We don't like community groups much do we!

We don't like community groups much do we?

How else was it possible for the then third sector to grow 200% in 10 years under New Labour and yet small and medium sized charities ended up getting smaller at the same time?

This has to be a central concern for the Comunity Sector Coalition and all of its members - the continual failure to pass reources, voice and power down within the wider sector, let alone in society.

If the Voluntary & Community Sector (VCS) can't even set a good example why should government or anyone else take it remotely seriously

We also don't like community groups much because in the upper echelons of the VCS the great and the good keep trying to talk down to groups, suggesting interventions that are inappropriate and technocratic

Spot a community group, one that hasn't run away, and then lecture them about how poor their governance is, where's the business proposition, on and on with the sustained and continuous attack based on an assumption of superiority and then...

follow up by the inevitable sales pitch: why don't they pay money to go on a capacity building course to build up skills and confidence

Community groups are constantly faced by the assumption from above that they are are somehow not doing it properly and urgently need to have their skills boosted - where do you go with that?

The result would seem to be that they absent themselves from both government and those parts of the voluntary sector that seek to sweep into communities, grab contracts, do minimal consultation and exit

We'll see more of this predatory behaviour, if big society continues to lose its way because the only way larger nationals can now surive is to try to pick up work locally, which means a head on conflict of interest with indigenous groups

Community groups faced with a compact document that isn't about them, shun it.

Community groups faced with an LSP that meets privately in a hiden corner of the town hall ignore it.

Community groups basically are far too busy to be bothered with anything that is not immediately relevent

And what is it with this enterprise model all the time? Not every one is a failure if they haven't swallowed an MBA for breakfast

Instead of exhorting community groups to become Alan Sugar Apprentice clones (there is a very good reason why increasingly less people say they trust the voluntary sector after all) the winner takes all culture that dominated the ChangeUp capacitybuilders era needs to be seen for what it is - meaningless for most of the sector most of the time

Still we have the assumption of enterprise good; community sector bad - when surely it was a naive belief in enterprise that brough our banks to their knees and hence the enusing mess in the first place - why would we want to revisit that way of operating on our community groups? Perhaps they don't want to do a pyramid selling version of community assets thank you very much

Big Society and its ideologues understood the failure and venality of recent years which is why it is able to frame cuts in the following way - see page 7 below

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/426258/support-stronger-civil-society.pdf

But it is not entirely clear whether the new coalition has more regard for community groups than the previous lot.

Logically the focus on civil society organisations is all but identical. But the nascent localism bill fails to locate the sector last time I noticed and given that we've all been here before and seen big rhetoric fail to fire, the alarm bells are ringing rather loudly about the lack of substance behind how Big Society actually works, i.e. maybe it doesn't.

Big Society seems to have inherited New Labour's magical thinking about social enterprise, not noticing that social entreprenurs are every bit as grant dependent as their voluntary sector competitors (note that comunity groups never had much money anyway)

http://www.tsrc.ac.uk/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=MqmKeY9Ciss%3d&tabid=749

If you don't like community groups then the first thing you might want to do is change them into something you do like that reflects your ideological prejudices but by doing so mutual failure is guranteed.

For that reason CSC's call for a new settlement that puts the sector at the centre of the VCS via our unleashing the potential doc also on the website,

http://www.communitysectorcoalition.org.uk/policy/our-policy-position

is the way we think we need to go

Community groups first not last!

And strictly on their own terms otherwise why would they bother to show up at all?

Service Jam - Nat Wei has left the building

I joined in the service jam which brought global voices together to chat electronically about empowerment and related topics. There were a number of guest speakers, George Bush (I kid you not), Kevin Curley, Nat Wei, some functionary from NCVquo etc

I thought I'd check the Nat Wei debate only to find the following message (it is a classic):

Lord Wei has had to leave the Jam 0106 PM Oct 12, 2010

Hello All

Lord Wei had to depart the Jam to catch a train. I (disobdied non specific person) work in tehOffice for Civil Society within the Cabinet Office (part of the UK Government that works with Lord Wei) and will be repsonding to some of your points until 1:30 pm. Lord Wei may be able to drop in later today


Ho hum

Missed my deep and meaningful comment then, which I didn't get off before he'd left; for what it is worth I've included it below in response to Nat Wei's question about how we can make people feel big about having a big society (I paraphrase)


Title: We need collective community action 01:04 PM Oct 12, 2010 [0]

Hi Nat

We need a both / and approach; my hope for the big society is that it does not repeat previous government mistakes by becoming a state sanctioned ideology.

I can see you like the community organising model and social entreprise but I don't hear you talking about the 20,000 UK CD workers, nor about the value not just of exhorting individuals to do more, but about the 'ecosystem' of actually existing community groups and their collective not individual action.

The coalition government has talked a lot about cuts to the public and voluntary sector but if you want to make people feel big you need to start with where they are at

In terms of the voluntary / community sector this means you need to acknowledge that most community groups never had any money in the first place, or indeed, much support from larger voluntary sector charities, councils or social enterprises.

I'd like the big society to make people feel big by talking about what actually exists on the ground - which is not organisers and social enterprise ready to deliver public services (govt ideologues)and which can easily make people feel very small

From reading your speeches, blogs etc I gather you focus a lot on the individual and less on the collective agency of community groups. I think this works agaisnt the big society because it skews the picture and lessens the chances of success. Remember Alinsky's rule #2 'never go beyond the experience of your own people' - the experience of active civil society is of working in groups, not merely as individuals feeling big but through collective agency, even collective struggle

The three legged stool of state, market and civil society needs fixing - you are right about that, so when it comes to the civil society side of the equation lets start start with community groups not ideology and build from there.

Recomend you read or re-read Paulo Freire's 'pedagogy of the oppressed' for new ideas and reach out into the community development field and wider informal sector. This approach would have worked in a way the town hall tours were not able to

Freire understood that people feel big or bigger when they have been listened to as equals and find their destiny in collective acts - anything else he termed 'false charity' destined to fail. Well worth exploring viz. the big society

All best

Waiting for the Spending Review

Crazy times for the sector - the rhetoric is cranked up really loud re 'giving power' to local people. And yet the localism bill shows every sign of mimicing the usual bodged local government acts of yesteryear - legislation by formula. Ditto the refreshed compact

No civil servant can say anything before 20th October (annoucement of spending review) about anything - the waiting has a soporific and dangerous feel. Daily announcements of support for the big society ring out from the upper echelons of the sector with a reminder to please to talk to us (about a small matter of delivery and how to be contractor) , and yet most of the wider sector according to recent polls believes big society is a smokescreen for cuts, bs in shorthand.

There is a lot of capturing and reflecting back of ideas going on. Govt presents big society as being about:

social action (individual)
community empowerment (together)
public service reform (state)

and about decentralisation, transparency and sorting out funding for the VCS

(As a semi competent policy person myself I took note earlier this week - my thnaks to DCLG...)

But note the semi mystical caveat as Francis Maude recently said, there isn't actually a plan

http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/News/DailyBulletin/1033203/Minister-admits-big-society-will-chaotic/2368133AE5887580BFA110ACC20A8A81/

Something is very odd about all of this. Unlike many in the sector my analysis of the previous rounds of state led community empowerment and third sector modernisation is very critical - I believe it divided the sector between winners (sub contractors) and losers (community associations) so for me a big society that talks about an independent civil realm made up of little batallions of commmunity groups has something going for it, that can and should be explored. Note that for New Labour community empowerment = local government (end of story) see Sir Simon Milton's comment in DCLG's 2007 Action Plan for Community Empowerment

But all of this does need some connection with reality, some urgent action otherwise it won't happen. I'm not seeing or feeling the big society move onto practical engagement with grassroots people - the cancelation of the town hall tours is a bad sign, we need raw open encounters, if people are angry that is better than being passive or cynical. How could they not be angry under the circumestances and how could anyone think that would not happen

I get the feeling that big society must be about deflecting the public gaze from cuts, because that is what any politican would do under the circumstances and a whole lot of others in our sector too

That is an issue that needs some truth telling, but we will judge people on what they do not what they say.

Are they going to actually listen to community groups, share their pain, take the time to attend their events, work with their agenda rather than impose the virtues of self help?

Will they retreat into disembodied (clever) media stunts, philanthropy with strings attached, and guilt tripping people into volunteering as part time organisers struggle to make quotas for signing up x number of new recruits?

And if all this means is that everything is on hold until the spending review that isn't good enough

Big Society: principled protest or vested interest?

The default position in much of the larger charity sector seems to veer between falsely claiming it has always and forever championed local unpaid community action, or a visceral resentment that there is no longer any money to be had as preferred arms length contractors of the state.

As we all know now, that particular gravy train has left the station and won't be coming back anytime soon.

I've been surprised by how many smaller groups have been saying good riddance in the face of the demise of their larger peers. And this is precisely because there is a serious lack of humility and reflection on how well the voluntary sector shared its wealth, and pushed power downwards, when at the time time it had plenty of it. Likewise there is often a lack of planning for cuts that any and every government would make, regardless of party ideology

These are horrible times for public and voluntary sector folk alike as the redundancies come in waves of misery. But by protesting about the unexpected scale of the cuts we may be missing the point not only about the internal voluntary sector monoploy but the wider global one.

At a recent talk by Danny Dorling at CABE he made the memorable comment that we could get rid of the deficit in many ways if we had a mind to; simply taxing the thousand richest people in our country more proportionately would go a long way. I'd add that closer attention to money laundering, which accounts for 5% global financial transactions, might be an idea, along with closure of the most gratuitous off shore banks and tax avidance industries, rather than encouragement of what amounts to little more than white collar crime. (Peter Mandelson: New Labour is deeply relaxed about people being filthy rich).

We need a radically different set of economic arrangements and this is what we should be puttign our energies into. The Better Banking Coalition shines a light on an aspect of this; what we need is the social movemetn across society to demand change, which would mean a new set of behaviours from our sector beyond beign organisationally predatory, mimicking the more unhealthy aspects of private sector practice

Some of us have always been political; others may have to go on a crash course of activism. And not only the activism by formula brands government is now turning to but hard won experience that comes from fighting in a much wider inclusive way.

For years the old school community workers saw any kind of politics stripped out, and were labelled as dinosaurs. The bland market and management models packaged as community capacity building were sold to the sector and then rejected by community groups who didn't see the point.

There has been a massive failure of inappropriate top down voluntary sector infrastructure - we need to own that before we think about complaining about cuts. Credit to the great work that has taken place, by many small, medium and occasionally large outfits, but in the scheme of things, most local groups, most of the time will tell a different story about how little support was on offer and where the money actually went.

Sadly the local support and development will inevitably becomes even less and is worth fighting for but if we are to fight and win, we need to know exactly where we have reached, and know when we are strong ground, and we are weak.

All of society would benefit, including the Big Soceity, from a confident, determined and united voluntary and community sector, but such a force would need to be far more reflective, innovative and equitable in its dealings with itself and others

The potential for community action at the grassroots has never been greater

"At a time of massive cuts 'community resilience' is what will determine how well local people will survive". This is how we started our recent CSC publication 'unleashed: the potential for community action at the grassroots' http://www.communitysectorcoalition.org.uk/policy

I think we were and are saying something no one else is and it feels good to hear from a range of people, Ed Mayo from Co-ops UK http://www.cooperatives-uk.coop/live/cme0.htm emailed and was very positive, Joe taylor from North West Community Activists Network http://nwcan.org/ likewise, Professor John Dimoand from Edgehill College http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/clps/ , Mandy Wilson from COGs http://www.cogs.uk.net/ and many others have kindly welcomed our celebration of the community sector

And in a nutshell we were saying some pretty simple stuff but overlooked by many - one is that in terms of sheer numbers most of the voluntary sector is a small unpaid community group; two is that the gap between local groups and more formalised, funded third sector bodies has grown far wider in recent years, i.e. there is an active inequality in the sector whereby the money and power has not trickled down in the way it should; thirdly in the new environment communtiy groups are far and way the best bet to build resilience because in the words of an activist friend of mine, Eileen Conn http://www.peckhamvision.org/wiki/images/2/21/SE15_article.pdf from Peckham, 'start from the propsition of what needs to be don then seek the support and money' - how refreshing it would be to see the wider voluntary sector start to get back to that kind of approach

As I type I hear a clamour of disent and accusation about falling into a trap of legitimising cuts - feel free to call me up on this. I am conscious of important discussions needing to be had with various government departments - not least my own presentation to the DCLG partnership board next week 23/6 - on the role of the sector in deprived neighbourhoods. But I can't help feeling it would be good for the voluntary community sector to go back to the basics of accountability to local communities. The people I speak to who actually have a relationship with residents as opposed to large national charity policy wonks, always seem to get left out of the presentation of 'what the sector thinks' so here's hoping and quite possibly exdpecting some social justice amidst all the austerity

What's in a name?

What's behind the endless renaming of our sector? Especially when most of it is made up of community groups. It may sound siolly but why aren;t community groups just called well, community groups?

A few years back it was the Voluntary and Community Sector - and most of the money was in the hands of the voluntary sector (hence prestige and power, hats off to those who used it wisely)

Then New Labour used the term 'third sector' imported via the USA and once again someone else gave us a makeover with a view to getting the state to do less and others a whole lot more re the running of services (fine for those who want to do that but what happens to those for whom it is not appropriate or desireable?)

Longside this you had the rise and rise of social enterprise, (Leadbetter 1996) not that co-ops and mutualism were novel ideas but it comes to something when Independent Tory Philip Blond feels able to say that all groups should be social enterprises (quoted from SEC AGM 2010) so do the math, the current 62,000 SE's only need to grow 18-20 times more to takeover the other 950,000 third sector bodies

Then not so long ago NCVO switched to talking about civil soceity organisaitons which includes trade unions, public schools and mostly it means unassociated community groups but the almanac can't get an accurate description of how many of these there are - could be 600,000, but is certainly more like 1 million (Elsdon 1999)

So for now it looks like civil soceity will win out because whereas third sector was code for 'contract' civil soceity is code for there's no money and you're on your own - we'll have a new dept for civil society in the cabinet office by the end of this summer

However this distance between the many and the few continues - the community sector went inot recession years ago according to the OTS 3rd sector review, because by 2007 it was clear small and medium sized charities had actually got smaller at a time when the 3rd sector was growing by 25%

For a sector that prides itself on fairness what name should we give to that?

We're going to the Seaside (Tory spring conference)

CSC is doing a stall and a fringe event this weekend at the Tory Spring Conference - weighed down with numerous and diverse member publications and flyers we will endeavour to get the community sector message across to a new generation of party faithful. My first party conference of any kind so will be interesting.

The Big Society message from Cameron as covered at the Hugo Young lecture says some interesting and important things, not least that poverty has actually increased in recent years, but do they (the Conservatives) have what it takes to reverse that trend and are they prepared to utilise the whole of the third sector to do so? I'll be on the look out to see whether it is re heated policy or whether they do make the connection with our part of the sector, the groups who didn't see much of the third sector modernisation money when it came around and now with the cuts have become more fashionable since the motivation is truly social