The subject of material needs and a flexible budget is very fraught because it deals directly with money and the powerful emotions that it evokes. In 2002, in the early days of the student programme Casework for Social Change, we dealt with a woman who was thought to be difficult to reach. Nevertheless, she established a close relationship with the student, and shared her difficulties with her. There was one aspect of her life that she did not share: her material difficulties – she never asked for help in this regard. It took a year and a half before she dared to ask for help with food when the holidays came. We viewed her request as an expression of her growing ability to reveal her vulnerability, to trust and to accept help. However, there was no formal channel at the social services department for presenting requests for financial aid for food and there was no designated budget for it. Service users who needed this kind of help were referred to the soup kitchen that operated in the town. The woman, who until then had hidden her distress, did not want to go to the soup kitchen. Together with her, we wrote a letter of special request to the director of the social services department. The request was refused. Three reasons were given: giving material help is not professional work; help with food encourages dependence in the service users; and giving help with food once will open a Pandora's box of similar requests that the social services department will be unable to meet.

We had answers to each of these claims: giving material help is both humane and professional; the request for help with food is the expression of a need and is not dependence, and so much more so in the present case of this woman, who had never asked for anything; and if answering the request creates an opening for similar requests, it will be an important lesson that we should be willing to learn about people's needs. However, our reply did not convince the head of the department.

This case made it clear that as long as there is no structural change that enables people to make ends meet, if we wanted to stand by service users, we needed to equip ourselves with a flexible budget that would allow us to respond to urgent material needs immediately.