Anti-Poverty Environmental Projects:
Working Through The Practical Issues
Written for the the "Making the Links Seminar" organised by the Health in Your Environment Voluntary Sector Forum and the Nottingham Health Action Group on 11th June 1999.
Introduction - devising holistic concepts systems is easier than implimenting them........
The task of finding a common concept system to unify social, environmental, health and economic policy is actually not so difficult. But implimenting it, making it work tangibly, is a hard slog. In this paper I want to describe such a concept system, one which I have been working to over a number of years, but then to go onto describe many of the practical problems that arise in implimentation. It is largely based on my personal experience as a mental health worker, interested in questions of local economy, developing an environmental project called Ecoworks, where we encourage the involvement of people with mental health problems. In describing the many problems actually experienced over the years developing Ecoworks, I want to stress, so that the rest of this essay is not too discouraging, that doing anything that is relatively new, either to oneself as an individual, or that is new more generally, is bound to be difficult. The difficulties - or challenges! - are both because any individual doing anything new has to acquire the knowledge to develop the orientation and skills to make good decisions - but also because, when one is pioneering a process which is socially innovative, one does not have access to a supportive context and environment. There is no matching infrastructure of support services, few like minded people to work with or to fall back on, the issues are not only unfamiliar to you, acting as developer, they are unfamiliar to everyone else as well - including funders; the techniques are experimental, untested and as yet non standard; the tools for the job may exist somewhere in the UK and Europe but not in a local store; the 3D designs are few in number, the practical material supplies that you want, are not conveniently available and so on. However, as you pioneer and other people and institutions catch on and latch on so the environment changes too - it becomes easier for other people to do what you found difficult or even impossible. Other people pass the point where you failed or gave up exhausted.
One possible holistic concept system
Economic and training programmes nowadays aim at "socially excluded people"; social and health services work with vulnerable people at risk with a "high dependency" in "community care programmes"; community regeneration programmes aim to help "multiply disadvantaged people" in areas of "urban and rural deprivation". While it is not totally true these are mostly one and the same group of people looked at from the different points of view of different public agencies. A unfiying concept system starts with that as point one. Second point - a large part of the work to solve the problems of this common group of people can be considered as linked to environmental agendas - this has already been de facto recognised by many officials and activists in Nottingham in the discussions held during the so called FEAT seminars - on Food, Energy Efficiency, Asthma and Transport. In each case the ideas from the environmental agenda were seen as solutions, or linked to solutions to a variety of health, social and economic agendas - healthy and cheaper eating, warmer and healthier homes, cleaner air, more exercise. This leads on to the third point in the concept system - a need to go for partnerships in which the environmental activists, the community regenerators, the health and social service workers start doing things together. The fourth point is in regard to the insitutional and geographical location for these partnerships. While there is a place for community entreprises aimed at formal employment much of the location for these activities is centred round home, gardens and neighbourhood and, more generally lifestyles. The link to "the economy" is, at least in part, through the domestic economy - a changed allocation of time and activities outside of paid employment. Thinking of home and neighbourhood as if it were itself a production unit this is about thinking how you can save on resources used ( e.g. water, energy, cash) and increase outputs ( e.g. self supplied food, household artfacts etc.). The target groups to be helped are, in any case, often unemployed or non employed. They are helped by organising activities and measures which should bring down living costs and resource usage - if you cycle to work (and you don't have an accident) you should be healthier. This will also bring down petrol costs. If your house is energy efficient your fuel bills are less as well as being better for your health and the environment. If you grow part of your own food, using self made compost, your food bills come down. The common idea here is personal energy and work in DIY activities brings down (fuel based) energy and financial costs. (While the economy is effected through the domestic economy there are at least some jobs to be gained in the process as these things require matching support services, resources centres and pooled community services - whose formal organisation creates jobs - e.g. employees in private or community DIY centres, community garden organisers, employees giving energy efficiency advice and/or installing insulation).
Virtual change and real change
Possibly the main feature of this strategy for me is that it stands or falls on its tangible quality. It must be possible to specify for projects a what, a where, a when, a why, a who, (and a how). The who must be people whose first names you know, the what must involve an object that you could take a photograph of or that you could photograph someone doing (if its a healthy eating project then that means things like carrots, cabbages and lettuces, if it is an energy project it might be a solar panel or an layer of insulation material etc, if it is a transport and exercise project then its someone riding a bike etc.)
You can approach healthy eating by researching what people eat and what you think they ought to eat and then organise discussions of professionals and academics about what people ought to eat followed up by making TV programmes and printing nutrition information leaflets that you leave in the leaflet racks of local health centres. You may go and talk in schools about what people ought to eat. Often programmes never leave the realms of communication - and the work solely exists as written and spoken words (and pictures). When these seem to not be achieving much you organise new meetings whose aim is to rethink something called the "strategy". What changes the virtual programmes (e.g. virtual nutrition - what you think they should eat) into real programmes is when it changes people's activity and relationships to the physical tangible world. (real nuritition - what people actually eat).
Extra effort versus greater convenience - not, at first sight, a winning strategy
But investing personal energy to produce change in and around the home, garden, neighbourhood and locality means extra effort or at least attempts to change long held comfy habits. A programme involving extra effort is never going to be a panacea and it actually runs counter to most of the economic trends aimed at the home where what is being sold by the supermarkets and departments stores are arrangements for getting things done quicker and with greater simplicity. They sell gadgets, meals and other services aimed at convenience (but which are fuel based energy intensive and ultimately, environmentally destructive). To compete it is necessary to offer a different kind of package. In the past I have argued that the attraction point in this other package needs to be sociability - i.e. you attract people to get involved and active by making them fun, making them re-creational (the play on words is deliberate) and by offering better and new relationships in common activities. This is because disadvantaged people are commonly socially isolated. To bring them together in convivial activities is meeting a different kind of need. Here is another wonderful idea, which, once again in the implimentation, turns out not to be so simple - sometimes the interpersonal dynamics of projects can evolve quite nastily, despite one's initial good intentions.
You can also argue, of course, as I have done before, that the socially excluded people are poor people and unemployed people - you can argue that they have the time on their hands and no money to buy the conveniences anyway. So they don't actually have much of a choice and a strategy which puts more energy into making their domestic lives more efficient is about as good as can be done for them. If, for example, they have had breakdowns then they might have seen their whole previous way of managing their lives in ruins and be looking for new activities, with time on their hands and not much chance of finding paid employment. Nevertheless there is a problem here - problem number one. The danger is of a widening split in which well paid officials, enthused by the new policy option, encourage less well off people to put more effort and energy into making their domestic arrangements cheaper, cleaner and healthier - but as for themselves they will continue to live with the "I'm too busy to have the time myself and need to buy a new car to get in from my commuter village" high income plus convenience lifestyle. Observing such a widening split the less well off are likely to end up thinking: "Yes, it would be cheaper to grow my own but I'm not a gardener. In fact I'd rather have a job and buy the stuff, neatly and cleanly packaged, like you, from the supermarket." or "It would be cheaper to get on my bike but you've got a car and I'd rather have one too - especially as people like you might knock me off it".
Perhaps therefore we should rephrase one of those moral commandments that the Bible gives us - recommend to others only what you already practice yourself.
Research and Development
So it is easier to find a concept system than to find a logistical system to make that concept system work. Of course working problems through is what pioneering work actually consists of, no more and no less. "Problem" is a word that means things are not straightforward and that you have to (re)search in areas where you have no previous orientation and don't know the ropes. Doing this successfully or failing depends on the resources available to you and the amount of tolerance for your trial and error approach that the organisations that fund you are prepared to give.
Research and Development Departments are to be found in most large organisations in the commercial field - R and D takes place also in the form of contracts to universities. Commercial organisations are prepared to pay for R and D in order to continue to stay ahead of competition. In dynamic organisations R and D is an integral part of their development plans. In R and D departments it is recognised that things are developed on a trial and error basis. However in the environmental, social and health fields, as well as in community economic regeneration, many of the new approaches are tried out by small not for profit voluntary organisations. These small groups are usually dependent on inflexible funding programmes. Funders almost always want you to specify in advance exactly what it is that you are going to provide and exactly how you are going to measure this. The increasingly tight way in which funders want to tie down in advance what is to be provided leaves very little room for anything that is experimental, that involves protypes, or that is done on a trial and error basis.
Organisational nightmares - working with people whose live are in chaos
I think this is important. At first sight the domestic economy orientation seems to mean that the intended activities are relatively small scale and therefore simple to organise. Unlike those regneration strategies which are about attracting huge inward investment for factories and offices, activities for home and garden seem within the reach of community level organisation. However, once again, it is quite often not as simple as that. Working in domestic and community settings with disadvantaged people actually involves some very specific difficulties. For example, when you do not pay people, when you do not tie them down in employment contracts, their involvement can be quite "crumbly" and sporadic. It can actually be quite difficult to tie down the days and times that you can actually come together to get things done. This is true for anyone involved as a volunteer, "disadvantaged" or not, because voluntary activities often compete with domestic commitments which people need to be flexible about outside of their working hours - the need to take children to a doctor, fitting in the shopping, putting up a visiting relative or friend. When you try to work with people who have a variety of social and economic problems voluntary commitment can be even more difficult to keep regular and consistent. Domestic relationships are likely to be stressed and motivation, morale and self confidence quite low. The ability to sustain a regular, patterned and dependable involvement with your bright idea for a holistic project will frequently crumble in the face of a mixture of personal financial crises, crises brought about by interviews with the employment or welfare services, disappointed hopes bringing about bouts of demobilising depression, illnesses or the illnesses of dependents and relatives, crises creating distractions, forgetfulness and hangovers, incidents in which people are the victims of crime and so on.
In these circumstances what can then happen is that paid workers structure their time chasing after people whose involvement is irregular and haphazard in a way that is difficult to integrate with the need to organise regular meetings with other people in the office. In the case of one of the projects I am involved with we are trying to help disadvantaged people renovate their own homes in an eco-friendly way. We are to be monitored by our funders on how well we do this so the worker is under pressure to build up the numbers and fits in with when her clients have the will and ability to do the work. She juggles her days in order to do this - making it very difficult for her to organise jointly with other workers. The attempt to involve and connect to people whose lives are in chaos may feed back chaos into the organisation that is trying to help.
In most formal organisations the normal hours and discipline of work and work style contracts imposes a structure to involvement whereby people are either involved or they are not at the premises of their employer and this enables a routine and regular pattern that makes possible joint activity. Working to try to renovate the domestic and non work lives of disadvantaged people in their own space, in activity which is non contracted, can create horrendously frustrating dynamics.
Working with people who are not very able - when social and environmental objects clash
There are other poblems too.....Many of the people who have had mental health or other social and health problems are very capable and an environmental or other project may be just the thing that inspires them for a new beginning to their lives. We have had in Ecoworks several such people who have got a lot out of the opportunity and found in it new directions and new interests. This is when the environmental objectives work well for personal rehabilitation as people pursue social and economic goals. However there are other people who have given up. They have become institutionalised and/or are very lacking in confidence. They need a lot of support to do anything at all. Inside projects they may get picked on, or take out their frustrations picking on someone else. It becomes hard work working through complicated and bitchy interpersonal dynamics. Quite rightly and quite justifiably their (statutory service) support workers are always on the look out for new openings and new places for them and they can find their way into multi-functional projects like Ecoworks. What then can happen is that the environmental objectives and the social objectives, rather than functioning well together, come to be in conflict. One or two very dependent people in a wider group can sometimes be carried along and grow in the process - but once a larger number of more dependent people enters the frame the whole character of a group can change.
Paid or volunteer support workers, whose main interest is in the environmental or production activity, find they have become mainly care workers. Perhaps they find themselves out of their depth in the interpersonal and psychological issues coming up, or unable to devote themselves to the activities and objectives that was their main interest. At this point a number of things may happen - if such key organisers are volunteers they may decide they want paying to continue or, alternatively they may decide to leave. Or, yet again, they may use the organisations that they are in to set up inititiatives and projects which are vehicles for their own interests - which evolve separately from the social side of the project. The different objectives start to evolve along different activities with different people on different days on different tracks...........
When paid workers are not very capable
Activities and projects aimed at disadvantaged people can provide environments where people can realise their full potential. People suddenly find they have unexpected abilities. Their confidence grows and they move on and through the organisations set up for them to other things. But in some organisations it is not only the less able volunteers that get stuck - so too may less able paid workers. Moreover, as time passes the old guard of once radical organisations can lose interest in the work but not in the money and be unable or unwilling to move on. Organisations can lose their way but keep on receiving the public sector hand outs - the officials who oversee their funding see that all is not well but are unable to see how they can be replaced.
As the long standing workers struggle or lose interest it is vital to bring in new blood to renew and recreate organisations. However bringing in new people is not always so easy especially when an organisation has gone stale. It is difficult enough at most times. Creating activities that people can access and get involved with when they want them can be intensly frustrating. What typically happens is that one creates a process where, in the early stages people come and want to get involved before you have done the necessary preparatory work. At the time of writing there are people interested in our catering project before our catering trailer is yet finished and the prior work on health and safety and logistics has still to been done.. After a few weeks the people we envisaged as potential cooks have disappered. Alternative activites were on offer to them that they could start there and then.
As a project developer I frequently go through weeks in which the days seem to alternate between steps forward and steps backward. As people fall away and my morale sags, another person steps forward and I become more optomistic again. I have reasonable confidence that in the projects I develop people will keep on coming forward but it is a continual worry as to whether they will have the skills, confidence, time and ability to stay involved and become part of the activity nework or team. I know from experience that in the various activities some of the people who become involved will, inevitably, drop out fairly quickly. A few will adhere to whatever the project is and become regular participants. Some will get a lot out of the project, perhaps taking up responsibilities inside it.. The next stage of their involvement is that they will end up wanting to stay with project and to get a job with it. At this stage things can start to turn sour. The most sour circumstances are where the chances of finding money are slim and where the keen volunteer finds themselves working alongside people who are paid but who have lost interest in their jobs or who are not very competent. They are putting in a lot and taking out little and it is inevitable that they clash with people who are taking out a lot and not putting in much. In such circumstances tensions can become extreme. Discontent builds and the volunteer may come to resent the pay of the worker and leave, pulling down some of the social networks and activities that have formed around them while they worked hard for no pay....
This may leave behind shrinking numbers in tiny cliques that are actually not very capable but are highly dependent and who cannot do anything else. The radical and innovative character of the projects disappear. Paid workers find they are managing non productive day centres that do not really interest them - and the emphasis turns more and more on support and less and less on whatever the original positive agenda was. The inward looking clique of users make it very uncomfortable for newcomers...
Sustainability - what is left several years after the PR photocall
I think it necessary to see things in the longer term. The whole social welfare, regeneration and environmental field is full of projects and indviduals who do short term projects, set things up and then move on. Indeed some organisations specialise in the quick turnover of short term projects. This is not always a bad thing since some people will only get involved in things which they see as short term - they cannot and will not commit themselves to longer things. Many activities in the home and garden and neighbourhood are short term. The organisation of events rather than projects is in many cases very valuable in its own right. Ecoworks gets a lot out of organising seasonal festivals. However with some things some people do have to sustain the longer term process. In a community garden, you have a wonderful venue for seasonal festivals but to keep the garden itself requires at least one person who will provide the long term continuity, the framework for the involvement of the short term sporadic volunteers.
Sustaining the long term is important but the time horizons of many organisations is a year, or three - set by funding cycles. During this period funding agencies are concerned but then lose interest. Workers create funding applications, they set up projects, making a name for themselves as innovators and then disappear to a more exciting job somewhere else. Other people are left taking up the post and break their backs making the brilliant ideas work.. Organisations move into an area, make promises, work with people to plant up a site, get photocalls for their PR brochures and funding strategies, then are gone. A year later the plants are gone, ripped out by local vandals and not a single person from the local community that helped would do it again because they are bitter and disillusioned by what happened to their hard work for local people.Their impression is that they were really there to justify the pay of the organisers.
The relevant watchword here is sustainability. Many organisations and initiatives gain a reputation for achievements in the honeymoon phase of their work - before the problems emerged. What gets remembered at conferences is the enthusiastic founder proclaiming the message that has inspired the funders. In the honeymoon years people got involved and things went well. But 5 years later the same idea of the organisation is still being proclaimed, except now it is because those who are left behind want to keep their jobs. At the same time the reality behind the facade is much sadder. Newcomers who are attracted to the organisation discover after a while that things are not up to scratch, try to change things but hit a wall of indifference or hostility and leave.
The devil is in the detail - pitfalls which are obvious with hindsight
The appearance and the essence of things are often in contradiction. When one starts out with a new idea one cannot possibly forsee all the pitfalls and issues which only reveal themselves in the process of implimenting them. Project plans forsee processes and look into a distant time frame. Everything seen at a distance appears smaller than when it is right up close. Right up close the details are visible and, as the saying goes, the "devil is in the detail". Working through these details is not intrinsically difficult if you have the time, money and support, but in a tiny organisation that is just what you are often lacking. In a small organisation you have a number of diseconomies of the smallscale to grapple with:
(1) You are unlikely to have the range of specialist in house expertise that you need and have to look for this among friends, allies and volunteers who, to repeat, may have other agendas and priorities or find it difficult to maintain a sustained involvement. Take the Ecoworks catering trailer project for example. Money was granted in a bid to kit out a trailer with solar technologies to provide a place to prepare food at the Ecoworks allotment site in hygienic conditions. This is a good example of a project that strives towards a "holistic approach" because it is about encouraging healthy eating, the take up of allotments, involving people with mental health problems. At the time of writing the trailer is being converted to use solar water heating. But putting the combination of aims together creates problems in implimentation since one is off the beaten track in what one is trying to do with few resources to do this. The installation of the solar water heater on the trailer involves technical skills none of the paid workers in Ecoworks has or has time to learn. It was always envisaged we would bring in support to do it. And we have. A lecturer at Nottingham Trent University is doing the work with his student group. This is one of the "partnerships" that is generally hailed as the way forward. Yet this has inevitably meant that the work has to fit when the student group and lecturer could do it -i.e. when they have time. The work has taken longer than we thought because it had to be juggled around term times, exams, student assessments and the other commitments of the lecturer. Involving mental health service users has been possible but the involvement has then come to be a bit of an add on because they have to fit in with what is possible for the students and lecturer. Involving a variety of organisations in an ad hoc "partnership" has been possible but this too has involved considerable liaison - the other groups who have been prepared to help have been in Derby and in Wales.
(2) When the resources are limited the scope for error in the usual trial and error process of prototype development is not there. The money is not there if mistakes are made to have another go and this puts an extra stress on the technical developers, making the process a lot more nerve wracking. In the case of the catering trailer the design issues proved much more complex than previously thought and several possible designs were worked through juggling to find the optimal design which takes into account issues of safety, cost, robustness and ease of use with the installed solar water heating.
(3) Issues that are obvious with hindsight in practice only turn up when you have started and radically determine the nature of the project. In the case of the catering trailer there have been extra running costs which we had not thought of - like insurance. Making a provision for insurance seems pretty obvious but it isn't when you have only a few hours to put together a bid before a deadline and, in any case the financial pot is only for capital and not for running expenses. This in turn pushes us towards finding revenues....
Pitfalls that emerge as a project evolves -
Then there are issues which arise which, even with hindsight, do not seem obvious. For example it was necessary for the catering trailer to be found a secure place that it could be parked when not in use (which is also a condition of the insurance deal), where its food content could be loaded and unloaded from. We needed to find expertise in catering, food safety and hygiene too. These combined influences have almost inevitably driven Ecoworks into a partnership with the mental health rehab project, SPAN, at Foster Drive at Woodthorpe in Nottingham where there is a locked car park, training kitchens, a catering worker who is sympathetic to working with us and, what is more, there is contact with mental health users who are our target group for involvement. But association with SPAN at its Foster Drive base had unforeseen consequences. The issue of finding volunteers has suddenly become complicated because SPAN users do catering work for which they are paid (therapeutic earnings). In the original Ecoworks concept the use of the trailer at our allotments was seen solely as being by unpaid volunteers who were up there anyway. However the people who might have done this have moved on and the garden worker feels that if we want to do catering we need new people. The idea of non paid new volunteers has however become an apparent non-goer if operating to and from SPAN, when SPAN itself pays their people. Users of the mental health service who have so far expressed an interest in doing work with the catering trailer have automatically assumed that there would be money involved and have been rather taken aback to find out that this was not the original idea. In any case there is the extra cost of running a trailer - insurance, gas, the extra diesel involved in towing and so on which Ecoworks must find a way of getting back.
I have dwelled on the catering trailer project to show how what is at first sight a simple idea turns into a huge managerial challenge to a part time worker, making the princely sum of £700 take home pay a month, with many other projects to support as well. When the project was first bid for I knew there would be problems, because there always are, but it seemed simple enough. We would buy a trailer, hand it over to the technical boffin contacts of Ecoworks, take it back from the boffins a few months later, hand it over to the garden organiser, who would tow it up to the allotments to be used by the normal volunteers to prepare their food. This simplified picture misses out the detailed issues that arose in the process - none of these issues is particularly difficult on its own and none of the issues are insurmountable. Single people do run catering trailers after all. However, adding on the innovative elements and then slipping the catering trailer into the rest of the organisation has meant a need to learn about and develop safety policies and procedures covering gas safety, towing safety, food hygiene hazard assessments and water safety. It has involved developing accounting arrangements; it means the recruitment, training, and supervision of future volunteers; it involves acquiring kitchen and other equipment, developing funding monitoring arrangements; it requires liaison with other organisations and working out agreements for joint working. To repeat it is not that any of these things on its own is particularly difficult....it is that the list of tasks seems currently to be endless......
When you are the bottom of some else's priority list
One of the greatest ironies I have recently experienced is of getting really sucked into these and other responsibilities and so getting pulled away from devoting enough time to another project. This other project has been quite successful in every respect but one - it hasn't got enough money to pay the people who have been organising it. The project is a craft group, mainly of women, who come together every week to recycle textiles with sewing and other artistic skills. The group that I neglected, then came close to collapsing because of the lack of funding but then came back from the brink, the crisis provoking hurried action that obliged me to do some emergency work bringing it to the attention of officials who then stepped in with the money to save it. This crisis is, however, instructive as an example of the kind of paradoxes that occur in a sector where a lot depends on volunteers who, when they get something out of the group do not necessarily want to hang around. Because the group was highly valued the number of participants rose. These were mainly people who had had mental health problems. The two volunteers who were running it had been involved for three years without pay. One wanted to move on and get a job. Being involved in the group had helped her but the success of the group has, ironically, meant losing her.... The other volunteer is now skint. With the numbers for whom she was taking responsibility increasing it suddenly became too much - especially when she still seemed to have no prospect of earning anything. She and her partner were getting sick of being used and feeling themselves to be on the bottom of other people's priority list, despite her long running loyalty and commitment. With my other commitments I had been moving at a snails pace towards helping get this group charitable status and getting bids in for it. Recycling fabrics was not sexy for big money and having to spend time developing things like the catering trailer turned my attention away. Then the crisis occurred. Fortunately, when they found that they were about to lose a group that was highly valued the relevant officials in social services moved quickly to give support.
A unified concept system for combining social, environmental, health and economic initiatives at the local level is easier to think up than to actualise. Sometimes the objectives - social, environmental, rehabilitation/therapeutic and economic - work well together but they often conflict. Because taking place at the local level, and involving small scale domestic, home and garden level activities, it seems as if the managerial and logistical aspects of organising the activities should be relatively accessible and sraightforward .It seems as if these things should be well within the capabilities of the small community level groups which draw in and train local disadvantaged people in an empowering learning process. This viewpoint also is far too simplified. Although many of the activities taken on their own are rather simple, in their combination, working with volunteers, and organised with funding that must be accounted for, and in organisations that must be managed and work to constitutions, there are considerable organisational difficulties. There is a shortage of managerial and organisational talent to keep the show on the road and to keep pushing it forward.
Management training for the Third Sector is useful........up to a point
In recent weeks I have come across several examples of training schemes for social and environmental entrepreneurs. There is an MA in Social Innovations at the University of East Anglia, there are NVQ3 accredited courses in managing sustainable community enterprises; there are cascade training schemes for "social animateurs" focused on socially excluded groups spcifically focused on developing knowledge of European Union programmes (the Cicero Project); there are developments occuring transnationally - e.g. MOPS organised by the Social Work Departments of the Universities of Hamburg and Hannover creating a Curriculum for Professionals in the Third System - "to enable local people to be partners for the improvement of the social, cultural and economical infrastructures of their neighbourhood". There is certainly a need for these kind of training activities - and yet I still have mixed feelings. The reason is that my experience tells me that one learns above all else on the job and working over a very long term. This gives you a feeling for situations and people which, as I have shown, is even for experienced people, frequently wrong, but at least an approximate orientation to what is possible and what is not. No short term formal training programme can substitute for the experience of taking decisions without full infomation (about people, about technical processes, knowledge of how long things will take, funding etc) and under time pressure. Academics are often like media people or consultants -their involvement is as short term visitors and they can get a very superficial feel for things. They can be very useful helping you work though technical processes - e.g. installing solar heating panels - or teaching formal topics - like charity law obligations. However on issues of on the spot organistion and logistics what they can offer in training is much more limited. Such training schemes will be able to help to a degree but will, above all stand or fail on their ability to work with people doing practical work, in the field, supported by people who have that experience of work in the field.
Relationships with officialdom and the policy makers - Bottom up and top down
In addition to managerial skills the other area that one must consider is the relationship of 'holistic projects" to the public services bureaucracies, the policy makers and officials in health, environment, social services, community regneration, employment and economic development. Here the issue is frequently described as top-down and bottom-up. In the early stages of developing holistic projects the public sector is of course an important source of funding - but the funding almost always comes from specialised budgets that then skew the supposedly "holistic project" heavily in the direction of the funding agency specialism - as you have to meet monitoring targets framed in a particular way. In Nottingham only the HIP budget is explicitly aimed at projects which hit several themes (health, environment, social) at once and the HIP budget is very small indeed. What this has meant, for example, is that Ecoworks has always been more of a mental health project than an environmental project - even though there are many who have wanted it more the other way round.
As ever paradoxes abound in the relationships between the officials and policy makers and the practical organisers on the ground. One paradox is that too much help can harm you. Once an idea gets hold of the policy makers then the meetings to which you, as a practical organiser get invited, suddenly multiply. You are suddenly in demand by people who want you to go to their meetings partly so that they can work out how they can help your project and other projects like it. However, after a time you begin to feel, that these meetings are eating up the time you need to actually develop the work in your own office and in your own project. Yet you are frightened not to go to the policy makers meetings because the next thing you know a helpful policy maker has organised a meeting that will create a "strategic framework" for projects like yours which is in danger of setting the funding options for a year ahead in concrete - a strategic framework that would chop your own plans for refunding your organisation into two and set it off in a direction you never envisaged. Later it turns out that the development of the strategic framework is to be by the arrangement of a series of meetings at which lots of like minded organisations will be invited - with considerable finance getting eaten up in organising meetings.
The issues and paradoxes here are complex. Without doubt it is helpful, for example, that in Nottingham, the FEAT seminars(on holistic approaches to food, energy, asthma and transport) took place and have created a different vision among policy makers. It is helpful to to have seminars about holistic visions for the future. And yet the links and partnerships that actually work are those that are developed by the grass roots organisations themselve. These are links that make practical and logistical sense in the step by step development processes of the organisations concerned. If we understand "bottom upwardness" as the growth and development of practical projects and initiatives they will, quite naturally, as I have shown, seek and find partnerships that are useful and necessary to their growth. I have shown already how the Ecoworks catering trailer project went into a partnership with a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and SPAN. Yet I would be prepared to bet that no official would have been likely to have thought of the department of manufacturing engineering at Nottingham Trent University as an invitee to a food "strategic framework conference".
There is a difficult judgement here for policy decisions about budgetary allocation - do you spend resources on employing people to organise meetings on developing strategic frameworks (which does widen the view of the policy makers) or do you put the scarce resources directly into the grass roots projects and leave it up to them to find the partners that they need - thereby allowing the strategic framework to emerge organically in the objectives and partnerships that actual form around sustainable practical work.
In conclusion
To repeat something said earlier. I have described many difficulties here - but any job is about working through difficulties - that is what managers and developers are paid for. If you describe the difficulties instead with the different word "challenges" then there are people around who relish such things. People do all sorts of things that are difficult - like climbing mountains. Many of these difficulties or challenges are not specific to community holistic projects but are the sort of things that millions of small business people take on - albeit motivated by the hope of personal gain. These difficulties/challenges are to a considerable degree the diseconomies which adhere to any small scale organisation where multiple tasks and responsibilities, which would be done by specialists in a large organisation, must be done by a much smaller number of paid staff or not very reliable volunteers, in the small one. This produces a not very liberating high level of stress - or alternatively an exhiliratingly steep learning curve which is an opportunity for personal growth - depending on your point of view.
The idea of involving socially excluded people in environmentally related economic activities has now been tried around Europe for a number of years. Indeed it is a world phenomena, recognised by organisations like the Worldwatch Institute, that there has been a growing number of not for profit organisations, seeking to work directly with disadvantaged people on social, economic and environmental issues at the local level. Partly disillusioned by the failure of the big ideologies for social change, people have taken the small is beautiful idea and done what they could where they were to tackle problems directly - thinking globally and acting locally. In Europe there have been organisations like the European Network for Economic Self Help and Local Development and Europan wide networks of training organisations that set themselves the goal, not only of training disadvantaged people in environmental technologies, but of working together European wide to do this. This has been a process with set backs - for example the bankrupcy in Berlin of the training project Atlantis, which originally inspired the creation of Ecoworks.
Such set backs are perhaps inevitable. The problems and issues described here have a certain inevitability to them. To try to develop things "holistically" should therefore not be seen as a panacea. It would be wonderful if working towards social sustainability with disadvantaged people automatically provides the ideal conditions for environmental sustainability and economic advancement in a set of mutually reinforcing virtuous circles. Unfortunately some of the relationships are not mutually reinforcing but mutually contradictory. When you move towards one goal you move further away from another one - you are forced to work out what is the trade off or relaionship that you want with more of one meaing less of the other. The word 'holistic' is sometimes used by authors who can only see the win-win combinations - but the world is not only win win situations. It sometimes is, but sometimes it is also win-lose situations. (In permaculture there are plants which, when grown together enhance each others growth, but there are also plants which, when grown together compete and impede each others growth).
One must always seek for a better way of doing things because organisations that stop doing this lose their life, their internal interest, that which keeps people involved and they die. They may indeed live on in a formal sense but eventually wither. Indeed organisations involving disadvantaged people, without skills and dynamism, are sometimes in danger of going this way, if their principle members cannot change. If they cannot change and look at new ideas they inevitably go into decline, fail to attract new members, and eventually end their lives as small unproductive cliques, perhaps held together by ideas that were radical and innovative at one time but which are now irrelevant. No wonderful new way of working will remain wonderful and new. Ideas cease to be new and innovative when they have shown their inherent limits - at this point what remains is normal work, normal slog, a new set of distinctive problems, a new set of paradoxes and tensions where it is necessary to make different kinds of compromises and trade offs. If this process seems to be more and more unproductive then, at some point, it is necesary to give up and try to turn to something else.
Final Words - the Millennium Bug - breaking the old links and starting again - a personal fantasy
This paper is not about the Millennium Bug but it is worth noting that many of the recommended community level preparations for the Millennium Bug draw on the local economy and environmental ideas to be found in my paper. Towns like Portland in Oregon in the USA have based their community level Year 2000 strategy on the community ecological strategy for the city. This makes sense because if the Year 2000 does lead to extensive disruptions to infrastructure and economic activities people will fall back on having to help each other, to pool their resources, to adopt measures to save on energy, water and other materials, and to perhaps exchange more locally. Perhaps it is a cheeky fantasy but I have an idea of an optimal Year 2000 crisis which does not involve too many disastrous accidents and environmental spills but does, perhaps, lead to a lot of officials, academics and "communicators" finding that their departments were not considered "mission critical", that their computers will not work, and that nothing much has happened when they stop working anyway. As the taxation system will also be rather ropy, and revenues plummeting in a bug induced recession, a lot of intelligent specialists would find themselves "downsized'. This would be rather like a dissolution of the monastries where a large number of clever people would find that they must now actually do practical things and gain a greater respect for people that work with their hands and get their boots muddy. Despite the horrendous initial shock the disruption would turn out to be a blessing in disguise. There would be a new respect for practical people and a new understanding of the difficulties of organising things, as well as a real sense of our common vulnerability as animals in Nature, which would kick off a new millennium to a really good start in 2001. Well, you never know....
Brian Davey
© BRIAN DAVEY