Action not just Reaction

Posted By Ben Lee, NANM Director Twitter: @NM_Association

Yesterday we co-hosted a lively roundtable debate with New Start. The aim was to explore how the coalition Government’s drive to create a larger role for civil society (aka the Big Society) might play out in practice – and how we might play our part.

A full report will be up on www.regenfuture.org shortly thanks to the efforts of writer Rosie Niven.

The biggest message was the extent the debate til now has side-stepped any real discussion about flows of value – be it in cash from taxpayers, in cash from private or corporate giving, or non-cash such as councils accepting social added-value as part of the price paid for assets. Or to be more precise – does anyone think the Big Society is cash-free? And if not, then what cash and how?

The second was that community organising needs organisers, and they need the right skills and abilities. Some of those skills already exist in various parts of the UK economy – but some skills are rare or missing, and what we have isn’t always where we need it such as in public service management. We’ll also need people who can give days and years and even careers, not just a few snatched evenings and weekends.

Free Schools offer a glimpse of where this all leads, and we must make the conceptual and policy connections. Yes, there is an appetite among some parents to take the place of municipal government in running schools – people do care enough to act. But (1) Free Schools won’t operate on some special new kind of community activism they will run on good old fashioned taxpayer pounds and (2) parents won’t literally step into the classroom and start teaching – or even move into the headteacher’s office ad start managing. More parents may get involved in school life but the people running the school will by and large be paid a salary.

The best thing about the discussion is that it carried on through the Tweets (captured here), blogs, follow-up emails and videos posted by colleagues who joined the discussion.

Julian Dobson’s neat summary breaks the debate into six headlines, third of which is the need to share knowledge “There is little value in keeping it in a collection of obscure websites that few people use” he blogs.

David Wilcox’s interviews (filmed on his iPhone) are worth a watch – not least for Prof Tony Bovaird’s proposal to top-slice 1% of local public service budgets and let community groups decide how it should be spent.

Steve Moore founding director of the Big Society Network issued a clear challenge not just to react and comment but to co-produce the policy…

Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller’s had usefully dissected the manifesto commitments on civil society and have packaged their paper as part of their new PACES online resource.

John Houghton’s smart analogy has been much Tweeted - that the shift in how we view Civic Society is similar to the shift in how we see energy generation. From being about massive power stations with a central controller – to mixed generation by all kinds of organisations (many of them micro) connected to a grid.

Steve Broome head of the the RSA’s Connected Communities project had some nifty Core/Periphery diagrams from a presentation he’s given shopwing how the core of highly-networked individuals in one neighbourhood were quite seperate from the ‘formal’ community development scene. In fact there almost seemed to be a semi-permeable membrane between the highly networked but very unorganised core, and the more formal people on the periphery.

So thanks once again to everyone who spared the time and found the headspace. Look out for the full notes, and let’s not forget the challenge for Action as well as Reaction.