director blog

Director blog January 2022 – Freedom from Fear

‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others’. – Nelson Mandela / Marianne Williamson

When I think of inspirational quotes this is one I frequently return to because it is so direct and relatable. Mandela used it in his inaugural address and took it from an earlier source (Marianne Williamson) so it is a mishmash. The child of God reference may mean different things to people of faith or no faith, for me that doesn’t really matter. It asks an interesting question – what are we afraid of? What holds us back? At the beginning of a New Year and after nearly two years of the pandemic with all the disruption and uncertainty that brings, the world feels strangely adrift. Plenty of things to be fearful of but where does that get us?

Fear is a universal experience but it doesn’t have to be defining; it doesn’t have to set limits. Addressing what is difficult is more often liberating. I wanted to think about this in the context of community work in Thames Ward and beyond.

One of the things I am conscious of is that for community work to be successful people need to invest in something bigger than themselves. In contrast much of the social conditioning we receive encourages us to be selfish and competitive – in order to get ahead. Community work is relatively low profile relative to footballers, tech entrepreneurs, celebrities, erratic politicians – that suck up the national conversation. If the criteria for success is money, profile, status, power – and the fear of not having those things drives us, then community work is out of step with the world, playing by the wrong rules.

Here’s the thing – recent research consistently shows happiness is something we do for its own sake, not for external goals. When we become fully immersed in something we enjoy we experience what is sometimes called ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). We don’t watch the clock because we are wholly absorbed and more truly ourselves. That sounds like winning to me, and along the lines of what Mandela spoke about – something liberating which spreads outwards. When I see community work in action, in its better moments, it is the same dynamic taking place.

My wider reflection is that the community sector is the cornerstone of a successful neighbourhood, ward and borough. One in four people nationally regularly volunteer – that is around 17 million people across the UK. That is a good news story that deserves much more celebration. They don’t do it individually – they do it together in groups (community groups).

I hope the community sector doesn’t continue, in the words of Mandela, to ‘play it small’. Sometimes when community groups get round the table with professionals you can feel people shrinking. The resident voice if it gets any access at all rarely sets the agenda and even rarer, do they hold money and deliver services. Billions of pounds of investment come in and out of the borough in a process that is largely invisible to most people. We are a million miles from where we need to be in terms of real empowerment to leave you with another quote: ‘The first step is half the journey’ (Aristotle).

What that means is, once enough people in the community case choose not to be afraid and come to appreciate what Mandela terms, their innate brilliance and talents – that is the ‘first step’ and it changes everything. As soon as residents and community groups stop following and start leading we are more than halfway to where we need to be.

Happy New Year everyone!

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director blog December 2021 – Of Elephants and Eggshells

Circuses are often seen as cruel these days but when I was growing up that concern wasn’t a thing. We had a small black and white tele with three channels so circuses were a big deal. If you’ve ever been to the circus a few years back or seen clips on TV of old shows, you might notice that the younger elephants wear big manacles attached to huge chains tied to big spikes sunk metres into the ground. Or you might miss that bit and just see the regalia, consume the spectacle as is intended. Look a bit closer and you might notice that the larger older elephants have very thin ropes around one foot attached to a spike less deeply rooted in the ground.

Why the difference? Why would the larger elephants not need a much heavier chain than the younger one? Understand this and you’ll understand where much of the voluntary sector is right now. Where resident empowerment has got up to, too. It is a little psychological trick called learned helplessness. The younger elephant cannot move, it cannot escape because the chain is way too heavy. Over time it gets used to the idea that whenever it feels something on its leg, it is tied to something too powerful to break and thus it cannot escape, even though in reality it could snap those bonds very easily.

When our world and what we can do is restricted over a long enough time, we end up believing we cannot snap our bonds, we cannot choose anything other than what we’ve got, even though the bonds are as sheer as gossamer. That’s when it gets dangerous, when people fall into despair and make poor choices and everyone pays the price for the confinement.

The elephants are being gaslighted. Made to doubt their own reality.

Reading the council corporate plan 2020-2022 as maybe more people should do, because otherwise how will you ever get an appreciation of the bigger picture, I read about how the voluntary and community sector was seen as playing a role – pages 20 and 21. There are four priorities.

The first is capacity building – the BD Collective get to do that (although I had thought it was the CVS).
Second is participation in social networks – Participatory City get to do that. I’m not sure what the difference is between this and the next one but…
Third is democratic participation – BD CAN get to do that. Every grassroots action, all of it presumably.
Fourth – a more relational council, as I understand it, the council relationship managers do that, though presumably it permeates all the way from top to bottom.

Why does any of this matter? Who cares?

It matters to me because it is a top-down representation of the sector I work in and what I do, and what thousands of volunteers and community groups do, and it is inaccurate. Three or four organisations who have a transactional relationship and in many cases were created by the council, will not create ‘a friendly borough with a strong community spirit.’

At this point it can feel like an elephant treading on eggshells. That feeling again when the words and the actions go in different directions. The documents all say the right thing – the 2019 Council VCSE strategy (yes, you should read that one too) talks about ‘enabling and embedding relationships based on trust.’ At this point all that is solid melts into PR. We don’t learn about the detail of what happens when this lofty aim falls short. It is asserted and that appears to be enough. We have yet to see a voluntary sector compact, one of the VCSE strategy actions, but even if one were to exist it would have no legal teeth. Which means in effect, it’s nice when it’s nice and it isn’t when it isn’t.

One of the exciting things about the many spaces BD Collective have created is the emergence of an independent vision of what community is. Michael Little, working with the BD Collective, reframes it as the community was here first and underpins everything else. It’s easy to forget that when reading about it in somebody else’s policy document. You’ll only feel your chains when you start to move. Something is starting to move though.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director blog November 2021 – Reimagining Adult Social Care

I’ve been attending a forum on adult social care – one of the BD Collective’s many networks, and now TWCP has taken on a convening role, so very much involved. Adult social care covers a wide range of activities to help people who are older or living with disability or physical or mental illness live independently and stay well and safe. It takes up a massive amount of local authority budget and is often a mandatory legal requirement as opposed to more discretionary services that get cut.

My take on it, from a voluntary sector perspective is that most community groups deliver health outcomes but only a few of them get funded. That is really hard to change because statutory services are locked into top-down systems of command and control that provide bureaucratic reassurance by having a rigorous commissioning process that provides efficiency and economy, but in my view, not equity. There are just too many hoops to jump through, hoops that are barriers to access and hence inimical to sharing the wealth across the community. Like in Vegas, the house always wins. A handful of charities may get minor commissions but 99.9% of the voluntary and community sector will be excluded from the process. As it stands that remains good enough for the commissioners because, let’s face it, if you want different, you will do different. My role – encouraging others to do different.

My solution, and I’ve not been shy of offering it up, is ring-fenced funding automatically given to small groups and a social value commissioning process that rewards coalitions and consortiums.

It is often met with silence.

I’m taking it as a success indicator. As community organising training teaches: the action is always in the reaction. Change is always resisted, greeted with ridicule or disbelief, but at a certain tipping point, becomes mainstream and people wonder how it was ever not the case. The former bishop of Barking, Peter Hill always used to say, you have to ‘disrupt the present to claim the future’. Works for him so works for me.

There’s a lot of hype about systems change. Every collaborative meeting I go to seems to have consultants talking about systems change and how it will magically make everyone work in perfect partnership. Not true. Money and delivery on the ground are real – systems change is meaningless and abstract. Community groups need money not magical thinking that only eats up time and brings us no closer to accessible commissioning, to accessing money for resident-led activity. The commissioning system reduplicates inequality like a virus, to those that have, more is given. It doesn’t deliver equitable and effective change, it just moves money around the system.

I’m struck by the existence of two different worlds that live next to each other. The kindness and support that flows upwards from community action and neighbourliness. The cold dead hand of administrative power that kicks down.

In 2018, I had an experience of adult social care with Wiltshire Social Services. My sister got sectioned. The care home she lived in got taken over by a much larger firm. The staff changed overnight and my sister, who has autism, couldn’t cope with so much change and literally began to pull her hair out. The authorities’ response was to put her on heavy tranquillisers and place here in a psychiatric hospital. My parent’s efforts to work out what was happening got nowhere – they were on first name terms with social workers but none the wiser about why and when key decisions would be made. Eventually they moved my sister to a care home one hundred miles away, all the while complaining about the cost to the authority and the need to move her back at any time, to save money. The neglect is brutal and capricious. The most vulnerable can be uprooted at any time.

Looking back, it might explain why I struggle to believe in a whole systems approach. If we were to re-imagine adult social care, it should not be done by tame consultants or already commissioned charities. The system cannot and will not reform itself. It has no incentive to do so.

Instead it should follow the logic of asset based social work which has 5 steps. The first one is to ‘change the narrative’. I think that’s what I’m doing here. I’m not up for telling how the current system is wonderful. Those who currently control the story and how it is told have got to get out of the way. We need to start from a different place. In my view, this is the activity of thousands of smaller community groups and millions of volunteers and carers.

Steps 2, 3 and 4 of asset based social work is to map, connect and grow these assets. Then finally ‘learn’ from it (step 5). To repeat, several thousand never funded and never commissioned community groups and thousands more volunteers are what we should consider ‘assets’. What the asset based social work model doesn’t mention is money, which is a fatal flaw. Simply put what is needed is to put the money somewhere else. It is not enough to finally come around to seeing smaller community groups, volunteers and carers as assets – the money needs to follow value.

A lot of this reimagining is simply about doing what it says on the tin, in this case asset based social work, or by extension the LBBD corporate plan around empowerment and participation, and to mix metaphors, putting the money where the mouth is. We get bamboozled and worn down by overly elaborate professionally controlled conversations that are often the entire reason for not actually changing things. Wouldn’t take much to change that – just a bit more collective courage to move from issue to solution to action.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director blog October 2021 – The Power of Relationships

What did you do during lockdown?

We had loads of online discussions with our resident trustees over lockdown as well as delivering courses and meet ups online; I lived vicariously on zoom and we got a lot done. We were careful to check how people were getting on. It didn’t make sense to pretend these were or are normal times and to charge into business as usual. The community organising training we’ve done starts and ends with relational power – with relationships – an organised community is as strong as its relationships. Communities may lack large buildings, large organisations, lots of money, but they will always have more people on the ground where it matters. So it is important that we look after each other because sometimes that is all we have.

At our meetings we asked people what things they’d been doing – coping strategies, things for fun and so forth. We generated quite a long list: lots of online yoga, pilates, learning new things online, trying new recipes, checking out new music, going for walks, exploring new places locally.

One of the things I did was read a lot of books; that is my downtime. All sorts of books, novels, history, travel, books about ideas. It is a good counter to the online hyperactivity of social media and work and there’s only so much Netflix you can watch till it all gets the same. A couple of books I did read were by the borough’s local MPs which were pretty eye opening.

Jon Cruddas’ book on ‘The Dignity of Labour’ draws on his experience of Dagenham and looks at the importance of work and belonging. It made a lot of sense to me. Somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten that where we live and what we do for work is central to how we feel and by extension how well society holds together. The fragmenting of community and social ties driven by a precarious job market, where work is short term and liable to change any minute undermines human dignity. We need to feel rooted to be fully alive and connected to one another. There’s a lot of theory in it but that was the message I took away. One thing I wanted to hear more about was the role of community groups. That bit was missing for me. People organise collectively by creating small groups, meeting in their front rooms, places of worship, tenant halls – that for me is what transforms the sense of isolation and builds community. My complaint is that the community sector always gets forgotten about and yet it is the backbone to what gets done – hence BD Collective’s estimate of 7,000 community groups in the borough, mostly invisible.

What I remember most about Margaret Hodge’s book ‘Called to Account’ is the Public Accounts Committee work. The inside story of how hard it is to get a whole range of public servants and private sector companies to be accountable is something to behold. The micro detail of what blocks transparency and openness about how things are run could hardly be more important. You could have all the policies and plans in the world but if they get keep getting blocked that really needs to be looked at because otherwise there is a continual loop of failure. I guess my takeaway is that it is right to ask questions and to keep on asking them, and not to stop. Sometimes I feel that’s a lonely place to be and that the (non) answers tend to be hostile and evasive in equal measure. My point about relationships at the start – we know when people are being open with us and that creates warmth and stronger communities. Other parts of society could learn from that.

I love reading because it opens up new worlds for me; its immersive and whilst reading can cut you off for a while, it is good to take a break and those worlds within the words can deepen connections that might have been missed. Let me know any good tips of stuff to read.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director blog September 2021: Kindness; Vulnerability; Solidarity

We are revisiting our strategic plan over the next few months. The last one we had was geared very much around the priorities of our 2017 reaching communities Lottery bid before we even had resident trustees or staff. The fundamentals of the plan I worked to was essentially set out in advance – kind of like painting by numbers. There was room for interpretation and innovation, but I was aware of, and appreciated, the framework set out ahead of time. The objectives were fourfold with work focused on cohesion, health, skills and environment and by 2020, to have in place a community development trust (CDT). When it came to values our 2017-2020 plan will show we came up with these:

Energizing and empowering
Entrepreneurial and can-do
Relational approach
Transparency and accountability
Inclusive

My older self looks back and thinks, okay not the worst but plenty of bingo buzzwords that mean what exactly? Paulo Freire, a Brazilian community educator wrote that to speak a true word is to transform the world. Speaking a true word meaning something genuinely and unreservedly coming from the heart of oneself and one’s experience of the world – not sure the above list does that. Looking back they feel mediated by professional jargon; my bad.

At a recent discussion with trustees and staff led by Locality – ahead of board games people brought with them as a DIY social and refreshments sourced from a local resident business (happy to recommend), I jotted down the kind of words I wanted to be central as values for our new plan: kindness, vulnerability; solidarity. They ended up on a stick-it note somewhere and may or may not make the cut as and when the plan gets signed off but I’m already feeling good about them.

I’m sure we’ve all spent time over lockdown thinking about what is important to our lives; lots of people have suddenly left their jobs, moved away, simplified things. Maybe that is part of what is on my mind – the appreciation we feel when someone asks how we are, when mutual aid networks reach out door to door, street by street. The currency of kindness. It is not forced or regimented; it flows out from communities.

I think the pandemic has also shown us how vulnerable we all are – how quickly everything can change, how little control we have. I’ve been thinking that maybe our vulnerability is actually our superpower. I’ll have to explain this one. Normally I bang on about structures – and that power resides with public and private sector bodies; with politics and money. Normally I resist platitudes that claim it’s all about relationships as a partial truth at best. At worst a con. But it struck me, all the people I admire and respect are people who have struggled, suffered and in doing so grown and remained open and accessible. Some kinds of power, where people fear you, are probably not worth having, so just maybe vulnerability is where our creativity and potential combine to empower us – individually and collectively. You’ll have to tell me if that makes any kind of sense.

Soon after I started working in Thames Ward the council’s director of participation told me the view from on high was that I was ‘old fashioned’ in my approach to community work. Pot, kettle, black. I didn’t really understand why but I imagine having an independent thought process can be alarming if you are not used to it. Solidarity is an old school word; it is not trendy, it smacks of another age, but I reached for it anyway, as my third value. Strip it down and it means being there for people, having their back. I’ve always worked in the voluntary sector and I rarely see much solidarity but when I do I want to hold it close. A youth worker friend of mine, who died earlier this year, always told me the way to get the sector to fight amongst itself was to leave a five pound note on the table. Divide and rule is a powerful thing. My thought: we are divided and ruled until such time as we choose not to be, and then everyone wins.

My final word I jotted down was enterprise, I didn’t highlight it here because it has a distance to it at odds to the rest of the blog. My experience of Thames Ward is not of voluntarism – that doing stuff for free and let organisations with money drop a few crumbs, is not going to work out. Kindness, vulnerability and solidarity are things to be and do – they are enterprising and creative; they don’t work if they are fenced in. The pandemic has shown that control can be illusory but the re-set that is taking place can be liberating, depending on how we go about planning for it.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Director blog August 2021: Getting things done

Most of us will know what it feels like to make a list of things we need to do, diligently work through it, maybe get side–tracked by stuff, come back to other stuff that is urgent and cannot be put off any longer. Get to the end of the day, or week and then do it all over again – another list.

Maybe most of us will also know what it feels like to have too much to do – and that some tasks won’t get done, fall through the gaps in our busy lives. Which generates stress, no matter how hard we work.

One of the ways I decompress is by reading – whatever takes my interest, novels, current affairs, books on ideas and theory – and I found myself reading about stress free productivity – hence the blog. The premise being that the more we are able to relax, the more things get done. Having a lot of things on your mind limits how much gets done – we feel overwhelmed. It is exhausting thinking about all the things that need to get done, and this is simply trying to recall what it is we need to do, not even the act of doing it.

A lot of this is obvious but we often miss what is obvious – like where we find ourselves placing our attention. I was a bit shocked to realise how much time I spend thinking about doing things and trying to remember all the things I should be doing rather than actually doing them. Quite a lot of my life caught up on that hamster wheel. Whereas what I enjoy is being absorbed by what I am doing, being in the moment, not distracted by trying to chase after lists.

The wider reflection for me, is about how we do community work. Again I spend a lot of my life going to meetings, having conversations with people which come down to – so what are we going to do? Dancing around who does what and will it get done and do we even get to the point of spelling out that there is an action and someone is going to do it. I break things down into issues, solutions and actions. In community work we spend a lot of time talking about issues but we often miss the solutions and fail to take actions. Sometimes that is fine because we need the space to simply speak it out, build relational power and trust – people before programme. Not rush to transact business and instrumentalise people. So chat about issues is fine.

But and there is a but, I think one of the major reasons why community work falls short is we don’t then go on to frame the solution and action in specific measurable terms. Sometimes I think this is a deliberate strategy – power holders get people to talk about issues but that is all it is. Stuff doesn’t get done if it hasn’t been clearly agreed what the action is and who is going to do it. I think that is what transparency and accountability means.

I was in a meeting the other week with a lot of public sector workers who lamented the absence of smaller community groups in the delivery of local services and thought was given about how these small groups might ‘get on board’. I seem to have heard the same conversation for years, a subtext of almost every meeting I go to. My thought is – if you want to get more community groups ‘on board’ you just do it. If you really want to do it, you will find a way. It really isn’t hard. This is about political and institutional will. The fact that it still gets talked about means the will is lacking. The solution for example is to identify what resource exists and ring fence and re-direct some of it. Trouble is, no one is framing the solution and the action – hence smaller community groups are disenfranchised. This is by design. I’m not saying there is a malign intent – I just think there are a lot of people copping out. Sometimes people blame the ‘system’ but we are the ones who create the system by who we are and what we do. So for me it is not about the ‘system’ or bureaucracy, it is just about the will and desire to do it differently and better.

Sometimes it occurs to me that maybe the same people in the ‘system’ have a lot on and feel overwhelmed. They can’t relax but bounce from meeting to meeting – too many things to do, important people to placate. No wonder stuff doesn’t get done. Or when it gets done it happens at the margins because no one felt the need to form a committee or bring external consultants in. Sometimes it feels like a conspiracy to agree things are being done when they are not. There’s a fear factor. Maybe that sounds a bit critical.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, wrote about how oppression operates through a culture of silence. Power holders encourage magical and naive thinking when addressing social problems – magical in the sense of things being an act of fate or chance, naïve in the sense that those in power always and only act on the best interests of those without power and in fact want to give power away rather than hold on to it. Freire suggests only critical thinking gets things done – that’s why maybe I’m coming across as critical. Critical as in asking questions, trying to move from issue to solution to action. Sometimes getting lost in a list of things to do.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Allen, D (2015) Getting Things Done. London: Piatkus

Friere, P (1995) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin

Director blog July 2021: Wellbeing – The personal is political

Wellbeing has rightly risen up the agenda of things people are talking about – not just because of the pandemic but also because people expect more from employers, the workplace and the day-to-day social spaces we inhabit. That’s a good thing.

What I wonder is whether we have a strong enough shared understanding about what wellbeing is? Inevitably wellbeing means different things to different people but is there a robust enough overall vision? A big tent that people can unite behind and get with the programme. My sense is that we don’t have this – I don’t think wellbeing has broken through because if it had, we’d be living in a very different world.

Wellbeing is a warm comforting word, like ‘community’; it gets sprayed around as a non-specifically positive thing. Fuzzy and vague. But as we know goals and objectives that are not ‘smart’ (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed) or even ‘smarter’ (evaluated and reviewed) – well those loose goals have a habit of not getting done.

To be fair there are plenty of toolkits and how-to guides around:

https://neweconomics.org/2012/07/measuring-wellbeing

https://www.actionforhappiness.org/10-keys-to-happier-living

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/guides-tools-and-activities/five-steps-to-mental-wellbeing/

So just like safe-guarding, equal opportunities, health and safety and similar must-have policies it is easy enough to get something written down, and more to the point, understood, used and reviewed. In other words, it can be managerial, technocratic and in its better moments a framework for accountability.

What I feel is lacking from the wellbeing conversation society is having with itself these days is a deeper location of wellbeing as political thing. Funny how that gets airbrushed out of the picture; how we don’t get around to talking about structures of power, control and oppression – move along, nothing to see here.

I’m all up for doing more exercise, going on long walks together, learning a new skill. My point is that the answer to social problems is through both individual self-care AND wider institutional and political actions. And all I get from the professionalised choreography about wellbeing is the former not the latter.

At its worst wellbeing is just a mix of naive and magical thinking – if you are on the sharp end of poverty that is as much about politics and economics as opposed to learning how to breathe properly. The solutions to the stresses that bear down on us can be framed in terms of things you can do as an individual and things that the state can do to or for you, for example via legislation. A tussle between the agency of the individual to sort their lives out versus the structure of the state (NHS / Council etc) to sort it via tax and as public servants.

If you are in power, with all that money and patronage what message would you want to put out there? I’d say it would be about putting all the responsibility on the shoulders of individuals and then try and make out like it was deeply meaningful and empowering. An example of how ideas need to be questioned or else they end up carelessly repeated as assumed ‘common sense’: an ideological con trick.

To be clear, I just think we need a mix of emphasis on what individuals can do, and what wider society needs to get done. A balance, not one thing or the other.

What I reckon we could do is use the opportunity that is presented by wellbeing to put a whole lot of things on the agenda. To think critically, to open up conversations and propose new solutions and actions. I think this is best of both worlds – the individual bit and the collective action joined as one.

The slogan that ‘the personal is political’ is associated with second wave feminism but I feel it is universal and multi-purpose. We can use what we experience to prompt reflective conversations that critically examine how we are living and how we might want to live differently. That in turn is a programme for political action. If we get the opportunity to jump on the wellbeing bandwagon and chat freely why not give it some welly? Be a shame not to.

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

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

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

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

Tag: director blog

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Making the connections – May 2021

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

Reaching Outwards – April 2021

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