In the process of a job interview I was recently asked to answer three questions:
- From your perspective what do you think are the 3 key issues for the Voluntary Community Sector in relation to Community Development?
- How will your knowledge and expertise inform the development of our Community Development strategy?
- What programme of activity would you want to see in an operational plan to meet these 3 key issues?
I don’t consider for a minute I am certain I have drawn the right conclusions but I offer this thesis for discussion.
Common definitions say Community Development is the practice of building stronger and more resilient local communities. It aims to empower people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change – i.e. to be activists.
My perspective is from the ground; meeting the people who are trying to do things in their community. So from the coal-face, it’s not going to answer the question if I talk about the landscapes of funding, local government policies or the organisational structure of support agencies, although I am very interested in these things.
Many things cause clients (or society) to need our services but if I reflect on my recent work, I can surmise some common themes.
I suggest three key issues drive my clients’ need for my support:
- Bureaucracy
- Entropy
- Apathy
Bureaucracy can be a pejorative word but I mean the necessary administrative burden of compliance with regulations as well as the processes of funding and reporting outcomes and the general administration of their organisation. For the most part, my clients are people that want to get things done. They want to be busy with the kettle and the cups and saucers and not the permits to use them.
I used to run a youth club that was started after a sports field was created with funding from the Lottery, the sort of outcome hoped for by that investment. At first it was easy but as it grew bigger there had to be a committee, accounts, minutes, CRB checks, safe-guarding policies, insurance and so on. None of this actually contributed to what we provided and it took more hours per week than the activities for the children. Although we got support, the advice was we had to comply and no one could actually do that work for us.
After five years and months of pleading when no other parents came forward to be on the committee, the entire committee resigned. Three months later other parents restarted the youth club but on a much smaller scale to avoid the bureaucracy that went before.
Another factor in this scenario is entropy. By that I mean the term used in thermodynamics that energy will gradually become less useful if the process stays the same.
An organisation’s purpose is perishable. People’s enthusiasm is perishable too. Whether large or small; processes within organisations often decay in efficiency just as software frequently does with each update making it more and more bloated.
I can think of an example of an older people’s social club who could not countenance working in partnership with another scheme that approached them. It was rather more than indifference; they saw them as a threat. The social club was not interested in adapting to meet the needs in the community as it had slowly come to serve just a small clique of regulars and expected the financial support of the town and district council to be perpetual. It didn't encourage new people on its committee either as apparently it served the committee members to be in positions of patronage.
What is particularly difficult in this kind of situation is unless there’s actual dishonesty there isn't much anyone can do. You can’t close down a club or service for just being ineffective but you must find ways to work around the obstacles that it can put in the way of others who can do much better with the public’s money.
The third issue is apathy, by which I mean negative attitudes or reluctance about volunteering, disillusionment and any disbelief that problems can be fixed. The willingness to help others is called social capital and is a currency by which we measure whether our work is profitable or not. A study of “enablers, barriers and propensity for enterprise” carried out in one of Suffolk’s more depressed towns found less social capital there than in more prosperous areas and cited a pervasive culture of failure and benefits dependency.
However I know in the same place that a private dance school has given thousands of children a ticket to spectacular attainments without a penny of public money. I’d like to find out how we can do what they can do.
I can identify communities rich in social capital as well as poor ones. It is our challenge to keep both those communities solvent in social capital and build it up where it is depleted. Research finds the traditional “risk-factors” such as poverty and mobility are not as significant as most people assume but the confidence in communities to intervene in their social problems is.
Where trust and social networks flourish, individuals and neighbourhoods all prosper economically. I feel fortunate that in Suffolk whenever there is bad news, at least we can also find good news to learn from nearby. So I think any strategy must ensure that communities do not lose the confidence that they can make a difference.
Naturally I would like to think that a future strategy will focus on tackling these problems and I have been asked what I can bring to the table in doing this. Quite simply, I think it will be the clients’ perspective. While management may be busy negotiating with funders, or reading the runes in Whitehall, my role has to focus my clients’ problems with whatever resources I have.
My suggestion to alleviate the burden of bureaucracy is to ensure the VCS provide clear advice about compliance and have the capability to create the materials. I am confident I can do that myself. We must always remember that our clients don’t understand jargon. We can also look providing support through online forums so that advice on the most common issues can be collaboratively authored and one response can help many.
While there are many resources available, it not always the case that we know where to find them so our signposting must be second to none and all VCS support organisations must do all they can to prevent their clients getting a run-around. I have done a lot of research into solving that problem myself.
There is no single magic bullet for preventing entropy in organisations. If there was, management consultancy would cease to exist. However, whenever communities are able to scrutinise the organisations in their community; that usually has the effect of ensuring they keep to their purpose and are generally more effective overall.
Encouraging community groups to act transparently will counter the process of entropy. That worked when the first Directory of Social Change revealed what charitable foundations in those days spent on staff perks and posh headquarters. Therefore may I suggest that in strategy is a policy that as much data as feasible is publicly accessible and documents such as grant applications and outcomes are available to be read online as a condition of providing of support. This is in the same spirit that Eric Pickles wants all council documents on the web and indexed so people can actually find them and web-streaming of council meetings.
Similarly, there is no simple way to build social capital; that is after our raison d'être, but your strategy should be to build more links between successful practise in building social capital and those who can implement it. We need to be really good at telling stories about how problems were overcome in ways that inspire others to try and to persevere. While we do some of this already, we need to look at how to reach the untapped citizen-activists and not the usual suspects.
So in summary I find bureaucracy, entropy and apathy get in the way of community development and that we can overcome them by improving access to knowledge, encouraging transparency and more sharing of success in our practice.
