After some time of acquaintance with the PAP, social workers often confront me with some questions: why do people in poverty not work? How can their budgetary priorities be changed? What explanation do we have for the difference between those who manage to extricate themselves from poverty and those who do not? What is the difference between providing fish to people in poverty and teaching them to fish? Other people tell me that they are confronted by similar questions when arguing in favour of people in poverty with friends or family. This chapter collects the questions that are frequently raised and answers them.

Some people say that an intervention programme should be based on providing hooks and not fish, because fish provide only a temporary answer whereas hooks provide tools for ongoing change. Is this so?

Social workers like to distinguish between hooks and fish, and are proud of the hooks that they supply because ‘fish’ reminds them of charity, which is not in line with professional ethics and is not considered professional activity. Moreover, the distinction between ‘hooks’ and ‘fish’ echoes the distinction between psychosocial treatment and material assistance. This distinction has two outcomes: first, it causes material assistance and psychosocial treatment to be seen as two different things; and, second, it confers a higher status on treatment, leaving material assistance as less legitimate. However, in the PAP, material assistance and treatment are much the same: fish can become hooks and hooks can become fish since material and emotional needs are closely interwoven. This is a matter not of conditioning material assistance on emotional treatment, but on seeing them as interconnected. The need for a basic material response carries with it powerful emotions, and the form that the response takes should take account of the material and the emotional needs together. It is clear to us that when a mother breastfeeds her baby, she is providing the baby with an answer to both a material and an emotional need at the same time. She feeds the baby's stomach and heart.