Frau Dr Ulla Peters has asked me to speak on latest development in community development and community and local economy in England. I come from the county of Nottinghamshire where I was recently told that there are 5,000 non governmental organisations and community groups for a population of about a million people - on average about one group for every 200 people. In the UK this sector employs about one half a million people, about 2% of the UK workforce. On top of the paid jobs, in and through these organisations about 22 million people in the UK volunteer about 88 million hours a week. So we are not very comparable with here in East Germany where voluntary work is still regarded with suspicion after the bad experience of volunteering in the GDR.. What we are seeing in Nottingham, and I believe in other towns and cities in the UK is a distinctive kind of social and community economy taking shape which will, I believe, have a significant effect on the social and economic structure of the new century. I want to give you my impressions of this - but also to tell you about problems and tensions that will need to be dealt with.

Now why, you may ask, are there so many groups? There have long been community, self help, mutual aid and charitable groups in the UK. Nevertheless in the last few years there has been a great growth of this sector of activity. Perhaps twenty thirty years ago most people had paid employment and if they had social or health problems there were state institutions to support them. In the last three decades several important changes have occurred. Although not as catastrophically as in East Germany there has been a big increase in unemployment and an impoverishment of a considerable of the population while others have got richer. New needs and problems like homelessness has arisen faster than state services could respond and the not for profit sector has emerged to provide some of these services. Secondly people who are relying more on more on the welfare state have become more and more dissatisfied with it. There has been a considerable growth of user and advocacy organisations. Thirdly workers in government and local government organisations have often been keen to try to experiment with working in new ways. Some have left the public sector to try out new approaches.

Often the disatisfaction from workers and customers has first gone through a stage of campaigning, lobbying and protest. The aim of many groups starts out as being to change state provision. Campaiging organisations exist for housing, social services, health services, conservation and the environment. Later, however, some of these groups and critical workers have set up their own alternatives to show how services things can be organised differently.

The experiences of these rapid developments are now being digested and there are a whole series of attempts to learn new ways of working. There are new journals about voluntary action, there are attempts to find common methods to do things, to organise training courses for community leadership and how to go about community and voluntary sector organisation. The not for profit sector has developed quite an infrastructure and bureaucracy of its own. Innovative approaches are promoted through the resulting networks.

An example of an innovative way of working was a project I visited in London recently who work in the most deprived neighbourhood in the country, the Bromley by Bow Healthy Living Centre. This has many similarities to what the Kreativeszentrum aims to be but with the following differences. It started out, not by employing workers, but by giving artists and crafts people a rent free workshop to work from in exchange for them putting on events and courses for local people. This worked very well. Another feature is that they aim to work with those who are keen to use their workshops - often socially excluded and poor people are demoralised and cannot motivate themselves to do creative things. We use the expression in England, there is no use flogging a dead horse. In Bromley by Bow they work with those who want do things. The example of these people inspires and motivates neighbours, family, friends and acquaintances. A ripple effect occurs in the neighbourhood. In my Project we have also found that it is most important to draw in the people who are most dynamic or who are ready to try something new and not concentrate solely on demoralised disadvantaged people. Gradually more and more of the target disadvantaged group get pulled in when you do. Wounds heal from the edges first - not immediately where things are at their worse. The important thing is to keep on moving to draw the positive people and the people with problems to get them to work together. Another feature of Bromley by Bow is that they recognise that lots of people are not interested in talking and committee mongering - while they are interested in doing creative activities like crafts, gardening, catering and so on. They will talk then about the immediate practicalities but that is all that they are interested in so that is all that is asked of them. So they do not even try to get such people to come to committees for endless discussions. The democacy is not only through the strategic discussion and participation forums- if the centre does not do what people want they will stay away. They vote with their presence or their absence.

There is currently much thinking about what it is that draws people into community involvement and what they get out of it. Why should 22 million Britains do 88 million hours of vlountary work every week? What do they get out of it? In recent years voluntary activity is seen as an important aspect of the building of a genuine civil society. At least among some politicians, though by no means all, the importance of joining groups and active community networks is now recognised and promoted as important to civic health - as well as being important for personal physical and mental health. It is by people joining community activities that they can overcome social and economic exclusion.

An idea that is currently considered very important is that involvement in community activities enables people to acquire what is called "social capital". When you are an isolated person in a community of isolated people your life is likely to be miserable and you will experience yourself as powerless and vulnerable. If you are involved in activities with other people, where your relationships are based on trust, where you are doing things for them and they for you, where you share resources, like a community garden or a workshop, then your life will be much happier. You will have the personal and social connections to do things for yourself and your life will be better. We say that you have a lot of "social capital". In Nottingham there is a project, started by the Nottingham Health Authority, which is a state organisation at the local level responsible for overseeing health services, which is looking at how to help isolated people to accumulate social capital. My organisation is working with them to see how best to help isolated parents develop social capital through our garden project.

Another current issue is the role of the not for profit sector and community sector in partnerships with local official agencies which break down traditional public sector specialist boundraries. More holistic services are possible. Particularly important in this regard are alliances which involve voluntary groups, public sector officials and workers, as well as a small number of enlightened politicians around health, the environment and local economy. Themes such as food policy, affordable warmth and transport have been taken up in many towns and cities including Nottingham.

There are now many officials and workers in local government, in the health services and elsewhere in the state sector who have a background in the non governmental sector. They have worked in it, understand how it works and what it has to offer. Such officials are playing a really important role in providing forums and partnerships where local policy strategies can emerge in which not for profit groups and community organisations have a major role to play. At the same time many voluntary groups and community activists have come together to look at how they might work together.

In one such alliance in Nottingham that my organisation is involved with, called the Food Initiatives Group, an attempt is being made to promote food grown organically without environmental damage, at the same time to promote healthy eating, at the same time promoting local jobs and the use of local green spaces. The FIG aims to explore the food dimensions of community development. In the FIG are dieticians from the health services, community gardening groups and urban farms, the local government officials with responsibility for Agenda 21, local organic farmers near the city, shopkeepers selling organic produce, officials with responsibility for local economic development, food co-operatives and so on. We are meeting to look at how we can help each other. For example at the moment several groups who want to run community cafes are looking at how they might jointly employ a training worker - something which would not be possible for each of the small groups on its own. The FIG is involved with another major study and process promoting the use of urban green spaces for local food production in a social economy model called "Garden to Plate".

There are other consortiums which my organisation is involved with includes local government housing officials, health workers, neighbourhood energy workers, and private sector energy companies jointly working together to promote affordable warmth and energy efficiency in the homes of socially disadvantaged people.

A further field of activity where institutional boundraries are being crossed and different groups are coming together is that of arts, crafts and culture. A few years ago arts and craft organisations tended to be more elitist and specialist but, over recent years, arts and crafts workers have been looking for new roles and settings for their work and for new audiences and participants. Arts and crafts activities are seen as important for cultural dialogue between different ethnic groups, as a means of working with disabled and disadvantaged people, as relevant to environmental themes. There is an interest in the role of arts and crafts in local community regeneration and healthy living.

While these positive things are going there are also unfortunately real and potential conflicts and tensions. Part of these tensions are about cost and financing. In the last few years major new sources of independent funding have arisen through the national lottery in the UK. However quite a lot of community and not for profit activity is funded through local government. The trend is to move away from grants to contracts and funding agreements in which the not for profit sector is much more tightly controlled by the local government and its officials. In many respect these contracts and agreements represent a tightening of control over what was previously an independent sector by local government officials and politicians. Whereas before many groups were acting as watchdogs of the public sector now public sector officials are often acting as the indirect managers of groups who are therefore far less independent. There is little come-back if the local government decides to cut and therefore to close them.

Of course issues also arise where the local government controls access to buildings and other resources needed by the groups. There are many potentials for difficulty - particularly when officials and politicians take decisions about access to resources without serious consultation which favour their own departments or their own favourite client organisations but which are detrimental to the organisations that are more independent or more innovative. When budgets are tight money may flow to the organisations that senior politicians and officials are more comfortable with rather than to their critics and to the organisations trying out new approaches. This is even more the case because many people in the voluntary sector have decades of varied experience and know-how as well as a close knowledge of on-the-ground issues for socially deprived people. Some politicians or rapidly promoted officials who have only experienced or worked within their parties or in the official specialist institutional frameworks are sometimes out of touch. For these officials and politicians the voluntary sector can be a threat, a source of too-accurate criticism and therefore something they would like to try to control or even hinder. Some officials and politicians appear to regard the community sector as a potential pool of unpaid skivvies available to work for their own agenda or as pawns that they can move round the chess board of local politics. But perhaps you understand this mentality from the former GDR and its know-whats-best-for-you managerial elite. There are tensions here that some people in the voluntary sector apparently do not like to look at but which, I think, are not going to go away.

There are potential tensions too, I think, between different levels of the voluntary sector, national and local. Some recent national funding programmes have been administered through money being made available, firstly, to large national organisations who are then asked to organise and sponsor local level projects. I dare say this seems the obvious way to do things in London where the policy makers meet the lobbyists of the large national organisations when they are designing the funding delivery programmes. However this way of organising carries the danger of excluding small local organisations unless they first become clients of the larger national level voluntary sector empires. Yet these NGO empires often work to particular models, particularly business models, that preclude local control, experiment and different work methods to their own. My own project for example does not work to a business model - it has a philosophy very similar to that of the Munich Anstiftung, namely, promoting mutual aid and DIY style own-work largely outside of commercial calculation and work methodologies. We are trying to develop forms of collective recreation (re-creation) in the fields of garden, home and the arts. There is a danger here that funding programmes and national level policy assumptions about how things can and should be organised will foist standardised ways of working on local groups, ways of working that stifle innovation and prevent adaption to local circumstances and local people.

Brian Davey

June 2000
 

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