The conference will hear from several projects that are empowering people to have a say in decisions that affect them and become more active citizens. These include Exeter CVS's Speaking Up course, Black Development Agency's empowerment training for Black and Minority Ethnic women in Bristol and Gloucestershire's Neighbourhood Co-ordination Group, a partnership between the Police, Gloucestershire County Council and Gloucestershire Association for Voluntary and Community Action. Ann Watt from Office
of Civil Society will explain government's Big Society approach, and other speakers from Localis, Urban Forum and Wiltshire Council will give their thoughts on how to take things forward.
See the full conference programme here.
Please note the conference is fully booked so there are no more places available, but we'll be blogging here and on twitter using the hashtags #bssw and #bigsociety. After the conference we'll post videos of all the presentations.
For more information on Big Society and how it relates to community empowerment, see our Empowerment Works presentation.
We'd like to encourage you to share your experiences of community empowerment and your thoughts on Big Society, and any reflections on issues raised at the conference. Here are some questions to get you started...
- What is your experience of community empowerment? Has it benefited you or made a difference in your area?
- Do you consider yourself part of the Big Society?
- What do you think needs to happen to make the Big Society happen?
- How can we make sure Big Society benefits the most marginalised and excluded, not just the majority?
- How do we make the business case for empowerment and community development work at this time of cuts?
- How do we keep the community of people who work in this field in the South West connected at a time when many jobs are threatened?
- Are there any questions you would like to ask the speakers at the conference?
Really impressed with the interest and turnout for this event. Clearly great appetite for BigSoc in SW - but needs recognition (from Gvt) that it can't happen in a vacuum: community action requires resources and skilled support!
ReplyDeleteThe success of the Big Society concept is dependent on ensuring that ALL people have a say, including the poor, the vulnerable, old and young, women of all communities, etc. Empowering the unempowered requires expertise and knowledge and the SW musn't lose all that has been learnt over the last few years of public and voluntary investment.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting blog from Centre for Local Policy Studies suggests that Big Society is an attempt to 'depoliticise the voluntary and community sector'. See http://bit.ly/9WjMK5
ReplyDeleteI have a dream...
ReplyDelete...that in the face of cuts the public sector and voluntary sector will sit down together at the table of solidarity to support their communities.
…that difficult decisions will be the best decisions possible as everyone will have had a say and able to make a positive contribution
...that the chains of bureaucracy, central guidance and top down control will be unfettered and individuals and communities and neighbourhoods will be empowered to take more control of their lives
...that we will one day live in a nation where the ‘size’ of our Society will not be judged by the amount of public expenditure but by our ability to grasp and command it.
Somerset County Council has announced a 100% cut in its funding to Civil Society Infrastructure organisations in the county (5 district CVS and the Rural Community Council). In so doing it has acknowledged publicly that this action will reduce its funding support for Big Society activity. So far our campaigning has fallen on deaf ears. Does the Minister have any suggestions as to where we go from here?
ReplyDeleteThat is truly shocking and a massive blow for Somerset. Some tough questions for Ann Watt tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteSo Hurd 'Annoyed' and 'Irritated' at Somerset CC cuts but won't intervene. BigSoc may not be fig leaf for cuts but perhaps 'Localism' is?
ReplyDeleteIf the "Big Society" is to mean anything there will need to be more money invested into seed corning projects. Cutting local authority spending so drastically will severely impact the building of a any "Big Society". It is a tragedy that already - less than six months in - that so many see it as "government on the cheap", "window dressing" etc.There must be a change to putting investment in seed corning, community champions etc. at the top of the agenda.
ReplyDeleteSouth West Forum is holding a briefing for all 55 South West MPs in the House of Commons on 17 Nov. Do encourage "your" MP(s) to attend and feed in your concerns, ideas and issues direct to SWF to inform the briefing. Contact Steve stevew@southwestforum.org.uk
ReplyDeleteBig society and the substantive issues around it, is a very exciting concept and this conference is useful in moving the dialogue forward. We are ambassadors for this new revolution and really want it to work for our community. However, we need some issues to be thought through to help us make it a reality. For example, the information that is currently available to us is not sufficiently detailed or robust or sometimes credible. We also need to be able to overcome significant hurdles of traditional thinking, authoritative and obstructive decision makers, professional enabling support so that we appear credible as well as impassioned, and all our enthusiasm is not dissipated before we attain our objectives.
ReplyDeleteThanks for all your comments, and the conversation on Twitter. As one of the organisers of the day, my job now is to see that it was just one busy moment in a continuing conversation. We’ll be getting all the presentations, including videos, case studies and other stuff up on the empowerment page of the Creating Excellence website (http://www.creatingexcellence.org.uk/) as soon as we can. Do keep an eye on the blog, and blog yourself.
ReplyDeleteJust for now, a little more on how how Ann Watt, Deputy Director at Office of Civil Society with responsibility for Big Society policy replied to Katrina Midgley’s question about Somerset County Council’s cuts to Civil Society spending. Her polite way of putting it, to add to Nick Hurd’s annoyance (expressed by him yesterday at the NAVCA conference) was that Somerset is ‘operating in the previous world’. She suggested delegates might raise the matter with their MP, and strongly encouraged them to read the just published Cabinet Office document on how authorities and VCS organisations should work together, Better Together (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/428506/better_together.pdf). Mention was made by others of a Stop the Cuts march in Taunton this Saturday. Her presentation was followed by Jane Scott, Leader of Wiltshire Council, who said that working with the community was an investment, £750,000 of their money bringing £3 million into the county.
I hope I am the only one to have found Thursday's conference to be to be largely vacuous, patronising, and quite worrying at a number of levels.
ReplyDeleteTo begin with, I was surprised that so few of those who did turn up were suprised that Mr Hurd hadn't.I was also disappointed that his sub then bunked off before the live feedback session. in the event I suppose it didn't really matter because there wasn't much of a real feedback session anyway. I just hope someone will send Hurd a bill for £25.00 that the rest of us were threatened with if we said we were coming and then couldn't be bothered.
Ann Watt began by asking us how many of us had heard of the Big Society (all of us ) and then how many of us knew what Mr Hurd thought it was(not many). There was a general grumbling at my table that she might have learned rather more if she had asked us how many of us thought we were already part of it, and then how many of us thought that our ability to go on being part of it was under serious threat by what we had so far seen of the "New Improved Version".
For example, I was also at one of the meetings in Bristol to launch the idea of the immaculate conception of 5000 community organisers who are magically going to materialise from the areas of least "social capital", ie the crap areas with the most problems, and who will raise their own funding, having emerged from the grass roots of the areas least likely to produce them!
In this case, as with Thursday's meeting there seems to be an almost perverse determination to ignore the fact that most people at the meeting thought they were already part of the big society, and a fundamental exclusion of councillors at all levels, who are not even mentioned under any heading or on a single slide. And we were asked to think about 'what we could learn' from a number of 'case studies' set up, organised and funded by organisations that Big Society is now going to stop funding, which will somehow be better. Now I do realise what a useless bunch of stick in the mud pillocks councillors often are, partly because I was one, together with some of the obstructive jobsworth local authorities they represent, but that is how our system works, and you won't make it better by ignoring it. Since they are democratically elected to even the most remote and neglected patches of the realm, perhaps we might give them some resources and the power to improve the lot of the people who voted for them. This is, of course, rather what we, the general peasantry, hope our elected representatives are going to do when we vote for them in the first place. I quite accept that there are few of us left who still cling to this rose tinted ideal, but perhaps this is an opportunity to rediscover it.
I am also involved in discussions about the Community Right to Build where the enthusiasm to reach the 'real community' involves decision making that bypasses all levels of elected democracy in an anarchic rush to give the people what they want. Mind you, this again seems to involve quite a lot of organic fund raising at grass roots level since we gave all or government money to the bankers so that they could rescue us again, and achieving levels of community support usually managed only in totalitarian states with access to the voting figures.
It is not that I am against it. It just seems that demolishing the infrastucture you have in the hope that a new inspired breed of unqualified but free people will descend on a cloud of goodwill to do it themselves is an unlikely scenario.
Please tell me I am wrong. But you will need to expain why.
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ReplyDeleteDear Robin,
ReplyDeleteYou are not wrong. And, at the risk of sounding patronising, might I say that is the best post I have EVER read on the subject of the Big Society; particularly your last (unlikely scenario) comment.
Whilst I am sad you didn't get much from the event, I would suggest you perhaps either didn't catch or misheard Toby's contributions. He argued that the voluntary and community organisations in the South West had been working in the Big Society field for decades. And I don't think John (our host for the day) left us in any doubt that he held similar views.
Time for a confession of my own, I used to work in government (in the old Neighbourhood Renewal Unit). I'm afraid government, particularly the bit that deals with 'society' is packed full of policy 'wonks' who are academically stellar but have little experience of the world at large, a shortcoming they address by being possessed of an unnerving degree of certainty about "what to do about society" and generally regarding the issue as having more to do with 'management' and systems than more emotive issues like equality and justice! Our system is based on a civil service that remains in office when a new government is elected and thus MUST get behind whatever policy the government wishes to pursue.
Ann was therefore doing her job in giving a positive 'spin' to the Big Society policy. Of course it would have been much better if Nick Hurd had been able to turn up (I shall indeed look into whether he should be charged £25 non attendance fee!).
For what its worth, I think you have eloquently expressed an opinion that is shared by loads of people, including myself.
Dear Dominic,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your kind remarks, and for pointing out the good bits, which I should have mentioned. Unfortunately they were confined to the space between "largely vacuous" and what would otherwise have been "totally vacuous".
However, if I remember ,those like Toby, who share our view seem to be confined to those speakers who were "Us" rather than "Them".
It would be good if those who do agree with us were able to post a comment saying so, otherwise "They", if they even see this feedback, will be able to write us off as a couple of troublemakers with nothing better to do.
The irony is that I can see that much of the existing structure needs a bomb under it, and in many ways I am surprised to find myself defending it.
The government is quite right to want to do something radical, but at the moment, the current concept of the Big Society isn't it.
It is a grandiose, intellectual concept, produced, as you say, by those with rather more degrees than common sense, and it has no real structure, mass, or heart.