Ms Sarah McGillivary:

The people who access our services are incredibly resilient. If I were faced with the circumstances of sleeping on the street at night with a sleeping bag and not being able to manage the situation, I would not survive it. Resilience has been around for a very long time but it is a term that we use more commonly now. Sometimes we latch onto these words and they lose all meaning. I can only speak for myself and the people I have worked with. The level of resilience shown by some of the people I have come across through work is absolutely incredible. It is certainly not something to be dismissed or minimised or anything like that. I have often tried to put myself in their situation and ask whether I would survive that; probably not. That is down to exposure in childhood. That is down to different developmental stages that we might not necessarily have met throughout adolescent periods. There are many contributing factors to that. It is important to recognise that.