Sarit's story, taken from my PhD dissertation, was published in a Hebrew book entitled Women in poverty: Life stories: Gender, pain, resistance in 2006. Over the years, the story has been widely used for teaching on numerous programmes. Originally, I used it in order to explain the concept of intersectionality and its contribution to the understanding of poor women's lives. Although the intersectional perspective is very important as it stands, in this chapter, I present a new analysis that focuses on Sarit's knowledge and her needs.

Introduction

This chapter is dedicated to the recognition of service users’ knowledge and needs. I will first say a few words about the two concepts and then illustrate them using the story of Sarit, whom I interviewed in the framework of a life-story study.

Knowledge

As a young feminist, I initially preferred the term ‘voice’ to ‘knowledge’. As opposed to the objective, generalised ‘knowledge’ disconnected from the knower, I wanted to celebrate the subjective, personal and located ‘voice’. Later, influenced by British scholars such as Peter Beresford (Beresford and Turner, 1997; Beresford and Wilson, 1998; Beresford et al, 1999; Beresford, 2000, 2001; Beresford and Croft, 2004) and activists such as ATD Fourth World (Tardieu, 1999; Rosenfeld and Tardieu, 2000), I was alerted to the importance of thinking of service users as having knowledge as a central component of social work practice.

One incident with a senior official of the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services also contributed to this shift in my thinking from ‘voice’ to ‘knowledge’. She was a member of a steering committee of a conference that I organised in 2002 in the framework of participatory action research. At this conference, people with direct experience of poverty were asked to present position papers on the education, housing and welfare social systems, written after a long process of discussions with groups of people coping with poverty all over Israel (Krumer-Nevo, 2009). The conference consisted of three sessions, each devoted to discussing one social system. Each of the sessions opened with the position paper, followed by the responses of stakeholders from the relevant field, including representatives of the various governmental ministries.