Note from a network discussion: What would a Better Way place look like?
NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DINNER DISCUSSION, 26 NOVEMBER 2018
Summary of key points
It is vital to create a sense of agency amongst local people – a kind of constructive sense of entitlement to a better life – to make this work.
Building connections between people and within communities is necessary so that change can be community-led.
Design and social infrastructure matters. Meeting spaces are important and communities can be designed to be inclusive and to facilitate connections, or not.
Communities do have ‘hidden’ resources on which to build, as demonstrated by the closing down of streets to cars to create play and meeting spaces for communities. Publicly owned land or buildings are another such resource. New funds are nonetheless needed to enhance social infrastructure in some communities; but local people can contribute eg through the creation of locally owned energy companies; or community shares; or through business donations to local wealth funds.
Funding of staff time to make things happen is important too, including funded social connectors, as exist in the Hackney and Hastings examples discussed.
A Better Way place would work for everyone in the community and be designed through its housing and communal spaces to encourage social connections. It would have a high street devoted not just to commercial but also community activities and places to meet. Businesses would be committed to their communities and business rates could be used to incentivise healthy high streets and good employment practices.
In more detail..
Jess Steele opened the discussion drawing on her own experience in Hastings. Often neighbourhoods are faced with a false choice between gentrification and decline. Capital gains resulting from regeneration were often lost to the community itself, whereas taking over ownership of a big community building tethered gains to the community. To make it happen, you needed a group of enthusiastic people but there are people from every background who can do it. They were now trying to develop a ‘common treasury of adaptable ideas’ to attract other people to Hastings and create a fund of ideas others could use.
Igniting an impulse to act and a constructive sense of entitlement
We discussed the fact that one of the challenges was lack of time and also, amongst those who had time, such as the unemployed or retired people, igniting the impulse to act. Creating a space to meet can help. A sense of personal agency is critical, we concluded, but education can kick it out of us, and many people are just shattered by the problems of making ends meet and managing the precariousness of their lives, for example, created by zero hours contracts or universal credit. This sense of agency can be much stronger in affluent communities. An example was given of a threat to a park in St Albans and how the local residents stopped it from happening, and now run the park themselves. If everyone had the ‘sense of entitlement’ that these mainly middle class residents demonstrated, local and national government would be challenged far more successfully than it is.
Shared leadership and common goals
It was agreed that shared leadership and common goals is vital to transforming a place. Although in theory the voluntary sector might play a leading role, at present it tends to be focused on the money and lacks agency.
Could collective impact, place based approaches help transform a neighbourhood? This could create its own problems, especially if finance is linked to it, as in the West London Zone, we were told. It requires some organisations to give up doing things, which they may resist. It also depends on common measurement approaches in real time. Measures are often driven by an external player and there is an underlying lack of power in this situation. It has happened in the States successfully but family foundations that are financing this are more generous so there is not a problem of scarcity. The USA is further advanced on measurement.
Context matters
We discussed how the context in London and the South East and many northern cities was very different with austerity hitting harder in the north. Many more play spaces had been closed, for example, and finding funds for repairs of buildings was far more of a challenge. The economy was worse.
In Newcastle, the choice between gentrification and decline did not exist. Local charities were going under. One building had been given to a charity on a 99 year lease but this was undercapitalised and went bust. Even where there was money, a top down approach can undermine otherwise good initiatives. The Big Lottery had funded a participatory budgetary exercise in one community which led to a decision to reclaim the lanes behind their estate. But in the end this was undermined by fly-tipping and the local council - without consultation - deciding to use the space for communal bins. In Newcastle, the answers lay more in bringing services together than community ownership. There was money in Newcastle, near the centre, but it was a struggle for less advantaged parts of the city to get hold of it.
Good design to promote social connections
It is often said ‘get it right for children and you get it right for everyone’. UNICEF has a framework for creating child-friendly cities through the participation of cities, though this in itself is not sufficient. Hackney was currently advertising for a post to put this into practice. The Mayor is very interested in the design of the environment and housing. It is important that children have safe places to play unsupervised, ideally in front of people’s homes, and this helps build social capital within a community. In Hackney, they were closing streets for children to play in for 2 hours, funded by Hackney’s public health budget. London Play have described children as social pollinators, and in Hackney not just children but also adults come out and take up roles like stewarding and making tea. Importantly, this had happened not spontaneously but by Hackney creating a part-time worker, and equally importantly this was a local resident from one of the estates, who could facilitate peer to peer activity. Around 50 streets were involved, 30-40 actively.
Building community wealth
We talked about the importance of social infrastructure – not just public services within a community but also its buildings and built environment and the social capital or connections within it. Social assets are created and maintained not just by public sector resources but also by the community and social sectors and the private sector. How could we build a social infrastructure fit for the 21st century and also tackle disparities between communities?
One idea that Caroline Slocock has been pursuing is a national Social Wealth Fund which might draw on public land as one of its assets and might also help seed local wealth funds which could also be supplemented from various sources. Bristol had established independently managed funds which included donations from local businesses, for example. There were also many local authorities which had set up not for profit businesses, for example, for solar energy, and some were setting up recycling waste businesses, which could generate funds for this purpose. There are community share schemes and also wealthy people who had attachment to a community they’d grown up in might be prepared to contribute, to give other examples.
What would a Better Way place look like?
Finally, we talked about what a Better Way place would look like. It would be designed around people, with pedestrianised areas and centres in which people don’t just shop but can meet and carry out communal and educational activities. These communities would work for everyone and be inclusive to people of all ages and backgrounds. Housing developments would be designed to encourage contact and to get people to work together and would have built in social infrastructure. There might be communal gardens in addition to private space, car sharing schemes, places to meet etc (nb contrast some new developments where seating is made deliberately uncomfortable and places for young people to congregate are actively designed out). In some countries, ‘parklets’ have been created out of parking spaces and pop up shops have taken the place of cars. Local businesses would be committed to their communities. Business rates might be used as an incentive eg higher rates for harmful businesses like gambling and lower rates for those that pay the living wage.
Note from a Better Way Dinner: Collaborative Commissioning
Better Way Collaborative Commissioning
NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DINNER, 14 NOVEMBER 2018
Summary of key points:
The starting point should not be ways to deliver a pre-determined contract more collaboratively but a genuine discussion with partners about what a place is trying to achieve, with the aim of achieving a shared vision. This should be a whole systems review which also looks at all the resources in a community, not just public sector funds. This needs time and investment, including investment in training commissioners to see themselves as architects of collaboration.
Decisions on how to achieve that vision should start from what would best work for a particular place. A decision tree would help determine whether grants or competitive tendering or other options are best; and - where competitive tendering still takes place - what criteria should apply eg on local knowledge.
The true costs of competitive tendering should be made clear in that decision-making process. Many voluntary organisations are devoting considerable and very scarce resources to it which could be much better deployed, for example on helping to facilitate citizen participation.
Citizen participation is important but needs to be well delivered and properly resourced, especially where communities currently feel disempowered, disenchanted or are divided.
In more detail:
Steve Wyler started by outlining the plans in the Government’s recently published civil society strategy, including a commitment to collaborative commissioning, Citizen Commissioners, a revival of grant-making, an enhancement of the Social Value Act and a bringing together public and other resources within a community.
Members talked about their experience of some of these things. In Alison Nabarro’s area, Sutton, Citizens Commissioners already existed and were run by a volunteer centre, and there were also Young Commissioners. They were brought in as required by commissioners. On domestic violence, which was a big issue in their area, they were looking at how all the money was currently spent and how it could be used better. Another model was the process followed for recommissioning the CVS through a competitive process which involved a board including voluntary sector practitioners. Yet another model of collaboration was Sutton Together, a consortium of 3 organisations for winning advice contracts.
The case for ‘good competition’
We talked about the case for competition in terms of opening up markets, preventing nepotism, providing transparency and ensuring equal opportunities. There were circumstances in which it was merited. But we also agreed that competition was not always necessary or desirable. Where it was used, the criteria set were very important eg weight being given to local knowledge, as in Hackney on play services.
The costs of competition should be made much clearer
The costs of competitive tendering should be made far clearer to aid decision making on where it was merited and cost-effective. The Third Sector Research Centre’s longitutinal studies of the voluntary sector have shown just how much voluntary sector bodies have had to invest in the business development function.
Collaborative commissioning
What we thought was really important was not collaborative tendering, where much of the discussion tended to focus, but genuinely collaborative commissioning in which there was an onus to genuinely understand the territory and organisations and individuals were invited to take part in discussing what was required. Richard Wilson was going to do some work on commissioning and would share it with the group.
Shared vision and a whole systems approach
‘Never ever start by talking about the money’ should be the maxim. The development of a shared vision was essential, as in places like Plymouth and Bristol. Sutton was another example, where they had engaged in collaborative planning, setting up a community development action group. Time is an essential ingredient, and training may also be useful. It would be important to start at a very high level ie not just focusing on an existing service but on the whole system and looking at all resources, not just the public sector.
Training commissioners to encourage collaboration might help redefine their role as the architects of collaboration. The social sector needs to collaborate more with itself, let alone with others, and this also requires a shift in approach and investment.
A decision tree for deciding on best delivery options
After this process, a judgement should be made on the actual state of services and what is in the best interests of a place. Market stewardship should be considered. A decision-tree might be helpful about which options to pursue in different cases.
Tools to support collaboration
The collective impact model as used in the West London Zone was one way of creating collective measurement of impact and recognising that no one organisation could achieve an outcome. Shared data is critical. CVS could play a role in collaboration. For example, in the past Rotherham CVS had worked with the NHS as a trusted partner and given grants to it that the CVS disburses to smaller groups at its discretion.
Citizen involvement and participatory budgeting
Participatory budgeting had until recently dropped off the agenda and it was said that it had got a bad name. We discussed some positive examples. A BLF-funded Ageing Better programme, designed to overcome social isolation, included a participatory budgeting exercise ran by Hackney CVS: 30 expressions of interest from community groups were voted on by a meeting of 500 residents. In Sutton, Citizen Commissioners took part in expert panels. There had also been a Fairness Commission in Sutton too. There were also digital models for engaging people. Experience suggests that much depends on how these ideas are executed but also history matters. Some communities are more inclined to engage than others. Participation needs resources but these could be unlocked by not having to invest in staff and staff time to win competitive contracts.
Note from a network discussion: Better Way social wealth
Social wealth – note of a discussion among Better Way members, 13th November 2018
In recent years social infrastructure has been depleted as Caroline Slocock has set out in a recent Community Links report for the Early Action Task Force:
‘Britain has a proud history of creating a rich social infrastructure, compared to many other countries. But recently there has been significant disinvestment in the physical assets and preventative services that are an important part of social infrastructure, potentially leading to a further downward spiral.’
This disinvestment has impoverished communities across the country, hitting some especially hard, especially in the poorest places. This is not only about the dismantling of public services, such as youth services for example, but also about many other things which matter to people in the areas where they live, for example parks, clean air, shopping facilities, places to meet, and play areas.
We noted that social infrastructure is created not just by the public but also the social and private sectors. A combination of resources will be needed, including public sector funds (the new post-Brexit Shared Prosperity Fund for example), private sector contributions, and the deployment of land and property, in order to make good what has been lost and to build afresh. Pension funds might play a role.
A great deal of previous infrastructure investment, for example much that took place in successive regeneration programmes, did not achieve the hoped-for benefits. So how can we create funds which do not simply continue business as usual? What are the ‘rules’ which might produce something better? We felt the following principles were especially important
Local people in the driving seat in terms of design and control (not simply ‘consulted’)
A core aim of rebuilding cultural and social capability.
Planning for the long term and aiming to achieve enduring benefit.
We also believe that the best social infrastructure is capable of reducing community divisions, for example those produced by differences in ethnicity, wealth, age. Conscious and unconscious bias runs in all directions (eg people might be experienced as intimidating because they are wealthy or because they are poor) and this can best be demystified at a human level. However a lot of community initiatives are only appealing to a small section of the population, and this is partly because funding usually requires that activities are targeted on those regarded as in greatest need – but a truly social infrastructure needs to appeal to all sections of the population.
Conclusions
Our conclusions were as follows:
In some places there are simply not enough community facilities or services, or of the right kind.
Many traditional community building models are insufficient (they appeal to a minority, and do not connect people enough). We need to promote those models which engage many people not the few. The Selby Centre in Tottenham is an example - many cultures, one community.
A bigger focus on cultural infrastructure is needed. The mixing of genres – creative fusion – can attract new audiences and widen participation, and can be commercially successful at the same time
Finance is often necessary – and there is a strong case to invest in social infrastructure.
It’s necessary to create a sense of common ownership, mutual benefit and interest in the community. We shouldn’t just look to the public sector to contribute finance, but also businesses and the community itself, appealing to self-interest as well as to altruism (for example helping companies understand that investing in community improvement is a sound business decision as it can improve quality of life for employees and increase property values). Community shares can be one way of contributing.
Funding by itself is not sufficient to produce social wealth, and when poorly applied can drive behaviours which are deeply damaging to community resilience and confidence. Who controls the finance and who controls the infrastructure really matters. We need more mechanisms which allow spending power to be in the hands of local people, individually and collectively, and digital platforms are beginning to extend possibilities for this.
Where funds are available, they should be spent locally wherever possible, to create economic and social multiplier effects.
Funds should be deployed in ways which reduce the tendency for money to be absorbed in the running costs of provider organisations, and instead flow through to energise community life more directly.
Note from a network discussion: Better Way Politics
Better Way Politics – note of a discussion among Better Way members, 7th November 2018
Politics has become a dirty word, and many people don’t want to have anything to do with it. And yet the ancient Greeks had a word for private individuals who were foolish enough not to engage in the public world of politics: idiotes. Members of the Better Way are starting to imagine what a different, healthier form of politics might look like, what mechanisms might help, and what might attract more people – including the next generation – to want to play a part in political life.
1. What is wrong with politics?
We sense that politics as currently practised makes it difficult for Better Way practices to flourish.
This is partly because the system of party politics at national and local levels means that politicians, whatever their good intentions, feel compelled to demonstrate their effectiveness through command and control behaviours, often peddling false certainties, and trading people’s welfare for votes.
It is also, more fundamentally, because of the way in which everyday political discourse takes place, policy is formed and decisions are made, with suitably qualified ‘professionals’ in the dominant role, and most people feeling alienated from the political processes that frame their lives.
We believe that the politics we have at present generates an ‘us and them’ mindset, and the consequences are pervasive across our public culture and our public services. We can see this in how systems operate, how things are measured, how people are treated, and the effect is dehumanising. From the perspective of a ‘service user’ the behaviours which our politics ultimately produce are deeply unsatisfactory, as demonstrated in a blog from Love Barrow Families (which works in Barrow-in-Furness with families facing multiple and severe disadvantage):
‘How can you be expected to build a relationship and come to understand each other if it’s already geared up for termination? The person will know that you’re not truly present and not connected to them. Professionals don’t like words such as ‘relationship’ or ‘connection’. They don’t want to be connected to what they see. You can watch professionals trying to hide their own disgust. They become immobile and take on the appearance of someone who has found themselves in the wrong room. They subtly, without the individual knowing, try and find the room that they should be in. And it doesn’t work. The quieter they try to do it, the louder it becomes. They can’t get past their own history and history is never quiet. Just because it isn’t spoken doesn’t mean it isn’t heard. People create systems for this reason until the systems become fluent enough to manage their own anomalies. Rules are issued. Specialised people are brought in to root out values. Values are for walls, front doors and funders. They’re not for the people who desperately need the service. Organisations don’t want you to belong. They want you for your vital statistics. They want you when the humans come to look at the animals in the zoo. Questionnaires, scales of one to ten. Ticks in boxes and tallied at the bottom. Tables consulted. You are this, you are that. People will look for a diagnosis and willingly take anything. It’s what they want and services give it to them. Then they can go out into the world and say,” I am this”. And the world says,” so what, it’s meaningless”. If you’re set up to only look for the symptoms then that is all you will treat. And they will be back because the central issue hasn’t been addressed. Belonging is clouded by issues in orbit. Services target the issues and not the belonging.’
We can also observe the ‘primacy of pain’ in public policy. Painful stories are exploited by a prurient media, and by politicians needing to make an impact, and by public services (including charities) needing to justify their existence, and so they form the basis of much policy making. This is essentially a deficit model, focusing on (and ultimately reinforcing) the worst not the best.
2. What are the alternatives?
Here are two responses:
‘The whole system of democracy needs to be redesigned, with different distributions of power, different means of assigning political legitimacy, devolution of all powers capable of remaining local, extended enforcement of universal human rights. We simply cannot rely on the supreme authority of a single selectorat claiming legitimacy merely by mass vote-casting systems’ (Roger Warren Evans)
Maybe we could argue for a different kind of approach to policy-making, which is less certain, less media driven, less dualistic, more ambiguous, tentative, diverse, respecting of many different expertises and perspectives, more attentive and listening, comfortable with not-knowing, accepting that success and failure come in many guises. In other words, a non-political (with respect to today's model of politics) policy-making. (Charity sector leader)
We reminded ourselves that we are not striving towards a ‘perfect’ political model and that all attempts to establish Utopia have ended in disaster. Any system of Better Way politics needs to accommodate imperfection, learning, and change.
Many of us feel that the more that public policy making can be localised, the better. Debate and decision-making among people who know each other, and have some appreciation of the context of each other’s lives, could help build a better form of politics. But this by itself is not the whole answer: we acknowledge that proximity does not necessarily produce connection, trust, or respect, and not all political questions can be determined at neighbourhood level.
Various forms of participatory democracy can create opportunities for many more people to participate in debate and decision-making. But allowing more voices to be heard is not of itself sufficient – inequalities and concentrations of power can persist within participatory democracy, with some voices dominating over others.
An important starting point is the recognition of one’s own vulnerability. We must allow ourselves to feel our own powerlessness, unknowing and vulnerability in the face of theirs. Without that first step, little else is possible.
3. Power
As Elinor Ostrom has argued, in any group there will be a majority in favour of co-operation, but also a greedy minority who will act to take over. Therefore, it will always be necessary to challenge concentrations of power. There are many mechanisms to do so (an independent judiciary, a free media, proportional representation, a second chamber, an impartial civil service, regulatory bodies, the work of civil society agencies, for example), and these are always under pressure from vested interests, who want to remain in control for their own advantage.
However, we felt that a focus on power alone may not be the way to build a Better Way politics. After all, power is not a fixed quantity and it ebbs and flows. In physics power is the rate at which energy is transferred, rather than something possessed by an entity. In many senses politicians and political institutions are less powerful than they would like to believe.
While recognising widespread inequalities and concentrations of power, we need a different foundation for a Better Way politics, one which is less adversarial and starts with the notion of ‘humans helping other humans’ rather than the notion of ‘some humans controlling others’. We shared some ideas of what this might this look like:
Integration: in the face of increasing fragmentation and complexity a core political goal should be to achieve a more connected society.
Our practice of politics should be founded upon a shared understanding of the needs we all have, as set out for example by the Centre for Non-Violent Communication (see Annex).
Those responsible for designing systems of support should recognise that ultimately people want people who are not paid to be in their lives.
Those in leadership roles in political life should foster adult to adult relationships (not parent to child).
Political decision-making should be decentralised where possible, according to the notion of subsidiarity, with a willingness to design in local difference (a postcode choice not a postcode lottery).
We need a shift in educational practice, in order to bring up a next generation of citizens who have an understanding of their interconnectedness as human beings, have positive strategies to respond to conflict, and also have the belief and confidence that they can change things for the better, that it is possible to be constructively disruptive of prevailing systems.
4. Sortition
We also discussed the idea of ‘sortition’ (the use of random selection to populate a decision making assembly), and we believe that this can be extended to other aspects of political life beyond jury service, which is one of our few public institutions which retains general public confidence.
We understand that juries are effective in the criminal justice system for several reasons:
They enshrine a popular principle (that we are all equal before the law);
They are associative (a group of twelve people is needed to reach a common decision);
They have access to advice from people with a depth of professional knowledge (barristers, expert witnesses, judges, court clerks).
We think that if sortition were to become more widespread in political life equivalent mechanisms would be needed to maximise the chance for success. We felt it would be useful to engage those with greater expertise on this subject (eg Involve, Sortition Foundation etc).
Note from Better Way London Cell: Campaigning and Social Change
Note from Better Way London cell 2 – 17 July 2017
We considered the recent discussion by the Better Way London cell 1, following on from the Grenfell fire, about what generates social change – is it resident-led campaigning, or a sub-set of the elite winning the argument with their class, or an alliance of both, alongside technical specialists, journalists, academics, and others?
We also considered the observation from the June 2017 Better Way gathering that ‘the role of social activists is to grow the capacity for change making in others, not simply to lead the change ourselves’.
We observed that within much of the voluntary sector, ‘campaigning’ has become problematic.
Even the most progressive independent grant makers are finding it difficult to persuade their trustees to fund ‘campaigns’, feeling more comfortable with terms like social change. In the UK, compared to the United States, there is little institutional support, especially in the form of unencumbered grant aid, for the core operations of campaigning bodies.
Campaigning has become degraded within many charities. Staff with campaigning roles tend to be low status, and campaigning has become at best a function of policy or public affairs, building relationships behind the scenes with the powerful rather than generating mass mobilisation or speaking out against injustice. At worst it is little more than an adjunct to fundraising. ‘Born campaigners’ rarely sit comfortably within a conventional charity structure; their inherent tendency is to challenge and break the rules, not to adhere to a corporate brand. Campaigners are rarely promoted to leadership roles in charities, which tend to value professionalised managerial skills in order to safeguard and grow organisations, rather than to change the world. As a result we have few if any charity leaders who can bring an authentic campaigning voice into national public debates, as for example Sheila McKechnie once did. And we have too many ‘zombie charities’: organisations just concerned with continued existence rather than making a difference, more dead than alive.
The voluntary sector leadership response to the recent attacks by government and the Charity Commission on campaigning by charities has been weak; it seemed the priority was about defending organisational privilege rather than speaking up for the validity of bold and outspoken campaigning. We seem to lack intellectual leadership within civil society.
Perhaps this is in part a reflection of a dominant strain within the voluntary sector, which sees itself as emerging from a philanthropic heritage, and is therefore naturally aligned with the establishment (unlike in the USA where campaigning was born of the civil rights movement), and cautious about campaigning when it threatens to disrupt the status quo. And yet the voluntary sector and civil society also has another heritage which has evolved in parallel with philanthropy: self-help and mutual aid, stretching back at least to the eighteenth century. This emerged from friendly societies and other forms of working class association, and included union mill societies, corresponding societies, early trades unions, co-operative societies, early building societies and so on. Perhaps we need to rediscover and celebrate that heritage, and the more radical campaigning spirit which often went with it.
And indeed there are some signs of this. A generation of social activists are turning away from traditional philanthropic charity models and using other vehicles: community interest companies, community land trusts, community benefit societies, for example. They are applying associational methods, crowd-funding, community shares, and attracting large numbers of people into campaigns through social media. There is usually less preoccupation with organisational boundaries and brand, and there is often high energy and optimism. Overall, there seems to be more “fire” from leaders at local level and the change that is most effective is happening outside of charities. Sometimes this is coming from the private sector.
And yet much of this remains essentially consensual, often assuming that a combination of the many will of itself produce positive change, and is weakened by a lack of ananalysis of power, and how those without resources, or who are systematically marginalised, can bring about change. Social entrepreneurs it seems are not necessarily social activists or campaigners.
In this context it might be helpful to revisit Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’, in which campaigning tactics start from the premise that power is concentrated in institutions which will not easily give it up. While sometimes criticised for adversarial positioning, many of Alinsky’s rules still have resonance today:
1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the expertise of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on. Never let up.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
We considered what we might learn from successful campaigns in the recent past, eg the dramatic shift in gay and lesbian legal rights and in public attitudes over the last two decades. Reflecting on this we can see that a combination of elements was needed: a cause celebre (the Clause 28 campaign); campaigning agencies (eg Stonewall); determined and brave leadership figures (eg Peter Tatchell); skills to ‘dance with the system’ and win allies within the establishment and media (Tory MPs, Princess Diana, Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman). It seems that a change of this magnitude happens when people in power feel uncomfortable about standing in the way (even if they don’t necessarily believe wholeheartedly in the cause).
We should not forget that not all campaigning is about social change. Campaigning can also be about defending things which are valued, blocking change which is seen as damaging. Nor is the loudest campaigning necessarily the most effective: Sarah Corbett from the Craftivist Collective speaks up for the ‘quiet campaigners’ which, in her case, means exposing the scandal of global poverty and human rights injustices through the power of craft and public art.
Power, and how it is applied by institutions, is perhaps more complex now and operates in more disguised forms than when Saul Alinsky started out in 1930’s Chicago battling against the venal Town Hall, the corrupt Teamsters trade union, the Catholic Church, and the Mob! But as we look forward we will increasingly face big ethical questions: what are we for? And if we are, at least in part, for challenging injustice, and institutions which perpetuate injustice, how far are we prepared to go in pursuit of that?
We concluded by wondering why there was not more leadership in the voluntary secretary, including a leadership of ideas. The voluntary sector should not allow itself to be characterised just by its philanthropic history. Potentially Grenfell Tower had created a “teachable moment” and ways needed to be found to use this emotional heat but first we need to sharpen our tools and wake up.
Note from July 2018 national gathering
The Better Way Dinner 2rd July
Caroline Slocock, co-founder of the network, welcomed the guests and introduced four speakers:
Martyn Evans: CEO of the Carnegie UK Trust, which has supported the Better Way network since its inception.
Martyn, welcoming members to the dinner, reflected on the importance of ‘associational life’ as a key part of democracy. The state can do some things better than civil society and there are some things only it can do eg provide national armed forces, but part of its role is to enable others in society to do what they do best - an issue explored in the Carnegie UK Trust’s Enabling State project. In the 21st century, we need to reimagine the state and also the role of civil society. This issue lies at the heart of the Better Way network, whose origins began in an event he had attended with Steve Wyler, Caroline Slocock and others at Windsor Castle some years ago, which eventually led to setting up the network via an earlier initiative, A Call to Action for the Common Good. CUKT had helped fund this work. Like other projects it supports, such as on kindness, the Trust recognised it was exploratory, potentially ground-breaking but also highly risky: none of us at the outset could be sure about what we would achieve, if anything. He applauded our spirit and what the network together had achieved so far.
Sue Tibballs, CEO of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation and member of a London cell.
Sue spoke about SMK’s recent report, Social Power, and her related essay in Insights for A Better Way. She said that civil society was too passive at present, and tended to focus too much on influencing institutional power and delivering services. But it had enormous social power by virtue of its proximity to people and the relationships it forms. Government should value the voice of the sector but most importantly we should ‘get on with it’ ourselves in civil society, using this power. The key message: change starts with us.
Danny Kruger, a founding member of a Better Way, currently working in the Office of Civil Society on the civil society strategy.
Danny said that the civil society strategy – a draft of which is currently being consulted upon in Government - will not be a set of policies or include major policy changes. However it would, he hoped, represent a significant shift toward what he described as a ‘gentle revolution’ - ie moving away from seeing people as individual units and costed transactions to relationships and also in favour of ‘responsible business’. He said that we should expect to see a shift in language - eg from procurer to co-creator - and thought it should be seen as a starting point for dialogue between Government and civil society in future.
Steve Wyler: co-founder of A Better Way and Panel Member on Civil Society Futures, the inquiry into the future of civil society underway.
Steve gave us some insights into the emerging thinking of Civil Society Futures and the links across the thinking of the network. Civil society’s role had evolved over time, eg from the alleviation of poverty, to social justice and, more recently, to service delivery. Against a backdrop where people are now feeling a lack of agency and as a result of AI we may be facing a ‘us and them’ future, civil society could play a vital role in putting power into the hands of communities and connecting us in ways that humanise how we do things. But civil society is not yet fit for this purpose, he said. It is in fact part of the problem, perpetuating a command and control model, hoarding power, fighting its own corner and not allowing others to step forward. Looking ahead, the Inquiry was now focusing on four areas: place; belonging and identity; work and purpose; and organisations. The thinking was moving toward a new ‘a new PACT amongst us’, where PACT stood for P: power and participation; A: accountability and access; C: community and connecting; T: trust and transformation. And it was looking at the ‘architecture’ to push things in this direction including a ‘new social national grid’, connectivity over activity and rethinking the hierarchy of evidence in measurement. This was all rich territory for a Better Way.
2) Gathering event, 4th July
Session one: what we’ve learnt during the year:
Kathy Evans, a founding member, welcomed everyone to the event and then Caroline Slocock introduced Insights for A Better Way: improving services and building strong communities, which was launched that day. She said the collection of some 40 contributions had fleshed out the Better Way propositions and had helped us deliver on our priorities for this year (which had been identified at last year’s Gathering). These were:
Creating stories that move hearts as well as minds, bringing our propositions to life
Exploring what it means to be a Better Way leader, what we have started to call ‘shared leadership’
Demonstrating the rich potential of communities, people and organisations
Finding ways to put the Better Way propositions into action, avoiding lip service.
She added that we had also made some progress on our other priority, diversifying the network, which was reflected in this volume, though there is more to do, particularly in bringing people from other sectors in the network.
She said that the stories and essays shed light on the individual Better Way propositions and showed in many different ways why they were important and how they could be achieved. They were a stepping stone to our final Call to Action – our goal at the end of the third year of our network in July 2019.
Some themes were emerging that might be developed in that Call to Action, she suggested, which were as follows, inviting contributors who were present to speak for one minute about what they had written:
1) Shared leadership: (reflecting the Better Way propositions on ‘collaboration’ and ‘changing ourselves’):
Sue Tibballs invited us to become bolder leaders and recognise the legitimacy and potential of ‘social power’.
Cate Newnes- Smith had come to see herself as a ‘systems leader’ in Surrey and said that this started with no longer seeing the organisation as the end, actively seeking to collaborate across and within sectors, and creating shared ‘big hairy goals’.
Audrey Thompson drew on her experience of being a ‘local connector’ in Doncaster to show how it can unlock ‘social leadership’, which is especially important in disadvantaged areas.
2) Relationships (reflecting our propositions on ‘deep value relationships’ and ‘building on strengths’):
Richard Wilson pointed to the underlying factors that support ‘Good Help’ including helping individuals to find their own sense of purpose and the confidence to act, all of which requires strong relationships.
Colin Falconer described how he and the late Jane Slowey (to whom the collection is dedicated) invented ‘Advantaged Thinking’, which sees young people as assets rather than focusing on risks and deficits, in a direct challenge to the negative narrative of ‘disadvantage’ that pervades much of the voluntary sector.
3) Better way organisations –(‘organisations without walls’, as we have described them in our Better Way discussions, which bring in or are led by experts in lived experience, engage with the communities they serve and empower front line staff to build strong relationships with those with whom they work):
Karin Woodley spoke of how we need to keep our organisations personal, praticising ‘radical listening’ which treats communities more as partners than consumers, creating the diversity within our organisations that reflects those served, and shaking off contracts that take organisations off mission.
Simon Shaw talked about how the Food Power programme is involving experts by experience to say what they want, and how this is changing how they talk and think about food poverty.
4) Better Way places (reflecting our propositions on ‘local’ and ‘prevention’)
Nicola Butler talked about the positive examples of Hackney Council and the Governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in relation to play. Hackney Council is practising effective local partnership with play providers and the local community and actively values the particular contributions of local organisations in commissioning and reflects the priorities of local people. But national partnerships are also supporting this work in a complementary way. Both are needed.
Bethia McNeil, who is exploring in a Better Way cross-cutting group how to shift the bias in current measurement away from national to local organisations, explained that we need a shift away from high-stakes accountability and targets toward measures that show whether organisations are delivering on their mission - so that we ‘hit the point, not the target’.
Caroline Slocock explained that ‘social infrastructure’ – the buildings and built environment; the services and organisations; the social capital within communities and between organisations –builds readiness and resilience, but is being undervalued and cut back. We need to invest more and think holistically.
5) Mass participation. Providers are very focused on services, but ‘freeing people from services’ could be our aim, a point made during the Better Way visit to Ignite in Coventry in 2018:
Sona Mahtani called for ‘a Selby Centre in every area’, describing the extraordinary diversity and energy in Tottenham. The simple act of bringing people together unleashes creativity, opportunity and energy that people create themselves.
So Jung Rim, who had grown up in Seoul and witnessed first hand the social innovation revolution of the Mayor there, explained how she is now working in the Social Innovation Exchange to create different platforms for diverse voices.
Then there were two cross cutting strands in the Insights volume:
6) Better way systems that help make better way leadership, relationships, places, organisations and mass participation happen:
Toby Lowe spoke about the complexity of individuals, people and systems. The current flawed process model - of individual action by organisations leading to specific outcomes - is beginning to be replaced by collaboration and a growing movement toward funding and collaborative commissioning which genuinely reflects that complexity.
Graeme Duncan, speaking about schools, lamented the impact of high-stakes targets and the way in which they were leading to the exclusions of pupils and teachers abandoning the very principles that often drew them to teaching. He proposed new principles that could be adopted instead of targets.
Matt Kepple made a plea for the social sector and others to take up the immense opportunity created by new technology to share data on what works – our own wikepedia – and empower others to improve services.
7) Last but not least: arresting stories, which bring home why and how these things can be achieved:
Clare Wightman spoke of her experience of putting local people in touch with a vulnerable family in a difficult estate and the unique value of this support network, so much better than ‘services’.
Steve Wyler told the group of his experience of an elderly neighbour who had been able to make her own way and evade social services through the kindness of strangers but fell ill when finally forced to be under their care, when a ceiling fell in.
Kathy Evans recalled her own journey toward becoming a ‘thought leader’, battling with ‘imposter syndrome’ and recognising that you need to lead with your heart, not your head, in order to challenge the status quo.
In open discussion, some of the points made in response were:
We often focus on the ‘what’ we do, but it is the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ that is more important in delivering a Better Way.
We need to work on language, which is not connecting with the people we serve, recognising that different language works for different communities and there are different levels of engagement and discourse for practitioners, specialists and users.
We also need to find a different language other than that of ‘delivering services’, which does not embody the Better Way propositions.
It’s important to employ people from within communities and people with lived experience and to be more self-reflective about what we claim. For example, we are not giving people agency or empowering them, they have it already, we need to ‘give our organisations away’ and give others the space to take power.
There is a specific job to be done, which some are doing, to engage the voices of communities in articulating what they want.
Diversity is critical, not an add-on. We need to reflect the communities we work with.
The relationship between the state and the social sector has sometimes been mutually supportive but the state has now become a generator of harm eg through the ‘hostile environment’ and the punitive nature of some parts of the welfare state. This presents a different problem to simply trying to reform its processes or work alongside it.
Recognising and protecting human rights, rather than thinking of our core activities as being about the more effective delivery of services, is important.
We focus too much on institutional power and the provision of services and need to spend more time working with individuals and communities and influencing the public debate (which is often a key block or spur to change).
We need to engage with politics in the sense of policies and the wider narrative more – this is how systemic change happens.
Who are ‘we’? ‘We’ should not just be the social sector – we need to widen our network - and we should stop seeing ‘we’ as institutions and organisational interests.
Seeing ourselves as system leaders and social activists is important.
Hot topics: ideas others can adopt
The group then broke into the following syndicates to discuss four topics. Here are some points coming out of these that were brought back to the wider group that seemed to resonate:
Collaboration in action (led by Cate Newnes-Smith, Toby Lowe and Matt Kepple):
We need to develop measurement to enable learning rather than accountability – note that the airline industry learns from accidents, whereas the NHS holds people heavily accountable for them. Measures need to come from purpose and must include qualitative information. It’s too much about numbers now.
Understanding the complexity of issues, people and systems unlocks shared leadership. Cate Newnes-Smith and Toby Lowe committed to work in Surrey to help them better understand the systems and issues there and to use local councillors as allies.
Matt Kepple said that it would be useful to use technology to visualise the complex factors affecting individuals, for example on obesity. This would enable organisations to understand better and target their contribution. It might also allow a person to become more aware of what was available and help in guiding their transitions. An example of where such a map might exist, or could help, was support for older people in Lambeth, where different organisations coming into contact with individuals are signposting help by others.
Building on strengths/deep value relationships (led by Rich Wilson, Karin Woodley and Colin Falconer):
There was a strong message about the importance of relationships in the Better Way network itself, and the fact that these were under-estimated as a way of facilitating change.
Some suggestions were put forward for helping to make these relationships stronger – ‘liming’ (where people meet over a drink to chew over an issue, originating from the Caribbean), and ‘home groups’ (where people share personal issues with each other and provide mutual learning and support).
At the same time we can and should continue to learn from each other about ‘how’ to do things, but also recognise that stronger relationships would facilitate this and build trust.
One area we could work on the ‘how’ is Advantaged Thinking, which is a strong concept but where we could learn and communicate better how to do it.
Principles are better than targets/local is better than national (led by Bethia McNeil, Graham Duncan):
We need to work on language, paring it back so it feels more authentic.
We should focus more on the process (the ‘how’) and less on the outcome (the ‘what’).
And move away from high-stakes to low-stakes accountability, recognising uncertainty rather than pretending that there is certainty.
There is a failure to learn because we do not focus on the right things.
Changing ourselves/mass participation (led by Sona Mahtani and So Jung Rim):
We need to create physical spaces to bring people together – eg community land, ‘commons Treasury’.
The Mayor of Seoul had a ‘mobile office’ so that he was genuinely out listening to people.
Community GPs have proved a powerful concept. Rhys Davies gave the example of a retired nurse who acted in a ‘connector’ role, linking up 300 people who would not have done so otherwise.
Amongst the wider reflections on this feedback:
Time is a barrier and we need to be aware of this. We need time to reflect and invent and space to do something new.
The hospice movement is one example of where it is recognised that it is the process that matters – death is the outcome but this is not the objective of care.
Relationships are a key asset for the social sector but are undervalued. We need to build that asset and our network is part of this.
Our priorities for the year ahead:
Steve Wyler introduced this part of the discussion by raising the following questions:
What are we doing right and what needs to change?
Should our priorities stay the same as this year or shift?
How can we develop our overall story of change?
Where should we put our efforts in recruiting more people to join us?
How can we develop cross-cell working and spread knowledge across the network?
In response, the points made included:
An endorsement of the value of relationships in the network and a recognition of the different ways of developing them, including ‘liming’.
Dinners don’t work for everyone but there was also a strong feeling amongst some that they are still valuable – some members really like the discussions, and the ideas that come out of them are the biggest value for some.
There were therefore potentially ‘horses for courses’.
We could do more of bringing individual challenges into the group to ‘chew things through’, with individuals leading discussions. Specific topics of wide interest could be broadcast across the network asking for people to volunteer to take part.
Sharing email addresses (GDPR permitting) would be very useful.
There was some interest in buddying/mentoring but this might perhaps happen spontaneously if we did more signposting through a register of particular interests.
Was this a leadership development network, someone asked– no! We are all social activists, not just the nominal leaders of organisations, and we are all leaders.
The call to action we have promised for the end of our third year could be a manifesto. It is important for us to think about the political dimension of what we are calling for and there was a strong call from some to move in this direction to influence the wider political narrative. ‘I am dying for policies’, someone said.
We need to be clear about what we stand for and believe in (our values and propositions). One suggestion for this was: ‘people who care about people’.
The process matters – the ‘how’. Sharing on how to put the propositions into action might be useful eg to enable greater collaboration and experimentation in a place.
This could include ways of challenging power, not just about delivery of services. We tend to focus on being constructive but also should be disruptive.
We could be testing and developing ideas over the next year.
There was a call for more cells in different places and more travelling to other cells and cross-fertilisation.
And perhaps some bigger events, joining up with other movements (eg movement for health creation).
It was agreed Steve Wyler and Caroline Slocock would use this steer to work up future priorities and working methods.
Participants
Lynne Berry, Civil Exchange**
Julie Bishop, Law Centres Federation
Geraldine Blake, London Funders
Richard Bridge, Corndel
Paul Buddery, Volunteering Matters
Nicola Butler, Hackney Play Association**
Rhys Davies, Community Catalysts
Frances Duncan, Clock Tower Sanctuary
Graeme Duncan, Right to Succeed**
Kathy Evans, Children England
Martyn Evans, Carnegie UK Trust
Colin Falconer, Inspire Chilli
Andy Gregg, Race on the Agenda
Athol Halle, Trust for Developing Communities
Richard Harries, Power to Change
Sarah Hughes,Centre for Mental Health
So Jung Rim, Social Innovation Exchange**
Matt Kepple, Makerble
Kate Kewley, Social Finance**
Danny Kruger, West London Zone, Only Connect*
Toby Lowe, Newcastle University Business School
Sona Mahtani, Selby Centre
Bethia McNeil, Centre for Youth Impact**
Vincent Neate, Relationship Capital Strategies*
Cate Newnes-Smith, Surrey Youth Focus
Helen Rice, Advising Communities
Simon Shaw, Sustain**
Duncan Shrubsole, Lloyds Bank Foundation**
Merron Simpson, New NHS Alliance
Caroline Slocock, Civil Exchange
Jess Steele, Jericho Road*
Sujutha Thaladi, The Mentor Ring
Audrey Thompson, Bentley Area Community Library
Sue Tibballs, Sheila McKechnie Foundation
Clare Wightman, Coventry Grapevine
Richard Wilson, OSCA
Karin Woodley, Cambridge House
Steve Wyler, Independent
Sally Young, Newcastle CVS
*Dinner only
**Workshop only
Note from a Better Way and Place cell 4: Local is better than national
Better Way London cell 4: 8 March 2018: Is ‘local better than national’?
Local and national
We started by considering the relationship between local and national action. The national it seems needs the local, and vice-versa.
On the one hand, national programmes require effective local delivery. In the field of mental health, for example, the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health is a national plan, which needs to be locally applied. Moreover, national agencies such as the NHS rely on strong local operations to provide the flow of evidence to make good national policy.
Equally, for the local to function well, we need local action to be supplemented by a national system capable of sharing and promoting ideas, encouraging challenge, developing common standards, and providing validation. Children’s play is one example, where play activities in neighbourhoods in every part of the country are at risk of marginalisation, and national activity is needed more than ever to promote the benefits of play, to understand and develop play skills, and to promote quality standards.
However, the relationship between the national and the local can be tense and problematic. In respect of the national plan for mental health services, flexibility in local delivery is in principle allowed, expect in respect of psychological therapy, where highly standardised models of Cognitive Behaviourial Therapy are imposed, and this results in difficulties for both commissioners and providers. Elsewhere, as in Individual Placement and Support services (IPS), assessment systems have been established to ensure local ‘fidelity’ to national models. But such mechanisms can produce ‘gaming’, with some people (those less likely to recover) excluded from services. Generally, this national framework is producing a growing gap in mental health service provision: those with low level support needs can get help, and so can those with very acute support needs, but the framework makes little available for those in the middle, and this is feeding the rising homeless and prison populations.
At the same time loss of national standards for qualifications on play has meant it is now hard to get funding for training.
There is evidence to support both seeking fidelity to a national model or alternatively setting a set of parameters. In the end, the group thought principles were better than targets because targets can be gamed..
Power hoarding and how to share it
The behaviour of many national organisations can be problematic. Power to achieve social change is not necessarily about growth or size, but many national organisations still behave as if it is, and seek to hoover up work from local organisations, leaving a mess behind. Many organisations ‘hoard power’.
We explored the idea that most institutions behave on the basis that ‘you can’t trust people’ and design systems and rules accordingly, and that the larger the organisation the more likely this is to happen, as managers become more remote from the people they are serving.
Some of this may derive from anxiety. Practitioners and managers may seek to put barriers between themselves and the people they serve as a way of erecting defences against it, according to Armstrong and Huffington (Working Below the Surface: The Emotional Life of Contemporary Organisations, Tavistock Clinic Series, 2004). One extreme example was when the local council sent its staff home to escape confrontation with the angry residents of Grenfell Tower, rather than sending them out to help.
Public pressure can distort behaviours, where senior politicians, CEOs of public bodies and charities, are held personally to account for everything that goes wrong. Pointing the finger is perhaps an inevitable accompaniment to public money, but it makes it much harder for prominent organisations to ‘let go’ of their command and control culture. The pressures are perhaps especially intense at national levels (although community leaders can also experience this type of pressure). This in turn can generate organisational anxiety and defensive command and control measures to try and avoid it. When leaders are women, the public criticism turns to misogyny, and this can be extreme when women make even innocuous public statements. A network of peer support can be important.
Devolution does not necessarily stop ‘power hoarding’, it just happens at a different level. In Scotland, for example, most power is still held at national and local authority level.
Some organisations work in completely different way, avoiding management structures altogether and acting as a ‘network’. This doesn’t always work well, as evidenced by experience of CND in the past, and the management of non-hierarchical institutions can be very time-consuming. But it can be a powerful technique for sharing power not just within but outside of the organisation. We heard from one organisation which operates on a national and indeed international basis and operates according to the insight that everyone has power: power is not something to give away from the centre, and the question therefore is how to create sparks and energy and build confidence among others. This however means that the level of organisational visibility is low - a difficult business model, as low visibility and a generous approach to attribution makes the case for investment and funding much harder.
We heard how a loss of national government funding can sometimes produce beneficial consequences. Government funding can shift the balance of organisational effort in national bodies towards the achievement of relatively narrow contract targets, and away from the activities which actually add most to frontline efforts, for example responding to ‘general enquiries’ and thereby providing bespoke services, tailored to the actual needs of the front line.
National organisations are often at their best as convenors and connectors, creating the conditions for sharing to take place across local organisations, helping them learn from and stimulate each other, rather than attempting to determine what they should be doing. Umbrella organisations should see themselves not as trade bodies but as ‘systems leaders’.
Are organisations themselves sometimes the barrier to social change? ‘Ideas not organisations’ says Charlie Howard, founder of young person’s charity MAC-UK, in a heartfelt blog. But she goes on to say, ‘The important question is what’s the alternative? How do you grow a team of brilliant people and get the money to be able to pay them, if you don’t have an organisation?’ Should we perhaps formulate the proposition ‘small is better than big’, and encourage large organisations to implement a radically federated model, where the (big) whole really can be more than the sum of its many (small) parts.
Spreading not scaling
Robin Murray, advocate of a co-operative economy, who sadly passed away recently, used to say that ‘spreading is better than scaling’. We need an organic rather than an industrial approach to building critical mass for social action, he argued, and he focused attention on the need to understand the interface between the grass roots and the system. This is where the most positive change can take place, he believed. It can be where conflicts occur that the most interesting things happen.
Peter MacFadyen, who founded Independents for Frome and who played a prominent role in the takeover of Council by independent councillors, and the flowering of community life in that town, has published Flatpack Democracy, a ‘DIY guide to creating independent politics’, which is designed to help other communities take a similar approach. One example perhaps of an attempt to encourage spreading rather than scaling.
Leadership that brings about social change is often not about dominating or hoarding power but about creating ideas that others want to follow. Fairtrade, for example, was a ‘magnetic idea’. The expression of vulnerability can be a starting point, as it can help create an enabling environment in which people can connect in a genuine way. This insight starts to change how we define what it means to be ‘professional’. Safeguarding issues are important but perhaps we should be moving toward a model of kindness versus being impartial and cold.
Some issues to explore:
Can we better define the role of national standards or aspirations in a way that supports local activity?
Can understanding the emotional drivers of organisational behaviour and social change help to stop ‘power hoarding’?
How can power be better shared and what does this mean for being ‘professional’?
Note from Better Way and Place cell: is local better than national?
February and March 2018
Does place matter any more?
In the age of digital platforms and widely available travel most of us are connected to many communities, but it seems that place remains important. Place and personal contact cannot be replaced by the internet; and it is where the deepest and most lasting bonds are forged.
Local and national
Our proposition states ‘local is better than national’. Community life is where human relationships can best flourish, and imposition from the centre rarely works when dealing with complex social problems, as it inevitably produces standardised and transactional behaviours, and reduces the potential for people to discover their own solutions.
But that doesn’t mean that we can or should ignore the national dimension. For the local to function well, we need local action to be supplemented by a national system capable of sharing and promoting ideas, encouraging challenge, developing common standards, and providing validation – with all of this guided and informed by evidence from local practice.
The risks of localism
Localism is not necessarily benign. Local institutions can be guilty of hoarding power just as much as national and international agencies. And communities, at their worst, can be divided and dispiriting places, resistant to change, dominated by elite groups, hostile and oppressive for outsiders and minorities. At the local level, the quality of leadership, especially in the public sector, is generally weak, failing to attract real talent or younger generations.
One response to such problems has been managerial – attempts to professionalise local administration, with armies of paid managers (relatively wealthy) doing things for communities (relatively poor). We have seen a movement away from neighbourhood and community levels towards larger geographical regions, in attempts to create economies of scale, centralising political and executive power most recently with directly elected mayors. But this shift from localism to devolution leaves place behind, replicates the national command and control culture, and reintroduces many of the behaviours which leave people feeling they have somehow lost control.
Places under stress
There are many places across the country where deprivation is high and the local infrastructure is failing to cope, let alone improve things. In a time of austerity this is getting even worse. But while we need a strong and effective local infrastructure, especially where problems are most acute, we should not underestimate the untapped strengths that exist in even the poorest places. The answer is not to send people in to ‘intervene’, but rather to take steps to realise local capability and invest in the people who live in these places and create the conditions for them to design and manage their own local infrastructure.
Sometimes organisations themselves may be the problem?
Organisations can often ‘hoard power’ and create command and control barriers between themselves and those they serve. Power can corrupt but it can be important to understand the emotional drivers too. There may be anxiety about getting too close to those with whom one works, or fear of being attacked when something goes wrong. They may also suffer from a lack of aspiration and lack of belief that they can make fundamental change happen. Too narrow a focus on targets may lead to a loss of fundamental purpose.
What might Better Way places look like?
We have heard about places where people, including in some cases those involved in the Better Way network, are attempting to operate according to the Better Way propositions. Examples can be seen in Coventry, Taunton, Stroud, Frome, Doncaster and elsewhere.
This is partly about local institutions, including voluntary agencies, doing far more to build contact and credibility with local people over time, doing things ‘with’ rather than ‘for’, and a willingness to operate across traditional sector boundaries, identifying common cause, while recognising that all communities are highly complex, with multiple competing interests. Networked rather than command and control organisations are likely to work best.
Sustained community connector or community organiser activity, as well as activities to build community ownership, and spaces for people to come together to understand each other and make decisions together (such as participatory budgeting), alongside mechanisms to encourage transparency and challenge, all seem essential for real progress to be made.
Democratic institutions would be strengthened and community based organisations would help give voice to local needs and concerns and provide a challenge function.
We would have a better understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ – of where activity best takes place and how local activity is supported by national and regional actions.
Local organisations would have high aspirations to solve problems, not just service them, and to create stronger communities, and would have the tools to deliver this eg through better feedback mechanisms, ways of spreading experiences and greater front-line autonomy which encourages a ‘journey of discovery’.
There would be a better understanding of where local adds value and of what has been called ‘context’ as well as ‘content’ skills and knowledge. Community organisations and activists often have lived experience and connections that make them more effective than national organisations. The concept of ‘professionalism’ would be reconfigured to include ‘kindness’ and relationship building.
Ways would be found to get more resources for local activity, for example local giving organisations, crowd sourcing and commissioning that recognises the value of local.
What needs to change?
Big is not necessarily better than small, and often the reverse is true, as large organisations are more likely to become disconnected from their communities and more inclined to self-protection. So we should stop talking about scaling up whenever we see an example of good local practice and talk about ‘spreading’ instead. And large organisations would do well to consider whether they can let go, providing much higher levels of autonomy to their constituent parts.
We need to make a better case for localism and the power of place to drive positive change. Some national problems cannot be overcome without a much greater emphasis on local action (homelessness for example) and agencies working in fields where this applies need to be brave enough to say so, and change their operating model, even if that threatens the current way of doing things.
Some problems cannot be tackled only at neighbourhood level. The challenges of migration and climate change for example need concerted action at international levels. Perhaps the best future will come from greater emphasis on the local and the international, and less on the national.
That said, there is a still an important role for the national, which needs to be better understood and articulated.
Some issues to explore further
National ways of measuring quality often underplay the value of local organisations and some of our members are going to explore how to change this in a cross-cell working group.
Can national agencies with strong public brands (and the ability to attract resources on a big scale) reposition themselves to act in service of the local, rather than dominating from the centre?
How can we get more funds into local activity eg through local giving organisations or crowd-sourcing?
How can we better promote organisational and professional behaviours that avoid ‘power hoarding’, including by understanding the emotional drivers of behaviour, and redefining what it means to be professional?
Notes of the discussion within individual cells:
Founding cell - 18 February 2018
London cell 2 - 22 February 2018
Note from Better Way and Place cell 3: Local is better than national
Note of Better Way Cell 3, 28 February on ‘local is better than national’
Local is not always best
Steve Wyler opened the discussion by saying that he recognised that local is not always better than national – we have been told that travellers and gypsies for example had found it more difficult to establish settlements once decisions were made locally. Local was often preached but less often practiced. A belief in the value of small communities is at least 200 years old, and yet Britain remains highly centralised.
One problem in ‘creating villages’ is that people often get excluded, black, Asian and minority people in particular. For many, the problem is that we have lost a sense of community and sense of ownership of place. The challenge is to be truly inclusive and give all people a voice.
The role of national standards
The choice is not always a binary one: even in the context of localism there is often a role for national legislation and government to enable, or to set universal standards. Part of this is about fairness and avoiding a so-called postcode lottery.
It is very easy to get this wrong, and to end up with perverse incentives or gaming – eg in relation to school exclusions. National standards should not be a blueprint, and must allow for local innovation and discretion. Principles are much better than targets – one of our Better Way propositions. For example, there should be a national ambition to safeguard children, but local solutions will and should vary.
There also needs to be a stronger sense of what works best at what level – the principle of subsidiarity – as some things can only be done locally, others nationally, and there is also regional and international action to consider.
Challenging ‘scalability’
We should challenge the concept of scalability ie that small-scale experiments or practices are only of value if they can be scaled up to a size that is deemed to be more economical. Locality has produced an excellent report on why local by default should replace so called diseconomies of scale: http://locality.org.uk/resources/saving-money-local-default-replace-diseconomies-scale/- Bigger is not always better.
It is values and process that can be learnt from others and adopted more widely, not a single model, and a model that is imposed from on high can end up being a form of national control that undermines local delivery.
‘Contextual ‘ versus ‘content’ knowledge and skills
Local, community based organisations are often relatively rich in the understanding of ‘context’ – and may have many volunteers and staff who have direct experience of it. This is why they can be highly effective locally.
But they may be less successful in competing with national organisations for work because they appear to be less well qualified in terms of professional ‘content’ skills and knowledge, and these are given disproportionate weight. Being able to connect with a community and create strong communities should be better recognised in the ‘metrics’ of what makes an effective organisation.
Sharing learning
Local solutions to problems are important but there are a lot of common challenges, even if the combination of circumstances are unique in each case. So learning from others should be facilitated. But how to break away from just sharing best practice?
Experience suggests that such sharing works better when organisations are not in competition. But other factors are also in play: aspirations need to be raised; and people need access to tools that will help them discover what works best.
Raising aspirations: ‘shifting the dial from minus zero to plus one’
Just as individuals can lack ‘self-efficacy’ – a lack of belief in what is possible and therefore of ambition - so can organisations; and they may not even be aware of this.
Aspirations may be set only on achieving what others have done; on what the contract requires; or to a basic level of expectation (‘moving the dial from minus one to zero). It is much better for the ambition to be to move from ‘zero to plus one’ and to do so it is important to understand and start from the essential purpose, not processes. So, for example, some voluntary organisations may simply aspire to become even better at ameliorating social problems, rather than acting in ways that would prevent them from happening in the first place and genuinely empowering those with whom they work. Content and context skills will play a part in moving to ‘plus one’.
Creating tools that create a ‘journey of discovery’
To achieve this, we need to move away from passive learning to giving people at the front line active tools to innovate. It is about shifting from training people in how to do the job, or simply giving them knowledge, and seeking to build ‘capability’ – a strong theme in current educational theory. The Buurtzog model is one example of this, with front-line staff empowered to work in ways that work best.
What practitioners need is not a manual but a feedback loop of information on effectiveness that provides a living process of learning, with access to others who may be on that same journey in other organisations.
The aim should be to facilitate a ‘journey of discovery’ that puts practitioners in control and gives them an appetite to change. Learning from others should not become a way of avoiding such a journey but should help it.
Regular information on performance must be part of this, but it needs to be done in a way that avoids the problems with much of evaluation - which can be too late, too narrow in focus and used to find out whether existing goals have been achieved rather than to identify the need for different objectives. Feedback should be fun, information should come in real time, and should measure the things that really matter, not just what funders require. Asking people in communities what they and others genuinely value should be a key starting point.
‘Social accounting’ used by social businesses has arguably been one model in the past and has involved stakeholder consultation about what they thought counted the most. Makerble is trying to deliver this kind of information in this way. Wazoku develops software to enable companies to learn from their own staff.
Some issues to explore further:
Developing a better sense of subsidiarity, i.e. what works best at what level, so that the case for local action is stronger and the right support is in place regionally and nationally.
Developing metrics, tools and concepts that help create more effective local action, move away from the idea that ‘big is best’, raise aspirations and empower front-line staff; and which help others to recognise and reward how they add value through ‘context’ as well as ‘content’ skills and knowledge.
Note from Better Way and Place cell 2: Local is better than national
Note of Better Way London cell 2: 22 February 2018 on ‘local is better than national’
We considered our proposition ‘local is better than national’. From a historical perspective, we don’t seem to be winning this argument: we have a highly centralised political and administrative system in this country, and although we have had champions of localism over the last two hundred years or more, it seems that most people put up with ever greater centralisation and seem to accept that the alternative would be worse. Why is that? Why have attempts to push localism so often failed?
One answer we feel is that the case for localism has simply not been well made. The virtues of localism are often assumed but rarely explained, let alone evidenced. For example, Locality’s recent Commission of the Future of Localism report has much to say about the ‘what’ (‘radical action to strengthen our local institutions; devolve tangible power resources and control to communities; ensure equality in community participation; and deliver change in local government behaviour and practice to enable local initiatives to thrive’) but says much less about the ‘why’, and without a convincing message about why localism matters we are unlikely to get very far with any of the actions proposed. We could construct a better case, for example, showing why some national problems cannot be overcome without a much greater emphasis on local action (homelessness for example), and demonstrating that the current model is failing in that respect (very little of the work of homelessness charities is community based).
Another reason for the failure of successive localism agendas is that local government is widely regarded as low quality, ineffective, bad value for money, resistant to change, self-serving and even corrupt. While there seems to be little evidence that these kinds of problems are worse in local government than in central government, nevertheless there is clearly a problem here – a system can’t be said to be legitimate if people don’t have confidence in it, and many people simply don’t have confidence in political and administrative localism. In recent times, local authorities have lost power and resources, and low voter turnout reduces legitimacy, eg for local mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners.
Moreover it is evident that relationships at local level are often dysfunctional, and especially between local councils and independent community action. Some local authorities tell a localism story but never really ‘let go’. Even ‘co-operative councils’ have a tendency to define and impose models of community engagement which they feel able to manage, and block attempts to develop more independent action (an example of one co-operative council’s resistance to neighbourhood planning was given).
On the other hand we also know that independent community action can be badly flawed. It can be driven by narrow vested interests, exhibiting the worst forms of ‘nimbyism’ and producing local division, resentment, and injustice. The idea that local people always know best is no more convincing than the idea that the council always knows best.
And it is also true that local is not always better than national. One example is the situation for gypsies and travellers, whose representative body has told us that since decisions on traveller sites have devolved to local level it has been much harder to get agreement to new ones. A healthier balance might be what we are seeking rather than one or the other.
So what can be done to overcome these problems and build confidence in favour of a shift towards localism? We considered the following:
· Greater powers might produce better quality
A local income tax, and more substantial responsibilities at a local level, could be expected to produce improvements in the quality of people attracted to stand for election and to work in local institutions. This would probably need to be accompanied some form of quality mechanism capable of stimulating creative and effective practice and minimising poor practice, perhaps a ‘community Ofsted’ (but bearing in mind our ‘principles are better than targets’ proposition).
· Communities could organise themselves better and civil society needs to stand up for their interests.
For localism to thrive communities need to be better organised and stand up for their interests. This means local institutions, including voluntary agencies, doing far more to build contact and credibility with local people over time. It is also important to recognise that contest is an inevitable and necessary part of democracy, and especially where democratic institutions are weak, and creates energy. Voice is important. Geographical communities and communities of interest need to organise themselves, through associational activity, self-help groups, campaigning groups, community organising, and the like – because otherwise they will always be pushed around by those in political power, locally and nationally. New models for doing this may be needed, and one interesting example was mentioned: the Stroud Investigates model of community-based investigative journalism.
· Facilitation skills for democratic participation can be improved
Cassie Robinson from Doteveryone has described the lack of capacity and confidence among councillors and officers in both scrutiny roles and in championing change. Perhaps it is time for civil society to step up and where we do have good facilitation and community development skills, to be more proactive and generous about sharing them with colleagues in local government. One idea to broaden political representation and voice was a concept of ‘jury service’.
· Could benign dictatorship be part of the way forward?
The imposition of powerful elected mayors in local authorities and city regions, as a price of devolution deals, is highly problematic. We felt that they give the appearance that things are being dealt with better but in fact they mimic the problems of centralisation, further alienating people from everyday democratic engagement and community life. And yet when we look at the French system, where local mayors have a great deal of power, there do seem to be benefits – at least it is clear to everyone who is ‘in charge’. But perhaps one difference is that French mayors are more accessible to ordinary people and therefore more personally accountable.
· Social change can emerge from place-based action
Social change of national significance can sometimes be driven at local levels. Often this involves a combination of different types of people and organisations, the outspoken types to shake things up and the quiet types to win credibility. But not all local activism will be progressive – the tendency toward exclusion of minority groups can be acute at local level. So measures to build cohesion and solidarity and overcome prejudice will be needed, and sometimes these will need to operate beyond the local levels.
We recognise that localism is as much a challenge for the third sector as it is for the state. Over time, the concentration of power at national level has been influential in how the third sector has developed, encouraging gravitation away from local and towards national, accentuating a professionalisation of the sector, and an undervaluing of community-based action and the skills that are best suited to that. Reversing this will be painful, but could also help many third sector organisations rediscover their purpose.
We also recognise that for some things to improve the answer will not come from local action but from national co-ordination: for example across the whole refugee and migrant sector, there are only six people paid to do communication work and this means that voices remain localised and are not heard in national policy and public debates. Moreover, in some cases we need to organise things beyond national borders, and work internationally (reducing problems created by economic migration, tackling climate change, learning from international practice, and so on). Perhaps our proposition should be reframed, and what we should ultimately be striving for is a shift away from the national, wherever possible, towards the local on the one hand and the international on the other.
We accept that localism – as with any system - is imperfect, and if we feel there will be gains from a shift in favour of localism, not least because that should allow human relationships to come more to the fore in public life and in the work of civil society, we should be realistic about what we will have to put up with, as a price worth paying.
Note from Better Way and Place cell 1: Local is better than national
Note of the Founding cell discussion on 18 February 2018
Steve Wyler started by pointing out that people have been promoting the importance of place and local activity for hundreds of years, for example in the cooperative movement, and yet Britain remains highly centralised. Why? He also said that, of all the Better Way propositions, this one had provoked the most debate and challenge.
What is meant by ‘local’? Is it a local authority, or is it a community, and how small is that? Often the two were confused, and what was seen as devolution was just handing power to another form of centralisation, albeit below national level.
Local meant a community, we thought. But how far are communities geographical in our digital age? People used to meet in the pub, but some of that is now happening online. Arguably, people are citizens of everywhere, and that ability to connect up with others in communities of interest wherever you live brings many advantages, helping to break down barriers, but it can also erect new ones. We were told that millennials are the most integrated generation racially but the next generation is far less so, as social media and online dating are leading them to only ‘meet’ people from similar backgrounds, interests and political views.
Geographical communities still matter just as much, the group concluded. Place and personal contact cannot be replaced by the internet; and it is where the deepest and most lasting bonds are forged. Some communities remain very strong but it is also true that for others this is much less so, especially where there is a lot of movement of people. In relatively deprived communities, social infrastructure (buildings and the built environment; services; and relationships) is often weak; and the poorest communities have been worst hit by recent cuts. Promoting social action, facilities and services locally is especially important here.
There is a danger of ‘doing down’ such places and portraying them as lacking in their own resources. For example, people in Port Talbot taking part in an RSA workshop complained that they love where they live and are angry when journalists portray Port Talbot as a sink area. The social sector colludes in this ‘problematizing/deficit based’ narrative as way of fund-raising. We must push back on it. Even the poorest communities have strong natural resources, both physical and social, and their internal strengths need to be harnessed, not undermined. One of our members who had lived and worked in one deprived area of London talked of people streaming out in the morning to jobs outside the area, while white middle class people came in during the day, presenting themselves as ‘saviours’.
Community led activity helps create strong communities; but one of the challenges has been a recent loss of community capacity, as more women are working, men are being more active in the home, and both increasingly have ‘two jobs’. There’s less time for civic action, participation and volunteering, it was noted.
Not all local groups are of good quality. Some are excellent, many are good, but it is equally true that some are sub-standard. It is important to find a way of raising quality but unfortunately existing ways of measuring this often distort the picture. This is shown by the fact that national funders often can’t spot the difference by the metrics they use; and in any case these kind of measures can are being gamed. National ways of measuring quality often underplay the value of local organisations and a number of our members are going to explore how to change this in a cross-cell working group. User satisfaction should be part of these new metrics, it was thought, and weight needs to be given to the value of building communities and relationships locally that local organisations bring.
One of the barriers to greater investment in local communities and organisations is a lack of trust. In Denmark, where local authorities delegate the running of children’s homes to voluntary organisations, there is much more social integration and trust across social groups than in the UK.
The group was clear that this Better Way proposition should not be interpreted as being against all national or indeed regional or local authority activity. We need to sort out more clearly the respective roles of national/regional and local and play to respective strengths. Sometimes national standards are very important. One person pointed to the issue of Academies and Free Schools. They are intended to give more power to local communities but the reality is more complex. Regret was expressed that they had abandoned national healthy eating standards.
Ways needed to be found to get more resources to help strengthen community organisations. We discussed the so-called Preston model, where contractors for public services are asked to spend their money locally, creating local jobs and prosperity. Similarly, there were opportunities to develop local fund-raising, for example through community development foundations or community shares. Islington and Hackney Giving are other examples of how to do this. Women’s Aid is trying to set up a national charitable trust to fundraise nationally for local services.
Finally, we discussed how local authorities and national charities can better support local organisations. In Surrey, for example, they were exploring ways of commissioning that supported this.
Some national charities are also looking for innovative ways to help sustain and nurture local organisations, for example taking advantage of their relative ‘cash richness’ through donations to use these resources to support independent local organisations that are struggling. It is important to recognise that different communities will need different solutions. Shelter is looking at this. Scope is divesting itself of services to focus on campaigning. Catch22 is acting as an incubator for some new organisations and supporting existing small charities by sharing common services.
Issues to explore further:
· What are the respective strengths and best roles for national, local authority and local organisations?
· How can we develop better metrics to better demonstrate the value of local organisations?
· How can we get more resources to local organisations, including through commissioning and fund-raising?
· What can national charities do?