Note from a network discussion: What could a national communities strategy look like?
Notes of a Better Way discussion on 26 November 2019, Euston, London
We brought together people from the public, voluntary and community, social enterprise and cooperative sectors to talk about what a future Government communities strategy might look like. This was against a background of an election, different proposals in manifestos and, in July 2019, the publication by the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) of a communities strategy, ‘By deeds and their results: strengthening our communities and nation’. Participants came up with a range of ideas for future community strategies, which are listed at the end of this note.
Introduction
Introducing the discussion, one participant, coming from a public sector perspective and having looked at the manifestos, said he thought the following issues needed to be considered when thinking about future strategies:
Size of the state: in the past public services have been subject to large scale privatisation, often with unhappy results. But what is the alternative? Should more resources flow out of the public sector towards community-led wealth building and co-operative endeavours, or should the state reverse direction and bring externally delivered services back-in house?
Boundaries of the state: should we expect more to be done by citizens themselves, and if so what forms of public participation in service design and delivery can achieve this?
Balance of power: should central government take the lead through national directly-funded programmes, or should local government and local communities have greater rights to deploy resources and take action on their own terms? It was notable that all the manifestos promised a big shift in power to a more local level.
Lessons from the past
In our discussion we noted that various aspects of a national community agenda have had some success across the country over the last decade or so. Government-funded programmes, and in some cases enabling legislation, have encouraged the transfer of land and buildings to community ownership, helped people take over and run their local pubs, trained local community organisers, and helped local communities establish a neighbourhood plan, for example. The Lottery’s Big Local programme has devolved resources and decision making to neighbourhood levels, over a ten year period. However, some promising experiments, such as the Our Place programme (which encouraged cross sector collaboration and pooled budgets at neighbourhood level) were not followed through.
For successive governments community policy has been problematic. It has often been tentative, with major spending departments regarding community development activities as peripheral or ‘soft’. A top-down, command and control approach to delivering the Big Society had, for example, often caused damage to the fragile eco-system of existing voluntary, community and social enterprise activity. The National Citizens Service was set up at a time when youth services experienced major cuts, for example. Competition for contracts had undermined local collaborations. The recent devolution agenda has shifted some power in favour of city regions and city mayors, but devolution is not decentralisation as far as local communities are concerned, and these arrangements continue to disempower people, who have little or no ability to influence behaviour at regional levels. The new Communities Strategy had been generally welcomed as a positive statement of intent, but some felt that the proposed actions lacked ambition.
Involvement, participation, power
In future, ways needed to be found to give communities more power, including influence over key decisions and genuine control over things that really matter. But we recognised that there were numerous challenges.
There is a baffling array of tools available. The Involve website sets out 58 different forms of public involvement: action planning, appreciative inquiry, citizens’ assemblies, co-production, conversation cafes, design charrettes, e-panels, feedback kiosks, forum theatre, participatory budgeting, planning for real, etc. Many of these are well established and can be effective, for different purposes, but if too many options are available locally that can produce confusion, and attempts to introduce new methods can undermine existing ones.
Important though engagement is, there was also some real scepticism and challenge about existing assumptions and methods from participants in this discussion. It was pointed out that we make a false assumption if we believe that everyone wants to participate or should participate in local community life. There is some evidence, eg from the Huddersfield Democracy Commission, that although people want some form of engagement they do not necessarily want participation. As one participant put it, when I go to my GP I want to be listened to, but I don’t want to participate directly in how the surgery is run. Many people feel overloaded and simply don’t have the bandwidth to take on more civic responsibility. They often feel lost and don’t understand how power works. People are experts in their own lives but rarely have expertise in the system. Sometimes engagement brought accountability without power, it was pointed out, and input could be ignored.
Indeed it is wholly unrealistic to expect full participation in every community; communities are simply too diverse, and modern life is simply too complex. Any strategy would also need to recognise that communities are rarely unified, except at times of crisis (floods for example). There are always multiple communities operating within a place, and people take part in and identify with these various communities to a greater or lesser extent at different times in their lives.
But the group thought there is nevertheless considerable value in making it much easier for people to become involved if and when they feel the need to, or believe they can make a useful contribution. Knowledge and communication are central requirements, it was pointed out. To make it work well, it was thought that we need to bring about:
A more universal understanding of how the democratic system works.
A constructive sense of entitlement which extends beyond the educated middle classes.
Investment in capacity building.
Easier access to associational activities, in new and revitalised forms.
We also need to understand that the journey of engagement often starts at a very low level, and that once someone is on that journey there needs to be the encouragement and support to take them on a trajectory where they can do more. Formal structures can get in the way – too often informal associations are required to incorporate as soon as they need even very small amounts of funding and that needs to change.
Community action could also end up in a quagmire of funding and admin, rather than creating real change.
We discussed some methods which can, potentially, help citizens challenge the power of large institutions, and take some power and control themselves.
Citizens’ assemblies are receiving attention at the moment, even if they have not always proved as influential as hoped for. Moreover, there we some in the group who thought that there were risks that these could actually undermine existing democratic systems by bypassing them and one said they thought they were tokenistic.
Community organising has also become more prominent in recent years. One key feature of community organising is that the agenda is developed by local citizens acting in informal combination, not by an institution such as local government.
Moreover, it was pointed out that we should not underestimate the importance of community spaces, at least those which provide a continuing opportunity for people from across a community to come together, to learn about each other and discover common cause, and take action together. Good community spaces can, it was said, could provide a better foundation for building community agency, and helping people take some ownership and control over the things that matter to them, than some more formal programmatic methods.
Often consultation and engagement happens to an agenda set by government, rather than being bottom up. Listening is really important. Some government guidance on how communities can best surface issues that really matter to them might be helpful.
The role of local government and the public sector
There needed to be a debate about rejuvenating good local government. Some said local authorities may not always be the best agency to lead engagement initiatives but others said they should be the convenors of this. However, they can and should develop skills to listen well. Some local authorities are working hard at developing a more collaborative style of working with their local communities. Barking and Dagenham and Wigan have received particular praise for this, but there are many other examples around the country.
Capacity within the local public sector is a problem. Often those working in the public sector feel overwhelmed, but once they start on the path they realise there is less red tape and regulations in the way of better engagement than they thought there would be. It is possible to introduce local procurement policies, for example.
Community wealth-building models have been introduced in Preston and elsewhere. In these, local anchor institutions take action to build a local supply chain and employ more local people, in order to reinvigorate the local economy,
Supporting communities versus national initiatives
Often the biggest challenge at community level is not the appetite to take action, nor the skills to do so well, but rather access to finance and many lived a precarious existence. There is therefore a good case for some national funding programmes to stimulate and strengthen community life but deployed in ways that support rather than undermine community based activity. Many new national initiatives can be spawned by eager Ministers which are put in place without any recognition of what already exists.
Some points for doing this well were suggested in the group:
Mapping should take place of existing initiatives and services before new ones are created and investment in them should be considered before replacing them with new ones.
New projects should only be funded if it can be confirmed that they are informed by real local knowledge.
Small amounts of funding should be easily accessible to large numbers of small organisations which are embedded in their community and which employ local people, with diverse backgrounds.
Trusted intermediaries should be available to provide advice, and facilitate peer learning and exchange.
Funding should be deployed wherever possible to build agency, allowing communities to do what they want to do on their own terms, and helping to build leadership from within communities themselves.
Innovative forms of grant making such as match trading grants (where funds are released according to uplift in trading income) should be considered, to incentivise and reward entrepreneurial behaviour, where there is scope for organisations to build up their earned income. Such mechanisms should be seen as an additional option, not as a replacement for traditional grant making.
Decisions about funding allocation should be made at the lowest practicable level, with involvement of people who understand the local ecosystem.
Funding should be for the longer term, ten years ideally. Funded initiatives should be given as much time as possible to develop their activities, and reshape their plans in the light of experience (as has been successfully demonstrated in the Big Local programme).
The Co-op Foundation is attempting to work in the space between grant hand-outs and commercial loans, by providing a combination of interest-free loans and grants and promoting co-operative models. It has also introduced match funding schemes with national government and lottery distributors, and has been able to play an intermediary role, acting as an advocate on behalf of communities. Perhaps there is scope to develop this type of trusted intermediary role further.
The digital world
Much of our community development practices emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, with the growth of community campaigns and pressure groups, and the spread of community-led anchor organisations, often centred on a physical space, together with forms of engagement which relied heavily on those willing to engage in often endless meetings and committees. The dramatic emergence of on-line social platforms in recent years, and access to big data, has introduced new and much faster ways to engage people, sometimes in much larger numbers, in community activities, and to plan interventions in much more targeted ways. It would be wrong to assume that a single national community strategy can fully address the opportunity this brings (as well as the associated difficulties), but our thinking must not remain confined by practices which will increasingly feel out-dated and indeed alien to a younger generation.
Proposals for a national community strategy
Some ideas which came out of the discussion for a national community strategy were:
Community impact assessments for any new development or policy initiative, similar to environmental impact assessments, which are well established and accepted. This would stimulate a positive discussion and consideration of how community harm of new national or public sector initiatives can be minimised and community benefits enhanced.
The use of national funds locally should be determined by local people.
At present allocation of Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy funding can be decided by local authorities without any wider community accountability. A national strategy should introduce accountability mechanisms, perhaps including the option of participatory budgeting.
There should be investment in building the capacity of individuals and communities to engage and participate, especially where existing levels are low, including raising understanding of how democracy and local decision-making works.
Funding for community based activity should be overhauled to make it more accessible to smaller organisations and to be longer term funding.
Good local government is key and it needs to be rejuvenated, with investment in its ability to listen, and to hear what matters to people, not just to engage with them on its own agenda.
There should be further nationwide activity to support community organising, and to support communities in neighbourhood planning, and in shaping (and where desired delivering) local services.
A national strategy should promote more community wealth-building, through local procurement and supply chain development, and employment of local people.
A national strategy should include programmes to maintain momentum, and indeed accelerate, community asset transfer.
A national strategy should set out ways in which private companies are expected to engage the local community, eg commissioning community researchers in development projects.
Ideally we should seek a cross party alliance on a national community strategy which transcends party politics.
Note from a network discussion: Beyond command and control
NOTES OF A BETTER WAY DISCUSSION ON 12 NOVEMBER 2019 WITH PROFESSOR JOHN SEDDON, FROM VANGUARD CONSULTING
John Seddon’s latest book Beyond Command and Control explains what is wrong in prevailing models of services to the public: a system of control with budget management at its heart. Those who are employed to provide help are constrained by unit cost controls, eligibility thresholds, specialisation of function, and activity targets. The consequence is that help is not provided ‘right first time’ and failure demand (a ‘revolving door’ for many users) is generated in huge quantities – comprising 90% or even more of all service activity. This, according to John Seddon, is the true story of why costs are rising in the public sector and elsewhere and why services are failing to improve. The book looks at examples from utilities, banks, insurance and financial institutions as well as services in other sectors working with people with complex needs.
Managers currently focus much of their time on staff performance but should instead focus on the system as it is this that prevents staff from doing a good job and indeed the job they generally want to do. Digitalisation of services often makes things worse and often drives change rather than supporting it – it should be the last thing to do, not the first. The system of control needs to change and this requires three things:
Knowledge of demand which can only be gained if leaders study for themselves what actually happens to real people in the system;
A rigorous focus on the work which produces value for the customer/beneficiary, and cutting out everything else;
Achievement of purpose in customer terms.
Change requires no plan – change is emergent, the scale and speed of the change cannot be known in advance. The leader’s job is to study and change the system of control, and when this is done well the results speak for themselves. Workforce motivation and productivity increase when the workforce is given responsibility and flexibility, the services improve, and costs fall.
In discussion the following points were made:
1. Command and control exacerbates and creates inequality
Command and control systems embed and reinforce inequality. Prescription and standardised forms of service delivery impact most negatively on those who are socially excluded or who have the most complex needs, excluding large numbers of people, and maintaining them at the margins of society. First, the un-user friendly nature of many services makes it harder for them to access them and, second, when they do their needs are most likely to remain unmet, universal credit being one example. This may help to explain why efforts to tackle service inequality which focus on a presentational shift in staff behaviour and advertising to make themselves more welcoming to the so-called ‘hard to reach’ have often achieved much less than hoped for: the systems of control themselves need changing.
2. Funders, commissioners and regulators make things worse
Funders and commissioners and regulators reinforce the problem when they focus on top-down measures and compliance with standard specifications. This accounts for the striking examples of institutions failing their users which have nonetheless passed inspections with flying colours. Characteristically, when services are failing, command and control practices by funders and regulators increases, making the problem worse.
Measures have value but should always be based on what users of services genuinely want from that service. The best tactic is to ask how we would know whether we are doing a good job and then measure that.
3. Marketisation of public services is part of the problem
Marketisation of public services produces a focus on targets, unit costs and outputs, often the wrong ones from the service user viewpoint. This makes it harder to achieve right-first-time services (let alone undertake preventative work). But this model is showing increasing signs of strain in public service delivery, with well-known failures, and we can push back on this collectively and at operational level by collecting evidence about what is genuinely works best for users of services and about the inefficiency of excess costs caused by failure demand.
Marketisation has also produced a tendency towards larger and larger service contracts, in the misguided belief that this can achieve economies of scale. But this does not reduce cost and pushes aside locally responsive services, which are more likely to address need effectively, as was documented in an earlier Vanguard/Locality publication: Saving Money by Doing the Right Thing: Why ‘local by default’ must replace ‘diseconomies of scale’.
4. Command and control can lead to seeing people as ‘other’and seeking to impose norms
Command and control models can reinforce the tendency for service delivery organisations to see people in difficult circumstances as ‘other’, to focus only on their problems and deficits. Because they push toward standardisation, the operating model can seek to impose ‘norms’ on people who are genuinely different, rather than build in flexibility to appreciate and respond to these differences.
5. Charities are being pushed away from their mission by command and control
Many organisations in the charity sector have themselves adopted command and control models, and this produces huge tensions between their operations which are constrained by numerical targets and cost constraints, and their underlying values and mission, which at best is informed by user experience and expertise
6. Contracts can be challenged – be brave
Many charities have become complicit in a funding system which insists on compliance with command and control. If they want to work with the State this is often seen as unavoidable, though it is possible to challenge it, as one of the participants had successfully done, mid contract, by showing how the measures were not working for their clients.
7. Change to the commissioning model is starting to happen
There are some tentative signs of change in commissioning. The Welsh Assembly has adopted a policy for working with people whose lives have come off the rails: starting with understanding what matters to them. In Gywnedd this is leading to changes in commissioning practice. An instance is given in John Seddon’s book:
Julie, head of adult services in a county council, describes the change as moving from asking “What’s the matter with you?” to “What matters to you?” Asking the former leads the service down the path of prescribing a set of predetermined service-driven solutions to a problem. The latter leads to a conversation about what a good life looks like to an individual citizen. That conversation may take two hours, two weeks or even two years to answer fully, but the important thing is to get a complete picture of the citizen and his or her requirements in their own context.
We need to build confidence that we can change commissioning for the better – shifting practice away from low cost procurement into commissioning informed by good knowledge and good local relationships, where all parties can be more honest with each other, especially when things are not working as well as hoped for.
For those in commissioning roles at mid-ranking levels it can be very difficult to challenge orthodox practice. In the NHS for example a continuing stream of standardised top-down targets and regulation makes it very hard to take account of different local circumstances.
One tactic would be to encourage curiosity among those in senior commissioning and strategy roles, so that they take time to study properly and see for themselves what is really going on. We discussed one example where this is working well, partly because of good relationships between commissioners and contractors, and partly because the commissioners had good knowledge themselves of users and the services. It can be more difficult to influence procurement where the account manager and procurer are different.
8. Ask the question ‘Why?’
These practices are so widespread that they can seem unchallengeable and overwhelming but one technique used by one of the participants in her own organisation is to ask the question, ‘Why?’ This encourages reflectiveness about what the purpose of different actions is intended to be, which then allows you to judge whether this is what was intended and whether the measures to deliver this purpose are working.
9. Seek 'better practice’ not best
We should avoid talking about ‘best practice’, and instead talk more about ‘better practice’ – and remember that this always begins with studying and acquiring knowledge in your own area – simply lifting practice from elsewhere may result in just another standardised delivery process.
10. Community development principles provide a model for listening to users about what works
We should also remember well-established community development principles, such as those advocated by Robert Chambers in the context of international rural development (putting the last first, finding out what people in poor communities themselves suggest and can do, rather than imposing solutions invented and controlled by privileged professionals coming in from outside).
11. A ‘whole systems’ approach is needed for complex issues, requiring collaborative leadership
Single organisations on their own can rarely develop services capable of tackling complex problems, and what is needed in order to develop meaningful responses is an alliance of agencies prepared to work together, and study together, looking at the system as a whole that delivers, for example, health, or homelessness.
12. Shifting the narrative
It is necessary to shift the narrative because the dominance of this model is a major barrier to change. It should be possible to build a direct, powerful story that explains what failure demand is and why it is so damaging, how we could run things differently and the benefits that would be produced. But it is difficult to do so. Most journalists and most of the media have accepted the command and control narrative as an article of faith. When there are national scandals about public service failure the underlying reasons are rarely discussed, and it is always tempting to ascribe blame to individuals rather than to system failure.
Moreover, the impetus to run things differently rarely comes from rational discussion, and more often from direct personal encounters with what is really happening, which profoundly shake people’s assumptions, and produce the energy needed to make change.
It would be useful to tell the stories of how leaders have tried to move beyond command and control, the obstacles they have faced, and the tactics they have used to overcome them.
It would also be powerful to tell the story ‘the other way round’ ie not through the eyes of managers but through the lived experience of service users.
13. Influencing the system
The Better Way network has some channels to influence practice at national government level, across the political spectrum, and we should make use of them, starting with the Call to Action for a Better Way launch at the end of November 2019. At the least we should be encouraging Whitehall to stop doing things which make the system of command and control even worse.
In his previous book The Whitehall Effect John Seddon documented the public service failures of government, and pointed to remedies, but it has proved extremely difficult to bring about real change at this level. Having said that, there have been times when profound change has been achieved across government, and the current reliance on command and control thinking need not be permanent.
14. Change starts with us
For some of those involved in the discussion, their focus was on what they can do directly in their organisation to change the system. For others, there was interest in how to counteract the dominant narrative and a belief that now might be a turning point. We ended by talking about the final Better Way principle:
‘Changing ourselves is better than demanding change from others. The best starting point is what we ourselves can do, putting the common good first and our vested interests last. The more we achieve, the more others will follow.’
We can seek to influence people within our reach, including those ‘just above us’: senior managers, funders, and so on, as well as colleagues within our organisations and networks. In so doing we can use human stories, translate the messages in ways that can be quickly understood, and encourage people to study for themselves.
Note form a roundtable: Collaboration and shared leadership so that people and communities come first
Better Way Roundtable, 5 June 2019
Introduction
Caroline Slocock introduced the roundtable, pointing out that in the Better Way, we believe in collaboration and shared leadership because that way people and communities come first. We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, including from:
Toby Lowe, who has written about how co-ordinated action not only better addresses structural causes, it also matches the complexity of individual lives, arguing for commissioning and funding to support this.
Cate Newnes-Smith would like to see more ‘holistic systems leaders’ who understand the real issues in people’s lives and work across organisations and sectors to deliver shared goals.
Polly Neate, who says that large charities should not compete against local charities, to To choose not to win, even though they can.
Kathy Evans, whose organisation Children England created the Declaration of Interdependence, advocates listening to your heart, not the head, if you want to follow a Better Way.
Audrey Thompson, who says we need ‘social connectors’ who can empower and link up individuals, particularly in disadvantaged communities.
Tom Levitt, who demonstrates that big companies are increasingly reaching out and working innovatively with charities toward shared goals.
Collaboration - a perspective from the homelessness sector
Rick Henderson is CEO of Homeless Link which now has 780 organisations in its membership. Rick described various experiences of collaboration:
The Making Every Adult Matter (MEAM) coalition was a largely successful collaboration to find better ways to support people with multiple disadvantage – across the fields of homelessness, mental health, criminal justice, and substance abuse, and including MIND, Homeless Link, Clinks and DrugScope (now Collective Voice). The MEAM Coalition has had significant impact at national policy level, influencing the work of the Lottery, leading grant making foundations, and government as well. There were challenges – the founding partners were of different sizes, and there was for example a big difference between the funds they could contribute to make things happen. But the common purpose was clear and much was achieved.
Homeless Link adopted a ‘partnerships by default’ policy. Everything the organisation did would if possible involve at least one partner. The number of partnerships quickly doubled, and there were some gains, not least that more people could be reached. But the rationale was not explained or understood well enough, and practice has drifted back to unilateral work.
Homeless Link attempted to form a strategic alliance on migrant destitution. This emerged from a ‘car-crash’ conference where it became clear that the homeless sector was failing to respond well to the changing demographic of homelessness, which included a sharp increase in migrants and refugees. Despite a promising start, the alliance failed, when two leading homeless charities decided to work with the Home Office to support repatriation efforts. It became clear that operating cultures were very different – homeless charities tend to be highly pragmatic, doing what is needed to, for example, help people off the streets, while the refugee sector tends to be driven by a particular set of values.
Let’s not romanticise the importance of personal relationships. Without a clear common objective, and shared values, it is hard to collaborate successfully.
Collaboration – a perspective from the refugee sector
Maurice Wren, CEO of the Refugee Council, pointed out that the term ‘refugee sector’ can be misleading. There are around 1,000 migrant and refugee charities/NGOs. Most are under-resourced, especially for policy work. Many are fiercely competitive for profile and position, and behaviours can be characterised by fear and suspicion. In 2015, as a result of the Syrian emergency, the landscape changed and existing agencies were unsure whether new actors were allies or threats.
There are rarely refugee specific solutions to the problems which refugees have. Most successes are process improvements, changes to regulations for example, behind the scenes, so it is difficult to point to a series of positive changes, although things might well have been worse with the work of the agencies.
It has been difficult to marshal and sustain a critical mass of collaboration. It has not been possible to build a movement. Attempts have implied a top-down model of leadership, reinforcing the difference between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’.
It might be more helpful to think about ecologies or ecosystems, where the notion of interdependence is forefront. This can produce more equality in the relationships, more voices which can be heard and respected. It shifts the focus away from leadership and towards co-ordination and organisation.
The Detention Forum is a network of organisations working together to challenge the UK’s use of detention. Some of the 30 organisations which came together hold a highly antagonistic view of government; others are prepared to work with the state. The Forum was however able to draw up a simple shared vision, and build a practice of collective decision making, respecting those who chose not to take part. It became evident that the strength of the forum was in its diversity. It was important to think long term, and about systems change. It is not realistic to expect members to change direction, but rather a gradual process of alignment of many years. It was necessary to invest in co-ordination of the Forum, for the larger members to behave in a more humble way, and for all to be willing to listen and be respectful. The way the Forum worked and the values that were practised were more important than mission and goals.
Discussion
Social sector organisations tend to highlight the importance of shared values in discussions about collaboration, but some of the most effective collaboration can take place across sectors where values can be very different, but there is a well-defined common cause and mutual advantage.
Moreover, we should not assume a single set of values operates in the charity sector and another set of different values operates in the business sector. Values can cross sectors, although more easily at the individual level, and less so at the institutional level.
Shared values can help to build strong teams within and across organisations, and storytelling produces a re-iteration of values, making them relevant and alive. Values can stimulate spontaneity (mission does not have that effect, it tends to constrains action).
It takes time to build trust, and establish credibility. The models we use in the social sector make collaboration and shared leadership more difficult:
The fetishisation of small differences is widespread in the social sector.
Governance models encourage the primacy of organisations over collaborative endeavour.
Planning gets in the way of spontaneity.
There are risks in polite behaviour. If we only look for consensus and avoid conflict, differences are never allowed to surface, and when they do, they become destructive.
Coalescence is necessary to identify and bring about change. For those in the social sector concerned with change and campaigning, working with others is nearly always necessary. In most cases social change organisations have few resources, so efforts to build alliances and systems thinking come naturally.
Leadership for social change needs to be more about building relationships and alliances rather than managing resources (although that is still not well recognised in recruitment practice). For a practice of collaboration to flourish we need leaders who are encouraged to behave as human beings first and foremost, with a willingness to encourage others to develop as leaders. Shared leadership means devolving decision making as close to people as possible, equipping them to become the designers and drivers of change.
The focus on impact, and in particular the expectation that individual organisations should be able to demonstrate their impact, is damaging. It is much better to focus on shared outcomes, and on collaboration as a good in itself.
Our world is wired for organisational growth but we need to rewire it for collaboration. We know this is possible; for example, most commissioning makes enemies of friends, but it doesn’t have to be this way; there are positive examples of alliance commissioning in Plymouth, Sheffield and elsewhere.
There is a particular challenge for larger established organisations, and funders, and how they should behave with new entrants and insurgents. Many are wary, but when they do create space for emergence and decide to support newcomers this can make a big difference.
In collaborations where there are inequalities between large and small organisations, we assume that the large ones should be in the driving seat. But that could be inverted. Local or specialist organisations, which may be closer to lived experience, could be in the driving seat, with any partnership funding flowing through them. One current example is the Health Now initiative, where Lottery funding comes to small charity Groundswell, and much larger national charities Shelter and Crisis are sub-contractors.
In a competitive capitalist society, size and money matters, and ruthlessness is admired. But in the social sector the most effective smaller organisations are adept at building their power, and those with most resources and in positions of relative power don’t have to ‘act like dicks’.
Note from a roundtable: Organisations without walls
BETTER WAY ROUNDTABLE, 16 MAY 2019
Introduction
Caroline Slocock from Better Way identified the problem: organisations can operate as if they are an end in themselves, erect walls between people and between organisations, hoarding rather than sharing power, failing to collaborate. They can build a poverty industry, seeing their business as achieving delivery targets, and people as units of production, or as the problem. But of course there are many counter-examples, as articles in our Insights for A Better Way document and blogs on the Better Way website illustrate. Many of these are focusing on building communities not services. At their best they engage all elements of a community and unlock its power.
Karin Woodley, who reminds us to keep our organisations ‘personal’ and practise ‘radical listening’: communities should be seen as partners, not consumers, and be representative of those they serve.
Clare Wightman, who demonstrates that people in the community can sometimes provide better support than that provided by organisations and services.
Ollie Batchelor, writing about how they’ve established a food co-op, rather than a foodbank service, in Gateshead, who says it’s a community ‘where every person matters and brings their own strengths and qualities to the table’.
Sona Mahtani, who explains how the Selby Centre in Tottenham brings a diverse group of people together from right across the community and ‘unleashes creativity, opportunity and energy people create themselves’.
Radical listening
Karin Woodley from Cambridge House described how our sector has been walking a path towards self-destruction. We have broken down service users lives into disconnected problems, and as a result have stigmatised users and failed to combat oppression, serving instead the patriarchal requirements of funders and stakeholders. We undervalue lived experience, and constantly marginalise people. Our models of tackling exclusion have become complacent.
But a practice of radical listening can help organisations to become authentic change-makers, transferring control back to the people we work with, bringing people with lived experience to the fore, and stimulating outside-in continuous improvement.
Organisations need to act boldly to change their own composition. At Cambridge House the CEO decided that for six months the only people to be recruited were those who had been in prison, and made it happen.
To become radical listeners is a real challenge. Our support models imply that service users are not as capable or as confident as us. Our communication is undermined by saying too much. We need to get much better at engaging people we work with in conversations where we listen rather than talk.
We need to learn, in group and one-to–one meetings, how to place the emphasis on questions rather than propositions. We need to stop ourselves recapping what has been said, making generalisations, categorising, joining the dots, proposing solutions. Only in this way will we create space for authentic insight to emerge.
We need to develop a theory of change which is based on the agency of the people we work with. We can only succeed in this if we liberate our front-line delivery staff, stop undertaking short term projects, and see ourselves not as in the service of the state but rather as radical activists for change.
A community not a service
Clare Wightman from Coventry Grapevine acknowledges that formal services are sometimes needed but what people usually need most is what services can’t provide. Love, companionship, friendship. Services are limited but what people will do for each other can be unlimited. Clare told us about a boy with Downs Syndrome and his mother. The boy was locked out of school, left in the playground in the rain, punched someone and ran off. Services were offered – counselling, a parenting programme – but this help didn’t help. Grapevine connected the boy and the mother to people who were prepared to help as friends, who would be there for them in tough times. At school the boy had been rejected for the school pantomime, and failed the literacy requirements for the drama courses, but it turned out he had acting skills, and, encouraged by his friends, is now a successful actor and dance artist.
Coventry Grapevine received funding to help 1,000 people to become physically active. Rather than a project or a programme, they build a social movement, mobilising people in the community to mobilise other people, leading from the back. They ignored the targets, in the expectation that the numbers would look after themselves, and they did – and moreover, four of the six initiatives that people set up as a result are still going.
The difference is this. A service model usually means providing limited help for people who need it, focusing on a particular problem. A community model is fundamentally different. It taps into richness and abundance, with multiple mutually beneficial relationships, producing lots of additional support and activity.
Discussion
Community is what we do and how we do it – not simply a synonym for place. Community models can enhance accessibility, especially where people are free to act on their own ideas and run with them, rather than fit into a pre-set model. But we do need to acknowledge that not all community models operate in accessible ways, and some groups can be made to feel unwelcome in some community settings, because of race, or class, or other characteristics.
Some of us feel that there is an important and legitimate role for government, to help society become fairer, and kinder. Others that government will always be an impediment because it cannot listen well, it always tries to control and direct.
Our responsibility is to be catalysts for change, not produce the change our leaders want to see.
Radical listening can be informed by the practice of coaching, or of action learning. It requires more than passive listening, for example asking questions in the spirit of inquiry.
Most forms of ‘co-production’ fall short of radical listening. Radical listening implies a shift away from services, and towards the practice of mobilising people to mobilise others. It implies that design and decision making should be much closer to those affected. Using techniques such as community organising can make subsidiarity real.
In the field of homelessness for example, people can become institutionalised by the charities, separated from wider society. The task must always be to reconnect people to society.
How can we nurture more radical listening, and bring about a shift from services to community? We need a national narrative to promote these ideas. We need better mechanisms to help people determine the outcomes and benefits which matter most to them, rather than being expected to conform to those established by remote governments. We need to find ways of creating space and time for people to come together to make the difference they want to see. We need positive ways of dealing with negative community behaviours. We need to reward bravery, courage, the entrepreneurial spirit. We need more charitable trusts and foundations and public institutions willing to think in this way.
Note from a roundtable: Tactics for Practitioners
Tactics for practitioners
BETTER WAY ROUNDTABLE, 4 APRIL 2019
Introduction
Caroline Slocock introduced the roundtable, which is intended to identify tactics so that people and communities can thrive, not just cope. We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, which included contributions from:
Edel Harris, who says that Local Cornerstone is ‘throwing away the rulebook’ and empowering front-line staff so they have space to make time for people.
Matt Kepple, who says we should create a network of ‘curious’ people and challenges us to create our own version of Wikipedia so that we can share what works and become a collective force for good.
Colin Falconer, who explains how the Foyer Federation established Advantaged Thinking for practitioners to ‘build on strengths’ and avoid ‘the branding of disadvantage’.
Richard Wilson, who explains that good relationships between practitioners and those they work with are key to ‘Good’ and ‘Bad Help’.
Graeme Duncan, who identifies principles that are more likely to lead to better education than damaging high-stakes targets.
David Robinson, who advocates putting ‘relationships, rather than transactions’ into practice and also writes movingly about the importance of the exercise of humanity in services.
Steven Platts, who shows how at Groundswell the ‘Give a lot, Get a lot’ ethos works, bringing in experts in lived experience to support people facing homelessness.
Advantaged thinking
Colin Falconer pointed out that attempts to redress the balance between meeting the needs of people and developing their strengths has a long history which can be traced back to Aristotle’s notions of a ‘good life’ and in recent years has found expression in Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and in other strengths-based approaches.
Advantaged Thinking was developed at the Foyer Federation as an alternative narrative about young people designed to inspire rather that to focus on the negative. Seven tests were developed:
· How we talk about people (without stigmatising)
· How we understand people (potential, not just problems)
· How we work with people (encouraging risk taking and trust)
· How we invest in people (beyond surviving and c0ping)
· What we expect for people (for them to thrive)
· How we involve people as their own solutions (so they are agents of change)
· How we act to find, develop, support and challenge thinking in others (to make all of the above more widely possible)
Colin encouraged us to consider how we behave as parents, when a child is still crawling. A disadvantaged-thinking parent would assume the child will never walk, and tell the child that they will always have to crawl, and they would put in place crawl-related therapy and similar measures. An advantaged thinking parent would encourage the child to learn to walk, based on a belief that they will walk.
A social Wiki
Matt Kepple described his work to establish the Makerble platform to make it easier for organisations to track impact. The wider challenge he said is how to make best practice more discoverable. The problem we face in the social sector is that the pace of iteration is too slow. James Dyson produced 5,126 versions of his vacuum cleaner that hat failed before he made one that worked. We do produce changes and improvements, but if evaluation and dissemination only happens at the end of a programme we are held back. We can de-risk and accelerate iteration by sharing and building a community of practice, but our primary methods, conferences and training events, only reach senior staff, not front-line workers. Can we learn from the extraordinary success of Wikipedia and Spotify, for example, to create an on-line library of best practice targeted to outcomes and beneficiary groups, and personalised so that the people using the library get what they need?
Much of the work of the social sector is about helping people and communities progress from a negative position (‘minus one’) to a just about tolerable position (‘zero’), whereas the real prize is to move further, to a positive position (‘plus one’):
Discussion
In the discussion, the following points were made:
An open-source approach to intellectual property is essential to achieve rapid progress in the social sector. The late Jane Slowey, who led the Foyer Federation as Advantaged Thinking was being developed, was always willing to share with anyone interested.
Models similar to the seven tests of advantaged thinking have been developed in other sectors. For example the five features of health creating practices developed by the New NHS Alliance: listening and responding, truth-telling, strengths-focus, self-organising and power-shifting.
There have been examples of successful on-line social sector sharing platforms. One is the Rightsnet system, developed by LASA, which is a platform for thousands of advisers across the UK to stay up to date with the latest social welfare law news and case law developments, to get casework support, to test their ideas and share their experience, and to network with other advice workers. Similary there is a Refugee Legal Group online network. These have been developed as voluntary communities, where any investment of time is amply rewarded. They require good administration and scale, so that information is constantly refreshed.
It is very difficult for new entrants to gain critical mass, and activities such as a festival of ideas may be needed to generate initial content on a particular cause. A feedback loop, even a rating system, can help to build trust and confidence in the platform. But if possible it would be best to use an existing platform rather than invent a new one.
Do these platforms reinforce a tendency to apply models which do things ‘for ‘and ‘to’ people, rather than to help them to do things for themselves? Not necessarily, and Colin described how communities of practice have developed in Australia to explore advantaged thinking techniques together and to involve the whole organisation.
In places, we need better platforms which can help people and organisations to come together to consider what matters and to measure impact. But we should be wary on imposing systems.
Sharing platforms can operate best whether there is also an intention to change from above. For example, in Wigan the local authority leadership has decided that asset based community development approaches should be applied to every aspect of the council’s work, and all staff are required to have basic training in the principles. Strategic determination of this kind can create the conditions for a learning community to flourish.
Social sector organisations tend to hoard their own resources. They are very reluctant to give money to people directly, to investment in them so that they can make change on their own terms. But perhaps much more of this would be a good thing, to build agency and self-determination. A recent book, Utopia for Realists, identifies examples (including work with long term rough sleepers in London) where providing people with money was more effective that providing them with conventional services.
It is wrong to assume that all social interventions are designed to support people and to help them flourish in their lives. This is not always the case. As has been revealed recently, the immigration services were designed to create a hostile environment. Much of the benefit system seems designed to control rather than support people. We have set up a childcare system which privileges those in high-income work and disadvantages those on benefits.
In such cases it is not enough to introduce better practice (eg asset based models of working). The systems themselves need to be challenged and dismantled. It is sometimes possible to appeal to notions of ‘fair play’, and to build a coalition capable of achieving a change to a national system which is treating people unjustly or holding them back. In other cases it is possible to find some common ground even where there are significant policy or cultural differences, and make some gains.
Wherever there are opportunities to build better systems, models like Advantaged Thinking will be needed, and effective communities of practice that can share learning and that can engage users and frontline staff in design.
There is an excitement about technology-enabled, not technology-led solutions. Tactics so that people and communities can thrive, not just cope, need to be both top-down as well as bottom-up. Our efforts need to build critical mass, and become viral. In that process we not only move towards ‘plus one’ practice, but also start to change the national story.
Note from an online roundtable: Sharing Power
Introduction
Caroline Slocock from Better Way introduced the discussion topic: how to create opportunities for more people, especially those who are usually overlooked, to participate in setting the agenda. We need to help more people develop a ‘constructive sense of entitlement’. We need a shift in political life away from command and control behaviours, listening better, and thinking locally wherever possible.
We’ve already started to explore how to do so through a number of essays in Insights for A Better Way, and blogs on the Better Way website, which include contributions from:
· Sue Tibballs, who asks people to make more use of the immense latent ‘social power’ of civil society.
· So Jung Rim, who tells how the Social Innovation Exchange is creating platforms that bring in diverse voices.
· Richard Bridge, who argues that local authorities need to distribute power more equally.
· Mark Johnson, who writes about how he’s challenged the deep-seated bias against experts in lived experience in the criminal justice system and built a movement.
· Simon Shaw, who explains how Food Power is creating opportunities for people experiencing food poverty to set the agenda.
· Sufina Ahmed, who points out that sharing power has to start with understanding power and privilege.
· Rhiannon Bearne, who call for a redirection of effort towards making rather than shaping power.
· Avril McIntyre, who considers how to help others in ways which genuinely empower them.
Community organising
Nick Gardham from Community Organisers described the experience of community organising which listens to people and brings them together to take collective action on things they care about. He explored the concept of ‘sharing power’. This is not the same as giving power, or even shifting power. It implies a sense of responsibility on all sides. It requires trust and this is difficult for institutions and even more so for the majority of people, who do not believe that they can affect change, and are fearful of becoming visible. It can therefore be important to start on a small scale, with lunch clubs, litter-picks for example. Even small actions like these produce stories of personal change. They can and sometimes do also lead to campaigns for wider system change, and generate pressure on institutions to change their behaviour. So the experience of sharing power can produce conflict as well as collaboration. But sharing power does not happen of its own accord – it requires resources. The government funding in recent years to train community organisers is an example of what can and has been achieved.
The Power Project
Steve Reed, Shadow Civil Society Minister, described the experience of introducing a Co-operative Council model in Lambeth when he was Council Leader. There was rapid improvement, but the gains fell away quickly when local policies shifted. It is not enough to address inequalities of wealth, health outcomes, etc, without addressing inequalities of power, which underpin them all. A non-violent revolution is needed, to take power from those who have it and abuse it, and share it with everyone else. This requires actions in different spheres: the economy, in community life, in local and national politics. Politics is broken. It is too remote from people. The social contract, that the proceeds of prosperity and growth should be shared fairly, has failed – a minority have accumulated even more. Big data has been used by companies to exploit us. We have failed to respond to the climate crisis. Our social institutions and our current forms of liberal democracy have failed to protect people, and so people are turning their backs on them. Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, the re-emergence of neo-fascism across Europe are all the result in a loss of public confidence in liberal democracy. But we cannot give up on democracy – rather we need to ‘double down on democracy’. This will require bottom up political renewal accompanied by change at the top. We need to give people direct power, forms of democracy which will allow the workforce to take back a fair share. We need to nurture and develop the capacity of people to self-organise, and institutions which encourage this, radical models of devolution and participation. There are many barriers. For example stasis within organisations – people in leadership roles are incentivised to maintain the organisational forms which have placed them at the top. There is always resistance to the threat that power will be taken away. Politicians are threatened by the idea of building the capacity of people to take decisions themselves, and ensure that they are kept as outsiders, and people have little choice but to take up placards. We cannot take democracy for granted. Throughout history in most parts of the world the default position has been the autocracy of the ‘strong man’. However, the appetite for democratic participation is evident. It can be seen in Barking & Dagenham, in Wigan, among climate change action groups, in the digital citizens’ platforms in Seoul. A new form of politics is trying to emerge. We need a new settlement between citizen and state, more respectful relationships, a break- up of public and private and digital monopolies. The Power Project aims to understand this and too build a movement for a radical transformative type of politics.
Discussion
In the discussion, the following points were made:
Powerless is a lack of connection. Relationships – deep value relationships – are needed to help people build trust, come together, and discover their own power. Connectedness and solidarity are the antidote to powerlessness. We should consider how to build connection, and therefore collective efficacy, and how those in a privileged place can help with this. We should also consider how to incorporate relationship-friendly design in many aspects of our lives if we are to overcome powerlessness.
There were different views about whether it is necessary to take power from those who have excessive amounts in order to increase power among those who have very little, or whether power is potentially infinite, and therefore the task should be to build power among those who have little. It was suggested that communities are latently powerful because all political power ultimately derives from them. It was also noted that even the most powerful can feel powerless in some circumstances, and that the oppressed can become the oppressor. But the reality is that the somewhat powerless are those who most exclude the completely powerless. If we are to achieve a power shift, people and agencies will need to give up some power, but will usually be resistant to this, or even where the leadership is willing to make a change, they will find it hard to do so. So we will need measures which support, guide, and reward the shifting and the sharing of power.
We need to help people understand how political systems work, and to deal honestly with unrealistic expectations. Concentrations of power are a problem. Power always agglomerates and perpetuates itself. In this country power is concentrated in Westminster and in the two party system. We need measures such as proportional representation or sortition (selection of people at random to exercise decision making, as with the jury system) to break it up. Participatory forms of democracy, as in participatory budgeting, and subsidiarity in decision making, are other measures which can resist the tendency towards centralisation of power. There appears to be an appetite in some parts of government to do things differently, as indicated in the Community Paradigm report from the New Local Government Network.
Power can operate horizontally (power with) rather than vertically (power over). We should develop institutions and practices which encourage the former and discourage the latter. The funding of social programmes should allow activity beyond formal limits when people have the appetite to go further themselves. It is possible to build a set of principles and tools, sing for example common good thinking, to encourage people to come together and share power. A lot of what is needed is already known. For example, a recent Big Lottery Fund report identified what is needed to help people take on power in the context of place:
o Know the history, background and context of place
o Invest in people and relationships
o Work with others to build a shared vision for change
o Start small, try different things
o Allow for variation
o Be realistic. Accept mistakes and failure, make space for learning and reflection.
o Keep looking for change.
If we can create connected, accountable communities we will be better placed to deal with the big national challenges, it was suggested. Forging relationships helps build movements such as MeToo and how people with HIV made change happen by demanding it.
However local action is not sufficient: locality can be the seat of disempowerment, a bastion of white and male privilege. It may be that ‘power’ is not the best way to organise our thinking. A focus on power, and how people can discover their power, tends to side-line considerations of equality and inclusion. People do not start from an equal place.
There is a relationship between power and wellness – listening, responding, self-organising, truth telling are the things which make people well, and powerful.
Some parts of the public services system are attempting to share power, though co-production, co-design etc, notably in the health services, but institutional change is proving extremely difficult in practice. The NHS Alliance, for example, has developed a model for power sharing.
A sense of entitlement is well developed among those who have power and wealth. Can we develop a sense of entitlement among other groups, including young people? Within our educational system we need to do much more to build an appreciation of what it is to be an individual in society. The most vulnerable may not be able to run things, but they still deserve a voice and to be listened to, and responded to. We need to provide support to help people build their voice.
The ways in which power is built and maintained is not only through hard power (coercion, legislation, military and economic systems) but also through soft power (persuasion, culture, values, etc). We should not underestimate how language, narrative, story-telling can act as a disruptor to prevailing power, or reinforce it. If we are to shift power we need to communicate differently, to ask questions rather than tell people, to encourage others to speak, to learn how to hear silence as well.
In a delta the pilots who live a fragile subsistence life know the intricate waterways and therefore have some power, because the ships which pass through depend upon the pilot for safe navigation. If the delta was to be bombed the waterways would became clear, the pilots would lose power. Do we need to empower people to be pilots, or bomb the delta – in other words work within the existing system, or change the system?
It may be that a shift in power and a sharing of power will require significant internal culture change, resources to make a sustained difference, and the need for both bottom up and top down actions.