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Key Note for Voluntary Action Leeds AGM

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16th November 2010 Wheeler Hall, Leeds Cathedral

  • Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today.  It is a very real privilege.
  • Let us get a little perspective on the last decade or so…real growth in the sector and the budgets that it has at its disposal…but have we made the impact on social justice in the city that would hope for in the course of such relatively plentiful times?
  • For a decade or more we have pursued a dumb strategy, taking Govt money to do Govt work in our communities.
  • We have let politicians in Whitehall and increasingly their celebrity friends do our research and development, come up with new schemes and programmes, which they have paid us to ‘roll out’ in our communities
  • Now we need a smart strategy…one that does not trap us in the hands of the economy and politicians; but that puts us at the heart of our communities and their development.
  • Now is the time to start listening, responding to and facilitating the people who we are here to serve (NB this is not civil servants and ministers but people in our communities, especially the marginalised)
  • We have in recent years lost ground in our communities as we have pursued the dumb strategy – but it is ground that we can and will make-up.  We are uniquely placed to respond.
  • We must no longer look at the economy as the only thing that matters.  Economy, culture, society cannot be separated out.  Making GDP ‘king’ is daft! Other forms of wealth matter too.
  • Mark Prisk Secretary of State for Trade and Industry may have shown some interest in the role of the third sector in contributing to the work of the Local Enterprise Partnerships and the Regional Growth Fund.   We should not turn our back on this opportunity, but we must recognise that this is more about increasing the tax base for the Treasury than it is about growing local, vibrant and most importantly sustainable communities.  We must be careful not to keep pursuing a dumb strategy.
  • And a word on big society.  Again there are opportunities and risks.  Risks in getting drawn into a London centric debate about using volunteers to deliver front line services.  Risks in developing initiatives that maybe under-capitalised, under specified and deliver more political impact than social justice.
  • There is another big society.  One in which local people come together to support themselves in pursuing their own agendas for change and progress.  More ‘Our Society’ than ‘Big Society’…
  • The role of community organisers in the city?  Well, I love what the people behind Leeds Community Organising are trying to do, but are we in danger of that project being swamped by Mr Cameron’s army of Community Organiser?  If delivered on a per capita basis we would have about 60 in Leeds.  If paid this would require a budget of well over £1m a year.
  • So who is driving ‘development in our city’?  It is still the money men and women.  The bankers, the insurers, and the investors, supported by the planners and the architects
  • Physical regeneration matters, but it is expensive, elitist (investment goes to where the ROI is greatest in the short term ie commerce) and slow.  Main beneficiaries are builders, developers, architects and investors.  They tend to suck money out of our community and return it to shareholders elsewhere.
  • Eastgate, Trinity, The Arena on the large scale. But on a smaller scale too I see asset transfer and similar projects channel love, energy, wisdom, experience and millions of pounds into re-casting concrete, bricks, stone and steel in a city already full of under-used infrastructure.
  • Now of course physical regeneration matters….but …
  • Psychological regeneration matters more.  How do we engage 700 000 Leeds residents in making progress in their own lives?   Regeneration between the ears can be fast, relatively cheap and egalitarian – for every pound that is spent on physical infrastructure how about a penny being put into community development and facilitation?  Contributions from Trinity, Eastgate and Arena would be roughly £12.5m over next 5 years.  Add that to philanthropic sources and we have a serious budget – even in times of austerity.  The question is can we, a coalition between public, private and third sector generate a return on investment in the long term.  Real cultural change.
  • How do we help people to plan and organise in pursuit of what really matters to them?
  • Time to put social justice right at the heart of our work….
  • Time to get to work

Frugality, smart cities and social justice….I really should apologise

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I really should apologise…

Last night at TEDxLeeds we had some really excellent presentations including one from IBM’s Rashik Parmar on Smarter Cities that included a great little video on the stupidity of food supply logistics…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DAR5wW19Eg]

Rashik then went on to talk about how ‘sustainability’ and an era of ‘frugality’ will  impact on how we might build a smarter city.

Which is where I lost it.  A little.

We are in the throws of an investment of £1.25bn into a two new shopping centres and an Arena for Leeds.

Sustainability?  Frugality?  Localism?

An additional million square feet of retail space,  and 13500 seats to be sold at least 100 nights a year at an average ticket price of perhaps £30?  And a further £15m is to be invested in a southern entrance to the station (pedestrian only) when the existing 2 entrances are shambolic.

Now the shopping centres will be funded entirely out of private money I believe.  And investors have no doubt done the research to suggest that even in times of frugality they are an investment that will pay off.  Because the frugality is not for all of us.  We are not all in frugality together.  Nor sustainability.

The southern entrance to the station will be paid for by money from central government and local transport bodies (don’t ask me if they are public or private – but I suspect it is either our taxes or our fares one way or another).  But it is an investment that will reduce travel times for an estimated 20% of the stations users who need to access  Granary Wharf, Holbeck Urban Village or the City Inn.  Now I would be gobsmacked if those destinations counted for 20% of station passengers – but I will go with it.

And how will it reduce journey times?

By meaning that passengers will no longer have to walk for perhaps 5 minutes and pass through the recently refurbished Neville Street and under the Dark Arches to get south of the river.

This at a time, and over a timescale, when 1 in 6 council workers will be made redundant to save £150m over the next 4 years….

1 in 6 council workers being laid off and we spend £15m so that those who can still commute to a job have a shorter walk.

So I asked a question.

I asked whether this sounded like it was smart strategy for a city facing challenges of sustainability and frugality?  Apparently that is a political question….one on which Rashik would not be drawn.

Perhaps  now is not a time for ‘political’ questions….

I think that it is.  But, perhaps I am the minority.

Now where was that Derek Sivers video on starting a movement?

Yorkshire Musician’s Social Media Surgery

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This was yet another event pulled together by John Popham and inspired by the social media surgery format.
It was a great example of a peer to peer support mechanism with everyone getting something from the event.  The Round Foundry who provided the room, got to showcase their wonderfully flexible building and to prove once again how great they are as people.  Social media bods got richly entertained by musicians.  Musicians learned a bit from social media bods. Event sponsors  http://get-ctrl.com get to raise awareness for their service,  local business Out of the Woods get to sell a few platters of wonderful canapés and it seems that everyone is a winner.
No evaluation forms, no sign in sheets, no evidence of GVA created, jobs retained or any of the usual nonsense to be sent to a funder for rubber stamping to release funds.
No event management teams handing out name badges and ticking  lists.
No pop up banners reminding everyone how great we are in providing this service and ramming an expensive, publicly funded brand down their necks.
Just a great experience shared by people who might not otherwise have met, networks built and strengthened, opportunities uncovered, smiles on faces, tunes in hearts and I suspect some really talented people who now have ideas about how to get their music heard and perhaps some more revenue too.  We have known for a long time that conviviality matters.  But mainstream business support rarely manages to achieve it.
No ‘gurus’ or accredited advisers either!  There is a debate about the future of business support in which I advocate for a greater emphasis on peer to peer networks and problem based learning as more cost effective ways to support enterprise than a model based on professional business advisers and brokerage.  And the main criticism of what I am advocating is that ‘we can’t assure the quality of the advice given’.  Well apart from not being entirely true (we use an informal peer review to check out the quality of our work in social media surgeries) it also shows a lack of faith in the ability of lay people to help other lay people make progress.  Information is offered on a caveat emptor, or ‘you might want to think about…’ basis, and people are advised to talk with more than one surgeon to get a different perspective.  In short, people are taught how to get value from ‘would be’ helpers.
And when we look at advisory regimes that are fully quality assured, supervised and regulated – like the finance industry – are we really supposed to think that this is a model that provides guarantees of quality?
Let’s just open every single event with a reminder from Buddha – “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Duck Farming, Enterprise, Big Society and Neighbourhood Challenge

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This morning saw the launch at NESTA of the Neighbourhood Challenge.  A chance to pitch to become one of 10 organisations to be given 18 months and £150k to galvanise communities to respond to local priorities.

Much talk of hyperlocal websites, community organisers, big society, radical shifts in power and areas of low social capital.  All good stuff.  But not the kind of things I hear when I am talking with people in communities in Leeds about their priorities.  These things are not their concerns.  They are the concerns of policy makers and funders.

It reminded me of  the launch of the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative.  A very sage colleague of mine said to me at the time,

Mike, I have concerns about this programme.  These people don’t understand enterprise.  I think if the minister had stood up and said that ‘The future of our communities lies in duck farming, and so today I am launching a major new programme to promote duck farming in our most deprived communities’ we would have had much the same audience nodding and clapping.  These people know how to write bids.  They know how to manage projects. But do they really know about enterprise?

I hope that this mornings audience was more versed in community organising, social capital and community.

And less versed in snaffling up money on behalf of the communities that they serve.

I am sure many communities will put forward bids.  And I expect that people from outside of their communities will sit in judgement and decide.

And there is the rub.

Creating Jobs in Leeds….

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What a very touching and re-assuring letter those 35 key directors of FTSE 100 companies published in the Telegraph this week.

In their view the cuts are necessary and have to be made quickly.  And the resulting  job losses of some 500 000 from the public sector in the next four years will be offset by new jobs created in the private sector.

But what has their track record been in job creation in recent years?

Well, according to Andrew Hill in the Financial Times they have between them shed 20 000 UK jobs since 2007.

I believe that  large employers have not been creating jobs in the UK for a good while.  Nor should we expect them to in the future.  It is not what they exist to do.  They exist to create profits, not jobs.  For them, jobs represent costs and wherever possible should be cut in pursuit of productivity and profit.  If they can use technology or offshore labour to reduce employment costs, then that is what they will try to do.  Not because they are bad people, but because they are first and foremost good business people.

There seems to be some suggestion that ‘Big Business’ is prepared to invest some of the war chests that they have accumulated over recent highly profitable years in creating new jobs.  Personally I can’t see it happening.  Not on any grand scale.   Not unless those new jobs make good sense in the pursuit of profits.  And in that case they are hardly doing a social service are they?

In Leeds I have been told that the top 100 employers employ between then 100 000 people.  Should we expect that number to go up or down?  I know where I would place my bets.

So where might jobs be created in Leeds if we should not expect big business to do it for us?

Well, maybe we need to shift the thinking away from ‘jobs and employers’ to  ‘enterprise’ and ‘good work’.  Instead of the main narrative being about ’employers creating jobs’ it could be about us learning to find our own work; understanding for ourselves how to keep our economic engines running while doing ‘good work’ that makes our communities a better place for us and our children?

And this is not about getting on our bikes and chasing jobs down the M1 or across the M62.  It is about asking ourselves what we can do to create value in our own community and make it a place of hope and potential for all of its members.