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Why we shouldn’t worry about LEPS

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As someone who remembers the Small Firms Service, Manpower Services Commission, The Training Agency, TECS, Business Links and the establishment of RDAs, I refuse to be overly exercised by the development of Local Economic Partnerships.

We know that they will have significantly reduced budgets.  We know that they will be led by some concoction of ‘private’ and ‘public’ sector with a seasoning of social enterprise for good measure.

We can be relatively sure that they will have considerable bureaucratic overheads – necessary to ensure openness, accountability and probity and that they will tie themselves up in the same debates about economic development policy that have raged with sterility for decades; picking winners, encouraging start-ups, clusters, sectors, creative classes, beautification, yada, yada, yada.

We know that they will be very heavily influenced by professions allied to construction and engineering. Planners, place-makers, architects, developers who can throw big money at making sure they retain the lion’s share of public spending even as the spending pie shrinks.  One just needs to look at the key ‘Partners’of the currentRegeneration and Renewal National Summit to see the evidence.

We can also be sure that they will embrace a strategic, top down approach to economic development that pretends that economic development happens in a bubble that is disconnected from cultural and social development.  No doubt these too will get their own shrivelled strategic bodies.  The paradigm of economic growth as an unmitigated good will hold sway in the strange world of economic development.  Ideas of sustainability and steady state will not be seriously entertained (unless of course they paradoxically provide opportunities for growth).  Visions will be developed by the anointed, and most of us will see the world of economic development at best, ‘through a glass darkly’.

We must choose our engagements with the strategists, and the terms of our engagement very carefully.  We are currently paying the price for allowing our strategies to be far too dependent on continued and unsustainable state funding.  We must make sure that we don’t give the state such power and control over our futures again.  Over-reliance on the state has proven to be just ‘bad strategy’  We must not sell ourselves to the funders while we call ourselves community development workers – unless they fully embrace the principles of community led regeneration – whether they are convenient to the politicians and bureaucrats or not.

Facilitation is unlikely to get a look in.  Whole person approaches will be ignored (economic development will continue to speak to homo econimicus), co-creation is as close as we will get to responsiveness and bottom-up. And let’s be clear, co-creation as conceived by the state is nowhere near responsive and bottom up.  It still asks ‘how do we engage people in the agenda of the state’ and not ‘how do we engage the state in the agendas of the people’.  For me this is the ultimate deceit that lies at the heart of ‘Big Society’ and that needs to be carefully and thoroughly outed.

We can also be sure that those who actually live in the communities and give their time and skills to help make things better will be expected to do so for free as budgets for community development shrink and are increasingly targeted at problems (obesity, crime, drugs etc) that see humans as essentially degenerate instead of at the development of aspiration, hopes and dreams which see people as essentially good and progressive.

So I refuse to be exercised.  LEPs will evolve.  They will be largely ineffective in spite of the fact that they will be stuffed to the ginnels with good, committed, well meaning people.  And in a decade they will evolve again.  The sign-makers, website developers and letterhead printers will rub their hands with glee.

I will put my energies into supporting bottom up, responsive approaches that honour peoples humanity, that build social capital, that value the contributions of all, regardless of sector, ambition or potential.  And I will keep looking for genuinely innovative approaches to the thorny question of progress?

In practice this means helping others to develop initiatives like Bettkultcha, Cultural Conversations, TEDx Leeds etc (we are blessed with a resurgence of such civic endeavour in Leeds) that holds real promise to nurture something very exciting.

But I will also endeavour to provide some contributions of my own.  For me this means trying to develop Progress School and Innovation Lab as places to foster radical personal and organisational transformation.

And just perhaps we might be able to persuade those in authority to trust us, to support us, to help us.

Who knows?

Making Social Marketing Work – Leeds July 29th

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This practical workshop will introduce you to the theory and practice of social marketing – how to use marketing techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals designed to lead to social good.

Whether you are trying to promote healthy lifestyles, encourage people back into work or to start a business, get back into education, or engage in a campaign, an understanding of social marketing can help you to:

  • find new people who want to work on your agenda
  • support them on their journey to make real change happen
  • get the right people at the right events at the right time

What Will You Learn?

You will learn how to:

  • Develop marketing collateral (leaflets, posters and websites) that might just work
  • Use the media effectively – PR and role models that work
  • Build ‘Word of Mouth’ strategies and referral networks
  • Work with ‘gatekeepers’ to ‘gain entry‘
  • Manage introductions in the community

The day will involve some theory and explore a number of examples of good and not so good social marketing campaigns.  Participants will have the opportunity to apply what they learn to a real campaign of their own.

Agenda

What is social marketing and how can I use it?

What behaviours are we trying to promote?

Using Segmentation to Increase Impact

Eating an Elephant – bite sized chunks….

Social Marketing Tools – with a focus on emerging social media (twitter, facebook, wikis etc)

The Role of Traditional Marketing and PR

Developing a Social Marketing Campaign (making a start)

Marketing through Relationships and Networks

Find out more and book your space – http://socialmarketingworks.eventbrite.com

The Great Reset – Lessons for Leeds?

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The most successful examples…result not from top-down policies imposed by local governments but from organic, bottom-up, community based efforts.  While…government and business leaders pressed for big government solutions – new stadiums and convention centres – the city’s real turnaround was driven by community groups and citizen-led initiatives.  Community groups, local foundations and non-profits – not city hall or business led economic development groups – drove…transformation, playing a key role in stabilising and strengthening neighbourhoods…Many of…(the) best neighbourhoods…are ones that were somehow spared from the wrath of urban renewal…

Richard Florida – The Great Reset

Talking about the transformation of Pittsburgh.

It is not about getting citizen led groups to do the work of the state – which seems to be the idea behind BIG Society – but about engaging the state in the work of the citizens.  Making a transition as far as possible from authority towards enabler.

This requires community development workers to not be ‘bought’ by the state to foist policy on neighbourhoods.  To recognise that their role is to facilitate enterprising communities and not to be an extension of the state with a smiling face.

Sounds reasonable?  The get involved with Progress School and/or Innovation Lab.

Transformation at Tower Works – Grass Roots or Astroturf?

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Seems ironic that I should pick up on this on a day when I have been quoting Barack Obama on real change being a grass-roots phenomena.

It seems that someone has decided that the ‘regeneration’ that is underway at Tower Works in Leeds needs to catch the eye a little more.  So why not install a grass mosaic spelling out TRANSFORM so as to be visible from the top of nearby local landmark the Candle Building.  Why not indeed?  Such metaphorical power…..

I am surprised that they did not use Astroturf.  At least it has no pretence at being grass-roots and can be laid quite happily on concrete.  The grass-roots here are destined to whither.

Regeneration is not about buildings and developers.  It is about people, passion, skills and aspirations.  It is about community, networks and creativity.  In s

Living the ‘Vida Loca’ in Leeds?

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Interesting things have been happening down at Granary Wharf in Leeds over the last few years.  It is a part of town I did know well. Some 25 years ago, when I was doing my Certificate in Education, I surveyed the site for its field trip and educational potential for teaching geography, history, science, environmental studies, design and biology.

But these days the area is hosting a very different crowd to my Fifth Formers with clipboards and quadrants.

With the development of City Inn, Candle House and a car park under the once vibrant dark arches the area is becoming another beautified waterfront development where those with access to cash can choose whether to invest or spend.  Both City Inn and Candle House offer spectacular views and the latter at least is a genuinely interesting piece of architecture (not that I am qualified to comment beyond my own personal aesthetic).

Once the enormous ‘wem‘ that is the Southern Entrance to Leeds Station gets built I am sure that we will have yet another riverside development to be proud of.  The perfect infrastructure in which the magical process of regeneration can happen.  New life breathed into a barren wasteland by a consortium of socially aware developers, architects and planners with low carbon credentials and a commitment to community consultation.

What is not to like?

Let’s assume that things go well.  Retail spaces around the dark arches fill (once again) with quirky, well capitalised, independent retail and hospitality businesses.  The ticket barriers in the new southern entrance are a delight to use and lead to a train system that is clean, efficient and reliable.  The new apartment blocks fill up with resident’s who sustain sufficient incomes to pay their rents and mortgages. Dozens of jobs are created for residents of the ‘southern rim’ with ‘high grade concierge’ and similar skills. Taxes are paid and redistributed.  Surely everyone is a winner?  And no doubt this development will be presented as phenomenal example of regeneration in Leeds at MIPIM further fuelling the cycle of regeneration.

But even in this optimistic scenario who benefits from the development of the city?  Who makes money?  Who has access to opportunities to broaden their capabilities and develop successful careers?  Who gets to play in the new waterside development? And who doesn’t?

Perhaps this video offers some clues?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee-g-8J0NOE]

‘at least they’re honest about their vision of Leeds, and the intended beneficiaries’

Remarkable the control software gives over building surfaces, colours and textures yet public places are only populated (apparently) by shiny, happy and skinny Caucasians.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am not anti development. Nor am I anti business.  And some of my best friends are architects, planners and property developers.  They are ‘good’ people, using their talents to the best of their abilities to build a better city. Just like most of us.  They play an important role.

But I do see a pattern of investment in regeneration that prioritises physical development and pursues shortcuts to increased GDP based on the importation of ‘talent’ rather than a genuinely inclusive investment in ‘proper’ education.  For me regeneration starts between the ears of the people who live in a community.  Not between the ears of a well meaning planner.  And it is not about engaging locals in the visions of the anointed – but rather finding ways to engage the anointed in the many, disparate and personal visions of local people.

(I know we are investing lots in re-developing our schools.  We now have academies in yet more new buildings.  We are getting more young people than ever 5 grades A-C that educationalists and politicians promise will provide some kind of magic key to the kingdom. But our schools and colleges continue to fail large swathes of the community.)

I don’t know what gets me more fired up – watching Sports Relief portray as some kind of failure of morality and civilisation children in developing countries both going to work and school, or the fact that we, here in the UK, now have millions of people NOT in education, training or employment.  Physician heal thyself.  It’s not as if we have magic solutions to export!

I do think we have got the balance of our regeneration investments badly wrong.

That we rely too much on ‘placemakers’ and imported talent to make our city work.  That we spend too much on strategic planning and not enough on responding to the real barriers that prevent people from developing their capabilities.  We may not be Mother Glasgow but perhaps we too are clipping wings?

In the second city of the Empire
Mother Glasgow watches all her weans
Trying hard to feed her little starlings
Unconsciously she clips their little wings
…
Among the flightless birds and sightless starlings
Father Glasgow knows his starlings well
He wont make his own way up to heaven
By waltzing all his charges in to hell
Perhaps it is time for a more inclusive, person centred and responsive approach to development.  Where development is not so tightly wedded to GDP but instead to a freedom to develop our capabilities.  To develop our abilities to live the kinds of lives that we want to lead.
Or perhaps we should just keep on ‘living the vida loca’ and hoping  that we can make it last.