On Thursday 80 people involved in empowerment are gathering at Keeping Empowerment Working to discuss what we can do about all this. How can we make the case for community empowerment? Add your ideas by commenting below.
Simon Burall from Involve will make the economic case for empowerment, Sue Warr from Dorset Partnership for Older People Programme will make the social case for empowerment, and Peter Lipman from Transition Towns Network will make the environmental case for empowerment. You can watch online here, and comment on twitter using the hashtag #empworks.
We know that Government says it wants people to be empowered to challenge public authorities, and that community empowerment is one of the key strands of its much maligned ‘Big Society’ vision. However, we also know that many great community empowerment projects and initiatives are threatened by local and national spending cuts. As cuts bed in after March we will see further implications for community empowerment as there is less direct and indirect funding and other resources available to help people to influence public bodies on the issues that matter to them most.
For now, can you share your thoughts on how we can make the case for community empowerment?
- What would your area look like if there was no community empowerment?
- Who is most affected when community empowerment is cut?
- Have you got an example of where doing something in an empowering way has Saved money? Or where not involving people has cost money? Made a difference you can really identify to local people? Made where you live a better place?
- Do you have any questions you’d like to ask the speakers at the conference about how to make the case for empowerment?
I'm really looking forward to hearing about what people are up to in the South West in relation to community empowerment and hope that we can develop a conversation between the South West and the West Midlands, where there is also a lot of great activity going on around empowerment.
ReplyDeleteI was at the Big Society Conference in Taunton last November, and confess that I found it pretty vacuous and depressing. However, it was nothing compared to listening to Mr Hurd trying to explain the Big Society yet again on the Today programme this morning.
ReplyDeleteWhen governments of any party have passed "power to the people" in education or health, each has insisted that "the money must follow the choice".
The current policy on "Empowerment" seems to involve delegating the problem and then removing the resources to provide the solution. I am sure that there are a lot of dozy and overdependent organisations around who need shaking up and having their money taken away. But when we ask the Minister to point them out,he can't, or won't.Perhaps this is a question we might ask ourselves on Thursday, so that we can seriously challenge ourselves, or him.
The Critical Success Factors workshop at the Keeping Empowerment Working conference will provide an opportunity for you tell us about your experience of the key elements that needed to be in place for successful empowerment. We would like to include a report of the key factors in the final evaluation of the South West Empowering Communities Partnership which will inform the national evaluation to be presented to Ministers. Do come along and tell us what you believe needs to be in place in the current climate, perhaps it’s stable funding, effective partnership working, skilled staff…… Whatever it was let’s hear from you.
ReplyDeleteGreat post... I could write an essay! In fact I did write my dissertation on how Community Led Planning can help with the process of housing delivery. Heres where community empowerment eases the process of what can be quite daunting for rural communities. As soon as a group has been through the CLP process they take a look at their community and identify where the needs are. As they are empowered to take a look themselves they realise that a need is in their community.
ReplyDeleteAm really interested in what comes out of the event.
Good to hear, Tessa, your endorsement of the close links between community empowerment, Community Led Planning and housing. Perhaps I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was that Empowering Communities and Creating Excellence's Community Led Planning conference next week was fully booked within three days of its announcement! We're hoping to hold a follow-up event in the Summer or Autumn, so let us know what you'd particularly like to see discussed.
ReplyDeleteI’m looking forward to meeting colleagues tomorrow and hearing from Simon Burall and others. In his recent blog ‘Letting the Big Society Die’ http://s.coop/bw4 Simon makes an excellent and timely contribution to the current Big Society debate.
ReplyDeleteOne issue I would like explored is how we engage with all parts of our communities and particularly the business sector. The current Big Society debate has been focused on the tensions between, charities, volunteers and local authorities and the resultant impact on vulnerable citizens.
In response DCLG is proposing to ‘empower citizens’ through various measures in the Localism Bill, whilst OCS is currently reviewing the consultation on infrastructure (having already made swathing cuts to the Strategic Partners programme).
However lets not forget that in The Coalition: Our Programme for Government published in May, the 23 pages of aspirational ‘we will’s......’ is ended on the inside back cover by a large caveat ; The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement.
[It is notable that Big Society is only mentioned twice in this document, once in the introduction and then with reference to the proposed Big Society Bank]
If the Governments focus on deficit reduction (and by implication, economic growth) it seems to be currently happening without engagement of any of the concepts of the Big Society, you only have to read a handful of the Local Economic Partnership submissions to see the complete lack of any reference or recognition of businesses part in the Big Society. Perhaps it’s been convenient for the business community not to be engaged?
We need to empower (and engage) in all sectors of our communities and not have the concept of Big Society pigeon holed as something the ‘former VCS’ did.
Looking forward to the debate!
I spent this morning at Volunteering England's excellent Modernising Volunteering event in Exeter. A do at which people said many of the things that I suspect will also be said at our Keep Empowerment Working event in Bristol tomorrow. And I've had a series of conversations recently with people from the worlds of the arts, children & young people and the environment who were all saying the same things, too.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that as the capacity and number of people in all these silos - so many of them with the same values and aims - shrinks, we ought to start getting together more, if only to discuss how we all keep going.
As a social enterprise based in the Forest of Dean we present the economic and environmental case for empowerment for localised people-centered economic development throug our work with the Economics for Ecology conferences at Sumy State University:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.p-ced.com/1/projects/ukraine/sumy/
Thank you for yesterday. I learned some things, and thank you for lunch. For me, the highlight of the day was Sue Warr's presentation of her Dorset Partnersip for Older People Programme, and not just because I am one. It was partly because of two or three elements that I think are fundamental to the mechanism of making empowerment work. Firstly she knows the importance of members. She is not intimidated by them, and understands their desperate need to be loved. You don't just have to persuade them. You have to get them inside the project with you. I know this because I was one for more than a decade. I know it isn't easy. If it was you wouldn't get money to do it. If you don't manage it your programmes are constantly under threat, which is a rotten way to have to work. Of course, at the moment they will be anyway, which isn't your fault. Then there is the difference between consultation, finding out interesting things about a community and what it says it wants, trying to get them to join boards or audits, or liaison groups, and really empowering people to do stuff for themselves. This requires quite a lot of workers very very close to the ground and a bit of money. Not much, just some.In that way you not only dig out the grass roots needs, but you will find out who really are the "doers" as opposed to those who will turn up to meetings, or sit on coordination groups. And if you can give them a bit of money without a lot of red tape you achieve something else which I think is important.You give those who are going to set up the lunch club, or organise the transport, or the table tennis, some key things as volunteers.
ReplyDeleteYou recognise their existence, and give them a role, trust, and the responsibilty for making a difference to their community. That is empowerment.
I say this with feeling because I am both a leader and a volunteer. I cannot tell you how often I have felt myself to be not really wanted, excluded from feeling "part of" a project, being more trouble than I am worth, and so often have the feeling that "they" have not really thought through what they are going to do with us. What happens is that we stop turning up and then "they" moan that the community doesn't care and won't get involved. Of course that shouldn't happen but I can give you a depressing lst of quite big organisations where it does.
I am sure that Dorset POPP is not perfect, and I don't know the extent that it could be replicated or even whether that would be a good idea , but it did highlight some things I feel are important.
Of course there were other important contributions to yesterday, and there is more that I would be happy to share about economic and environmental evaluation.
Perhaps a discussion for the future might look at the role of social enterprise in delivering social benefits, the role, if any, of profit as a driver, and the extent to which it is realistic to expect "straight business" to just give us money as part of their "corporate social responsibility". I see these as three totally distinct mechanisms, but I wonder whether we tend to muddle them together.
Thank you, Robin, I couldn't agree with you more. Dorset POPP has so much to teach. Its use of small sums of money to enable people to do what they think is needed in their communities, and its ability to prove the contribution of that to health outcomes (that table-tennis table leading to someone leaving hospital earlier) is also exactly the experience of the small grants programme for networks run by South West Foundation, supported by Creating Excellence. You can read a report about that here: http://www.creatingexcellence.org.uk/mod-Downloads-index-req-viewdownloaddetails-lid-252.html. And here's a link to our case study on Dorset POPP: http://www.creatingexcellence.org.uk/regeneration-renewal-article248-p1.html .
ReplyDeleteWhat I'd add to what you say about Dorset POPP is the way in which it exemplifies what can be achieved by really good joint working between the County Council, Health and Voluntary sector. And it doesn't cost nothing!
Talking of which, a good point was made in a discussion I was part of by someone who used to be work in corporate responsibility for a large firm of accountants - she was surprised that there was so little mention of that yesterday. There's a limit to which this work can be done for profit (who can afford to pay for it?), and social enterprises need to make a (recycled) profit too. Companies have a profit-related interest in communities that work, so I do think we should be exploring their willingness to fund this more, now that government is getting smaller.
I've posted a rather full summary of the event on my blog (http://lornaprescott.blogspot.com/2011/02/keeping-empowerment-working-learning.html)but in the main my reflections following this fantastic event are around understanding empowerment, using online social tools and our values.
ReplyDeleteThe following is extracted from the blog I mentioned above. The blog page includes hyperlinks which I couldn't embed below.
Understanding empowerment
I noticed that when people are introduced to the community empowerment dimensions developed by changes they find them really useful - a delegate fed back that this was something useful they had learned during the conference. (The 5 community empowerment dimensions are from changes DiCE evaluation and planning framework - see www.changesuk.net)
Using social tools
The second thing which stands out in my mind is how different attitudes to using online social tools are. I was speaking to on officer from a Housing Association over lunch and she mentioned some community activists she works with who would like an online ‘chatroom’ to be able to meet and talk in online. She confessed that she wasn’t up to speed with social media, so was interested when I suggested that her residents could join and set up their own group for free on the Our Society networking site (www.oursociety.org.uk) and be part of a wider conversation there, linking in to people from across the country.
This was quite different to the reaction when I mentioned the Our Society online activity in the first workshop I attended. While some very legitimate issues were raised about the accessibility of websites, the fact that not everyone is online and web savvy and that some don’t like online networking, the discussion ended up in a place which seemed to reject this way of networking. This was in contrast to the effort that the South West Forum and Isabel Livingstone in particular have gone to in order to ensure an online space for bring together people, tools and information at Empowerment Works in the South West, built on a free platform (blogger) thus not requiring future financial support. Isabel had also gone to great effort to involve people in the conference itself through an array of online social tools – people were tweeting from the event and others from around the country were tweeting in and watching the live video feed of the speakers. Still others have been reading and adding to blog posts on the site, and writing their own blogs as a result of being involved in the event, including Simon Burall, and me!
As someone who has discovered online social tools in the last 12 months, I am astonished at how much they are now part of how I connect with others, they offer a whole new dimension and level to other networking tools we might make use of, and enhance face-to-face networking in so many ways. I can’t help thinking that those relying on face-to-face gatherings, emails and static websites will be missing out on wider conversations with friends they haven’t met yet but would find great to know!
Our values
The third thing which stands out in my memory from the day is how welcoming and eager to network the delegates were, and the feeling of a really strong shared value base of everyone I spoke to and heard from. I really felt at home among this collective of people, and will close this post with a question I heard asked twice during the day Mark Robins, Senior Policy Officer with the RSPB: “Are we too timid in expressing our values?”