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Local devolution is not big devolution in miniature

February 25, 2015 by ben Leave a Comment

Dolls in the Rain by byjoelodge on FlickrWe would argue it’s more human, more interesting, and more radical by far.

We have heard the word “Devolution” everywhere over the past six months;  from Scotland’s referendum, to new financial and political powers for Manchester, Leeds and  Sheffield.  We have also heard increasingly about groups of local activists seizing the initiative in their own communities – to re-open a local pub, to save libraries, or to win contracts to deliver services previously run by local authorities.

The temptation is to see these developments as similar responses at different scales to the same issues; scepticism of Whitehall and Westminster politics, disillusionment with ‘big’ power and big projects, and a widespread sense of traditional power seeming distant and disconnected from daily human local lives.

One reading of all this is that the big devolutionary tilt – in Scotland, and in the English city regions – now just needs to be replicated or given another shove, on a smaller scale and we’ll have achieved ‘more power to local communities’?

We are not so sure.  When we meet with others involved in neighbourhood and community projects we often hear them describe their Town Hall or County Halls as feeling just as distant as Whitehall.  For many people it seems that shifting power from Westminster to their own city council or local authority doesn’t lead to them feeling decisions are being taken closer to them, or that they have more control.  It’s just one group of decision-makers ‘somewhere else’ being replaced by another.  The headline priorities of newly empowered cities reinforce this: grand transport schemes and other infrastructure projects; steel and glass, rather than people and communities.  The human element is often reduced to workforce statistics – reinforcing our concern that future ‘devolved’ decisions of re-invigorated cities will feel no more focused on local communities than Whitehall’s decisions today (see high speed rail, housing, and healthcare).

And if you study what the more ambitious local authorities are saying about getting closer to communities and neighbourhoods is it really about surrendering decision-making power and budgets to communities?  In some cases it is – but more often the stated goals are about building cleverer administrative systems for tailoring services and pre-empting needs.  This is smart, necessary and important if public services are to meet spiralling demand, but it is not the same as devolving power, money, and decisions to villages, estates and neighbourhoods.

Yet, almost in a parallel world across the country there is a renewed energy and enthusiasm going into community-led activities to improve or create something right where people live.  We have seen this in the take-up (slow but steadily growing) of ‘community rights’ to create local plans, take over community buildings, or to bid for contracts to run local services.  We have also see it in the amazing energy which has been collected and released by the Big Local programme where £1million has been offered as a catalyst for change in 150 communities.  And then there are myriad examples of new organisations trying to meet pressing needs in their communities in new and imaginative ways, often using technology to turn labour-intensive tasks (like matching users to support, or distributing information) into very simple tasks.

This small and local devolution is not some kind of replica in miniature of city-regional devolution, in many cases it feels like a challenge to the culture and structure of city-regional government.  So while the newly empowered cities may quickly start looking like scaled-down versions of Whiltehall, local devolution looks very different; you could even say, the polar opposite.

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Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: Big Local, community rights, devolution, local government, Localism

Do you know where you’re going to?

July 21, 2013 by ben Leave a Comment

Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/highwaysagency/

We’ve been trying to take stock of plans coming out of Big Local, as well as neighbourhood planning  and Our Place! (as it’s now known).

One thing which interests us are the different routes these projects seem to be going down. For some it’s too soon to say they are on one route versus another but we’ve had a go at naming the routes, in the hope of stimulating discussion – in particular about where different projects are headed, and whether routes chosen now mean they are destined to grow into quite different things in the future? Here goes:

 

 

1) Bridgeheads and basecamps

  • In some places the first people on the scene started by securing a visible physical presence in a neighbourhood on behalf of the initiative, so there’s a person in the same place, most days of the week (or at least a “back in 5 mins” sign). It might be a desk in the office of an existing organisation, or something bigger. Ramsey Big Local did this early on, getting hold of a small office and meeting space just off the High Street where key movers and shakers can usually be found.  Others are doing similar like Warwick Ahead Big Local where the key organisers can usually be found up at the “Addy”, the estate’s popular community centre and adventure playground.
  • These projects are aiming for their physical bases to become literal meeting places to make new connections and cook-up plans. As these projects beg, borrow, or buy more space, and secures more income their physical home becomes their identity.  Ten years later they might be a new generation of Knowle West Media Centres, or Park Centres.

2) Seeding lots of small things

  • This route starts by seeking out local individuals or groups who have ideas which might improve the community, and then providing them with small amounts of human support and/or funding.  This is what UnLtd’s Star People fund does in tandem with Big Local. It’s also part of the rationale behind participatory budgeting like in Windsor and Maidenhead.
  • But can also be non-financial – like offering time to help turn ideas into reality (like NANM’s own work on Media4Me where we enabled a community radio station to deliver a project they had planned but were too stretched to deliver).
  • Seeding lots of things, means failure is expected, and part of the process – but over time these approaches could reach enough individuals to create a critical mass of people with more capacity and confidence which in turn inspires others.

3) We do therefore we fundraise

  • This is a different mindset from community organisations where the main focus is the activities and services and where grants are a means to an ends. This is more like the model adopted by of national charities like Macmillan but on a local scale where the goal is to create a strong fundraising capacity in parallel social action and services.  Some Big Local areas like Rastrick for whom innovative fundraising and creative ways of getting people involved are one and the same thing.
  • There are existing examples too, like the Shoreditch Trust and the Alt Valley Community Trust for whom being brilliant at fundraising and creating income are as integral to their model as their brilliant community services.

4) Building on the last thing

  • Does a truly ‘new’ community group ever really form? It’s hard to imagine an individual who could get people together in their community who was not already connected in some way.
  • In two London neighbourhoods Barnfield (in SE London) and White City (in W London) the leadership for Big Local and for Neighbourhood Community Budgets came from community groups which had been set up for a previous community-change project – in these cases Well London.
  • These groups have already done the hard work of learning how to work together and get things done.  But at the same time, it’s only natural for them to approach these new projects as a chance to pursue (as far as the rules allow) the goals and ambitions they have spent the past five years developing.

5) Changing the Rules

  • Places and communities are shaped by the rules they operate under. And another route is to exploit new opportunities to change the rules.   Queens Park Parish is one of the best examples, where the new legal right to create Parishes with revenue-raising powers has been used. The new household-levy which they have been able to set forms a permanent source of revenue and guarantees its future.
  • Another example are the community groups using the new neighbourhood planning rights like Upper Eden in Cumbria to tackle local problems (in Upper Eden’s case it’s affordable housing).  Free Schools are another example.

What do you think? Might these kinds of distinctions help or hinder us in understanding how to make change happen now, and where it might take communities in the future. Has all this been done before? Or do you have another way to cut-it?

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Big Local, communities, community budgets, community group, empowerment, engagement, Neighbourhood management, neighbourhood planning

What’s in the Plan Stan?

July 21, 2013 by ben Leave a Comment

We’ve spent the past few months reading as many community-produced plans as we can from Big Local, as well as other neighbourhood-change projects –  especially neighbourhood planning and neighbourhood budgets (now called Our Place!).

As part of  this we held workshop on 18 June in Barnfield, SE London getting people together to share plans from different projects across the country to see what they have in common. The answer is… a great deal! Common factors included  – reflecting community aspirations more than those of public agencies, capturing and empowering individual action as much as action by groups of formal bodies, and an underlying bias towards inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, and creativity.

We heard from Donna at Voluntary Action Camden about neighbourhood planning in two very different London communities – Somerstown, a community dominated by social housing sandwiched between two mainline stations, and Bloomsbury a community on the edge of London’s West End with extremes of wealth and poverty.

We also heard from the Barnfield Community Group about how they are using the energy and expertise they developed through five years of Well London, to now develop a Big Local Plan to use £1m of Lottery money their community has received.

Jenny Frew from CLG also talked about the ‘community rights’ support which communities can use for free via http://mycommunityrights.org.uk/my-community-rights/

* NB – a few days later CLG then launched  Our Place! which is a massive expansion of neighbourhood budgets with a £4.3m enabling budget

And we heard from the chair of the Grove Park Community Group about how they are looking for ways to make positive changes happen in their neighbourhood whether that’s through community planning or other ways.

If we were getting really carried away we’d say there’s a bigger theme here of de-institutionalising and re-humanising communities, tapping into personal passions, enabling enterprise, and creating value. We might even argue this points to a new breed of community action or even a ‘movement’.

We were also struck by the language CLG used around community-led change in relation to neighbourhood budgets – (and the newly launched Our Place!) which was quite a shift from what began as much more local authority-led processes two years ago.

And another thing we found interesting were the routes these and other projects look like they might be going down. For some it’s too soon to say what route they are on – but some seem to have chosen different routes which might take them to quite different places. See our next post for more on this.

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Filed Under: Event Tagged With: Big Local, communities, empowerment, neighbourhood budgets, neighbourhood planning, neighbourhoods, our place, planning

Media4ME in Fishermead – project story and update January 2013

February 27, 2013 by ben Leave a Comment

For the past two years we have been working with communities in Fishermead, Milton Keynes on a project called Media4ME.  It’s part of a six-nation EU programme co-ordinated by our partners Mira Media in the Netherlands and David Wilcox of Socialreporters has also been working on the project with us.

We have a presentation about the Media4ME project here. And we have written a more detailed report here.

Secklow Sounds-20120710Secklow Sounds-20120710-00138

 

The project has used an asset-based approach to community empowerment, seeking out individuals with their own ideas and plans, and using the project resources to help them.  We have also put concerted effort into connecting up those individuals so they can make a bigger difference. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Media4Me Tagged With: community, media, milton keynes, radio

DIY neighbourhoods, open space, and new challenges #diylocal

October 20, 2012 by ben Leave a Comment

This week’s open space in Bradford was a great start to a new kind of NANM-hosted gathering – of which we hope to host more. Firstly a huge thank you is due to @MichaelaHowell2 and her colleauges at Bradford Trident for hosting us.

Secondly, this post is just a snapshot of the discussion, if you were there, or just interested then please do comment or link to your own thoughts.

We chose the title Neighbourhoods and DIY local democracy because we thought it captured both the growth in different forms of local decision-making, and the fact that it is increasing up to communities not just what decisions they take, but how those decisions are taken. We also thought it was a useful place to start a discussion.

And so it was.  [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Event, NANM related, News, Uncategorized Tagged With: communities, community budgets, Localism, NANM, neighbourhood, Neighbourhood management, participation

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