The Campaign Company Blog

"We've Got the Power?"

TCC has posted a lot about the White Paper on Community Empowerment when it was still developing. We are pleased to that it is is now published and commits to:

• A local authority duty to promote democracy
• An extended duty to involve covering most crucially Police Authorities
• A £7.5 million Community Empowerment Fund
• £2 million in opportunities for people with disabilities to volunteer
• Extending mentoring and befriending
• A pathfinder "Take Part" programme on Citizenship education for adults
• £70 million "Community Builders" scheme to support independent multi-purpose organisations
• A duty on Council's to respond to petitions
• An extension in participatory budgeting to all local authorities
• Modest incentives for voting
• More Neighbourhood Councils
• Extensions of Neighbourhood Management by Council's and partners
• More "community justice" and pilot projects in "community payback" by young offenders
• The establishment of the Tenant Services Authority to strengthen the rights of tenants of affordable housing
• Direct access and shadowing by  young advisors of ministers and elected mayors
• A £6 million national institute of youth leadership
• Youth internships with Councillors
• Making it easier to have a directly elected Mayor
• More discretionary localised budgets for Councillors to act as a community leader on
• A new Asset Transfer Unit to help local communities act on the the Quirk Report
• A national framework for Community Land Trusts and 14 pilots

Whilst the debate on community empowerment will continue, the most important aspects at this stage of the process are:

• The additional monies that will be available. This is important in pump priming local activity. 
• The Asset Transfer process being strengthened. This area needs support to encourage demands to come from below, in order to realise the ideals of the Quirk Report. Any body should itself be made accountable to the bodies representing community groups such as the Development Trust Association and the recognition given to Community Land Trusts could also strengthen local communities.

Some organisations have expressed the concern that white paper is giving giving individuals rather than communities "control". However we at TCC think the proposals are actually the sort of approach that we have been advocating and acting upon for years. We recognises that to empower communities you need to empower individuals first. Community groups shouldn't feel threatened by this - they should feel genuinely empowered by it.

In saying the above we recognise this is an unfinished agenda. A lot is being proposed, but there is a lot more to consider. For example the need to make make Police Authorities and PCT's more accountable to the communities they cover is clearly now next on the agenda.

As a result rather than than just passively promoting the document, surely we should not just be talking to ourselves but instead organising a serious public information campaign by all engagement practitioners from across all the various sectors. We should not just leave it to the DCLG but collectively promote it. This would maximise its impact and its benefits to the public in the run up to it being approved as well as pushing public bodies to organise more pilots in advance of it.

The DCLG has produced postcards promoting the white papers key elements. Perhaps we should ensure they have a much wider distribution than usual?

Richard Wilson, the Director of Involve commented on need to treat community empowerment similar social networking software. In the same way that the web 2.0 makes many services as ubiquitous as electricity, we now need the scope for communities of interest, whether geographical or interest group, to be able to plug into democratic structures in the same way that one can plug into an online system. The fact that vast numbers are now mobilised by Facebook for social events shows the potential for involvement.

Finally we should add that the White Paper seemed to gain a reasonable degree of consensus from the main political parties. This should mean legislation happens quicker and there is a degree of stability to bed down some of the proposals.

 

 

Memo to Local Authorities: "Make me smile (come up and see me)"!

A useful report published today from the Young Foundation on the wellbeing and happiness agenda and empowerment. It adds strength to the case against the low aspiration agenda for the Community Empowerment White Paper argued by some who do not wish to leave their comfort zone and which I have previously blogged on.

The report presents evidence to make the case for three hypotheses:

• that wellbeing is higher in areas where residents can influence decisions
  affecting their neighbourhood
• that wellbeing is higher amongst people who have regular contact with
  their neighbours
• that wellbeing is higher in areas where residents have the confidence to
  exercise control over local circumstances.

TCC experience working with local authorities and their local strategic partners also seems to confirm these hypotheses. The insight we gather through social marketing for Primary Care Trusts (PCT's), provides a slightly different angle in looking at this issue, but also seems to confirm the case being made.

In saying this, I don't fully agree with Richard Layard's arguments over the happiness issue and that you can improve things across the board to similarly match the rise in GDP. For example any complex human society will have sadness at various points in life such as a family bereavement and other stressful episodes that happen such as divorce or bankruptcy. Nevertheless the public and voluntary sector can do much to help the least happy 10% through the recently agreed extra expenditure on talking therapies in mental health.

Whilst some of the wellbeing and happiness agenda may be ambitious at times, surely part of the empowerment agenda should include an attempt at increasing wellbeing. If a local authority can't always make people happy all the time, surely it can try to empower residents to increase local human interactions that in themselves will "make people smile a bit more". This can even be be measured in how people react to a local authority in surveys and qualitative local discussion groups.

TCC have worked for local authorities such as Newham where we have developed community engagement programmes for Neighbourhood Forums along the lines of "shared challenges" such as local community led "Clean Sweeps" of Neighbourhoods. Watching whole families of all ages and from very diverse backgrounds turn up to don their luminous jackets and work together to litter pick local public spaces, in my experience, puts a smile on most people's faces!

The forthcoming Community Empowerment White Paper should address well-being issues and assist local authorities in putting a smile back on the faces of their many local communities!

Time to end the poverty of aspiration over engagement?

There does seem to be a worrying trend from people who should know better to attack the proposals in the Community Empowerment draft bill as not being of great relevance to an apathetic public. This was the case made by David Walker of Guardian Public Magazine writing in Guardian Society today.

Sometimes you expect to come across a poverty of aspiration within poorer communities but it's depressing to hear it from the editor of a journal read by many public sector professionals.

The argument seems to go: "If people claim to be generally satisfied with their public services just let sleeping dogs lie".

Just as modernisation is occurring in specific services such as health and education, the community empowerment bill is promising similar modernisation in public engagement. This will create a new "balanced scorecard" for public services that doesn't just measure public satisfaction, but also measures public involvement.

Of course we also need more emotional intelligence from public servants in dealing with the public - that requires additional training programmes as well as feeding back to staff the views of the public in real time . However that still doesn't far go enough. And we shouldn't be satisfied with a 33% turnout at local elections. But there is a clue in the fact that during the Poll Tax era it reached nearly 50% and that in the recent Boris v Ken contest there was a significantly increased turnout of in the mid forty per cent mark in London. We know people will engage if the issues are important and the choices are clear.

David Walker  compares "cold" local election voting and "X Factor" reality shows. But he draws the wrong conclusions. Why is reality show voting (when it is done properly and not rigged!) popular? It's because people actually feel empowered in the context of what they are taking part in. They are not just passively watching but collectively creating programme content and in effect "writing the script for the following week" by determining who comes back. How often does that happen in local government? Just as important as the immediacy, is that the results of their voting appears in the popular magazines they read and also provokes a conversation the next day around the water cooler. Where is the equivalent infrastructure in the public services that encourages this debate around a decision? You can't simply do it with a glossy leaflet!

He also confuses antagonism for creative tension over the issue of "personalisation v collectivism". I think he is far too pessimistic. This creative tension dates back to when humanity first created societies of towns and cities which allowed both public spaces but also individual endeavour.Of course there will be political choices that need to be made over resources for places like sport centres. But why is there a contradiction between this and allowing local communities to build up a wide range of locally owned community assets? Why should such choice be restricted to an existing building or facility? It could also include land for development too where the debate could be what they use it for. More affordable eco-housing v a new community centre? If local democracy is just seen as a remote Council making decisions for people, of course voter turnout will stay at 33% but we know that regeneration and stock transfer ballots are far higher so the potential is there to help people feel they have a much greater stake in their community.

The Community Empowerment Bill gives us an opportunity to build on the current relatively rare three-party consensus that exists to do something quite exciting in the coming year. Whilst we need to be realistic, we should not start off pessimistic.

Empowerment to the People!!

Richard Wilson Director of Involve has posted an article on the Guardian Blog about the "empowerment gap" and gives an excellent overview of how the government has sought to tackle it over the last decade.

I commented on it and made 3 points, which I expand on in much greater detail here:

• As Richard points out there has been a lot of progress, but as a result of many of these initiatives being driven by individual government departments through the relationship with relevant local agencies there has been uneven empowerment development across public sector bodies within localities. So for example, some sections of local government (eg, planning) may be far ahead of other departments in the local authority as well as compared to other local bodies like Primary Care Trust's (PCT's). There would be nothing wrong with this if it were a conscious decision arising out of collective local priorities, but this has actually emerged through many, sometimes unconnected, decisions made at various times in separate Whitehall departments. The next stage could be to develop a combined empowerment agenda at Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) level, to enable local public sector and voluntary bodies to advance together and become collectively more accountable to the communities they serve. Ways to achieve this might include: LSP's to jointly commission single public engagement units in each local government area which would benefit from economies of scale with duplication of savings ploughed back into more engagement; agreeing common local standards to various consultations; strengthening the scrutiny function in local government as well as perhaps even developing a formal scrutiny function for MP's over their own local public services?
• Capacity building is vital and part of this requires greater investment in community leadership support and training at a local level. This should not just be aimed at Councillors but should also be targeted at less well-off communities. TCC has already done work on developing local community champions for communities covering specific policy areas like recycling, but also in a wider role. This approach can help develop the local leaders of the future and widen their representativeness and diversity. This would be a broader approach than rely simply on the electoral process in a locality to throw up a small number of individuals who might then receive training from their local authority. Early intervention here can widen the pool of local leaders thus helping to build wider local trust in institutions.
• TCC, in working with PCT's, has discovered that in reviewing services there is an issue around "low expectations" whereby people may say a service is fine because they have no way to compare it with the equivalent in another area: eg you may find that people say they are happy with GP services, even when they do not compare well with somewhere else. This can also be linked to the wider "Delivery Paradox" whereby people say they are satisfied with their local service, but feel the same service is as a whole declining. So far the government has generally relied on league tables and delivery incentives from the centre to drive up some improvement, but if expectations are low in the first place, there is much less local pressure from below on organisations to improve. Greater local democratic accountability is clearly part of the solution, but is probably not enough on its own. Training up "expert residents" in local communities to learn more about what is happening elsewhere and be able to assert themselves as part of a wider community champion scheme might be a way forward to help build a critical mass for higher local expectations. We have formal twinning between Council's in different countries across Europe and even with the developing world, why don't we have twinning within the UK so Council's twin with other Council's to share knowledge and good practice with much of the work being done online to ensure value for money. Most local authorities will have historic connections with many others across the country so the decision over who to twin with could be quite an interesting process in its own right. Twinning could also be taken further so good practice is shared between twinned LSP's and therefore services in areas like health are twinned too.

Increased social capital makes for a more socially cohesive society. Community Empowerment provides an opportunity to challenge complacency at the local level, whilst making people feel they can influence more at a national level.

As Richard says in his article, we don't need countless repeat measures to tell us that. What we need is to use the current broad political consensus in this area to make some clear progress in wider local empowerment in the coming years!

Googling Alone! - A quick way to assess local social capital

You may have heard of the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam where he surveys the decline of social capital and suggests how it can be revived. The evidence base is generally drawn from American sources, however the points he make are very much applicable to other developed democracies.

Putnam conducted a lot of research for his book, but many working in their community trying to assess social capital for their area do not the time or the academic resources Putnam had.

Perhaps there is a web 2.0 solution?

If you are reading this article, there is a good chance you use Google or another good web search engine. If you use Google a lot you may be aware of many of its search facilities. One of the most interesting is if you type a full postcode in you get many internet entries associated with that geographical area.

As someone who was a Councillor for 20 years, I was fortunate in having a pretty good understanding of the social geography of my area. As a result recently I started typing in postcodes for some of the wealthier areas of my borough and some of the poorest.

The results were reasonably predictable. In areas that were quite wealthy you would find postings for people who ran their own businesses or were in community groups. In poorer areas you would generally find websites that related to wider public sector bodies but little community or small scale enterprise activity. At times I found up to 10 times as many pages for a relatively well-off residential road with no other facilities compared to a poorer area of flatted social housing.

Of course some might say it is all about access to home computers between poor and well off areas and that in poorer areas it is the mobile phone that has much more usage. A fair point. However in this much more connected world access to and participation on the internet can be a reinforcing factor for developing social capital in wealthier areas. The fact that the gap is so wide in the number of Google pages is a useful proxy indicator for quickly assessing levels of basic social capital and social connectedness.

What can we do about this?

One idea I had was that Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) could trawl every postcode in their locality and ensure they are connected with every group listed. I suspect there is good software that can automate much of this process. This in itself might go some way to increase the overall stock of social capital across a local authority area as more groups and individuals would be connected to key local stakeholders. A far-sighted LSP might even seek to connect people within a community together through encouraging the development of geographical based social networking software similar to Residents HQ that I have previously blogged about.

Another thought was for Local Strategic Partnerships to identify 10-20 postcodes with low Google pages and perhaps conduct a pilot survey of them regarding internet access. It may be that residents are not using free facilities in local libraries? Some extra publicity and perhaps even the sort of doorstep engagement that TCC recommends for many projects could be easily provided. This could be linked to an offer of simple computer training.

This sort of approach might go some way to connecting people up and creating the sort of network effects that can perhaps start to increase the stock of social capital in some poorer communities.

An E-Bowl of Sugar!

An interesting new approach to social networking, which is normally associated with widely dispersed communities.

This time it is to reinforce a real geographical community.

Residents UK is a social network site for people living within modern blocks of flats to communicate with each other. In other words people don't ignore their neighbours or have a chance meeting on the landing but actually move in and check out who lives in the block and who might share an interest with them or who can help them.

It will be interesting to see whether it takes off and whether developers of these blocks encourage it? The danger is that it might increase social segregation by making such electronically "gated communities" even more cohesive and less connected with surrounding poorer communities.

I would therefore love to see a local council kit out one of its own housing blocks with home computers and encourage people to join a local block social network - a sort of "e-tenants association". Could such a network go some way to tackle the generally lower levels of trust in poorer communities and perhaps enhance community cohesion?

The Death of Communities?

The Independent on Sunday has coverage of a study by the Prince's Trust about community decline. The report claims that a third of people are predicting the death of their communities as traditional social networks decline in the face of rapid change in the composition of communities.

The report claims that:

"Most people believe the days of face-to-face contact are numbered, with 65 per cent saying that people in the future will have more contact through the internet than in person. Almost one in 10 Britons, nine per cent, admits to failing to meet other people socially on a weekly basis. And 15 per cent go a week without speaking to any of their neighbours."

More significantly from a community cohesion perspective the report claims that:

"Poorer communities are the least confident about the future of their community and the least satisfied with life in general. More than one in five people here said they had not spoken to a neighbour for at least a week, while eight per cent have not spoken to a neighbour for at least a month."

The Independent also reports on laudable actions by government and the voluntary and private sector to support those poorer communities. Whilst one can always argue for more resources, a more important issue is how we use existing resources better. Two things come to mind:

• Investing in community assets so they draw in a wider community of people to increase social interactions and strengthen social networks.
• Supporting people in the community to act as local champions and advocates - perhaps through a relaxing of some inflexible benefits rules to enable them to be better supported in the work they could do talking to a range of local people.

TCC, working with the New Deal for Communities (NDC) Network as well as with local authorities on community cohesion, has come to the view that it is investment in some of those smaller changes that can make a bigger change in the long-run.

If we are to either sustain or rebuild social networks and community cohesion, it can only be through engaging with the people in a community and helping them to identify the shared challenges that face them and their neighbours. Only when you identify those challenges can you create a potential for dialogue across other cultural and social barriers.

Do something good with your Xmas cards!

As the company that proudly devised the Recycling for Real method of consultation, we were pleased to read about the Woodland Trust's Christmas Card Recycling scheme launched last week by Anna Ryder Richardson (she of lovely houses and jungle fame).

The target this year is to collect 100 million cards, which will enable 24,000 trees to be planted and save 2,600 tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases - the same as taking over 800 cars off the road for a year!

Special collection bins will be available throughout January at mainland WHSmith High street stores, Tesco stores, any TK Maxx stores and M&S stores.

So now that it's twelfth night and your decorations are down, get yourself down to one of those places now, do your bit and feel extremely good in the process!

Is Civil Society Prepared for the Future?

Geoff Mulgan wrote in the Guardian yesterday about the Carnegie UK Trust Inquiry into the future of Civil Society. He was Chair of the Inquiry and in his article summarises some of the key findings.

Quite a few findings were pessimistic. Societal fragmentation, inequalities, racial tension, loss of public spaces (both physical and intangible) and increased fear through raised security against terrorism were all issues that could challenge civic society.

Third sector involvement in the delivery of public services was expected to modestly expand, but there was an issue of the private sector displacing the third sector in areas where it was established.

At the same time there was much greater debate, public awareness, government interest and cross-party consensus over the need to support civil society than the past and no senior politician ever argues "there is no such thing" nowadays!

Geoff Mulgan concludes by posing the question:

"So is civil society prepared for the future? Probably not. Most organisations have to live hand to mouth, juggling short-term funding and perpetual minor crises. Even the bigger ones rarely get much time to stand back and look at the bigger picture. Many are on a treadmill chasing after contracts and new funding."

This is probably the biggest challenge out there. Only through more wide ranging community engagement and public debate can we perhaps address the question posed.

Young People to lead on environmental change

A new report from the Sustainable Development Commission, Every Child’s Future Matters, calls for local authorities and young people to lead on environmental change, and calls for schools, youth services and community groups to empower young people to do this. TCC has recently been working with schools and youth groups in EC1 on recycling and climate change – aiming to empower children and young people to be recycling champions in their local areas. In East Sussex we have also been working with the County Council, young people, and the wider community on participatory budgeting projects which are seeing young people having a genuine say and making a positive impact on their local environment. The SDC report explores the influence of the environment as a whole - from road traffic to green spaces to climate change - on children and young people’s well-being, and provides evidence that the environment can deliver the Every Child Matters outcomes. Does anyone have any other examples of how local authorities and other bodies are working with young people on environmental change? Read the report here