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Community Anchors: Regeneration Cause or Effect?

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Community Anchors are independent, community-led organisations. They are at the heart of their communities, physically and psychologically.  They are able to respond in a holistic way to local problems and challenges, by giving local people support to act.

Community Anchors come in many different shapes, forms and structures but they all share this basic purpose of animating and co-ordinating progress.  You can read more about them here and here.

It seems that there is a high correlation between communities that experience successful regeneration and the development of effective Anchor Organisations.

This has led many regeneration funders to seek to establish Anchor Organisations in ‘failing’ communities in the belief that they can weave their magic and turn things around.  And perhaps they can.

But I have a slight concern.  I would hypothesise that Anchor Organisations emerge from communities that are already working actively at their own regeneration.  They are a natural evolution as independent people and community organisations begin to reach out to each other in the realisation that only through association can they become more effective in their work.

Their success depends to a very large extent on the timing being right and incumbent diverse and fragmented community groups recognising that the development of a successful Anchor Organisation is in their best interest.  This realisation and consensus can take many years to accrue.

If this hypothesis is correct then we should expect Anchor Organisations that have been artificially seeded by external funders to find it tough going.   The local incumbents may not yet have reached the limits of their own development.  They may not yet see the need for the anchor.  They may see it as yet another project foisted on them by funders by more money with sense.

Instead of acting as midwifes to the birth of a wonderful new baby, regeneration professionals then end up putting a premature and often unwanted delivery into some very expensive intensive care – if the baby gets born at all.

I have had the privilege of working with some highly successful Anchor Organisations – which emerged from local people and groups in response to local circumstances and opportunities.  I have also witnessed Anchor Organisations struggle to get off the ground – and most of these seem to have been primarily ‘funding’ and ‘policy’ driven, conceived by outsiders as an appropriate ‘strategic’ response to the needs of local communities.

If my hypothesis is right then Anchor Organisations are a naturally emergent property of communities that are already on the up.  They are an effect of regeneration rather than a cause.

And instead of trying to seed them in communities where they perceive there is a need, funders should focus on facilitating local groups until such time as they decide that the time is right for an Anchor Organisation to emerge.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists,

when his work is done,

his aim fulfilled,

they will say: we did it ourselves.

Lao Tzu

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My Favourite Enterprise Podcast…ever

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While many businesses pay lip service to the idea of environmentally responsible practices, Patagonia has defined itself by “inspiring and implementing solutions to the environmental crisis,” says Chouinard.

The company has pledged that by 2010, it will to make all of its clothing from recycled and recyclable materials. Chouinard says that he would exit the clothing business altogether rather than compromise his standards.

Patagonia takes many steps to control its growth, such as drastically limiting its catalog distribution and not taking the company public in an IPO.

Chouinard even encourages his customers to buy less and focus on their needs rather than their wants. He insists that every time Patagonia invests in the environment, he sees an increase in the company’s bottom line.

Check out the full podcast here it is well worth the effort.

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Surrealism is Alive and Well and Living in Leeds

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I had an eventful afternoon yesterday.  In order to vote I had to pop into electoral services in the Town Hall as my postal vote had failed to materialise.  A polite, efficient, helpful and very professional service. Well done to the electoral services team at the council.

Vote registered I then visited a fantastic project in Hunslet called Involve led by Kris Clayden.  Based in the old Salvation Army building – which is a bit of a 1970s concrete carbuncle – Kris and his team provide a service to young people from South Leeds who have been permanently excluded from school.

Delivered on a shoe string, through a cocktail of short term funding, working with some of the most challenging young people in Leeds, based in a building that is far from fit for purpose but doing an important job with passion and vigour.  It took me back to my time of working with children in residential care.  You learn a lot in these environments.

My next engagement was for the launch of the Leeds City Workshop.  This is the product of a collaboration between Leeds City Council and one of the major property developers in the city to provide a physical space where planners can engage with communities and developers to discuss plans for the physical regeneration of the city.

The Leeds City Workshop occupies a part of the Wellington Street Marketing Centre where the city developers promote their latest residential, retail and industrial plans to well-heeled entrepreneurs and investors.

On arrival we were served with wine and lime and lemongrass cordial while a string quartet played Bach.  The canapes reflected the tough times in the city – mini shepherds pies, chicken kebabs, crab cakes and and bruschetta.  The patio was hardly sun drenched, but the re-assuring crunch of astroturf underfoot and the views across the city were sublime.

One of the proerty developers who had kindly provided the workshop space, in their Marketing Suite, (three enormous shipping containers sliced, diced and welded together) opened the speeches.  He talked of tough times, but work on physical development of the city goes on.  He  told us how they work all over the country – but no-where else is doing city place shaping work quite as well as Leeds.  Then a council official talking about the significant progress that has been made on the physical development of the city.  How, where development projects are put on hold, they are working hard with developers to put interesting temporary projects in place – seeding lawns, marking out football pitches etc.  How work on the arena will start soon and be completed in 2012.  There si only one small problem – we ‘just’ need a planning permission.  Luckily the head of planning  permissions in the city was in the room – so I am sure that will not be a major problem.

All very impressive.

Then downstairs to see the actual workshop where the planning conversations are taking place.  Without doubt they have created an impressive space.  A square table for 22 people surrounded by high walls draped with impressive and colourful plans of the city.  Acoustics professionally engineered and a state of the art audio visual system showing a film of the future Leeds with the city’s golden owl acting as winged guide from one planning triumph to the next.

This workshop is to be the base for John Thorp, the City Architect and his team to provide them with a more conducive environment for planning than the mundane facilities provided by the council.   Leeds city planners  co-located with and, in part, resourced by the developers – it reminded me of Our Friends in the North.

John seemed much taken by some ‘new’ technology that he heard about.  Some kind of graphics tablets that meant he could draw images directly onto the audio visual system.  No more climbing up ladders balancing felt tip pens and tippex!  Try the Wacom Cintiq John I think you might love it.

The contrast between these two experiences was surreal.  Kris in his 1970s carbuncle in Hunslet and John and the developers in their architect designed and styled acoustically engineered palace in the city with Bach and canapes.

One couldn’t help but feel that somewhere we had not quite the balance right between investing in local people and investing in physical infrastructure.

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The Information Problem…

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Todd Hannula has blogged about the possibility of an open source information platform for social entrepreneurs.  He posits that such a platform might help more social entrepreneurs get the information that they need at the right time.  Sounds like the kind of idea that the public purse might get interested in investing in.

But does it stack up?

  • Is the Internet not an open source information platform?
  • Is it possible to provide any more information within a few clicks?
  • Is the supply side of business support not already rammed full to the gunnels with information and workshops?

I think that the answer to the information question lies in an exploration of the ‘demand side’  for information rather than thinking about how we can develop the information ‘supply side’.

If entrepreneurs REALLY want to succeed (rather than look and feel good for a while) they should get the right team in place before they start.  A team that is as obsessed about financial management and marketing and sales as it is about saving the world.  With a balanced team seeking information and ‘better practice’ in each of these domains they are much less likely to fail as a business and the demand side of the information market place will be more robust.

So let’s have less encouragement to individual entrepreneurs to change the world single handed and more encouragement to them to build powerful and balanced teams.

Todd suggests that the realisation for most social entrepreneurs that they are ‘not very good’ at business comes ‘just too late’.  This is an unpalatable (and therefore largely unspoken) truth for nearly all entrepreneurs – social or otherwise.

They nearly all get a massive shock at some point.

  • They run out of money.
  • Customers get angry.
  • Products and services don’t work as well as was planned.

The question is how to respond?

  • Are they prepared for the shock?
  • Did they know it was likely to come along?
  • Do they have the networks and resources to work through the shock and to learn from it?
  • Or do they bail out thinking – ‘I am not cut out for this’?

How do ‘support agencies’ make sure that they are ready to face these traumas when they almost inevitably come?

Because the painful traumas of business start-up might discourage some people from starting, they are often swept under the carpet.

We might use some euphemism, like ‘You need to do a little more work on your business plan’, but we rarely help the client to explore the unvarnished truth; No matter how much planning they do they will never be ready.  There will be nasty and uncomfortable surprises.  It is the ability to deal with these shocks and their ramifications that will separate the entrepreneurs from the wannabes.

I choose to consistently focus clients on the possible downsides of their business as much as on the upsides.  I usually beg them to find some less risky way of following their dream other than starting their own business.  I make them explore the things that might go wrong – and of the devastating impact that they could have on finances, relationships and reputations.

People say to me ‘Mike, they will never start a business if you keep pointing out all of the downsides…’

Well I make no apologies.

If someone is put off starting a business by a good exploration of the possible downsides then they are probably making exactly the right decision.

It is not more businesses that we need, but better businesses.  Businesses that have a pragmatic understanding of the risks that they face (bankruptcy, debt, damaged relationships etc) – and are still prepared to take them.  Businesses whose antennae are tuned to both problems and opportunities.  You can’t stop a business like this from avidly consuming information.  They seek it out.  They devour it.  Even if it is hard to find or ambiguous.

Instead we often find ourselves trying to resource dozens of ‘wannabe’ hopefuls buoyed up by a raft of interventions to promote enterprise on a sea of support agencies whose criteria for success is based on counting start-ups rather than survival rates.  And then we have to find ways to spoon feed them information like medicine that might keep their business off the rocks – and we wonder if there is not some better way of shaping the information supply side.

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Why Doesn’t Motivation Work?

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This is a question I was asked recently by someone in local government.  ‘How come some people travel two thousand miles in search of a job, while others won’t even get on a bus?’

It is a question that deserves consideration – and I believe that the answer lies in both hope and fear.

With hope, travel (both geographical and psychological) is a necessity.  Where there is hope we are driven to pursue it.  Without hope then even the smallest step towards self improvement might not be taken.  The person that travels two thousand miles does so in hope.  The hope that they will find their share of the wealth and that they will be able to alleviate conditions at home by sending some of this wealth back.

The person that won’t get on the bus is in the true sense of the word hopeless in this area of their lives.  What IS the point of another trip to the job centre or the college that will just end up in yet another failure?  It is hard to believe that the institutions that are there to help can be of any help at all.  It is an example of what the psychologists call Learned Helplessness.

The second part of the equation is fear.  How will my life unfold if I don’t take personal responsibility for changing things?  Almost certainly the person prepared to travel thousands of miles is doing so to escape literally fearful conditions at home.  Maybe war or violent crime.  Maybe the type of crushing poverty that leaves you without decent housing and with no hope for improvement at home.  Escape is perceived as an urgent priority, literally life and death.

But what about the person that won’t get on the bus?  How will their life unfold as a consequence?  Well they will remain just like a significant proportion of their peers – which they will find comforting.  As a group they can collectively blame others for their condition.  They can claim benefits and perhaps do a bit of work on the side.  And there is certainly ‘excitement’ to be had – everything from Jeremy Kyle through Diamond White to adrenaline pumping crime.  In the short term life is not so bad.  The longer term consequences maybe less than optimal – but people can always defer worrying about the future. As the Office of Science and Technology puts it “Evidence shows that people may be biased towards seeking short-term rewards at the expense of greater long-term benefits.”

So the need is to offer real hope and a realistic assessment of the long term consequences of not getting on the bus.  It is to help people start to explore their ‘enterprising soul’.  And this is not about a half day ‘business start-up’ workshop.

The tragically ironic thing about the people that travel two thousand miles?  For many, within a few months of arriving, a forced engagement with depressing ESOL classes and tussles with bureaucracy soon lead to the same sense of learned helplessness that means they too will no longer get on a bus.

You see, the problem is that motivation always works – perfectly.

It is ‘the system’ that let us down.

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