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Director blog: People before programme – June 2021

One of the many things that stuck in my mind on recent community organising training was this phrase ‘people before programme’. It hit me like a train when I got what it meant.

Essentially ‘people before programme’ means not just starting from where people are at, rather than where you want them to be, but also putting the person first, genuinely valuing the relationship rather than what you think you can get out of it.

I’m guilty of getting on the wrong side of that and I’m pretty sure most of us, one way or the other take the occasional short cut. Pretty much every meeting I go to I see people talking past each other, waiting to speak rather than actively listening. A lot of the time I don’t even notice because it is habitual, and I end up doing the same; it is transactional not relational.

I guess if you work in the private or the public sector you know what to expect – there are rules to the game. The private sector has profit as a bottom line and money defines the feedback loop; the public sector runs on systems of top-down accountability and political control. Once you get beyond the massive PR and hype that mystifies the public and private sector, the ‘programme’ is brutally clear, and people on the inside need to follow it. The nail that stands out gets hammered down. But in the community sector we get the opportunity to do differently. We get to define and create our own culture which is why the principle of ‘people before programme’ hit home – how come we don’t do more of that? Obama said: ‘we are the leaders we are waiting for’ and in the community sector we have more freedom than most to make that true.

It isn’t complicated. We all know how it feels to be fully listened to, and on the flip-side when someone tunes out. The power that flows between us was made to be shared – that is what relationships are about, but as we move outwards, we experience ‘the world as it is’, not ‘the world as it should be’, and it doesn’t pay to be naive. Building a more relational culture will not be enough, but it is a start.

If you put ‘people before programme’, you give them power. The power to set their own agenda, to be listened to and initiate their own programme for change. It requires losing control. But also offers the opportunity to work alongside. I’d like to think our citizen action groups follow that and we should be more widely held to account on that basis and on how we develop the resident-led Community Development Trust now in place. There is a vulnerability as well as a strength in that. It is just as easy to pull apart as to pull together – the reasons for pulling together are not as obvious as elsewhere (public and private sector) – but when it clicks, wow.

I’ve been going to the Learning Group convened by BD Collective and the Llankelly Chase Foundation that has been looking into issues of power and paternalism in the borough. I’m not sure the word ‘paternalism’ connects with people but think of it as a near neighbour to sexism, racism and other oppressions. It speaks to a world where things are done to you, like it or not. Where power is held over you by a few, or even a single individual, at the top of the tree. I guess that learning group is trying to put ‘people before programme’ too, but what would it take to dismantle the isms and schisms, the paternalism and all that? Nothing less that conscious and consistent dismantling of control whenever it gets in the way, which is often.

Losing control – that is the strapline I want to see on the next LBBD corporate plan 2022-2026 and VCSE (Voluntary, Community, Social Enterprise!) strategy. Losing control as the means to get a bigger win for all. For me that is the logic of coproduction, localism and generative governance – all the flash terms policy people get paid to talk about but struggle to deliver, so really it is an appeal to be consistent, to do what it says on the tin.

Meanwhile here’s to creating new and exciting spaces to learn and work together.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Inside TWCP: Meet our new Health Outreach Worker, Rahela Begum!

Growing up in South London I’d heard about Barking and Dagenham, and just like where I’m from, it didn’t have the best reputation. So, fast forward to 2017, when I was looking for somewhere to live and I found an affordable place in London, I couldn’t believe it. It was here in Barking that I found a lovely community on the river. The place I moved into was a houseboat! From that first day walking through the town, and when I spoke to my future neighbours, I felt at home. It had that same community feel I was missing from my childhood. The area was full of families and people who had lived here for years, as well as so many new people. It was buzzing with people who had ideas of how they wanted to change the area, and the feeling was catching. I soon got a job in the area, joining Participatory City and the Every One Every Day project. I got to work in the area I lived in and I felt so lucky because I got to meet even more people.

I started to explore the area that was now my home and my favourite way to do that was by visiting all the parks. I started falling in love with the familiar sights of the weeping willows of Greatfields. I followed the path along the lake in Barking Park to the cafe and listened to the children play in the park. I eventually got a bike and ventured to the expansive Mayesbrook and Parsloes. I wanted to get to know the borough like the people I worked with and learn about the history. So many important things have happened here! I eventually moved to Chadwell Heath onto the famous Becontree estate. With Participatory I got to work across the borough on lots of projects, but I wanted to focus my efforts and create an impact.

Why TWCP?

The Thames Ward Community Project is based in one part of the borough, separated by the A13, it’s a place with the fastest developments going up. So how do you create and keep a sense of identity and community when everything around you is changing? I have joined the team as the Health Outreach Worker, so it is my job to bridge the gap between developers, the NHS, other organisations and the residents of the area. I want to help residents create programmes and develop projects that will get people feeling healthier and happier and more involved in their community. The borough is changing and the people living here are changing, I see this as a chance for us to have a positive impact on what’s going on around us. TWCP works with residents directly and supports people to be at the forefront of the projects they want to see in the area. That’s the role I want to play in the community. I want to be behind people’s great ideas, supporting with connecting people, sharing knowledge, opportunities and helping organise ideas to make sure they are successful and long lasting.

Rahela Begum

Health Outreach Worker

Making the connections – May 2021

Community coalition building can transform adult social care outcomes (and much more).

You may have noticed that there are a lot of collaboration type meetings going on right now. Twenty or thirty people on a teams call, an even mix of council officers and second tier charities, a consultant or two. I like that all over B&D people are chatting on shared online calls about collaboration and partnership working right now; it will all help us build back better after the pandemic. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian community worker, said we ‘change the world one conversation at a time’ and I believe that. Margaret Mead said it was a ‘small group of thoughtful committed individuals’ but what I think matters even more is how that conversation happens.

The thing I’m noticing about the ‘reimagining adult social care group’, one of those many larger online meetings about better partnership working and delivery, is that it is pretty open in a way that most of the spaces I’ve encountered in the borough are not. The council has talked about moving away from a paternalistic culture and that can only be a good thing. There is something about the culture of strongly political and hierarchical organisations that inhibit wider collaboration – the higher up you go the more brutal it can get; people learn not to bring their whole self to the job which is a shame because the fearful and transactional only gets you so far. With the reimagining adult social care group it is a big shift and it becomes contagious when people behave like they’ve got autonomy, stuff gets done better and quicker.

My assumption is that the adult social care meetings I have been to are highly provisional spaces – some ideas might fly, relationships build and hopefully some very specific piloting of work. This blog is about a proposal for the latter (specific piloting of work). At these meetings I’ve found myself talking about getting resource (money) and support (capacity building) into the hands of smaller community groups – the ones who don’t go to these meetings, who are not constituted or contract ready but who make up the overwhelming majority of resident collective action.

We need to dismantle the winner takes all system. Hence the value of coalitions – if commissioners placed greater social value on consortiums and coalitions it would be transformative – not just reaching and involving more people, leveraging a greater contribution but fundamentally changing the rules of the game.

In terms of how it might work, the approach we’ve taken at Thames Ward Community Project is to build resident-led coalitions. We listen to what people are angry about, what they care about. We distinguish issue, solution and action and start planning together; we ferret out what works through testing and reviewing. We find small pots of money, then deliver, then repeat at maybe greater scale – all done by resident-led groups. Those groups work together as a wider network or coalition – as we get more success we bid for pots of money as consortiums and coalitions because we are not and never have been in competition with each other. It would be great to get other local examples of shared funding and delivery. But what I’d say is not enough of us are working like this because if we were, there’d be more money pushed downwards whereas mostly the money flows upwards to a few.

Michael who chairs the meetings said there were an estimated 7,000 community groups in the borough. I checked on the Charities Commission website and there are very few charities, well under a hundred and of those only a few with significant turnover, so basically you can count the number of groups on a set of fingers who are going to win contracts and play an active, mature partnership role.

What I’ve learnt in Thames Ward is that residents want jobs and the social solidarity that comes from working together; they want their creativity and entrepreneurial flair to lead to more control in their lives – control over work, money, personal and professional development. The journey to that kind of social business sustainability is a rare thing but we should champion this intention, go beyond occasional contracts for the ‘trusted’ few and open up mainstream budgets to smaller groups controlled by local people, especially in a borough that has more developer investment than anywhere in Europe (so I’m told) and a council that exhorts inclusive growth.

When we have these exploratory conversations about collaboration it is easy to rein in ambitions, seek pragmatic and incremental change. I think we should go much further: shift far more money, decision-making and delivery to many more groups via coalitions, consortiums and networks and be explicit about that.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Inside TWCP: From Zero Engagement to Community Work

I’ll be honest, I lived my first year as a resident of Barking Riverside with little to no engagement at all with the community. The “little” compromised solely of taking the EL1 bus route to Barking station, heading to work, and commuting back home again. On weekends, we would head to the town centre, to the local supermarket, which was merely out of necessity, and I was okay with living like this. I had become accustomed to this sort of urban nomad life, in which I made little effort to grow roots where I lived.

A few reasons drove this behaviour, one just being the tunnel vision of the working life, but another has to do with the regeneration that took place in what I would call my hometown. I grew up to watch the area change from infamous to a bohemian hotspot. Young working professionals and students arrived finally seeing the potential for communal projects and shared spaces, to enhance community, without the community. The divide is stark. It made me lose a bit of my sense of belonging, and knowing you belong, and you have a voice to shape where you live is everything.

Fast forward to moving to Barking, and it took giving birth to my first born and the Pandemic to make me slow down and finally embrace what was my new locality. I received a newspaper from a well known charity, which sparked my interest. Exploring all the Warehouse on River Road had to offer gave me a new found excitement for my local area and I actually started to talk to my neighbours. My year was spent taking part in a collaborative business project, where I learned how to create handcrafted candles and textile products; taking care of chickens, a fun and beneficial past time in terms of collecting eggs; and finally joining a Women’s cycling group, which ultimately changed the trajectory of my life! It led me to this job.

It was the year 2020, and those experiences that ignited in me a desire to not only be a part of the Thames Ward community, but to empower the voices of all of us to be part of the change happening right now. You can become an active part of holding those with duty accountable, creating your own solutions to local issues, collaborating with others so the wheel isn’t reinvented, and just learning from the diverse group of people that live here.

I want to challenge you if you are a local resident to be heard! Yes we’re all a little rusty after spending time in lockdowns but thats the crux of what we’re doing here at Thames Ward Community Project. We’re conveners. We’ll help you cultivate your skills, get you a seat at the table and support the community so that conversations turn into action.

Zainab Jalloh

Communications and Outreach Officer

Reaching Outwards – April 2021

Big news: on Friday 26th March we heard we’d been successful in securing a further three years of funding from the Lottery. Our success is a tribute to an incredible amount of hard work and support from residents, partners and local groups over the last three and half years: very much a team effort and evidence of deep collaboration which got us over the line. It means we have a secure base of core funding on which to work from and this makes all the difference. We’ve found over the last couple of years that we’ve been able to secure smaller pots of funding for projects and initiate any number of activities, thus having massively raised expectations it’s great to have the resource to manage and activate this increased workload. Feels good.

Three and a half years ago we began our Reaching Communities programme with the aim of creating a resident-led Community Development Trust (CDT); that seems a long time ago but looking at some of the organisations we know and admire – the Bromley By Bow Centre, Selby Centre, Manor House Community Trust for example – their journey has spanned decades and ours is only just beginning. Hence the task is not only to facilitate empowerment, connection, organisation and community voice but also to ensure we become a mature social business and are sustainable over the long term.

Our work, along with everything around us, will be defined by how we build back better as we come out of the pandemic. The value of community-led action was never in doubt but is needed now more than ever in particular actions that support health and wellbeing, resilience and skills. Our work with health partners, the British Red Cross and with emerging social enterprises will become ever more important as part of the wider solution to the challenges we face.

For the future we need to reach out ever more widely to residents and partners and create a participative democratic practice to underpin the partnerships and projects we are involved with. This means finding ways to ensure what we do is genuinely resident-led and open to everyone who wants to make a contribution. Having become increasingly established and sustainable ourselves, it also means that our success should be defined by our record in helping others grow, become sustainable, attract and secure funding. If we get this right this will be a measure of real service to the wider community. There are lots of resident-led projects bubbling up, from ESOL, to arts, sports and health that show the way forward and with the right support will change what was hitherto thought was possible in terms of service delivery and resident-led social business.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director Blog – March 2021

Our priorities over the last year have been to provide support and find ways to tackle the pandemic collectively. We led the organisation of the BD CAN work over much of 2020 (shout out to Amina), pioneered a strong partnership with the British Red Cross, including training local people as volunteers and advocates, distributed hand sanitizer to 5,500 households in the ward, delivered literally hundreds of online resident-led events online and as socially distanced activities, supported the growing work around a ‘new model of care’ with health partners, started our Barking Food Forest project aka Riverside Community Garden, and set ourselves up as a new charitable incorporated organisation (Thames Life). There’s a much longer list of activities and achievements but I’ll pause there.

The thing that stands out for me is the resident-led bit. The numbers don’t lie. Everyone of our trustees is a local resident and collectively they reflect the diversity and breadth of expertise across the ward. Our job as staff is back office support; to convene the space and provide the platform – resident leaders will do the rest hence just about every one of our projects is led by residents and the extra funding we have won goes back into these initiatives. You may have noticed that there are a lot of experiments and pilots going on in Barking and Dagenham one way or another but I believe the way we have merged a social business and community organising approach is genuinely unique. Much of the support we have leveraged has come from out of the borough – from Locality, East London Business Association, Citizens UK, London Sport, Planning Aid London, Community Housing London, Laureus Foundation, London Youth, Just Space – because what we are trying to do has an ambition that led us in all sots of directions. When we seek out capacity building support it comes in all shapes and sizes and we all need as much support as we can get.

Right now we are at a crossroads. We have set up our resident-led Community Development Trust but this is the beginning of a whole set of new challenges – establishing the smooth running of an organisation and systems required to run it, having previously gone under the umbrella of Riverside School. This is the challenge of governance – if you are a large organisation you have the capacity to absorb this, but a small group which wants to remain small but able to maintain minimum size to deliver basic support has to get this right. To avoid becoming a bureaucracy and boring people or burning them out with procedures whilst ensuring the fiduciary matters are performed well. This is where the need to get the right support at the right time becomes vital and if the pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that we will need to build back better and make sure no one is left behind, to use the political jargon of our times.

Hopefully my next blog will speak of success in securing a further 3-years of Lottery funding – which will cover most of our core costs and really allow us to kick on. Either way we’ve got a lot done, not least in the last year. Especially pleasing has been our work with Barking Sports 4 Good where we managed to deliver a substantial part of this programme online and via socially distanced activity in the final months of 2020, which included the participation of 257 residents in a new women’s cycling and walking project, yoga classes, basketball and leadership training, boxing and women’s fitness classes, dance competitions, a men’s cycling project and enabled us to support the Hikmah Social Project and their football activities. Likewise our involvement with BRL has been pretty spectacular – including working on a resident-led editorial board, community gardening, place-shaping and social enterprise workshops, and ongoing health partnership working. I’ve mentioned the work with health partners previously but again Thames Ward is at the heart of new ways of working with local people and the Locality Board chaired by Cllr Wharby and the Thames View Activation Group supported by LBBD and the local NHS has moved the health agenda on a very long way in the space of a few months.

So no one wants an overly long blog – my message behind all of this is together over the last 3-4 years I feel very grateful for all the investment of time both residents and partners have made. Our Community Development Trust and range of projects seemed a distant prospect in 2017 but local people made it happen. We should demand and expect even greater positive change can and will happen in the coming years. A key measure of our future impact will be to ensure that resources and success is spread widely and evenly across a large number of groups and individuals. That would be my definition of inclusive growth – everybody can grow, everybody wins and no one is left behind.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director Blog – February 2021

Welcome to our first ever Director Blog!

Although we are now in our third lockdown we’ve managed to continue our work, via online resident-led activities and partnership working with the British Red Cross, NHS, LBBD and BRL among others. At some point the pandemic will ease and we are ready to ensure not only that there is resilience and recovery but a platform for residents to take more control of their local area.

Since October 2017 when we started our Lottery funded journey we’ve covered a lot of ground – the pinnacle of which has been to create a resident-led Community Development Trust (CDT) aka Thames Life, with exclusively local people as trustees. That feels good. To know that we have been able to start a project from scratch – Thames Ward Community Project – initially with the support of Riverside School as host (accountable body) and in less than three years create a new organisation run by local people, to go alongside the activities and campaigns we have been able to deliver that have brought in over £1m of investment for local projects and services. The challenge for us now is to make it sustainable over the longer term so that the community has a resource that will last for generations.

We are working on our governance, our funding and our social business model to ensure the value we create together through resident-led activity becomes a permanent feature in uncertain times, an anchor organisation that supports others, convenes and makes things happen so everyone can win and truly, no resident is left behind.

Finally thanks to all those we’ve worked with and who’ve supported us and a special welcome to Zainab, our new Communications and Outreach Officer and local resident, who has put our newsletter together to help us showcase the work of TWCP and the residents we work with. We want to ensure resident projects, ideas and voices are promoted far and wide so watch this space!

Matt Scott

TWCP Director

Category: Blog

Director blog: People before programme – June 2021

Inside TWCP: Meet our new Health Outreach Worker, Rahela Begum!

Making the connections – May 2021

Community coalition building can transform adult social care outcomes (and much more).

Inside TWCP: From Zero Engagement to Community Work

Reaching Outwards – April 2021

Director Blog – March 2021

Director Blog – February 2021

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