of mobility, care and labour. To understand the dynamic intersections that constitute volunteer outreach, an approach must be developed that draws on the two existing Smith and Hall (2016a); Smith and Hall (2016b) movement and work typology and Bowlby and McKie (2019) care ecology. Smith and Hall (2016a) typology provides a useful starting point, however their approach to care and the wider work conditions do not fully account for the practices of voluntary outreach. Bowlby and McKie (2019) “caringscapes” and “carescapes” bring a more relational understanding of informal care and the dynamic interactions between practices and conditions, however they do not sufficiently address mobilities. Consequently, a refined approach is required to analyse the findings of this research with mobile voluntary care workers.

3. Methods

This qualitative study into mobile caring-work began as a puzzle over differing responses to the crisis of homelessness in the UK. The methodology was designed to explore unevenness in spaces of homelessness through investigating voluntary outdoor projects supporting people living on the streets in Brighton and Hove. In 2018, participatory walking interviews were carried out with volunteer mobile workers alongside organisational mapping and a review of national and local homelessness policy. Through narrative analysis, the significant intersections of mobilities, care and work were revealed, the findings of which are presented in this paper.

The researcher acts within an “inside position” as a volunteer in a local outdoor relief network that distributes resources to homeless people. The experential knowledge gained from this voluntary position, alongside previous employment in the VCS homelessness sector, was utilised as part of a recruitment strategy to identify, approach and recruit participants from volunteer outdoor relief projects operating in Brighton & Hove. Relevant projects were identified through a mapping exercise and lead volunteers were contacted with recruitment materials alongside social media call outs to recruit seven volunteers to take part in walking interviews. Institutional research ethics approval was obtained from University of Southampton Research Ethics Committee to ensure confidentiality, anonymity, voluntary consent and transparency were adhered to and risk of harm to participants and researcher was assessed. The volunteer-researcher entanglement was advantageous in recruitment, building trust and rapport but also required clear boundary and expectation-setting and ethical reflexivity throughout the research process (Bourlessas 2021). The participant ages ranged from 25–70 years old and various professions were represented: retired head teacher, trade union worker, carer, self-employed, taxi driver, charity worker and unemployed. There was also a mix of gender identities: four identified as women (she), two as men (he), and one as non-binary (they). Five identified as white, one participant identified as a person of colour with mixed parentage and another participant as Bangladeshi British.

Mobile methods were chosen as appropriate for facilitating meaningful discussion of a mobile phenomenon and physically locating the research in urban public space, the physical and social space of the study (Fincham, McGuinness, and Murray 2010, 4–6). As demonstrated by social work literatures attending to mobilities, go-alongs and walking interviews are effective in investigating work and caring practices (Disney et al. 2019; Ferguson 2016; Roy 2017). The method adopted can be typified as participatory walking interviews (Kinney 2017). The researcher identified the location parameters of Brighton & Hove city-centre and the participants chose the route in advance. However, in practice, several participants only had a rough route idea and preferred to walk and talk in a manner that Kinney (2) would describe as “bimbling”.

Although the relationship to the place was an important prompt and brought proximity to the topic, the emphasis was on using the walking interview to create an informal environment that allowed the participant to recollect and articulate experiences. A semi-structured interview schedule was used to guide discussion: starting with warm-up questions about the volunteer’s role and motivations before moving onto topics of the mobile, transitory and care nature of the work, navigations of public space, and local responses to homelessness. The various routes taken were not necessarily representative of transitory and mobile care-giving movements but moving through the city encouraged discussion of the nature of caring work undertaken on the streets. It was made clear to interviewees that we were not doing “go-alongs”, which would have involved accompanying volunteers during soup runs or the distribution of resources (Kinney 2017, 2). This was deemed practically and ethically inappropriate for the research purposes, because it would intrude and disrupt the care-giving. This meant there were limitations to the study, which need to be addressed in future research. It did not include homeless people themselves, those who make up the other part of the care exchange, and therefore did not observe care in action or the experiences of care-receivers. Detailed narrative analysis on the interviews with care-givers was undertaken to gain in-depth understanding of the personal stories and lived experiences of mobile care-workers. The narrative analysis framework took an experience-centred approach, which focuses attention on the forms of telling, not just the contents (Riessman 1993; Gee 1999). The next findings and discussion sections are based on this narrative analysis across all seven interviews, however only a select number of quotations from four of the participants’ narratives are included for the purposes of this article rather than the whole narrative segments.

4. Findings

The study’s policy review and local project mapping revealed an uneven landscape of homelessness provision within which mobile caring-work operates. In the context of the national austerity agenda of reduced state and responsibilisation, the local council’s policy response mixes up concerns of being a “caring city” and of control as a “safe city” (Brighton & Hove City Council 2014; 2016). The organisational mapping exercise identified twelve different initiatives that provide volunteer outdoor support and care to homeless people in Brighton & Hove, operating within this complex and fragmented landscape of welfare provision.

These projects are diverse, ranging in types of organisations (registered charities, un-constituted activist networks and faith-based organisations), length of activity (1 year to over 20 years) and size (from small independent set-ups to sub-projects of regional charities). Indicative of VCO response to the “mean times” (Cloke, May, and Williams 2020), eight out of the twelve initiatives were set up since the 2008 austerity-ensuing financial crash. Their activities also varied and overlapped with four projects offering outreach support (variable frequency), five providing a soup kitchen (ranging from once a week to every evening), and nine distributing resources (variable frequency with some only seasonal). The mapping and walking interview findings showed how volunteers often undertake a variety of activities in each project. For example, a soup kitchen volunteer described organising a rota, buying bread on the way to their shift, meeting other volunteers at a Church storage space, packing up equipment onto a trolley, pulling this down to the seafront and setting up the soup pot and other refreshments at their designated spot. This was all before any contact with people on the streets. Once set up, the volunteer then spent time serving food and drinks to a queue of people, followed by talking and listening to those who had turned up, often giving out information about local services to people new to the streets or areas.

Crucially a significant amount of tasks described by volunteers can only be completed “on the move”. The different mobile practices in their caring-work include bringing donated food and resources from different parts of the city by car, moving and setting up equipment at a designated spot on foot and taking hot drinks and warm clothes out to people by car or on foot. Volunteers therefore described undertaking multiple mobile practices to enact caring-work, which speaks to the resourcefulness of informal voluntary networks. Figure 1 shows one unusual distribution activity of tying hot water bottles to trees in public spaces, which is far removed from state-commissioned professional outreach tasks. Volunteers explained that this served multiple purposes: getting donations out to people, taking over public space as a show of mutual aid and solidarity, and raising awareness of the project.

Figure 1. Photo of resource distribution activity by author.

Within these varied initiatives, narrative analysis of the walking interviews revealed how volunteers impose order and make sense of their experiences of mobile caring-work. What and how volunteers tell their experiences offer ways of making sense of their experiences and practices. Participants’ narratives can be categorised into five topic areas: volunteer/founder stories (how participants got into this type of caring-work); encounters and experiences during care-giving; organisational stories (how the project operates); local homelessness provision (how they interacted with other spaces of homelessness); and responses to homelessness (policy, state and general members of the public approaches). Overarching personal narratives were also identifiable whereby participants enacted a variety of identities through the stories they told, such as political activist, ethical parent, committed volunteer, Christian liberal peacemaker, grassroots campaigner, and humanitarian. The narrated visions and values can be grouped into three areas of care ethics: theo-ethics, humanitarian and political activism. For example, one participant, Xia, frequently emphasised the importance of a DIY mutual aid approach that is independent from state provision when describing the activities of distributing hot water bottles (including hanging them up in trees as shown in Figure 1):

Xia¹: … that’s what I really like about it as well, being like, here’s a really simple model, set up, like that anybody can do. Like, really, like no control, totally like you can take this thing and do it autonomously and like, and seeing that happening and seeing like people hanging them up and putting pictures up.

This identity work is an important part of understanding how participants situate and engage with their role of mobile care-giver both within their “caringscape” journeys and the wider “carescape” terrain. Consequently, the findings indicated both the significant mobile practices involved in such voluntary work, and through in-depth analysis of volunteer stories, the personal entanglement and ethical negotiations involved in informal care-work. Further interrogation of this intersection between mobilities, care and work that emerged in this narrative analysis is discussed in the next section.

5. Mobile caring-work discussion

The participants’ personal narratives are valuable routes into understanding the dynamic intersections between mobilities, work and care in this case of voluntary street-care. The findings from the narrative analysis will be discussed in three intersecting themes that illustrate the specificities of mobile caring-work. Firstly, Smith and Hall (2016a) typology is used as the starting point for examining the relationship between movement and work, spring-boarding into discussion of the multiple mobilities identified in the organisational mapping and volunteer personal narratives. Secondly, consideration of “caringscapes” allows us to unpack the care dynamics, in particular, how the personal narratives of participants enact a variety of identities through which we can ascertain particular values and meanings that are ascribed to their caring-work. This points to the significance of how care is conceived in analysing mobile work and the divergence in this case from existing research on professional mobile care practices (Smith and Hall 2016a; Ferguson 2016; Disney et al. 2019). Thirdly, these identified mobility and care dynamics impact on the ways volunteers narrated the specific emotional and physical challenges of this form of labour. These can be considered as constituting the “carescape” and exemplifying movement as work. From this discussion, a set of propositions of what makes mobile caring-work distinct will be offered as way of conclusion.

5.1. Mobile: multiple mobilities & mobility practices

In contrast to this paper’s interest in mobilities, neither the importance of movement nor its relationship with caring-work were explicitly brought up by volunteer participants and many of their narratives instead down-played this aspect. This can be seen in the following, when one participant was asked about how they found moving around the city and laughed off the question:

Xia: I mean it’s just like, where people are at, so it’s like how you get in touch with people. I mean we’ve done like, often places where people come to as well as going out. But like, err, yea I guess it’s just where people are at [laughter] so I don’t know what else.

However, analysis of the organisational mapping and participants’ narratives reveals how the multiple mobilities that constitute this form of care-work are highly significant. In trying to understand why the mobile dimension is downplayed, it is helpful to look to participants’ overarching narratives and the way their stories become an identity-building activity. In Xia’s case, they enact an identity as a practical and resourceful political activist, often returning at the end of their stories to the importance of solidarity and direct action over charity, which they sum up as a “just fucking do it” attitude. Other participants similarly portrayed a pragmatic “doing” role, telling of moving about the city as simply part and parcel of their work. In these stories, mobility appears of less interest to recount than the care encounters and impact of their work. This may also indicate the integration and amalgam of these movements as work to the extent that it becomes unremarkable to the care-givers.

Turning to Smith and Hall (2016a) typology, the different activities undertaken by each project can be mapped against their categorisations as a way of dissecting the multiple mobilities, as shown in Table 2. The movements involved in street kitchens are foremost destination-oriented with volunteers, resources and homeless people gathering at a particular fixed outdoor site. This type of work can be considered the most static, fitting the “functional” type, whereby the movements are antecedent to the main task of serving homeless people and the environment can be considered burdensome. However, unlike Smith and Hall (2016a) professional outreach case, these movements are not necessarily akin to an everyday workplace journey and can be considered more remarkable. The soup kitchen becomes a hub that attracts a mix of people and resources coming from different parts of the city, which requires the mobilisation of various social networks. For example, one volunteer described how every week food-bank volunteers drive from a neighbouring town to bring donated cold food. At the same time, hot food is cooked and brought from a local Hindu Women’s Group, which is all served by volunteers connected through one of the local mosques and the university’s Muslim student society.

Although street kitchens involve resource distribution, the redistribution of donated goods, such as food, clothes and hot water bottles, out to people across the city can be considered a different form of work that projects undertake. This work/movement combination can mostly be classified as “pragmatic” whereby there is no designated destination and volunteers work on the move. However, both within street kitchens and resource redistribution, the movements can enable caring-work and therefore elements of “peripatetic” can be identified, which cuts across these categories. In both types of activity, through the practical necessity of getting donations from a range of different places to a range of other places, social networks must be mobilised. These movements extend the spaces of care across the city’s public and private spaces and build important relationships of shared solidarity, which strengthen the capacity of the projects to deliver care. This includes for example a local restaurant that cooks up soup every night and volunteers’ homes where they sort and organise clothes. Online networks are also a significant component of these projects that support the work; social media is used on a daily basis to garner support, recruit donations and volunteers, share information and coordinate movements and tasks.

The final activity type, grassroots outreach support, is the most akin to Smith and Hall (2016a) professional outreach illustrative case of “mobile” work, providing more than just donated goods in the form of advice, advocacy and ongoing support. Volunteers described the mobility practice identified by Smith and Hall (2016b) of “searching” in the amalgam of work and movement. Smith and Hall (2016a, 2016b) analysis of their case limits the “mobile” category to when the particular work task of repair is amalgamated with movement, and the mobility practice of “searching” therefore emerges. In contrast, the findings in this case reveals that volunteers undertake several mobility practices whilst attempting to complete multiple work tasks that constitute their caring-work. The strengthening of support networks as volunteers move equipment, food and donations through the city, whilst also “searching” out people to give donations to, combines “functional” and “mobile” work/movement types, but both contribute to successfully carrying out their overall caring-work.

Consequently, when mapped across this typology, these voluntary projects appear less mobile and more static, thereby obscuring the multiple mobilities arising in these research findings. These projects’ plans can only be realised through being on the move, which, within Kesselring’s (2006) definition would make them mobile. In this respect the mobility practices described by volunteers chime with Ferguson’s (2016) analysis of social work practices as “negotiation in motion” through their complex manoeuvrings in space. Applying the typology therefore helps to raise interesting questions about the relationship between mobility and the different conditions of care-delivery. Namely, how the differences between voluntary/unpaid care-work, supported by social and community networks, and professional/paid care-work, funded by the state, impact on the dynamics of movement and work. These differences in practices may be better articulated by taking a more relational understanding of the “caring” taking place and considering the wider labour conditions, which can be enabled by viewing the notion of mobile caring-work.

5.2. Caring: volunteer “caringscapes”

The voluntary and unpaid nature of this work is distinct from professional caring-work “on the move” described in both cases of Smith and Hall (2016a) and social work literatures (Ferguson 2016; Disney et al. 2019). Consequently, the values and motivations that thread through participants’ personal narratives are crucial in interrogating this form of care and further understanding its intersections with mobility and work. The “caringscapes” framework conceives of informal care as an ethical activity and proposes that its performance involves “a person reflecting on and/or enacting aspects of past informal caring relationships and/or anticipating future caring relationships” (Bowlby 2012, 2112). Narrative analysis identified overarching stories across each interview whereby participants enact particular identities through which they negotiated the ethical nature of their volunteering, drawing on their experiences of other caring relationships (Riessman, 1993). Such identity work reveals the different ways participants ascribe meaning to their caring-work and what motivates them in their volunteering.

One set of values identified in the findings, “theo-ethics”, makes religious values central to the ways care is envisaged (Cloke, Johnsen, and May 2010, 44). For one volunteer in particular, these values drive their volunteering, using parables to explain how this care-delivery can be understood as “service” and “duty”. Another value grouping, “humanitarian”, showed volunteers taking a deliberate neutral stance with regard to local council politics and emphasising humanity and compassion. One volunteer extended this notion of humanitarian care from the local to the global, making frequent comparisons to other countries in the Global South where they have also delivered aid. In contrast, several volunteers politically positioned their activities as direct action and in solidarity with people criminalised by the state. For example, one volunteer spoke about how their support networks were able to help a homeless migrant resist deportation from the streets:

Marie: Cos she was the nicest girl, from Slovenia … She got deported. Yea she went to Heathrow or Gatwick, where they take the detainees. We were able to get a charity to go in, and, liaise with her. She got out though … She got released.

This blurring of political activism, advocacy and support within informal outreach stands in direct opposition to how professional outreach charities had recently been found to be helping the Home Office in identifying potential deportees (Taylor, 2018).

These findings resonate with several propositions within the “caringscapes” framework, namely, that informal care necessarily involves processes that connect across time and space and relationships of unequal power (Bowlby 2012, 2112). Volunteers frequently reflected in their narratives on the best way of delivering care, with many noting the contested landscape of homelessness provision and the ongoing ethical dilemmas arising from this particular caring-work. As can be seen in one narrative from volunteer Rosa which focused on the experiences of taking her children out volunteering, which enabled discussion of ethical issues to arise. In the following section Rosa, reflected on the positive aspects of taking her children out with her:

Rosa: Partially it’s just because, they just have to join in with what I’m doing sometimes, because, I can’t leave them alone and get on with. Sometimes it’s practical, is what I’m saying. But also they’re quite interested, and I think, I have always took them along to stuff. And they’re fairly, fairly socially aware.

And I know at school they talk about homelessness a lot. So it’s giving them some context to that. Erm, I really like the idea of that, actual human contact that happens, in this kind of initiative, rather than just donating money.

Or, I know at school sometimes they do little presentations. They even did like a little play fairly recently, the kids wrote a play, and it was about, about how some people are luckier than others, and they touched on homelessness. So there’s an awareness of it.

Rosa’s volunteering story of moving with her daughter balances the practical necessity of being a single mother and making the work manageable whilst also enacting an identity of being an ethical parent. It also resonates with understandings of voluntary-based ethics of care being a potentially emancipatory and hopeful arena within “the mean times” (Cloke, May, and Williams 2020). All the participants discussed this aspect of fitting their volunteering into existing life commitments, whether that be paid work or other informal caring responsibilities, and situated their volunteering within their lifecourse stage. For example, one participant’s beginning narrative plotted their progression from being a busy head teacher into a retired volunteer at a soup kitchen.

The “caringscapes” framework can be useful here in considering the ways participants reflect on and/or anticipate “how informal caring relationships link to other actual or anticipated aspects of their lives including other caring relationships” (Bowlby 2012, 2112). Looking across the participants’ narratives, it is evident that volunteers bring myriad values and ideological orientations to motivate their volunteering and ascribe different meanings to this caring-work. These social, relational, ethical and temporal aspects are crucial in understanding these mobile practices.

However the “caringscapes” propositions do not sufficiently address mobilities or help us understand how these informal care aspects shape and are shaped by the multiple mobilities and mobility practices that comprise this type of work. The mobile dimension figures in how volunteers integrate this caring-work with their personal lives and use for other caring purposes. As can be seen in Rosa’s use of the mobile volunteering in her children’s education, there is a “peripatetic” enabling relationship between the movement and the multiple caring-work tasks she is undertaking. Thus “caringscapes” can help us understand these “caring” dimensions, but cannot account for its intersections with mobilities, which requires further development.

5.3. Work: emotional & physical labour

The dynamics and conditions of mobility and care that have been so far discussed impact significantly on the ways that volunteers experience this form of work. There are parallels with Smith and Hall (2016a) case of professional outreach in the ways movement and labour are combined in the mobility practice of “searching”. Volunteers must similarly search out and find people living on the streets who are transient and highly mobile. This qualitative study similarly serves to reveal “the organisation of (im)mobilities of bodies, materials, objects, ideas and goods, which produce the contours of urban space and place” (Smith and Hall 2016b, 504). Similarities also extend to other realms of mobile professional care, such as social work’s “agile” work practices and use of transitional spaces to do vital emotion work (Ferguson 2016, 197–8). Yet within the uneven spaces of homelessness and welfare provision, this form of voluntary outreach is marginal to professional state-commissioned mobile teams, with voluntary projects operating on the peripheries of services with minimal resources and infrastructure. The notion of “carescapes” to denote the policies, services and infrastructures that make up the care ecology can help us attend to these wider work conditions (Bowlby and McKie 2019, 534). “Carescapes” enhances the conception of mobile caring-work in attending to the connections and disconnections between different types of informal and formal work. Crucially, however, the multiple mobilities that constitute these projects need to be incorporated into analysis, but they are not currently sufficiently addressed in the care ecology framework.

The research findings reveal how these multiple mobilities and mobility practices serve to increase the physical labour required from volunteers. For example, two outreach volunteers described the physical challenges of taking donations of clothes, hot water bottles and hot drinks out to people on foot between the two of them. Both volunteers have chronic health conditions, which increases the physical labour of these tasks. Yet rather than dwell on this hardship, the volunteers make light and joke about their set up. The following exchange is taken from a story they told of meeting another group of volunteers giving out donations. The narrative shows how these volunteers closely identify with the people they are supporting, being mistaken by other projects as homeless themselves:

Marie: With all our old lady shopping trolleys. [laughter]

Laura: It’s like they were telling us about the shelters, and Marie was like “yeah I know, that’s what we’re doing” [laughter]. And they were like “yeah but this shelter and this shelter”. “Yeah we know, but we’re doing outreach” [laughter]

Marie: Yea offered a cup of tea by the same outreach.

Laura: Do you remember, they offered? Were they from the Church? Yeah. And we were like, would you like a hot chocolate? Well I’ve got a ridiculously bright pink trolley, so that like just stands out. But then we’ve also just got so many bags, which must look like we’re homeless ourselves, cos we’ve got a lot of stuff.

In their street encounter narratives, Marie and Laura distinguish themselves from other projects and situate their caring-work in relation to the “carescape”. Throughout their stories, they take pride in their project being “grassroots” and run by volunteers that have direct experience of homelessness, either personally or through family members. Other project’s participants also narrated stories that described their interactions with the wider homelessness service provision, frequently reflecting on the best approaches to caring-work and tensions arising between different organisational approaches.

In Marie and Laura’s narrative, they move from describing these physical challenges to talking about the emotional labour that arises from encountering people who are sick and dying on the streets. Their narrative reveals how the specific conditions of this mobile caring-work creates particular forms of emotional and physical labour. Volunteers must negotiate the survival practices of homelessness in urban public space, which can bring moments of heart-break and shock.

The emotional challenges that stem from these negotiations are evident across participant narratives. For example, in the following section, Xia describes the uncomfortable feelings stemming from approaching a stranger on the street, but how this must be overcome and eventually becomes part of the volunteering practices:

Xia: Like if you see someone like sitting on the street, crying or maybe looking distressed or something, a lot of people just be like, super uncomfortable, and be like, “Ohh do I do this?” Cos it’s a boundary thing. It’s like, you don’t know where the boundary is whether they want that interaction, or not. But I sort of think, at the end of the day, it’s like offering that gently, with very much knowing a “no” is possible, is always going to be better than not. And someone could really need that.

Xia’s description of overcoming these boundaries reveals the many spatialities and temporalities of this caring-work (Bowlby and McKie 2019, 533). In particular, it suggests that the mobility practice of “searching” (Smith and Hall 2016a, 2016b) encompasses other spatial practices that are potentially counter to dominant usages of public space.

Participant narratives reveal many examples of the continual negotiations of these conflicts over the usage of public space. The care ethics that participants indicated in their narratives help volunteers navigate these tensions, showing the dynamic interaction between a volunteer’s caring practices and the conditions they are traversing. One volunteer, Ali, told a story about intervening in an incident in which two people were urinating on a homeless person. Ali concludes their story by focusing on the appreciation shown by this person to the volunteers who came to their aid. He resolves the narrative by asserting that kindness will always overcome cruelty and using it as evidence of the widespread compassion within British society:

Ali: But you don’t see it that every day. That’s the great thing, that’s a great thing about this. I mean, I’ve seen, you know, go to other countries, they’re just, beat him and hurt him, and God knows what. But here, people are compassionate. And I think we have such a great thing here. You see, that little compassionate can be a great compassionate. You get me?

This story is therefore used by Ali to express his commitment to humanitarian approaches and associated identity-building as an aid worker. Such narratives demonstrate the emotional labour and ethical sensibilities that arises from the particular mobile and care conditions of this voluntary work. These emotional aspects are significant and can be best understood through a relational approach, which is offered by the care ecology framework. Nevertheless, in order to centre the multiple mobilities and mobile practices that constitute these work practices, a conceptualisation of mobile caring-work is needed that attends to the intersection of mobilities, care and work.

6. Conclusion

Overall, this article has argued that voluntary outdoor homelessness projects can be best understood as mobile caring-work. This is a distinct form of mobile work that is under-researched but deserving of further academic attention. The few studies (Johnsen, Cloke, and May 2005; May and Cloke 2014; Cloke, Johnsen, and May 2010) that have looked at street kitchens have focused on their spatial and temporal dimensions and how these spaces of care contribute to different readings of urban injustices and debates over responses to homelessness. The work of Smith and Hall (2016a, 2016b) on professional outreach demonstrates how significant outreach mobility practices are to understanding the combinations of movement and work. A mobilities turn in social work research also evidences the importance of interrogating care work “on the move” in wider welfare provision. However, Smith and Hall’s movement/work typology is limited when applied to volunteer outreach and related forms of longstanding informal care provided to people living on the streets. This phenomenon therefore requires a more relational understanding of care, for which this article draws on Bowlby and McKie (2019) care ecology framework, to develop a new conceptualisation that weaves together the realms of mobility, care and work. This article takes a relational, dynamic and multi-scalar approach in offering mobile caring-work as a set of distinct practices and conditions.

Mobile caring-work is comprised of multiple mobilities and different mobility practices whereby the relationship between work and movement is significant. Movement is utilised in the pursuit of work activities to the extent that it becomes an important ingredient in the work practices. In this case, the caring-work is informal and unpaid which increases the physical and emotional labour experienced. The wider context of social networks, policies, services, infrastructures and resources provides the dynamic conditions that shape mobile caring-work practices. Experience of this form of work can be conceived as a mobile chapter or passage in an individual’s life-course and caring journey, which encompasses many temporalities, spatialities and im/mobilities.

This conceptualisation of mobile caring-work is offered in the hope of contributing new understandings to what happens when work and care go on the move. These propositions offer a way of bringing together the pivotal role of movement in the multi-dimensional landscape of care and work. This landscape is significantly changing under the global pandemic with existing community distribution networks and soup kitchens being stretched (Parry, 2021) but also new forms of mutual aid taking shape (Bullmore, 2021). Mobile caring-work takes on new meanings and possible applications in this context of fluctuating restricted movements that demands adaptable forms of caring relations. New lines of inquiry are therefore opened up, beginning in the first instance with identifying other empirical cases that can be considered mobile caring-work and further research examining the nature of the care exchange, namely the experiences and practices of receiving care on the move.

Acknowledgments

I give thanks first and foremost to the volunteers who took part in this research and continue to provide support to people on the streets. I would like to thank my supervisors for their ongoing guidance and support: Lesley Murray, Daniel Burdsey and Sarah Leaney. I also thank Athina Vlachantoni for her support during this research, Shahnaz Biggs for her input and Carl Walker and Mary Darking for inspiration to keep researching care-fully with local community groups. Finally thank you to my reviewers for their suggestions in strengthening this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership Scholarship, funded by the Economic & Social Research Council.

Notes

1. Participants chose their own pseudonyms for anonymity.