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What would I do with £13.6m?

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£13.6 million is (I believe) the project costs to build a new southern entrance to Leeds station.  It will mean that residents in the Granary wharf developments  and visitors to the Mint Hotel will have several hundred metres shaved off their walk to the station – and they will be able to avoid the recently refurbished (£4.6m) Neville St – which is already leaking again!  It is yet another investment to attract the creative classes to Leeds so that the rest of us can benefit from the trickle down effect of their fabulous wealth creation.  Sounds like a plan?

I would invest in informal education and development by providing 20 street based, person centred coaches, supported by area panels acting as a ‘social brain’ to help coaches when they find clients who are really stuck in their pursuit of progress.

20 coaches would enable us to say that the City of Leeds provides, to anyone who wants it, access to a free, person centred coach to help them make progress on their agenda.  We would develop a culture of active citizenship rather than passive acceptance and blame.

Social panels would be made up of local volunteers, service providers and others with an interest in the area.  Panels would meet monthly to review the coach’s progress and provide support on some of their most intractable cases.

Costs to start and run such a service in the first three years would be in the region of £4m.  Running costs for each subsequent year would be in the region of £1.2m.

I would expect such a service to provide meaningful support to well over 4000 Leeds people per year, providing significant gains in economic and social wellbeing for the majority of them.

It would also enable Leeds to promote itself as something truly unique – the person centred city.

We would gather incredible intelligence from across the city on the real barriers that hold people back, and service provider agencies might learn to respond to these rather than the dictats of the bureaucrats and their targets.

This IS doable.  Very doable.

And after running the service for 5 years I would still have £7 million in the bank!

What would you do with £13.6m to make Leeds a city to be proud of?

Your work is NOT person centred if…

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My inbox is rammed with emails from various agencies of the State claiming that they are developing person centred approaches to service design, delivery and development.

Most are not.

  • If you have set up a service designed to promote behaviour change because you have been told/asked/contracted to do so by a policy maker – then your work is not person centred – it is policy centred
  • If you have developed a service that only works on predefined agendas, with pre-defined ‘solutions’ and services, then your work is not person centred – it is service centred.
  • If your service works on a  premise that service users are in some way broken, faulty or otherwise in need of your modification (smoking cessation, weight management, more entrepreneurial, better CV and qualifications etc) then your work is NOT person centred.
  • If you push your services on people without being invited, using systems of sticks and carrots, and large marketing budgets, to promote engagement – then your work is not person centred – it is, to some degree at least, manipulative and coercive.
  • If you make decisions that prioritise achieving targets over the wellbeing of the people that use your service – then your work is not person centred.  It is target centred.

Person centred work is done:

  • At the invitation of the person – they invite you to work with them – primarily based on their perception of your relevance to them and their agendas.  If people are inviting you to work with them and finding the process helpful then word of mouth will soon spread and you do not need to spend vast sums promoting your service.
  • When the person sets out their agenda and accesses the support that they choose (rather than those that your agency is set up to deliver).  They always have choices and person centred work helps them to recognise these and prioritise amongst them.
  • When interventions let the person decided whether they wish to engage with ‘professional service providers’ and/or with their neighbours and peers – they don’t assume that the solution lies with experts and ‘mainstream’ providers.
  • When the ‘whole’ person is acknowledged and accepted – not when we fragment them according to our service design.  If we have a service that is just designed to promote health, crime reduction or entrepreneurship – then we are not person centred.

This matters enormously.

Once we start to take the ideas and ideals of person centred working seriously we can transform the impact of the so called ‘helping services’.  Instead of a Nanny State we can have an enabling and empowering state.  And people can really start to recognise their own responsibility for helping themselves in a context that is out to help rather than to fix.

Carl Rogers in On Becoming a Person had this to say:

It has gradually been driven home to me that I cannot be of help …by any means of any intellectual or training procedure.  No approach which relies upon knowledge, upon training, upon the acceptance of something that istaught, is of any use.  These approaches are so tempting and direct that I have, in the past, tried a great many of them.  It is possible to explain a person to himself, to prescribe steps that should lead him forward, to train him in knowledge about a more satisfying mode of life.  But such methods are, in my experience, futile and inconsequential.  The most they can accomplish is some temporary change, which soon disappears, leaving the individual more than ever convinced of their inadequacy.

The failure of any such approach through the intellect has forced me to recognise that change appears to come about through experience in a relationship.

…

If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.

Carl Rogers – On Becoming a Person

So my plea to you: If your work is not genuinely person centred – please don’t say that it is. You will just be serving to reduce the chances of genuinely person centred approaches ever getting a fair crack at the whip.

And if you you want to explore how you can adopt genuinely ‘person centred’ approaches then please do get in touch!

Enterprise trumps Entrepreneurship

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I think that enterprise is much more important for our communities than entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship focuses on encouraging people to move into self-employment or to start, or grow their own business. If instead we focus on enterprise we are encouraging people to think about their current situation and how it might be improved. We are helping them to develop strategies that will move them towards their preferred future.
By promoting enterprise in this way we will of course encourage entrepreneurship. As people become more enterprising they may, on occasion, need to start a new business to get them from where they are to their preferred future.
However our default setting should be to dissuade people from starting a business. If we can easily put them off, then it is likely that they would not have the necessary perseverance to make the business work. If they are insistent that only by starting a business can they become the kind of person that they wish to be and create the kind of future that they wish to have, then, and only then, should we roll our sleeves up and do all we can to help them succeed in their entrepreneurial venture, safe in the knowledge that they have the determination and persistence that they will require to succeed.
By adopting a premise that we should persuade as many people as possible not to start a business I believe that we can significantly increase the survival rate of those businesses that do start-up. As people in the community begin to see businesses that are both well thought through and successful taking hold, more and more will begin to believe that starting a business is not almost inevitably going to end in debt and misery.
However, even in the most entrepreneurial communities it is likely that fewer than 10 in 100 people of working age are ever likely to start their own business.  I would contend that of those hundred people every one of them would benefit from learning how to become more enterprising. That is, how to identify their current situation how to recognise what an improvement might look like, and to put in place plans and actions to move in that direction.

This is why I think that enterprise is much more important, as a concept or a philosophy, for our communities than entrepreneurship. If we wish to have more entrepreneurial communities then we must start by first making them more enterprising.

Employment and Skills – 21st Century Stylee?

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  • How do we develop a workforce that is Fit for the Future?
  • How do we tackle the problems of ‘worklessness’?

Important questions that we have sought solutions to for most of my working life.

Broadly speaking we have two possible approaches.  We can  set up a committee of the great and the good, employers, politicians, civil servants from Learning and Skills and Job Centre Plus and we can task them with collating evidence on labour markets, forecasting the future and identifying practical and affordable opportunities to intervene in the systems of education and worklessness that will make sure we develop the workforce that we need, when we need it.  This centralised approach puts power and resources in the hands of an Employment and Skills Board and sets them an impossible task.  It is the Soviet approach to planning tractor production.  It didn’t work for them.  And it hasn’t worked for us.

This approach results in a relatively small number of experiments (pilots) that are later rolled out.  It relies on a committee to accurately ‘read’ the future – to spot opportunities for job creation and then to exert an influence on the ‘production system’ quickly enough to make a positive difference.  This is usually done by setting targets, shifting resources and waiting to see how things unfold.  Strategies are typically set for perhaps half a decade and ‘refreshed’ annually – single-handedly tackling the worklessness agenda by employing a small army of civil servant and academics to collect data and produce reports.

Such boards end up being an ‘interesting’ balance between the voice of the private sector and democratic accountability.  In fact they usually become stylized ‘war zones’ from which the private sector often retreats beaten into submission by public sector and academic working practices.  Certainly the voice of the small business sector is rarely effectively heard.

Board strategies usually find a few ‘keys’ (NVQs, Diplomas, accredited in-house training, apprenticeships) to a few kingdoms (construction, health and beauty, tourism, call centres, and anything prefixed with ‘creative’, ‘digital’, ‘bio’, ‘high tech’ or ‘high growth’).  Aspirations and strengths of people are subordinated to the Board’s ideas about future skills needs and ‘opportunities’.  Conformity is valued over originality.  Learning ‘off piste’ becomes tricky.

Alternatively we could radically de-centralise and localise the process of thinking and planning about ‘fitness for the future’.  Instead of relying on an Employer Skills Boards to ‘make things right’ we could lay down a challenge to people to develop the skills and passions that they need to secure an economically viable future for themselves, to find what, for them, is ‘good work‘.  To  find their own contribution.   We could develop enterprising people supported in enterprising communities.  This would need schools and colleges to focus on the learner and their vision for their future rather than on the curriculum or qualification structures.

Such a decentralised, enterprising approach might:

  • enable many more informed brains to be brought to bear on the problem of fitness for the future – academics, industrialists and civil servants do not have a great track record in ‘workforce development’
  • enable people to explore ways of doing what they can do best – and not sub-optimising to conform with the ‘few keys to the few kingdoms’ identified by ‘The Board’
  • encourage the local community to support people in acquiring the skills, experience and work opportunities that they need to flourish economically and socially
  • support people to find learning experiences that help them to become the person that they want to be – rather than to conform with the ideal established by a fallible and distant Board
  • significantly increase the volume of learning experiments in the labour market and enable word of mouth to make sure that we develop a dynamic, flexible, responsive and self-reliant workforce

Perhaps these are not alternatives.  Perhaps we need to develop both strategic and responsive approaches to employment, skills and worklessness in the 21st century.

One thing I am sure of… establishing yet another Employment and  Skills Board (this time for the Leeds City Region) is unlikely to give us a major step forward.

Leeds Neighbourliness Circular – A Timely Response to the Cold Spell?

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I received this circular email on 13 January through the Leeds Third Sector Mailing Lists after snow had been on the ground for 4 weeks.

Dear All,

Current cold and icy conditions: A call for help to staff, friends and the community

As the cold and icy conditions continue to affect the country, please consider the impact of the wintry conditions and plunging temperatures on those more vulnerable to its impact than yourself. This might include those less able to get out and about, such as elderly neighbours, or people who are living alone or on low incomes, and who may be at risk.

During this sustained cold spell, we would ask that you consider checking that neighbours, friends or family are safe and warm and are not left without vital practical help. The icy conditions may mean that you can help someone by running errands, helping pick up a few provisions when you nip to the shops or simply providing a friendly voice. Ask the basics, such as:

  • Are they keeping warm?
  • Are they eating at least one hot meal a day?
  • Are they keeping as active as possible?
  • Are they keeping in contact with family, friends or other neighbours?
  • Do they need anything or can you help in any way?
  • Is there anyone in your neighbourhood that might need your support?

This year is Leeds ‘Year of the Volunteer’ and there is probably no better start for those who aren’t sure how they might do something for their own community than this.

If you have genuine concerns for a neighbour, relative or friend then please check on them. It might be that they need more than you feel able to provide and they may ask you to contact the appropriate local public services – this may be the Council (eg. Social Care, Housing or Benefits), Voluntary Organisations or Health Services. They are all in the front of the Phone Book and the numbers do change depending on where you live.

Further advice on keeping safe and warm is available online at a variety of locations including such sites as:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/

http://www.helptheaged.org.uk/

http://www.nhs.uk/

The BBC News website is also providing a good summary of advice covering a broad range of related issues relevant to all of us.

Please forward this email onto colleagues, friends and family whether they live in Leeds or not. You might end up helping someone who is desperate and in need of your support.

Although the weather is easing at present, conditions are still treacherous underfoot and who knows what weather the next few months may bring.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best Regards,

XXXXXX

Principal Emergency Planning Officer

Resilience Team

3rd Floor West, Civic Hall

Leeds LS1 1UR

I have my own thoughts on the timeliness, content and assumptions that lie behind such a circular.