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Archives for May 2012

Working In Community Development Today…

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Wheeler Hall in Leeds was packed for this conference, as busy as I have ever seen it, which I think reflects a couple of trends:

  • the increasing interest of funders and policy makers in using community development to achieve their policy goals
  • an increasing need to turn to our fellow citizens to tackle the small and big challenges in life as the impotence of governments becomes increasingly apparent.

The conference opened with John Low from JRF providing a retrospective of his 40 year career in community development spanning major periods of work in Halton Moor, then Wrexham and finally Bradford, with an emphasis on highlighting strengths and weaknesses in different approaches to community development and importantly lessons that had been learned.  I am not attempting here to report what the various speakers actually said, as much as the thoughts that they triggered in my head with their words.

  • John was attracted to community development because it seemed to offer a means of rebellion against his middle class up-bringing
  • Work on Halton Moor, good though it was showed how the issues that caused poverty on the estate were not caused by anything on the estate.  The causes of poverty were not the poor or the places they ended up living, but embedded in the wider socio-economic system.  The work on Halton Moor was able to ameliorate some impacts but to substantially address causes
  • The lack of any city-wide approach to community development meant that while Halton Moor enjoyed some successes from the approach other similar communities did not.  How can we ensure that all communities have access to the approach?
  • In Wrexham, John was part of the City Challenge programme one of  series of top down efforts at state funded and sanctioned community development and a series of independently funded projects.
  • Long term support from the National Government, Welsh Assembly and local authority gave 15 years of consistent community development.
  • The organisation that emerged showed signs of aping the bureaucracies and losing its edge.
  • It was always contested with several councillors looking to ‘clip its wings’, I suspect on the grounds that it had the power to tread on their toes.
  • In Bradford the project was city wide, working through a network of neighbourhood management and wardens with devolved budgets
  • They worked on 6 week task and finish cycles getting reported issues addressed quickly.  This worked well for short term fixes but made little impact on longer term issues such as planning and transport
  • It also found it hard to ensure that enough resources made their way into the poorest communities
  • Lessons from this 40 year odyssey were that poverty seems to be ‘intractable’.  Whatever phase of the economic cycle, boom or bust, the same folk stay at the bottom of the social pile and the gap between haves and have not seems to widen
  • Are industry is blighted by collective amnesia – we fail to learn and pass on the lessons to the next wave of workers.  This was highlighted on out own table where we had three generations of community development workers in the BD3 area with a collective memory of the last 2o years.  The most recent incumbents were just in post and had heard little of the past or what had already be tried and learned.  But this may be a good thing…
  • Current government policy in relation to localism does little to encourage community development work, although community organisers might be interesting.

Throughout Johns talk attention was slightly distracted by valiant attempts to get a laptop (first a mac, then a pc) to connect to a data projector so that our next speaker should show us such visual delights as a can of beans and Trotsky pushing a pram, to no avail.

So next up was the indefatigable Nick Beddow of CDX, describing the slides that should have been on the screen…key points for me were….

  • Community development is in danger of losing its identity as a centred practice with agreed principles and values at its core to a set of competing brands in danger of hacking each other to pieces in a race to the bottom to win the funders largesse. (Imagined slides of Heinz 57 varieties and Trotsky pushing a pram full of babies whacking each other with rattles)
  • We must ‘test’ projects that carry the community development label against the principles and values – not everything that claims to be….
  • We have to in some way unite to make the case….(community developers – develop thyself)
  • We have to continue to help ‘authorities’ and ‘funders’ to see communities differently.  They are not problems to be managed, but potentials to be facilitated…..
  • Cuts have left many good people and projects ‘wrecked’…
  • In search of funding, community development has been bought off by the state,hi-jacked.  Much of what is called community development is just the use of community development practices to achieve objectives of the state (smoking cessation, obesity management, breastfeeding, routes into work etc).  Many of us have sacrificed our professional integrity in order to pay the mortgage.  We have allowed ourselves to be locked in the gilded cage that we ask others to have the courage to step out of…..
  • Government approved community organising is a mixed blessing – it may get bums off seats and build activism – we should welcome them in to our worlds and help them to build on what has already been done
  • Training for government approved community organisers is woefully inadequate – they will need further support from local activists
  • The best campaigners are usually not great at running organisations – these are very different skillsets
  • We need to be much cuter about the causes of problems. Start from local issues but then look out… ask, ‘Why are our lives the way they are?’
  • We need to present a much better case for investment in grass roots organising, or, we have to ‘work with what we have got and start from where we are’ and not rely on either the benevolence or self interests of others….

The elephant in the room?  That perhaps there is no such thing as a ‘community’. Just individuals, their associations and aspirations….We claim to be working with communities when in reality we are only ever working with people…

In the next session we seemed to take a bit of a weird turn as we were shown some work on an online toolkit to help learning providers to design and develop learning in response to local needs.  My own prejudices against ‘online’ and ‘toolkits’ no doubt distorted my perceptions a little, along with being subjected to the 4th, 5th and 6th speaker from the front in quick succession in a hot room with poor acoustics…..

It was at this stage that I started to think about the possibilities of a conference of community development practitioners based on community development principles…. open space or knowledge cafe perhaps?

After lunch I got completely submerged in running a session on finding power for community on emerging commissioning structures of the NHS.  Which ended with an analysis that says if yo are really bothered about health inequalities dont worry about commissioning and  health and well-being boards but rather get stuck into the economic development agenda as only through economic development that does not promote economic growth over all other factors (health, well-being, environmental sustainability and so on) will we really start to deal with causes rather than symptoms.  This was exemplified nicely by a public health practitioner struggling to development community development approaches to the reduction of dental caries while Haribo access regional growth fund money to expand production in Wakefield….

After these workshops things descended into a bit of anarchy.

The resounding answer to the question of ‘So what?’….we all shambled out into the sun….

 

Making Progress Through Austerity

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There can be little doubt that these are relatively tough times in the UK, and the minds of many are focussed on how best to make progress when it feels like everything is being cut.

But most of those who are thinking about it are the professionals, who control budgets for the delivery of services or front-line service providers trying to figure out how to stop things getting dangerous as they are stretched further and further.  The assumption is that the job remains to be done, that they are the ones to do it, and they need to figure what they are going to do to make the best adjustments that they can.

But supposing they took a different tack?  Suppose they invited citizens in to explore the challenges that they face and how they might be met, how ordinary citizens might be able to use their resources, time, knowledge, skills and sometimes perhaps cash, to help?

So, for example, we might

  • invite citizens to explore issues around poverty in an area, and what they might be able to do about it.  And we might end up with something like Disrupting Poverty in Leeds
  • ask people to think about what they can do about empty properties in Leeds and end up with something  like Empty Homes
  • ask residents to explore how they can make a city more playful and end up with something like Playful Leeds

What might happen if we asked local people to step up and see what they might be able to do about other issues facing them, their loved ones and their neighbours like:

  • dementia care
  • sports development
  • fostering
  • elderly care
  • crime reduction
  • economic development and supporting start-up businesses
  • educational attainment
  • resettlement of offenders
  • suicide reduction
  • mental health promotion
  • and so on….

Or  we can just bundle these issues up into performance related contracts, attach our 56 pages of terms and conditions, develop it into a multi-million pound contract and pump it through the procurement process?

How might this work out at a local level?

I watched a community psychiatric nurse, working with a third sector service provider, planning home help for an elderly gentleman in the early stages of dementia.  He needed help with a weekly shop, food preparation and encouragement to take his medication.  Essentially they agreed a piece of business for the third sector to provide this basic support, paid for out of public finance.  There was no discussion of the role of neighbours in helping out.  No exploration about whether they might be able to manage a weekly shop between them, or set up a meal rota, or ensure a daily visit.

Now I don’t think this was a rare one-off.  I think our neighbourhoods are awash with opportunities for local people to engage with each other, to help and be helped, and to learn how to make a real difference to the big and small issues that beset us.

I am not saying that we don’t need specialist public services, of course we do.  But we will have to learn to do the basics for ourselves if we want to make progress.

The challenge is how can the funders possibly engage with a civic group that helps it to do something quite remarkable.  Because standard forms of procurement and project management are hardly conducive.

 

More from John Taylor Gatto

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“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us… I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to *prevent* children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

 

“It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does…”

 

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

Improving Employability…

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Businesses reading the future of the labour market and feeding employment needs back in to the education system sounds like a great plan.

Except we haven’t yet found a way to do it.

We do not know enough about how the labour market will shape up with enough ‘notice’ to make any real difference to the educational process at all.

And then there is the small matter that education is not all about employability and entrepreneurship.

Few teachers join the education system as a kind of prep school for employers and have an innate suspicion of employers looking for ready made employment ‘fodder’. The vision for education is larger than slotting people into jobs. It is about the realisation of potential. In the heads of many education professionals the two goals of realising potential and developing employability make uncomfortable bed-fellows.

I have been involved in Vocational Education and Training, both on the policy side and in practice for over 25 years. Not one of those 25 years has gone by without similar diagnoses and prescriptions:

  • A stronger role for employers,
  • more business in the curriculum,
  • better specifications of what it means to be employable (whole careers can be developed in this field),
  • reformations of the careers service,
  • more employability projects, internships, mentoring, and so on.

And while our engagement as ‘business people’ may help us to feel like we are doing our part, and there are plenty of awards to be won, in the grand schemes of things it makes very little difference. 20+ years of ‘improving school standards’ and still employers complaining about the product…..

If we are serious about improving the life chances of our young people we need to radically revise the nature of the education process and system, not bolt on another committee.

We need to encourage young people to know themselves, their passions and and their potential (almost impossible when you are asked to turn interest on and off at the call of the school bell).  Instead of trying to take slivers of the real world into school we should do much, much more to get children into adult company in real work and non-work settings, public, private and third sector. It is not just business that needs to be more involved with schools, but adult society in general.  Personally I think that post 14 most young people should spend more time being educated outside the school than in it.

There is an argument to say that the only thing children really learn at school is how to relate to an authoritarian system, either through compliance or defiance.

If we are serious about the potential of all our young people then tinkering with the curriculum and the occasional day of smoothie making is just not going to cut it. We need to re-think how we prepare young people to play full lives in adult society. And as a nation that is a debate that we not seem to have the political will to hold.