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A Future with Heart…?

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Yesterday I went to the official opening of HEART – Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre, an old Primary School, in a vibrant Leeds suburb which has been converted to a high standard by the Headingley Development Trust to provide:

  • 13 meeting rooms of various shapes and sizes
  • Exhibition space which local artists can use to hang their work
  • The Pulse Enterprise Space – shared workspace available on a membership basis
  • A Cafe, run by an independent operator, with 45 indoor covers and outside, off street, seating for 30 more

With, what seems to the untrained eye, excellent green credentials (solar panels, photovoltaic cells, grey water collection etc) the HEART Centre is a great new facility.  And with an eye to keeping costs down, using teams of volunteers wherever possible to run the building (very ‘big society’) and keeping debt as low as possible, the centre, with a lot of hard work, may just pay its way commercially and fulfil its vision – to create a vibrant and welcoming space for a wide range of people to meet, mix, work and play.

Similar in look and feel to both Hillside and Shine, I think there are several reasons why HEART has a chance of succeeding in the pursuit of its vision.

Firstly it is situated in a relatively prosperous part of the city, there are plenty of bright, young, and not so young things, with Mac Books, notebooks and iPads running small businesses who will almost immediately recognise the value of the Pulse Enterprise Space and find the £25 per month entry point both affordable and cost-effective.

It enjoys a wonderful location, with excellent footfall, and provides great spaces which fit well with the expectations and aspirations of many local people.

It really has been a carefully researched labour of love – the culmination of a 5 year project, led by local people, to keep the school in community use.

But perhaps most importantly I think it stands a chance of success because it is the flagship project of an established Development Trust led by local people who generally live in, and share insights into, the community that they exist to serve.  The Trust has developed over several years and those involved have already more than cut their teeth on a number of other projects including the Headingley Farmers Market, a Housing Project, a Community Orchard and even a Pig and Fowl Coop.  So the building is in the hands of a well established group of people committed to Headingley who have shared experiences over a number of years that have developed a real competence in their work.

Some Challenges to Be Met

Doing what pays – rather than doing what is wanted.  On my tour of the centre I was told about a significant demand from local people to have somewhere to practice their art, painting, drawing and so on – a community studio of some type.    However the centre was unable to respond to this demand because it is not commercially viable.  Local people want to develop their passion and skill and come together communally but this desire, at the moment at least cannot be catered for.  Perhaps in future surpluses from commercial activities could be used to cross subsidise such a resource?

We have to understand that financial viability follows on from the development of real craft.  It is not its pre-cursor.  If we could build a community of artists doing outstanding work then the revenues might start to flow.  Building skills and relationships lies at the heart of effective community development.  If we simply provide a home for those who are already economically viable perhaps we are missing a trick?

Displacement – There is a danger that money that gets pulled into the HEART Centre may be money that is pulled away from other local businesses and community groups offering similar services.   Of course competition is a good thing, as long as the playing fields are kept level between the private sector and community groups.  But if community groups are able to leverage volunteers, grants and subsidises not available to the private sector to compete with them then the results will not always be what we might hope.

Further Driving Inequality in the City? – Headingley, although not without the problems that come from a high population density including lots of students and ‘young professionals’, is not a deprived area.  Indeed it is the only part of the ‘Leeds Rim’ not to be amongst the most deprived wards in the country.   So we have a ‘successful community’ learning how to make itself more successful.  Which is to be applauded.

But can we do more to ensure that gaps between the rich and the poor do not further open up in the city?  How do we work successfully in more deprived areas to ensure that they too share in successful economic and social development.  I am not sure that similar buildings in more deprived parts of the city will have the same chance of really making a difference.

Keeping the Doors Open and On Mission

Buildings, especially ones that are open long hours, cost a lot of money.  Centre managers, caretakers, security, insurances, rates, utility bills and servicing debts all add to the overheads.  It is easy for the imperative to generate income to over-ride the social mission of such spaces.  Bills have to be paid.  But sometimes the desire to pay the bills takes the building away from what it was intended to be.  So, instead of being a place for the local community more of it is made available to affluent outsiders.

Hopeful…

But I am hopeful for HEART.  I think it has an excellent chance of doing great work in Headingley.  The host development trust seems well run.  It is embedded in the local community.  It will be hard work, and I suspect not without real scares along the way.  But I have a suspicion that HEART and the Headingley Development Trust will be a part of the Leeds infrastructure for some time to come.  It may be hard to make the managed workspace/meeting room combination work in more deprived areas of the city – but with a bit of tweaking it may be just right for Headingley.

Big Society: Doing it for ourselves; not for them

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One of the mantras of Big Society is that we all need to find time to do more, to give more, to help others more.

Now we can moan about this being poorly timed, or a fig leaf for cuts or whatever.  But this misses the real point.

Which is that, in my book, it completely misunderstands the nature of community, why we need it and how it helps.  It seems to go against the grain of human nature and millenia of evolutionary biology.  Because for most of us, most of the time what motivates us to act is our own self interest.  How we make things better for ourselves and our loved ones.

Most communities don’t develop as expressions of human kindness and generosity.  They don’t build around some desire to ‘place make’. Or around shared public statements of values, intent and belief.  Congregations maybe.  And cults.   But not real, diverse, vibrant communities.  There are plenty of ‘place making consultancies’ that tell us otherwise, and politicians who really value compliance over powerful communities.  But real communities (as opposed to planners confections) develop as a social response to a multiplicity of self-interests being negotiated.

Real communities develop because they help their members to live the kind of lives that they want to lead.  They are a human evolutionary response to attaining a competitive edge. To help us survive and then with good fortune, thrive. Community helps members to explore their potential and develop their lives as they would wish.

So the starting point for the process of community building is not finding more time to help others (laudable though this is) or philanthropy or some demonstration of social responsibility.  It is a thorough understanding of self interest; of the kind of life you wish to lead and the potential that you wish to develop.  As this becomes clear so to will those with whom you have to make common cause, with whom you have to co-operate and perhaps compete.

And as you start to understand that your self interest can only be met in relationship with others, and they understand the same then the development of vibrant and real community, as opposed to some Orwellian fiction that ‘shapes character to that chosen by the electorate’.

Which is why I advocate, as the starting point for community development, not community organisers, but community coaches, who help people to clarify their own self interest and to build their power.  Which they nearly always do by building their networks and relationships.  And once we have a critical mass of people pursuing their self interest with power and compassion through constructive engagement and association, lo and behold, we have a community with oomph, with enterprise.  We have ‘Big Society’.

Simples.

What If Leeds…the video

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At the What If consultation event on the future of Leeds they showed a video created by volinteers at Oblong.

If you were not there to see it, or would like to see it again, here it is:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/19267856]

Your thoughts, comments and observations would be very welcome.

Asset Based Community Development…

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Last week I ran a workshop for the Yorkshire and Humber Community Development Network on Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), what it is, and why we should think about it.

And one of the questions I got was ‘What is the relevance of ABCD to health promotion?’

An excellent question.

But first let’s establish what we mean by ‘asset based community development’.  Or even ‘community development’.  But wait, can we even agree on ‘community’? Or ‘development’?

Community development, at its best, helps individuals and groups of people develop the power that they need to make the progress they choose in their own lives.

This is done either through a focus on ‘assets’ or a focus on ‘needs’, giving us ‘asset based community development’ or ‘needs (or deficit) based community development’.  The following table gives some examples of assets and needs as they might be described in relation to individuals and communities.

assets and needs in personal and community development

So, in ABCD we start with what people and the community already have and with what they want to achieve, individually or collectively.  Development starts where the people are, and works with what they have got.  It embraces a philosophy that says we already have everything that we need in order to make progress. “Start change from where you are, and with what you’ve got.”

On the other hand, needs based community development starts with some sort of judgement of what is wrong with a community or individual.  What is missing.  This takes the form of some sort of assessment, usually done by an external agency, with a view to working out what needs to be fixed and how this might be achieved.  The vast majority of what is described as ‘community development’ work in the UK takes this needs based form.  It starts from a philosophy that says  ‘we know what is good for the community/individual and we will work to bring it about’.    It might be characterised as ‘Start from where we want you to be, and work with what we give you’.  The vast majority of health promotion work is close to this needs based model.  These needs based projects often use the tools and techniques of ‘community development’ recruiting local champions, building interest groups and generally doing what is needed to achieve the funders policy goals.  But is it community development?  Does it give people and groups the power to work on their agendas, or does it merely seduce them into working on the agendas of the funder?  And if course when the funder runs out of money, or the policy goal changes the community development stalls.

It is worth noticing that if you adopt a need based approach your stance will essentially have to be one of nagging, nudging or nannying however carefully you present it.  Whereas if you choose an asset based approach your role will be to facilitate, coordinate and connect.

So what would an ‘asset based’ approach to health development look like?

Well first of all it would not be on the agenda just because a funder had identified a need.  It would only be on the agenda if local people or groups recognised that they needed to work on health issues in order to make the progress that they want to make.  This implies that funders would need to learn to respond to the self-determined needs , or wants, of the community.  They need to understand working responsively as well as their more usual strategic perspective.

Health would be negotiated alongside enterprise, culture, employment and many other topics that the community may wish to address.  The development agenda in an asset based approach is much more likely to be holistic, whole system and person centred.  This contrasts with need based approaches which frequently lack integration, only work on part of the system and are centred on policy goals rather than people and their aspirations

An asset based approach, starting from where we are, working with what we have got, would be much less sensitive to the changing funding priorities of policy makers and is more likely to enable prolonged and steady progress.  It is also much more likely to build long-lasting social capital, of all types.

So why then are so many, the overwhelming majority in fact, of community development projects ‘needs based’ rather than ‘asset based’?  Well it has little to do with efficacy, in my opinion, and everything to do with accommodating the policy goals, timescales and resources of funders.

With the asset based approach you never really know what issues you may end up working on or what might be achieved. And, regardless of what might be done to help individuals and groups of people develop the power that they need to make the progress they choose in their own lives, which funder is going to invest in a methodology that will not allow them to tightly control outcomes, milestones and resources?