Thriving too

Social Collaborative Platforms: Scalable, Sustainable ... and Fundable!

If you’ve had a very imaginative idea but are struggling to scale up or duplicate through regular enterprise models and methods there is a chance you have created a Social Collaborative Platform without realising it. I have only recently come up with these observations, as always I am keen to know what you think.

Here's what SCPs could possibly look like

-       They are imaginative social ideas that a group of people were compelled to try out under their own steam.

-        Sometime over the last 5 years the idea was adopted by other groups of people from around the world. 

-       These ideas are replicated largely on a voluntary basis and are not social franchises.

-       The idea founders often encourge new groups to create their own logos, plan their own events, while creating some supportive infrastructure through websites, guides and advice.

-       These ideas are often strategic and have multiple effects in the communities where they are implemented.

- These ideas spread in a sustainable way by the founder groups adopting a high autonomy/high trust model of collaboration.

I have at least 6 or 7 examples that I think fit this description, by how they have been developed and how well they have scaled, but below are 4 that I know sufficiently well to describe.

Example 1 Social Media Surgeries

Started by Nick Booth & co in Birmingham.  An idea to set up free social media sessions for local community groups with a group of professionals working voluntarily. There are now 90 groups registered on their site which support the organisation of local events. 

Example 2 Sunday Soup

Started by InCUBATE, an arts based research in Chicago in 2007.  Sunday Soup is a ‘meal-based micro-granting' model.  The basic formula is that a group of people come together to share a meal and all the income from that meal is given as a grant to support a creative project. Everyone who purchases the meal gets one vote to determine who receives the grant. There are currently 66 groups across the world – the majority have been started in the last 2 years.  They have different names and logos.

Eample 3 Trade School

Started by Caroline Woolard & co in 2009 in New York. Trade School is a project that where people barter for instruction and offers everyone the chance to learn something new in exchange for skills, spaces or objects.  Laura Billings has just completed the first run of Trade School London, and there are Trade Schools being started in Cardiff, Milan, Singapore, Paris …. Trade Schools often have different logos and supported by the team in New York who are setting up the network as a co-operative.

Example 4 Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe

I put the book Hand Made together collaboratively in 2010.  The series has become the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe – with nearly 50 local voluntary editors across the world collecting stories about new types of community projects to publish. Rotterdam was published last month and May will see the publication of Amsterdam, Birmingham and Hackney.  Editors are using the process of putting the books together to create supportive knowledge sharing networks. 

These projects are working to a different model and because they are a bit confusing and the funders are not recognising them sufficiently yet. 

-       They are largely voluntary – but they aren’t charitable.  They are about groups of people wanting to do something good in their communities and see something valuable in these ideas.  The groups recognise that the projects either help spread knowledge, bring people together sociably but productively and can be used strategically to connect people and build trust at local level.

 -       A group of people would likely be unable to pay some sort of franchise fee to the project originator because the group would be unlikely to see any sort of business model in the idea – but there is a social model.  The idea would therefore be limited in its spread by the ability of people to turn them into businesses or charities of some kind.

- Their value is often a secondary benefit and often difficult to measured (Social Media Surgeries are doing a brilliant job of capturing effects) e.g. connection and relationships potentially reduces unemployment or depression, or even crime.

These projects challenge the idea of scalability in that they are spreading because they don’t involve money. For example with Community Lover’s Guides if we had budgets we would have to limit the number of issues we created by the amount of budget we had.  The core of these projects is money free…. But people need to survive so how are they doing that? In a number of different ways:

1. Founders are achieving funding to develop the infrastructure around the project to support the networks of groups e.g. websites
2. Value and content is being created around the project from the learning and network – giving people an opportunity to help others with technical support or consultancy.
3. Local groups are supporting their projects by simply chipping in for refreshments or are using empty spaces … and generally gathering existing resources.
4. Sometimes people have other paid jobs and do this on the side. It may not feel the same as volunteering for a charity, but people still don't feel they have to be paid for everything they do - particularly if it does some good in the world.

But overall, despite the difficulties, I wonder if there is sufficient evidence for funders to start to recognise this as a new model, that could start to sit more comfortably in their understanding of what works and why.  Sometimes it’s a social enterprise model, sometimes it’s a charity model and sometimes it’s a Social Collaborative Platform – that needs funding at the top – but not through every transaction.

If we want to see more of these very practical, very strategic and imaginative projects (which can be views as 'social tools') being developed we need to rely on more than the love that some of these projects are currently sustained on ... The model calls for funding at the top end for development and support - and smaller scale funding at community level to help with logistics.

Big Lunch is one of the few Social Collaborative Platforms which started on a fully funded footing, knowing from the start where the funding was needed - but it would be great to see a lot more funded in this way. 

In the social innovation sector we worry about the difficulties of scaling a lot. I wonder if a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of when to use which scaling and funding models wouldn't help us all achieve a lot more?

If you wanted to you could argue that The RSA and The Hub share many of the characteristics of a Social Collaborative Platform, but they achieve funding through mixtures of membership, co-operatives, enterprise etc. But these two examples also create brands, ideas, tools, methods, start up funding etc, and foster networks and collaboration which enable others to start something (network, enterprse,etc) at local level - very successfully indeed.

I can think of 3 projects that are struggling to be social enterprises at the moment who should be thinking about becoming a valuable Social Collaborative Platform, but through lack of funding/sponsorship are unable to make what feels like an enormous leap…. To give it away (strategically) to grow.

 

Somewhereto_ … Can we have one for everyone?

I was invited to an Action Group last Tuesday on Giving Spaces at the Cabinet Office, set up by the people at Somewhereto_, led by Sam Conniff of Livity.  If you aren’t familiar with Somewhereto_, it is an amazing project which has been unlocking empty spaces for young people to experiment and use. 

somewhereto_ aims to:

• unlock space to help young people
• create a movement which will enable young people to engage with their creative and cultural passions
• transform use of space throughout local communities

To date, somewhereto_ has…

• unlocked 308,000 sq ft of space,
• negotiated 1732 somewhereto_ space matches, between young people and space holders
• worked with youth partners to engage with young people and space partners who have access to the space which young people need
• highlighted we have potentially leveraged £1.6m in premises costs^.

 I have been a fan of the project since it was in planning and have been astonished at how well the project has been implemented.  On Tuesday we heard from two young people who had used the spaces that were made available to them, not only to fulfil their own aspirations and showcase their own talents and ideas… but also to support other young people do the same.  It was pretty inspiring.

Also inspiring was the dedication  and enthusiasm shown by the local project organisers who have been taking on the tougher side – speaking to local councils and businesses to release the spaces and to cut through red tape … of which there is a lot.

The frustrations won’t surprise you. How do they get more spaces unlocked quicker? How can we change some of the systems which mean the local authorities act with extreme caution, rather that with realism and imagination?

There is certainly willing… but a long way to go …

The meeting was under Chatham House rules, but I do feel at liberty to quote the Minister that was present who called for local authorities ‘to be bolder’ and to use the ‘General Power of Competence’ to find reasons for saying yes to more of these initiatives.

I came away inspired by a brilliantly conceived project, being brilliantly executed … and wishing that we could have a bigger Somewhereto_ that unlocked spaces for everyone’s use,  as well as young people … and also with renewed conviction that these sorts of projects only work this well when there is expert facilitation.

Thanks to Sam for the invitation and to Miranda Sawyer for such animated faciliation and Oli Barrett for bringing his whistle ... and in particlar to the young people who came and shared their inspiring stories! 

Big Society: R.I.P.?

In my opinion Big Society is one of the most inspiring governmental initiatives … where has it gone?

I have been a fan from the beginning – at its core I saw the potential for this powerful idea to disrupt and transform some of the  imbalances in society that have accidentally become self-generating, arising as they have from genuinely well-meaning, but frequently out-of-date approaches to solving complex, interrelated problems.

I have seen Big Society as an energising concept that could help regular citizens see the potential of deploying their own ideas, energies and talents to making and shaping where they live, moving away from viewing their immediate physical and social environments as deliverables, external to their own agency and resourcefulness.

But sadly, there is very little of the original enthusiasm coming from No10 currently. And this seems counter to my experiences of working and talking with local government, with local councillors and with people working in central government departments.  Even in recent weeks I have had several contacts with central government departments and I have seen only a strong commitment to trying to understand and deliver the goals of the Big Society agenda. The civil service has been ‘on message’ but have also demonstrated a deep and genuine dedication to these ideas.

Outside of government even people who are aligned to another party, are fighting fiercely against inequalities or cuts, or are critical of economic policy, would support the underlying principle of helping more people take more control of their lives and communities, and prosper as a result.

The first year after the launch of Big Society generated a huge amount of criticism and debate, but by comparison over the last 12 months the government, and the Prime Minister in particular, has gone quiet about Big Society.  This is a great pity and I would like to question, and with others hopefully understand, more of the thinking that has led to this ‘hands off’ approach that has been adopted.

The criticism and debate about Big Society that we had in the first year was pretty disruptive to relationships, but it was urgently needed and incredibly valuable. Professionals working in communities in various roles were forced to examine and compare their practice, including their own roles in relation to the potential of citizens.  We blogged, argued, made peace, wrestled with our own work and generally had a period of healthy self and other criticism which has sadly largely disappeared.

Only to replaced by, and please do argue with me about this description, a general sense of everyone ‘just getting on with it’.  Pretty much as we would have been ‘getting on with it’ had the words Big and Society never been strung together.  It has not caught fire in the general population in any meaningful way that I can see?

So why has David Cameron gone so quiet on Big Society?  Was it a PR smoke screen for cuts as many thought it was?  If so the government has never been more in need of smoke or distraction, with an announcement today of a double dip recession.  If we caste our cynicism aside for a moment, perhaps the PM has been too busy with more important things such as the economy or international affairs to be paying attention to what others would describe as his ‘pet project’. 

Personally I have been convinced that David Cameron is really dedicated to the Big Society idea and it’s potential. So below are some of the potential reasons that could be the source of the ‘hands off’ approach currently being adopted.

1. Too much criticism?

 It’s pretty hard to take and there was a lot of it. Especially after launching BS in such a clumsy way originally, looking strikingly as it did like a governmental attempt to claim credit for much hard work being done for many years in communities and the voluntary sector. They launched an umbrella when what they needed was a platform. Is a ‘hands off’ approach really just a form of ‘keeping your head down’ instead?

2. Bad advice?

 The role of government in supporting the Big Society is still something of a mystery.  It is not as if previous governments haven’t attempted something similar.  It is very difficult to understand in any sophisticated way how much stimulation, scaffolding and support to give communities when they are still learning to do new things in new ways (neighbourliness aside). But it appears that these subtle mechanisms are not being determined through detailed evaluation or systematic action research.  Instead a rather painful myth seems to have emerged, one that conveniently requires neither money nor action.  It’s the ‘get out of the way’ myth.  The assumption being that Big Society, could and would become a ‘movement’, requiring nothing but an initial round of fire setting and a benign and general blessing. You get out of the way of an out of control train - and I don't see one.

3. Too much focus on professionals?

 I imagine it  is easy to hear professionals louder than regular people … but a year ago people I met around the country were talking about Big Society, now they aren’t. (To be honest, no one is talking about Big Society – including professionals) Big Society, if it happens at all, will be done by spreading the ideas widely, systematically and strategically to the millions of people who currently have had little or no exposure to some of the amazing ideas emerging of citizen-led change.

4. “We are quietly working behind the scenes to build BS infrastructure”?

Fair enough.  We have seen the launch of the Big Society Capital this month - £600m of unused cash in bank accounts. Inspired.  But what else … what are we waiting for? Some rather expensive initiatives appear to be failing - perhaps we should collaborate somehow to support them ...?

 5. The ‘inevitable’ assumption?

Although we have noticed a surge in  citizen-led activity world-wide I  think this type of activity is vulnerable, vulnerable to a hard recession, extreme politics, competition, unemployment, loss of optimism, hyperactivism ... things that increase the need for Big Society Thinking… but may destroy the fragile conditions under which communities will come together positively to collaborate and create. 

The optimistic view of the future that Big Society has tried to promote, one where we are more connected to our neighbours, where we are more productive and socially aware, where this emergent and cultivated connection and trust might start to work on serious social problems such as crime, unemployment, truancy, depression, isolation … This view is important and worthy of protection and whether we like the politicians of the moment or not, I think we need all our politicians to strive for this type of collaborative vision of the future and to help its citizens achieve it, not because the politicians insist on it, but because we do.

Rarely has an idea sparked so much discussion and debate... love it or hate it.

 I like Big Society and I would like it back.

 

UPDATE:

 Responding post: Big Society killed by its contradictions by David Floyd

Knowledge, learning and the Social Brain Lab

We have started the Social Brain Lab to develop some practical tools to use in communities.  

All the projects we study at Social Spaces involve connecting people at local level. The projects often have multiple effects: raising awareness of environmental issues, introducing new ways to encourage informal learning or starting enterprises. 

However, we know that connection itself is important for two primary reasons:

 1. Positive relationships, trust and denser networks lead to new things happening

2. Creating social connection is valuable in itself.

More detail on this here.

Drawing on our existing research and knowledge in metacognition, collaboration and learning... plus our long running study of emergent community projects which, by design, fundamentally change how people interact face-to-face, the Social Brain Lab aims to collaborate with others to condense the large volume of research and data (social capital, social neuroscience, wellbeing etc) into a number of tools designed specifically to give a practical working knowledge of these important insights and stimulate further project ideas in a community workshop setting.

My interest in knowledge really grew doing the research and analysis for my MA Ed.  I used Lewin’s Equation to describe the overarching question “does knowledge about how we function change the way we behave?”.  Lewin’s Equation states that

B=ƒ(P,E)  Behaviour = Function of (Personality in their Environment). 

Do specific pieces of knowledge add to the influences of personality and environment? 

Are there automated human responses that can be drawn into more conscious decision-making processes with knowledge? 

Does knowledge help us to interpret life situations more accurately to inform our choices and subsequent behaviours?

Tracking knowledge through cognitive processes is a pretty complex and time consuming process. The research that I undertook involved teaching 200 teenagers over 2 years in a number of very different schools a set of experiential lessons on human functioning from many different disciplines.  I interviewed students at various stages, looking for cognitive patterns and learning processes in the analysis.

I took my emergent results to a number of specialists to help understand what the analysis was revealing, including long time friend and inspiration Colleen McLaughlin from Cambridge University… and Ian Morris, Head of Wellbeing at Wellington College, who had worked with me with the original student lessons.

The final learning model that emerged is described in the diagram below which I called Informed Autonomy, a model which I believe to be original in this type of research and strongly supports the idea of teaching young people about human functioning, as I expressed in this RSA article in 2008. 

The most significant results of the research were as follows:

-       Knowledge matters – knowing about how we function can change behaviour firstly on a conscious level .. eventually at a judgement level.

-       Knowledge matters more when you process it fully, connecting it to your personal experiences. Knowledge + cognitive processes + experience is the essential combination required for learning.

-       Knowledge triggers self-observation, repeated instances of self-observation lead to building personal knowledge.

-       You don’t need to use therapeutic methods (such as group self-disclosure) to build personal knowledge.

-       Higher level cognitive processes are required. In Blooms Taxonomy terms this equates to ‘Applying’ upwards… which comes after ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’.

Worth noting here is the brilliant work of the RSA's Social Brain project who have also done some work since on the value of teaching people about how their brains work.

So what has all this got to do with the Social Brain Lab?

In the same way that knowledge was condenced into the most relevant elements for the original research we are hoping to do the same for people designing community social projects. What knowledge from neuroscience and social neuroscience could help when applied to this setting? Can this type of knowledge help people collaborate better, design projects better ...?

We would like to develop these new tools in collaboration with other people because we know there is a lot of deep understanding out there about what knowledge is most up-to-date in research terms, and what tried and tested methods and social processes continue to work. We think that mixing this up with some design thinking could create some really helpful open source tools for communities to use.  

There is an open invitation to take part in this work, so if you are interested please do get in touch!

If you are interested in new ways of building knowledge, and want to see how this might work in a social context, please join us in the Ad Hoc Enquiries!

{NB If you are an organisation that would like to use the learning models above in your work, for non commercial purposes only, please do get in touch for permissions and more detail on the research process}

 

The Ad Hoc Enquiries: Do you have a new theory?

Starting in February 2012 Social Spaces will be running a series of 12 exploratory new events at Hub Westminster.

The primary assumption for the project is that there is new knowledge to be built and that we need to find new collaborative ways of building it.

These weekly Enquiries are structured events designed to give people who have designed and implemented innovation local projects an opportunity to describe their work and their emerging insights to a group of interested and experienced peers. These innovation projects are required to be working specifically in the participatory paradigm where creative and strategic solution seeking and collaborative working are their most evident characteristics. 

What happens at an Enquiry?

The evenings will begin with a sociable supper, during which the ‘theorist(s)’ will present their project, their theory of change and new emergent theory - followed by a number pieces of evidence to support their theory. 

Each participant in turn will state their core disciplinary perspective e.g. science, philosophy, design etc and offers either a supporting or challenging statement for the theory, connecting with other knowledge bases to understand and interpret the new theory. 

How will the Enquiries be documented?

Each week the event will ‘extreme’ recorded to a structured and pre-set format and set into a large format digital/on demand book including all participants names and responses. The events will be audio live streamed - and later converted into podcasts.

Why are they called The Ad Hoc Enquiries?

Enquiry

The name ‘enquiry’ goes some way to describe the format for the evenings. The name implies that the answers to our new questions are not currently evident and that some specific process is needed to draw out the ideas and examine the evidence.

The purpose of these events is a serious one, and the idea of calling it an ‘enquiry’ implies that some noteworthy and important work will take place during these evenings.   ‘Enquiry’ is also an academic term to describe an investigation into a specific topic or question.

Ad Hoc

The word ‘ad hoc’ is a term used in a number of contexts including scientific and philosophical theory; national investigations; technology systems and networks theory. There is also a link to the term Adhocracy, described by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock to mean an organisational structure working in the opposite way to a bureauracy.

How have we developed the format?

We have used understanding of how thinking in a new type of social setting might take place to develop this new format.  The events are structured to achieve knowledge creation through social and intellectual interaction and to be respectful of people’s ideas and the time they are offering to the project through the documentation and sharing process. 

The format takes account of the different phases individual and collective cognition might take place: stimulation/processing/connection/discussion/synthesis/building further on emergent ideas. 

The structure secures the serious aspects of the project's aims, and will therefor also allow a great deal of playfulness and fun to be injected into the evenings. We will be running these events in *very* strict order... possibly even using a gavel....

Call for new theories - do you have one?

 The first stage in preparing for these events is to ask people to submit their ideas for a theory they would like to present.

1. Have you developed an innovative local project?

2. Does this project work in the Creative/Collaborative paradigm?  

What we mean here is the work should not work in the Consumer, Representative, Charity or Challenge participatory paradigms.  There may be some of these in the mixture - but overall the project needs to work more collaboratively with communities and local authorities, possibly reconfiguring existing systems and fundamentally changing the way the community interacts in some way (See here and here for more details on how we see the Creative/Collaborative paradigm)

Apply here!

Deadline for applications to present a theory: 25 January 2012 

Register early interest to attend and participate in an Ad Hoc Enquiry here!

More pics of our cubes

 

How Do We Create New Knowledge for Creative/Collaborative Participatory Paradigm?

Thank you for the fascinating response to my post earlier this week asking if we are seeing a new participation paradigm emerging called Creative/Collaborative.

Having read the post you may or may not be persuaded that perhaps something new is going on?  Perhaps you have noticed some ideas and projects that don’t fit into the more mature paradigms… 

To follow on I wanted to outline a bit more detail about what I think some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of Creative/Collaborative might be.

Strengths

The evidence is mounting that connected communities with active and involved citizen have wide ranging and important human effects – increasing protective factors through clever social means and secondary effects. These individual research projects (example below on unemployment) are painting a picture where we can begin to see that a higher density of coordinated and strategic activity at local level might produce secondary effects that no linear organisational service delivery would hope to achieve.

One example of how local government and citizens are working together is the Reading Council project where parents with older children are mentoring families with young children – called Expert Mums. It is more than an idea about how to deliver services more efficiently – it is about doing things better through creative thinking and collaboration.  Having spent time with the remarkable team, led by Melani Oliver, who have been developing Expert Mums it is obvious that this project is totally collaborative – both in its co-design with the parents – right through to the training ... in fact creativity and collaboration are completely woven into the idea's design.

Vulnerabilities

1. Because it is still emerging we don’t understand it fully yet

 Myself and others at Social Spaces have been studying this phenomenon for a few years now.  It is emergent and so we need to be constantly watching and analysing… as well as discussing and arguing.  It is both exciting and demanding work.  We have been trying to do two things at once – learning from communities that are being successful  - and seeing how to spread this emergent knowledge to others.  By taking a positive deviance approach, studying what key factors are making local projects successful, we have been able to make some significant headway in understanding new ways of working in this new paradigm. But it is ongoing work and we need many many clever people to take this emergent knowledge to the maturity needed.

2. It is difficult

Working in this new way is more difficult – no question about that. But less about the work being difficult in itself - but more because it is different.  It requires a whole new set of methods and ideas – drawn from a whole host of disciplines.  It also requires a deep understanding of how change might be designed – not with last year's methods, but right now.  The communities we visit are ambitious – they don’t want help to start a project, or write a funding bid… they want to transform their communities.  They want their neighbourhoods to be good places to raise their children – drug and violence free.  They want people to feel welcome and appreciated – not lonely or depressed or poor.  And they want to be involved in making that happen – they have a real conviction that they can make change.

But making change is not so easy.  In organisations, where employees are paid to change, the statistic for successfully achieving any type of transformational change is believed to be around 25%. In the Charity or Challenge paradigms making change is much easier – one using compassion and the other pressure. Using your ingenuity to make change is difficult enough – but to do this collaboratively – with other living humans – is tough stuff.

3. Patchy and ineffectual

The more we work in this paradigm we see that being inspired is part of the story - it is motivating and exciting. Having one's imagination captured, having a collective vision of a more positive future - one that you might be able to make happen through the contribution of your own efforts - is essential.  But we think it is going to take more than that to have real impact.  It will take new knowledge and facilitation (from government and other professionals). It will also require new structures of funding. We are seeing examples where wrong sums of money injected at the wrong time can kill this type of work easier at times than no money.

So failure to have collective impact, failure to co-ordinate, collaborate and build on small initial steps .... wrong, or less sophisticated types of evaluation ... over time this could all add up to people losing confidence in its potential.

4. It might threaten other paradigms

As described in this article by Philip Colligan “Equipping citizens with the skills and knowledge to help themselves and each other is clearly a good investment. But running through many of these innovations is a more radical idea that challenges the nature of professionalism and expertise.” 

Additionally there are many professionals working in communities who work only in particular paradigms that are currently not that compatible with Creative/Collaborative.

But that isn't the full story by any means.  Professionals have valuable expertise to offer citizens - as citizens are increasingly creating knowledge themselves.  This exchange needs to become two-way, open and collaborative.  If we think it is right (and ultimately effective) for citizens to take the lead on making and shaping their communities - what sort of new professional practices need to evolve to facilitate and support this new type of activity?

The Challenge – The Opportunity – The Invitation

In summary, I believe that there is a new paradigm emerging that requires intense study, investment and sheer hard work.  I believe it has the real potential to change how the world works.  Over the last year I feel personally that some progress has been made in understanding how it all might work - our work is improving every week.

But, unfortunately or fortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, I also believe that the only way to make some significant progress in surfacing, understanding, growing and spreading this new knowledge is – you probably guessed already – collaboratively. And creatively.

At this moment in time you cannot sign up to do a degree course in the new Creative/Collaborative paradigm.  But there are university projects which are working on bits of it.  I estimate that there are 30-50 university projects world wide currently working at the intersection of localism – either through environment/design/social/art/tech/philosophy/policy and so on.  These projects are very important – but equally important are the hundreds of projects emerging at community level which are creative and collaborative.  While we may in the past have labelled these projects ‘practice’… I don’t believe this is true.  These projects are generating valuable knowledge.  You could consider that these grassroots projects are in fact conducting action research – but currently much of this knowledge isn’t being gathered.

Howard Gardner once suggested that it took 10 years for educational research generated at university level to reach schools widely.  This knowledge is far too important and timely to wait for traditional methods of gathering and dissemination. 

To demonstrate the speed of emergence I can point to Hand Made. Last year it was difficult to find 28 projects or commentary that fell into this type of thinking.  Now we have 40 volunteer editors gathering local stories of making change in a Creative/Collaborative way for what has become the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe.  This is significant enough to call a 'surge' in new types of activity.

Historically we have often regarded grassroots activity in a political context – often focusing on ‘voice’ and opinion.  If we regarded communities as makers and designers – generators of new knowledge and solvers of problems as well then we cannot rely on old ways of doing things. If we also regard that academics, theorists, policy makers and professionals have a rich and indispensible contribution to make to this landscape in understanding, gathering, applying valuable existing theories and knowledge.... we are left with a big challenge which I put to you.

How do we collaboratively create a transdisciplinary approach to people powered change?

‘[t]rans-disciplinarity emerges through a fusion and bridging of disciplines, not merely the bundling of multiple disciplines” Koizumi 1999

How do develop new methodologies of knowledge creation and dissemination which are faster and better? This is one discipline which isn't going to be developed in the office or in the field alone....

How do we generate new knowledge in such a way that we can make this knowledge open-source to communities - rather than proprietorial or commercial?

Is this the Big Society 'curriculum' that Matthew Taylor described in his post yesterday?

UPDATES:  

Brilliant post be Jocelyn Cunningham of the RSA about their experiences on the Peterbough project working in the Creative/Collaborative way...

Fascinating critic from David Wilcox on how the different models play out at the funding end of things....

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More collaborative

Creative/Collaboration as a New Participatory Paradigm?

After 6 months of thinking *very hard* about the more controversial things of life, like democracy, creativity and the future of society, *quietly to myself*, I suddenly find myself almost ready to ‘think out loud’ again and publish some unfinished thoughts for others to consider.  While this can feel very risky at times I consider that collaborative and public conversations around some of these difficult topics holds enormous value – so I invite you to agree, argue and criticise the ideas and suggestions below as strongly as possible – with a view that this process toughens thinking - hopefully making it more robust and useful.

Recap of earlier thinking

In May I wrote a series of posts which promoted the idea of collaboration between citizens and government and other organisations.  The thinking that I put forward was that to adopt ‘pressure’ and ‘challenge’ as the primary lever of change means we are open to the possibility that we remain ‘stuck’ in a cycle of moving power and resources around and that this didn’t leave enough room for innovative research and thinking which could lead to smarter decision making. 

I also argued that the ethics of activism was very important, and that while we might see the immediate usefulness of tactics promoted historically by ideas such as Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals – that this ‘means justifies the ends’ is not only unethical but ineffectual long term.  A combination of indiscriminate activism and poor decision-making can leave us trapped in a cycle which describes the problem rather than the solution You can read these posts here, here and here – as well as links to responding posts from other authors.

Below is the 'thoughts in progress' diagram which I ended up with in May, which attempted to describe these various complex processes - with small amendments.

Open publication - Free publishing - More collaboration

 

Current thinking

To challenge my own ideas and add more clarity where possible, over the last 6 months I have attempted to analyse more fully the current situation and dynamics. I have wanted to do this more thoroughly as a way of understanding where I think the future might lie - particularly in light of all the research we have been doing through Hand Made, Community Lover’s Guide and Social Spaces workshops over the last 3 years - where we continue to believe pretty strongly that there is ‘a new emergent community culture’ ... but we are still trying to analyse and understand the bigger picture as this emergence upfolds.

I found that this further analysis on different ways that people are participating in society helped to do five important things:

1. It established more clearly in my own mind that there is a new participation paradigm emerging which I am calling the ‘Creative/Collaborative’ paradigm.
2. It helped me to recognise the very real differences between this new paradigm and other more mature existing narratives.
3. It helped to show possible reasons why trying to blend these paradigms can prove difficult.
4. It helped to think about why some of the more mature paradigms are static or in decline
5. It helped to show why Creative/Collaborative needs to be a context that is deliberately created - not a strategy deployed in the heat of battle.

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More paradigm

 

So above is the chart which looks at these different paradigms for your critical consideration.  Personally I have acted in all these different paradigms, and my own experience is that when I have been in a leadership position in either the ‘representative’ or ‘challenge’ situation I have tried hard to move activity to the ‘creative/collaborative’ way of doing things … with very limited success indeed … and one of my big questions about this analysis is can you do this…or indeed should you even be trying? Does the vital role of representation and accountability get eroded if you try to operate in the Creative /Collaborative as well? Or does that amount to 'unworkable duality'? I would really like your thoughts on this in particular...

1. Creative /Collaborative as a new paradigm

 This isn’t a philosopher’s dream – it is a narrative being told by grassroots community projects popping up around the world.  These are the people that are teaching us about how to create projects and ideas that connect communities in new and productive ways.  I think this is a new way of participating because these examples I have been studying aren’t ‘representative’, ‘charitable’, ‘consumer’ or ‘challenge’….and largely they have their roots in new ways of thinking and designing… rather than in historical activity.  They are not a progression from any of these other more established paradigms - although they often seem inspired by a very wide range of disciplines and thinking.

So you could define Creative/Collaborative firstly by what it isn't i.e we see activity that doesn't fit the other 4 mature paradigms, and secondly by the two strongest characteristics demonstrated i.e. Creative: they connect many existing resources to make entirely new things, and Collaboratively: they boost this work by collaborating widely.

2. Differences between the paradigms
The different paradigms use different social levers to create change in society: economic, political, power and ingenuity…. This requires different skills and attracts people with different ideas and mindsets.  Although I included the idea of a ‘mode switcher’ into the chart, and I believe that as an individual you can learn to switch and work fluidly in the different paradigms depending on the context, I also think this can be difficult because these paradigms are often whole ‘world views’ in themselves. People can get really stuck, interpreting and responding to situations in a particular way depending on their world view. This can lead to a situation being 'misdiagnosed'... and negative patterns and cycles being reinforced rather than changed in a positive way.

3. Blending these different paradigms can be difficult
Some examples are popping up which present a confusing picture.  One example could be a charity using an empty space to hold a fair, thinking they are working in the creative/collaborative narrative …but in fact aren't changing how the community interacts in any meaningful way. It is also where social enterprise is struggling to define itself clearly at local community level. There are also a few instances where people are swerving recklessly between the paradigms - occasionally by central government itself - mostly because we don't collectively have a good enough understanding of what these mixtures might look like and what effects they might have. If for example you mixed 'Charitable' with 'Creative/Collaborative', which one would dominate?  

Most difficult of all is considering how elected council members in a Local Authority might collaborate with citizens to enable more people-led activity.  If they are firmly in the 'Representative' paradigm, which is vital to democracy, how would they encourage Creative/Collaboration for the good of the communities they serve, whilst still challenging the opposition, holding themselves or the opposition to account? How would they be able to take suitable and ethical amounts of credit for that facilitation and enablement of resident-led activity in order to differentiate themselves from the opposition sufficiently to get re-elected?  

4. Most mature paradigms are static or declining

Participating through the 'Representative' paradigm via democratic decision-making or voting is declining. Volunteering though the 'Charity' paradigm fluctuates by a comparatively small margin ... and all the evidence from travelling the country through the Travelling Pantry project and talking to hundreds of people is that many people don't find participating through 'opportunities' created by other people very satisfying any longer.  They *want* to design their own opportunities to make and shape their neighbourhoods and communities - together with other people. They want to co-produce - not participate. They don't want to struggle with the old, often formal, sometimes boring, ways of doing things - through forums and committees - they want to do things differently.

But, this doesn't just show that old ways don't excite a whole new group of people who suddenly want be involved (and are able) in creating their communities.  It also helps to illustrate that different paradigms suit different people, with different interests and passions, different talents and ideas, that naturally gravitate to the various narratives and work extremely well within them (particularly Representative and Charity), and should be supported and properly appreciated for doing so.  There will always likely be a level where the make up of the population will differ and where economic conditions will threaten the continued expectation that different paradigms will continue to grow in a particular way.

The area of frequent concern is the rampant growth of the Consumer narrative - tipping us over the edge of sustainability into unconscious materialism.  We are led to believe that as individual we have an important role to play propping up the economy by buying things - instead of collectively remodelling the systems to work in more sustainable way.

5. Creative/Collaborative as a cultivated, continuous context

One of the things that I was struggling with 6 months ago was that my own experiences had shown that there was an urgent need for ongoing, continuous dialogue to establish the conditions and relationships for real collaboration – particularly between citizens and government.  I realised that people who responded to this assertion with the idea that collaboration often meant compromise or concession, were often coming from the perspective of collaboration in the heat of battle… when a particular serious ‘challenge’ situation is already in play.  And I do agree with this view.  Dialogue is often the only way of resolving a situation, but in an existing challenge situation the interwoven politics and power narrative can be very open to manipulation.

My thinking on this was reinforced by a thesis published by Mariah Thompson entitled ‘The Disappearance of the Neighourhood Assembly Movement in Bueonos Aires, Argentina 2001 – 2004: A Phase of Demobilization”.  The research looks at the dynamics which led to the emergence of about 120 local community forums in a 4 month period (November 2001 - March 2002) in response to a ‘political and economic crisis of monumental proportions’ which led the government to freeze all citizen’s bank accounts - an action know as 'el corralito' - literally 'the little corral' - in an attempt to halt the crash. ‘At their peak one in every three citizens in Buenos Aires had participated in either a meeting or one of the movement’s activities.  Within only two years they had all but disappeared. Today only a handful continue to operate in the capital.’

The thesis is fascinating, the researcher compares the reasons for the  demobilization with theories by Sydney Tarrow.  “Tarrow asserts that the end of a movement is marked by three sets of causal factors. These include 1) exhaustion of movement members, leading to member withdrawal and subsequent internal polarization 2) disputes within the movement over the use of violence, paired with the institutionalization of more moderate sectors, and, 3) repression of the movement by the State along with State facilitation of some movement demands.”  

I won’t go into detail here but I recommend reading the full paper. One of the things that the paper helped to clarify is that when the situation is a big ‘challenge’ situation, that the ‘powers’ can manipulate a movement, separating moderates within a movement from more extreme members, and eventually drawing them back into traditional political paradigms where they feel most comfortable – especially people from more middle classes.  In Buenos Aires this is what happened …. But also the political and economic situation stabilized, the bank accounts were unfrozen…. And collectively this led to the forums fading away.

As I mentioned in my previous posts I have seen this repeatedly in my own experience – people get together to fight something – passionately. But after they win or lose they lose their reason to come together.  This is one of the really big differences I see with projects that fall into the Creative/Collaborative paradigm, the motivation to come together is to collaborate, to create something new, to make something, usually something that bridges and builds community and starts to solve real problems using the energy and imagination and knowledge of a lot of people. Coming together to make, learn or share can be heady stuff, it often sprouts more activity rather than shrinks.

My thinking around all this has been reinforced also by seeing how two real veterans of activism have moved into the Creative/ Collaborative space.

One person is Grace Lee Boggs, a 96 year activist, who has worked and lived through decades of activist movements – including the civil rights movement – who is inspired by the astonishing and fantastic resurgence of people-led community activity filling the vacuum in her home town of Detroit, created by the disappearance of economic viability that has accompanied the disappearance of industry. In the interview below Boggs talks about the Occupy movement saying, ‘you have to move from protest to start becoming the solution yourself’. I am hoping to meet Grace Lee Boggs on the trip we are planning to Detroit.

Grace Lee Boggs' Message to Occupy Wall Street Part 2 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

The other veteran is 94 year old Stephane Hessell, author of the French ‘Time for Outrage’ leaflet that has sold over 1.5 million copies. Hessell lived through WWII, was active in the French Resistance, survived concentration camps, was involved in drafting the Declaration of Human Rights, spend much of his life as a diplomat and an active agent of positive change.I wrote in more detail about this work here but his closing statement in “Indignez-Vous!” is: ‘To create is to resist; to resist is to create.”

And last but not least I wanted to draw your attention to a paper written by Eileen Conn, a long time activist from Peckham in London. I had to good fortune recently of spending an afternoon talking with Eileen and have subsequently read her fascinating paper called 'Community Engagement and the Social Eco-system Dance' currently being published through TSRC Below the Radar. In the paper Eileen describes the Space of Possibilities between the community and external and public agencies.  She also goes into some very interesting detail about how she sees the two different systems 'co-evolving'.  I highly recommend reading this paper.

So there it is ….. 6 months of thinking in 2400 words.  Well, not quite… I have more to add on what I think are the strengths and vulnerabilities of Creative/Collaborative… how we might start to work to deliberately to create the context for this new paradigm… as well as addressing the more complex questions around blending paradigms ….. but I am hoping that I can do that this with the help of  all the Social Spaces ‘thinking partners’  … including the readers of this blog!

And a special thank you to the people who might have laughed at the suggestion in the first line of this blog that I have been thinking about all this *quietly* to myself - those who contributed so much to the evolution of these ideas - and have given me so much time - and continue to put up with my obsessive questioning, talking and struggling to organise and make sense of some of this evolving thinking: Laura Billings, Maurice Specht, Michael Coughlin, Indy Johar, Alice Fung, Philip Colligan, David Gauntlett, Megan Deal, Matthew Taylor, Eilleen Conn, Zoe Hamlin, Cassie Robinson, Toby Blume,Tom Neumark, Jonathan Robinson, Yvonne Roberts, Nat Wei, Nick Booth, Noel Hatch, Karl Wilding, Jerry Stein, June Holley, Dougald Hine, Lorna Prescott, Nick Bird, Andrew Dick... and everyone I have worked with in workshops who have added so much richness and understanding of where things are right now in communities ....

  

Social Spaces: Civic Engagement, Social Capital and Unemployment

A fascinating post on the Social Capital Blog details two recent studies in the US which show correlations between civic engagement and levels of unemployment.  At one end of the scale Nevada, where less than 5% percent worked with neighbours, has unemployment of 10% - 12%... while at the top end is Alaska, where 15% worked with neighbours, has unemployment of 0% - 2%.

While they are quick to point out that the study does not prove causation. However Bob Graham thinks that taken together with other studies that these finding will be proven real:

"Assuming this finding turns out to be real, one might wonder about the mechanisms.  My hunch of the most likely culprit is that in higher social capital places, firms are more likely to share the pain through across-the-board cutback in hours rather than concentrate the pain through layoffs and firings.  Levine and Dietz posit other explanatory factors:

• stronger social networks make it easier for people to get re-employed;
• civic engagement helps generate skills and confidence that translate into employability;
• civic engagement helps spread information that make it easier for individuals to learn about job openings or training programs;
• civic engagement produces higher trust and higher trust leads to better economic performance (although social trust wasn’t directly measured in the CPS survey);
• governments are more responsible and responsive in high civic engagement states; or
• people in more engaged communities may feel greater community attachment which leads them to invest more locally."

This study supports the idea that community and connection can have a real impact on difficult problems - working very much in the area of 'effects'.  In April I wrote about protective factors for young people in particular and the idea that a connected community would have the 'secondary effect' of helping support young people better than some of the more direct interventions.

This is Community: Why the Clean-ups Are So Important

The analysis in the media of why the UK erupted in street violence last week have offered us a buffet of reasoning across the political spectrum.

We've been offered: greed, gangs, the recession, unemployment, bad parenting, cultural disintegration, harsh policing, lax policing, slack sentencing, attitudes, social norms, the media scandal, the banking scandal, the expenses scandal, government cuts, professional incompetence, social contagion, opportunism, backlash.  

We've seen the argument swerve dangerously (usually in the same programme) from individual responsibility to state responsibility - depending on which political party you are supporting. 

Finally the arguments ended the week  in a horrible intellectual heap of ridiculousness at the doors of David Starkey.

I offer my own brief observations with some understanding that a week on we have all pretty much had enough of the analysis and political point scoring. So I am sticking to some person thoughts from my own experience... and reflecting on things that have been helpful this week.

A great many young people involved in the riot activities in the last week will have been 'known to the authorities'.  It is unusual to go from a stay-at-home teenager to looting in one step.  If the are 'known' at all, they will have been on the system of several agencies, possibly including youth offending, social services, the police, education teams, employment schemes.  Having worked for a short period in a Youth Offending Team (YOT) I can assure you of the tightness of these processes in steering a young person through a system.  There is hardly a crack through which any small degree of anti-social behaviour can slip through.  There are endless rounds of meetings they must attend.  If they miss meetings they are back in court for further measures.  They are sent on courses, their parents are counselled, they go on restorative justice programmes, they do 'community service'....  Seriously, there is very little not deployed to reform and shape a young person's behaviour to a more pro-social way of living.  

The government has made cuts to Youth Offending Teams - and probably this is one of the many reasons why the violence erupted... but the professional practice of YOTs will not have altered much with the change in government.  

But my own experience of YOTs work, as valuable and important as it is, is that it does not compensate for what a caring community could do for young people.  Most kids with ASBOs are shunned by the community in which they live, the families are shunned and likely to schools exclude those children.  I wrote about these experiences in more detail in this post on Protective Factors, Systems Thinking and People Power.

The main point here being that communities can do for young people that no amount of services can do for them.  These services cannot give them a feeling of belonging, a feeling of importance, a sense that their talents and contributions to society are valued and valuable.  These services cannot help them build relationships with helpful adults, build their own social capital and empower them ultimately into economic independence and civic participation and contribution. There are things that only communities can do for each other.

The citizen-led clean-ups that happened across the effected areas in the days that followed the riots, lifted our spirits and gave us back a bit of hope that society hadn't quite unravelled in the way much of the press seemed happy to promote.  But they are much more important than simply extending hope.  They were statements of ownership across those neighbourhoods.  They were statements about the strong feelings of anger that local residents had towards the violence and the destruction of neighbourhoods.  

And the Local Authority clean-up squads couldn't send that sort of message.... and instinctively these local folk knew that the message was as important as the clearn-up and the message could not be delivered by the local authority.

I wrote recently about a programme in Chicago called CeaseFire designed by an expert in the spread of infectious diseases called Gary Slutkin who has used the power of community outrage as part of a detailed strategy which has reduced violence by 45%  - 75%.  Every time there is violence the community demonstrate against the violence. Note:  They don't march against the authorities to stop the violence, they march against the violent behaviours from their own community members.  They express a collective rejection of these behaviours.  As Slutkin says ‘for these communities violence is simply normal – we work to make it unusual’.

The Peace Rallies which have started to emerge this weekend are further really powerful examples of how citizens see this need to make social expressions of peace.

And this is essentially what these clean-ups have done, with the addition of showing pride on where these residents live.  And perhaps all rolled up that is why we have found them so heartening, and why more than likely they have contributed to the riots reducing. 

Now all we need to figure out is how to make young people get more of their sense of community from the clean-ups teams and less from their gangs - and thankfully that small detail is very much in our hands.

[For a more detailed and academic exploration of encouraging autonomy in young people I wrote this RSA article in 2008 following my own research.]

Pic: Notice board in Peckham where people posted messages of peace and tolerance.

 

Big Society: Time for Outrage?

I am not sure how I missed this story - I have found it so interesting and I thought it worth blogging about in case other's might have missed it too?  

Stephane Hessell released a 3 page pamphlet in France last October entitled “Indignez-Vous!” which has sold over 1.5 million copies.  The number of sales on this slim volume – sold for €3 - is pretty remarkable.

Hessell is 94.  He lived through the WWII, was active in the French Resistance, survived concentration camps, was involved in drafting the Declaration of Human Rights, spend much of his life as a diplomat and an active agent of positive change.  His experience and his life are significant factors in the spread of this recent work… but its timing has also contributed perhaps to how his message has been received.

So what is his message? I have read and reread it over the last couple of weeks – an English version here – wanting to blog about it, but thinking how important it is to drawn honestly on his text.  ‘Time for Outrage’ is a call to action on both political and social justice issues. Hessell draws our attention to a number of negative issues currently alive and well in society, examples include the widening gap between rich and poor, the powers of the press (ironically given the recent press scandals), the treatment of immigrants and more controversial issues concerning Israel and Palestine.

Here are some of the interpretations.. and further questions I have made from Hassell’s piece:

-       He asks for people not to ignore things that are happening subtly through the effects of social norms etc – such as showing a lack of respect to immigrants. The insidious permeation of behaviours, which add up to a terrible negative culture.  

-       He asks us to wake up to how the powers have been at work very quietly to dominate decision-making …. As well as waking up to our own contributions to the situation through passivity and via our smaller contributions.

-       He asks us to get active… but to work through peaceful means.  In fact his closing statement is ‘To create is to resist; to resist is to create.”

I recently read the book Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan and reading Hessell’s essay resonated with some of the things that Heffernan talks about.  In Willful Blindness Heffernan catalogues all the ways that we are blind to the bigger truths, sometimes in our personal lives, but also in work or public related ways.  One example is how the subprime mortgage crisis occurred not because of an individual ‘someone’ doing something hugely stupid (although Alan Greenspan ....) … but because literally 100s of people, at hundreds of organisations, across all levels, turned a blind eye to what they saw directly in front of them.  Individual employees were approving multiple mortgages on the same property on the same day.  It is a fascinating book with dozens of examples of how the mind works to make us ‘not know’ things that we sort of really do know but don’t want to confront even with ourselves. 

In another example Heffernan describes a firm in the US that kept a mine open for years with full knowledge that the high levels of asbestos in the dust was killing not only the workers in the mine – but the whole town.  When this knowledge was revealed publically the town did not want to know either – despite people actually dying around them at ridiculously young ages.  Most shocking in that story was the small fact that the head teacher at the town’s school did not reveal the fact for 5 years that the school’s running track was build on foundations of waste from the mine.  For 5 years after knowing the risks to health the students still performed athletics on contaminated dust!

What must things be like for Hessel – to live through one of the most shocking instances of crimes against humanity – to win – to make all sorts of huge and fundamental strides towards creating a better world – such as writing the Declaration of Human Rights … only to see some of those gains slip quietly away due to inattention or passivity or lack of knowledge or insight? It does feel as though Hessell is shouting …in frustation.

The questions that Hassel asks are ones that many have been asking for a long time:

-       How do we make obvious things that are often so slow or so invisible that we don’t see them until the full impact has been gathered. 

-       How do we take responsibility for our individual behaviours – knowing that they contribute powerfully to the collective that shapes our social culture.

-       How do we ‘create to resist’?  What does that look like?  Is the call that Hessell makes here a call to encourage citizens to pro-actively shape the world they want to live in – a ‘call to action’ rather than a ‘call to arms’ which its title initially suggests?

Hessel's work is controversial in many ways - there are many who are trying to dismiss it or criticise it - there were certainly many points that I noted seemed in need of further investigation.... but I can also see that there are many reasons why this commentary has drawn so many people in France to buy it, why it is so timely... and why Hessel's voice within this text has made it's appeal so strong.

I see many points of comparison with Big Society, a concept I still wholeheartedly support. Isn’t Big Society after all, at its most fundamental, a call  ... or an idea, to help people get more involved in shaping society – rather than simply acting as consumers or critiquing society from afar?

Imagine 1.5 million copies sold of a leaflet talking about Big Society? Can't see that happening somehow....

 

Together With Love We Will Make This Citadel Glorious.

A theatre company in Birmngham is explosring the small things it can do to make the city better, 

On a microcosmic level, how can an individual improve life for the collective whole? What small change can one person effect that touches the lives of many? What if, in this City of a million people, everyone took just one minute each day to tidy, dust, mop or polish a square of communal space. How would our citadel shine then?

Stan's Cafe has been looking around its home City and spotting small things that could make it a better place. Realizing how easy it would be to step in and take on a few of these little tasks the company is under taking a series of performances to improve things.

On 24th May the company will position itself at the Arrivals Gate at Terminal 1 of Birmingham International Airport to provide a warm welcome for visitors and valued citizens returning home.

On 25th May the company will be providing a friendly concierge service for the taxi rank at Snow Hill Station during peak periods.

These are the first two in a planed sequence of actions. If you would like to help either by volunteering your time to this project or by submitting your suggestions for future acts of improvement we would be delighted to hear from you.

Together With Love We Will Make This Citadel Glorious.

N.B. As of the end of September Stan's Cafe will cease to be funded by Birmingham City Council.

Interesting.

 

Big Society: Chicago's many community thinkers, connection and interruption

 

Jane Addams (1860-1935) just filled in a big hole in my understanding about communities, and our various strategies and approaches to making them better.  I knew very broadly about her, but only recently discovered more about her work through my research around Saul Alinsky and community organising.

Jane Addams was the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  She campaigned for woman’s rights and social reform… and she has become a fascinating and much admired figure for me, providing a working example in history of the creative collaborative approach I have been proposing in recent blog posts.

Daughter and heir of a wealth businessman in Chicago, Jane Addams bought a building in Chicago and called it Hull House.  Hull house became both a centre for community and learning and expanded into many different buildings over time.  What surprised and delighted me when reading about her work, was the similarity of Hull House and the ‘presence’ approach being used by Willem and Nol in their project in The Hague, which I blogged about here. Basically creating a hub in which ideas can be germinated and propagated – but very gently, and very people-led. You can read in more detail about the workings of the house, but the bit that interests me is her approach.  She was a collaborator and a connector.

“Hull House made Addams famous, giving her the opportunity to put her ideas to work on a larger scale. Good with a pen and a skilled orator, Addams began speaking out on local and national issues. She soon cast aside her disdain for politics, becoming adept at lobbying for concerns close to her heart: accomplishing women's suffrage, abolishing restrictive immigration policies, improving poor working conditions, and achieving equality for African-Americans.

 What made Addams so effective at promoting her vision was her ability to build coalitions. She abhorred conflict -- a product of her childhood growing up in a testy household -- and could always see both sides to an issue.”

She also offers us one of the first examples of strategic community map making, which I am so involved in developing myself.  Below is an example of a map she produced on the areas nationalities, but she also completed many others – including on income etc.

But what of Jane Addams legacy?  Why has the work of Saul Alinsky endured to the present day and Jane Addams’s work hasn’t? The answer is really hard to understand, especially as she was so prominent in her lifetime and her work and approach had so much impact.  Despite her unpopular passivist stance in the run up to WW1 she regained the national affection before her death.

Maurice Hamingtonhas written a riveting essay comparing Addams and Alinksy:

“It is not coincidence that Chicago produced two of the most important figures in community organizing of the twentieth century: Jane Addams and Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). Chicago was a center of social upheaval as exhibited by the Haymarket Riots of 1888, the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the Race Riots of 1919 (as well as race riots in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s). This city’s social unrest existed in dynamic relationship to ideas about social change and reform fomented in Chicago as witnessed in the settlement work of Addams’ Hull House, the socialist work of Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union, the urban research and social theorizing of the “Chicago School”[i], and the Back of the Yards organization founded by Saul Alinsky."

In the essay Hamington suggests that Addams, despite Alinsky’s expressed rejection and disdain, may in fact have influenced his work in a meaningful way, being the forerunner of community intevention in the same city, and feeding in her thinking to the Chicago University.  

Hamington writes:

"Marie Weil lists various United States social movements with significant female leadership, and no one is associated with more movements than Addams. Despite this delineation, Weil falls prey to gender perceptions, claiming:

Despite a rich and proud heritage of female organizers and movement leaders, the field of community organization, in both its teaching models and its major exponents, have been a male-dominated preserve, where, even though values are expressed in terms of participatory democracy, much of the focus within the dominant practice methods has been nonsupportive or antithetical to feminism. Strategies have largely been based on “macho-power” models, manipulativeness, and zero-sum gamesmanship.

I would qualify Weil’s largely accurate description by suggesting not that the field has been male dominated, but that the portrayal of it has been. Much like Alinsky’s effort to depict himself as using necessary masculine methods over and against inferior feminine methods, history has masked the successful communitarian and cooperative efforts of women organizers as anachronistic. In this manner, feminist community organizing is hidden behind the acclaim heaped upon male organizing. The feminist process of reassessing given historical truths reveals more grassroots organizing than is commonly attributed.”

Over the last couple of weeks I have tried to grapple with and understand the differences in approach between the classic or ‘formal’ community organizing models, and the more creative changes process I have been unearthing through studying new types of emergent case studies.  So far, in studying over 100 case studies of citizen-led (but not ‘organised’) initiatives that create positive change in communities, I have identified 5 different major change processes that build collaborative capacities in communities.

I see a great deal of divergence in how communities are coming together themselves to collaborate for positive change, using predominantly new ideas and thinking around the ‘power to do’, rather than the ‘power to decision-make’.

So what of the commonalities?  I see one major thing in common – the need to connect people: to campaign in the case of ‘community organising’, to collaborate in the case of these new emergent models.

Another commonality is an assumption that some type of activation or stimulation is needed in communities to create new type of outcomes.

What about communities that are extremely overactive already? Returning to Chicago I have made some study of the work of Gary Slutkin, a man with experience of reversing epidemics such as aids and cholera and tuberculosis, who turned his attention and understanding of infectious control on the problem of violence in Chicago neighbourhoods.

Slutkin discovered that when he studied the pattern of violence it looks in every single way like the spread of disease. And in an identical way he has approached preventing the spread of an invisible virus, he has reduced violence in the areas he has worked by 45% - 75%.

While new models of activation work on connection, Sluktin’s primary change lever is interruption.  He reduces connection.  Frontline workers drawn from within the community are trained to start conversations with people who might be thinking of acting or reacting violently.  They interrupt the thoughts and they interrupt the connections between violent gang members – they work to transform thinking.  They also connect in another way – whenever there is violence they organize local demonstrations.  Not directed at authorities – directed at the violence – basically saying ‘we don’t want this anymore’.

They have found that when the frontline workers are around things get cooled down, when they aren’t people get killed.  And over time this combined activity has changed the social norms… As Slutkin says ‘for these communities violence is simply normal – we work to make it unusual’.

With these examples we have one axis with campaigning/conflict vs creative/collaboration and on the other we have connection/activation vs interruption/deactivating.

And last but by no means least, Chicago offers us John McKnight, who developed the amazing Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) approach to helping communities collaborate and build on their ideas and talents. 

"Society is buzzing with ideas" - an interview from the Grassroots Channel podcast

First published here.

Meet Rinske van Noortwijk and Corian Hugenholtz-Sasse - they make wishes come true.

To listen to them talk please click here. (find the Grassroots Channel in iTunes)

I met them both in Rotterdam, invited through the wonderful Maurice Specht to speak to the Association of Initiative Brokers ( @inimakelaar ) in Holland, organised by Rinske. Two days before, Tessy Britton and I had been in The Hague speaking to senior civil servants from Dutch central government.

They kept asking us what they could do to help citizens do the simpler things that made sense in their communities. Scale-ability was constantly on their lips. I was urging them to be careful. Stepping back, getting out of the way is one way government can help citizens just get things done. Find simple ways to give people small amounts of no string attached help was the other - what I call "learn how to slip someone a quiet tenner".

Militant Optimists and New Radicals

Tessy wanted something more practical. She wanted government to support the people who have the skills to nurture community, to connect people, to amplify what is possible in communities. The people David Barrie calls Militant Optimists, the sort of people who appear on the Grassroots Channel and Tessy brings together through Hand Made. She wants government to recognise and support the people who follow here 12 rules for new radicals. here are the first three compared with older form of community organising:

RULE 1

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." Power is derived from 2 main sources - money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood.  

Britton (New/Collaborate): “Power involves creating spaces where ideas, energy and people are connected together from within all sections of the community and local government to create positive communities” This involves careful facilitation and creating safe spaces where everyone can share their opinions and contribute positively. There is no enemy in a community.

RULE 2

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Never go outside the expertise of your people." It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Always reject ignorance in favour of building skills and knowledge.” There are many new ideas and methods that result in creative solutions that make people and communities stronger.

RULE 3

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy." Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Whenever possible, instigate dialogue, so that everyone shares the same knowledge base to design solutions.” Look for ways to increase security, trust and responsibility.

Rinske and Corian are just those sort of people: militant optimist, new radicals: For nearly a decade they have been running Greenwish:

Greenwish means more space for sustainable initiative. We encourage people to implement their sustainable ideas. If people do what they really care about, people are very passionate. It is this force that will really accelerate sustainable development. Greenwish promotes the interest of government, civil society and business in social initiatives. We want to see more cooperation and more is learned from social initiative. Greenwish support promoters with advice and contacts. We represent the interests of promoters to policymakers and politicians. Greenwish advises government, civil society and business in what they can do for initiatives and vice versa

Originally they were funded to connect community ideas to the people who can help make those ideas happen. Sometimes they might connect a citizen to a government programme, sometimes to a private supporter, sometimes to another citizen - often to all three. Each year these brokers make around 200 things happen that would otherwise have gone by the wayside. They know people, have ideas, are networked and like finding the easiest ways to get things going.

"Society is buzzing with ideas"

Listen to them talk about it here:

• We met many people with good ideas to contribute to the community who need a little bit of help. We ask them waht do you need to make your next step and can we help you.
• We're interested in what gets people enthusiastic and why they are doing it.
• Government funded for some time, now in transition.
• Value is being known and trusted by people government wants to work with, it is still difficult to find government that works that way.
• It can take patience to make an idea real. Over time enthusiasm builds
• 200 initiatives supported, health, food, energy, participation
• Common currency is passion, it is always a struggle.
• People in places always have ideas - we get ideas easily. "Society is buzzing with ideas."
• We are the first believers for anyone with a crazy idea to help society
• Looking for new concepts for making our added value clear to the government, Tessy Britton gave me new ideas of how we should make that more clear. Big Society is a new way for government to stop thinking for citizens, instead allow citizens to think for themselves.
• There are so many ways to make what is happening visible through social media without having to push the information. Ask them to make themselves visible.

 

Big Society: Collaborative Services, Tools and Laundromats

I wrote back in October about ideas around Collaborative Services and how much potential I saw in citizens and local government working to make things better together in ways that neither could make on their own.

In that post I also highlighted a couple of really important research papers from the Sustainable Everyday Project – one which talks about Creative Communities and the other about Collaborative Services.  In Collaborative Services they have designed some predicted future scenarios which concern people coming together and putting things together in new ways - particularly locally.  They introduce some ideas around sustainable resourcing issues through sharing, of the sort that could be categorised as ‘collaborative consumption’, such as car sharing, driven by a ‘system’.  Others though describe services which depend on human relationships to make them work – such as citizens collaboratively running a child-care facility.

Others just require a remixing of what we have already to make it better – putting things together in new configurations to make them more sustainable or simply work better.

All of the ideas they explore seem so possible – and many are delightful in their sheer good sense, ‘why aren’t we doing this already?’…. And of course since this forward thinking paper was produced in 2004 we are seeing exactly that … everywhere you look it seems!

Two examples I found over the weekend was the Tool Lending at the Berkeley Public Library .  A spin of course, but a very good one, on all the other sharing schemes that are popping up.

An even more exciting find was the Laundromat Café’s in Denmark and Iceland. You guessed it – somewhere beautiful to do your laundry!  Book, coffee, internet – people!!! Why would you want to do your laundry at home for gods sake! You know, with your own expensive, resource-heavy machines… And of course this is a perfect example of new types of ‘social spaces’ – places that create naturally create connectivity, where people can spend time and meet people accidentally and start to form light relationships.  They call their customers ‘guests’…..

And this is exactly one of the predicted scenarios that they described in Collaborative Services.

More pics on their facebook page.

Big Society: Festival of Ideas New York City

There is a fantastic festival going in on New York around ideas for living in new ways, called the Festival of Ideas. In the context of drawing a comparison to *community organising* which works through 'decision making power' as a mechanism for change, I have been talking for the last two weeks about the really tangible 'power and potential of ideas and innovation' for changing how we live and how we can collaboratively find creative solutions and build cohesive and positive community.  This festival is a live example of just how relevant creativity and ingenuity is and it won't be long before we are having these all over the UK.

 

Big Society: The Kitchen As Metaphor For Community

I really enjoy working on ideas through metaphor.  I have had to explain why I named the Travelling Pantry the Travelling Pantry a few times over the last year.  Basically the idea I wanted to put across was that the workshop was only delivering a set of ingredients (usually the dried bottled/canned variety) and that the communities had all the fresh ingredients (assets/resources) and recipes (ideas) and they were the cooks and chefs that were going to deploy their amazing artistry to put these all together in community projects. 

I like the metaphor of cooking for community building a lot.  One of the people working in communities in the US that I really admire is Jack Ricchiuto.  Jack talks a lot about ‘small acts’ making a lot of difference.  Jack has also written "Instructions from the Cook – Recipes for new conversations" with George Nemeth - They recently made it available for free online and it makes a good stimulus to thinking about drawing together positively to talk about things they think are important.  Thanks Jack and George!

Recently Dornbracht a bathroom specialist asked its chief designer to consider moving the product range into kitchens and what emerged was The Farm Project, a kitchen which has now been exhibited in several design shows, including Milan, Holland and Germany.  When reading about this kitchen exhibit I found some great community metaphors that sort of exemplify some of the ideas we explore in the asset-based community workshops. If we compare The Farm Project with the standard ideal of a modern kitchen – sleek, perfect, tidy, minimal …It also can draw some parallels with the sort of 'regeneration' that is create by developers - and the sorts of communities that are hand made. I blogged recently about the new aesthetic that seemed to be developing around community's 'hand made' solutions and ideas - rather than the 'design' aesthetic of urban architecture - which can sometimes look a whole lot like a modern kitchen too!

From an interview with the Kitchen Project designer below are some quotes that could be used as metaphors for community.

“Meiré’s response was to take the pristine industrial/laboratory model, dominant at the luxury end of the kitchen market, and really mess it up. ‘I felt that minimalism was a bit finished’, he explains, ‘there are so many strong brands doing perfect kitchens and I felt it had somehow got rather extreme and ridiculous – even a coffee cup looks out of place if you leave it on the counter. I have a wife and three kids, so for us the kitchen has always been a very communicative and energetic place’.”

A vibrant community isn’t sterile and slick – its messy and active

 

"A fresh new take on the rural-inspired kitchen comprises a visual riot of fresh and packaged foodstuffs, plastic containers, live domestic animals, found objects and improvised furniture. Nothing is hidden away in Meiré’s kitchen, everything – from Asian food store products to tableaux inspired by 18th century Dutch still-lives full of dead animals – is on display in a what he calls ‘orchestrated chaos’."

Communities need people and their ideas revealed – not hidden away

 "The kitchen furnishings are a hotchpotch of ceramics and furniture that Meiré and his wife collected from flea markets: worthless, even ugly, things in conventional design terms, but remixed, placed in a new context, they become familiar, comfortable, reassuring and even rather refreshing. ‘Sometimes my wife and I laughed [at the objects we included] because they were so tacky’, he says, ‘but somehow in this context they became beautiful again."

It takes all sorts. Remixs of the old and familiar in communities, things that don’t always seem to match, either by age or class or interest, can look brilliant together again if we can create a new context for them to be beautiful.

"With his ‘Farm’ kitchen, Meiré wanted to embrace the richness of life that minimalism had taken away: the sense of ‘home’, of family and centred community is what he wants to bring back into the domestic equation – the kitchen as the engine of the house full of people. But also the animals, cooking, smells, sounds and life – or the ‘stage’ on which the drama of domestic life is played out."

Communities can create new types of ‘stages’, or common spaces, that can become the engines for activity.

 Lots more pics of the Farm Project here

Big Society: Power and Creativity, Saul Alinsky and Hilary Clinton

There are definite downsides to thinking out loud in public.  But one of the upsides is that people’s responses show weaknesses in how you’ve communicated… and expose gaps and inconsistencies in your ideas – and that is really helpful.

My discussion about Alinsky’s strategies and tactics, and ‘community organising’ in general, has raised many concerns about the government investing millions of pounds in what I call an “Old Power’ approach. I don’t believe this to be positive or progressive.

In my haste to raise some debate about this matter I realise that I have failed to put this conversation, which is about deliberate strategies at local level, into the wider context.  This wider context includes many other aspects of protest and politics that I don’t think I explored fully in earlier posts. Also issues around conflict, protest and oppression are important ones, so important that it brings out out strong and heartfelt feelings - no discussion on this sort of subject should be flippant or careless

One of the bigger misinterpretations of what I have been trying to express, quite understandably and kindly I might add, was from Julian Dobson responded with his own blog post.  In this post he reads my ideas to refer primarily to “a long and undervalued philosophical debate about non-violence and peacemaking”.  And in some respects I do very much share this as an overall philosophy. I think that in the context of my previous post in particular, which focused a lot on ethics, it would be easy to be diverted from what I was saying ....

What I have been trying to express is that I don’t believe that conflict and community organizing, as a deliberate strategy or intervention delivers good results long term.  I have tried in the last post on this subject to describe that what I am talking about is not just a different approach to the same question i.e. “we want power or more equality, now how are we going to get it – conflict or dialogue?”  What I am trying to describe is that it is completely different altogether – and it leverages creativity and ideas rather than power to effect change. It leverages, in fact, decades of existing research and thinking.

Currently all forms of community organising, with the exception of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), work through the ‘power’ dynamic, even the ‘non-Alinsky’, the ‘updated-Alinsky, the ‘softened-Alinsky, the ‘hardly-Alinsky-at-all’ and the ‘Alinsky-who?’, which I believe has poor practical long-term effects and contributes to negative patterns – particularly at local level. Community organizing as a concept, for all its very good intentions, is sadly stuck …. Somewhere prior to the 1970s. I have been wondering for ages why community organising doesn't incorporate new research and thinking and I believe that it is because it is a 'fixed model'.  It only has one way of operating and effecting change and that is through power systems.  The community organising training is all about agitation and power ... and the language around community organising is about power.  Until a few weeks ago I had never heard the phrase 'speak truth to power', but this type of phrase seems quite common.

Community organising has its own deeply held dogma, but is actually being used as a tool politically. Alinsky himself was undoubtedly driven by a desire to reduce poverty and improve living conditions and equality, but today the 'mechanisms' are being appropriated by many different ideologies. We associate social justice with left wing politics but on the level of taking power it can used by anyone. If you see community organising as a power lever to effect change, rather than a left-leaning ideology, it explains (a little) why in this country the Conservatives are promoting it... and in the US the Democrats have been aligned with it.  While in the US Alinsky and community organising has become the largest, most public, weapon of the Republicans against Obama, and the Rules for Radicals in particular shown as evidence of a lack of integrity on his part, the Tea Party movement is reported as having widely promoted Rules for Radicals.  It can be very confusing.

"Tea Party leader and "the co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter" Michael Patrick Leahy has written an entire book based off of Alinsky's "shocking" work, deftly entitled: Rules for Conservative Radicals: Lessons from Saul Alinsky[!] the Tea Party Movement and the Apostle Paul in the Age of Collaborative Technologies. In his book, "Leahy argues that today's conservative radical should follow the tactics of Saul Alinsky, but apply the morals and ethics of Martin Luther King."

But power as a lever for change isn't the only option anymore - surely we need to move on - try and move towards a more enlightened way of working, rather than repeat the negative patterns of the past? The three old levers for achieving social justice: Power, Charity and Education, have been joined for some time now by a fourth, Creativity.

Power and Creativity co-exist - they are happening around us every single day of the week.

My questions are:

Do you want more activism and conflict ... or more creative citizen-led solutions?

At local level which paradigm - Old or New Power - would you prefer to invest time and money in?

Which intervention offers the most promise for ensuring good decision making, social justice and equality?

Below is a diagram in which I try to describe the differences.  This has been a very difficult (and rather painful) task and I would appreciate your feedback as this is the first attempt at articulating these differences.  (Click on image to zoom)

Open publication 

Over the weekend I finally tracked down an online copy of Hilary Clinton’s thesis on Saul Alinsky.  Alinsky asked Hilary to work for him as an organizer – which she declined.  But she wrote her thesis on him and his work – published on the 2 May 1969 – exactly 52 years ago tomorrow.  The thesis, for reasons not clear, was sealed during Bill Clinton’s presidency … but is available below if you would like to read it yourself. 

Download Hillary Clinton's thesis

Here is one of Hilary’s observations about the overall effects of organizing at that time:

“The Council’s Executive Secretary, one of Alinsky’s fellow-radical, has held his position for over twenty five years and, if the neighborhood does not “change” (i.e. integrate) he could hold it for another twenty-five.  Change is the key to situation in Back of Yards today just as it was in 1939, only now the residents are the status quo.  When a community is organized around the concept of self-interest, as Back of Yards and other Alinsky-orgnized areas have been, it is natural that self-interest remains the theme of that community’s cohesion.”

This I found particularly interesting with reference to the current risk of handing ‘power’ to ‘certain people’ through the Localism Bill..

In another section she talks further about the effects long-term on communities and about people applying Alinsky’s conflict tactics badly:

“Alinsky’s psychodramatics have brought him attention and catalyzed organizational activity, but many sociologists, such as Professor Annmarie Shimony of Wellesley College, regard Alinsky as a showman rather than an activist. 

Professor Shimony considers both Back of the Yards and Woodlawn failures; the former because of its segregationist tendencies, which are particular hostilities publicly expressed, and the latter because its takeover by gangs who optimize a blatant hostility approach.  Another criticism of Alinsky’s catharsis approach is the difficulty in applying it.  Alinsky, the master showman, is able to orchestrate it, but other less-skilled organizers, such as the Reverend Mr Fry, cannot maintain control.  Many of the Alinsky-inspired poverty warriors could not (discounting political reasons) move beyond the cathartic first step of organizing groups “to oppose, complain, demonstrate, and boycott” to developing and running a program."

Hilary also introduces the idea of ‘contrived’ conflict through her quotes from Coser’s 'The Functions of Social Conflict', where he talks about ‘realistic’ and ‘unrealistic’ conflict’:

“Social conflicts that arise from frustrations of specific demands within a relationship and from estimates of gains of the participants, and that are directed to the presumed frustrating object, can be called realistic conflicts. Insofar as they are a means towards specific results, they can be replaced by alternative modes of interaction with the contending party if such alternatives seem to more adequate for realizing the end in view.

Nonrealistic conflicts, on the other hand, are not occasioned by the rival ends of the antagonists, but by the need for tension release of one or both of them.  In this case the conflict is not orientated toward the attainment of specific results.  Insofar as unrealistic conflict is an end in itself, insofar as it affords only tension release, the chosen antagonist can be substituted by any other suitable target.”

If you are interested in this, and have the time, do read Hilary Clinton’s thesis – really fascinating. She even included a cartoon at the end!

 UPDATE: Excellent posts that continue this discussion:

Thomas Neumark (RSA): There's more to getting a "stronger" than AV

Anthony Zacharzewski (The Democratic Society): Democracy for New Radicals

Julian Dobson (Our Society): Three questions to keep asking about power

Jess Steele (Locality) Transparency, creativity, power & responsibility

Big Society: IDEO.org to launch in September

"Drawing on what IDEO has learned through its work in the social sector, IDEO.org will seek to have impact in three ways: By partnering with organizations on design projects focused on poverty alleviation in the areas of health, agriculture, water and sanitation, financial services, and gender equity; by spreading human-centered design through storytelling, platforms, and new networks; and by fostering future leaders through a fellowship program that will bring together residents from IDEO and people from the design, business, and social sectors."

Can't wait! This is very good news indeed!

Big Society: Rules for *New* Radicals

I have received a lot of emails and tweets since posting the blog yesterday on conflict and collaboration - thank you for all of these!

While many have been very supportive of a less adversarial approach to the future of communities, a few of them have tried to explain that government sponsored community organisers will be involved in both conflict and collaboration. The implication being that they are equally valid 'tools' for achieving results - perhaps being on the same path - as if they are on the same continuum.  A common strategy in this mindset might include a bit of conflict to start off with, and then when the object of pressure is paying attention, move to a change of tactic and a more collaborative tone of voice.  It's about applying pressures and tools to get someone to do what you want.  And if the wants are worthy enough then the means are justified.

My own experiences, and I have had several as I mentioned yesterday, have all involved some initial demonstration and protest to bring people to the talking table. These talks have generally led to long processes to reach some a level of mutual understanding and trust - ultimately resulting in better decisions because they contain more knowledge and insight gathered from multiple perspectives. So I understand this well and am sympathetic to some of this thinking.

In the conflict model you could probably generalise a little and say that on average it takes 2-6 months to get heard after a bad decision, mistake or an injustice ... 6 months - 1 year to re-build trust and negotiate a change .... and about 2-5 years to repair the relationships in the community - and there is *always* a lot of damage with the conflict model, win or lose - the smaller the community the more damage.  There are cases where there are black and white absolutes, but frequently at local level the reasons for conflict divide a community - polarising differences in opinion. Having been involved personally in all of these different sections of the cycle, including the painstaking repairs, you can't help but observe after a few times, what a completely insane waste of time, money and effort this all is.... to do this by mistake is one thing ... to re-create this pattern on purpose....when there really are mature and ethical alternatives?

Through this discussion I am not proposing a softer or more pleasant way of dealing with disputes.  What I am proposing is an entirely different model altogether. This alternative model demands that *everyone* transform the way they operate - working towards creating communities that avoid disputes altogether.  This can be done by developing strong *permanent* lines of communication and building *collaborative capacity* through deliberately and methodically developing widespread connection - strong and trusting relationships and a sense of partnership between local authorities and community members. This model is about building communities which sustain the people they serve on every level.  

We have an opportunity today to make these changes with the current space created by the Big Society agenda - but also an urgent imperative and responsibility to do so ... this is what social innovation is for. 

As Bill Clinton said, “[Interdependence] could be good, bad or both, and today it’s both. My simple premise is that the mission of the 21st century is to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of interdependence.”

I am not proposing that people will always agree with one another.  On the contrary, disagreement is normal, inevitable and healthy - but it isn't the same as conflict and doesn't need to lead to conflict.

Neither am I proposing passivity or over-compromise. Quite the reverse, I am proposing active, imaginative and responsible participation.

We cannot move towards a different collaborative model until we let go of our charactatures of the heroic activists fighting against the evil intentions of the powerful.  Although these dynamics are sometimes true, very often they are not. And even where they are true perhaps we need to consider altering this dynamic purposefully, resisting the temptation to adopt stereotypical personas, and adopt instead pragmatic and honest approaches that recognise all the underlying motivations and needs of the people involved.

When 'standing up for ourselves' or 'standing up for others' slowly twists on it's axis to become a bending, bullying force in its own right, and yet receives no criticism or sanction, does this indicate that we should perhaps begin to self-examine if we have swallowed an inflated cultural narrative, of school playgrounds or epic cinema drama?  Or instead is it a symptom of the enormity of our fears of oppression and repression by our governing powers, and our lack of trust and confidence in democracy's ability to call these powers to account, that these double standards seems a small price to pay for freedom? Or is the democratic process just too lengthy or too much bother sometimes?

At local level what really is appropriate? Are we planning to support the interrelated and interdependent networks of families and businesses and schools that co-exist through friendships and partnerships that dream of living peaceably and socially together - drawing people into the positivity of community from the margins - making their lives better?  

Or somewhere along the line have we become confused about the difference between the power of 'disruptive innovation' to effect large scale change - such as the internet - and the effect of clumsily interfering in people's lives ... for the worse? The two largest conflict situations I was involved in locally literally snapped the social networks in half, sadly it even filtered down to the friendships of children - it hurt people, not for weeks but for months and years.

If we start to take seriously come very sounds ideas that building on community assets, rather than deficits, that  'community' itself might start to solve some intractable social problems, and we start to gather some proper evidence to this effect, then it becomes even more important that we ensure our actions bind rather than break communities.

I have particular problems with the current thinking about 'community organising' for the following reasons:

- Embedded in the thinking is the assumption that government is bad and that community organisation is needed to mobilise the community to *react* to these bad decisions.  This potentially leads to long-term negative cycles of: pressure ->defensiveness -> lack of listening and understanding->poor decisions -> pressure -> defensiveness ... and so on. We should be making long term strategies that change this dynamic completely - working to increase social justice and reduce mistakes systematically and collaboratively - not continue to feed cycles of reactivity.

- 'Ends justify the means' Alinsky tactics are tolerated as a legitimate approach. If not all Alinsky thinking is going to be promoted with community organisers there needs to be transparency and clarity about precisely what aspects of Alinsky thinking and strategies are supported and which aren't - His strategies are too controversial, manipulative and entirely out of step culturally and ethically to be vague.

The potential for the community organisers to help build flourishing communities is breathtaking. So much could be achieved through collaboration.

In continued support of collaboration, and frankly feeling rather radical myself at the moment, (in a sensible, 'harmony by design' sort of a way) below is a first draft of re-writting my own version of Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'. In one sense this is simply a different form of demo, a device to highlight some points I believe are important, rather than a serious attempt to create another set of 'rules'... we surely have more than enough of those.. and no theories here either - 10 years of trial and error repairing conflict damage are included in these ideas. 

BRITTON'S RULES FOR *NEW* RADICALS

RULE 1

Alinsky (Old/Conflict):  "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." Power is derived from 2 main sources - money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood. 

Britton (New/Collaborate): “Power involves creating spaces where ideas, energy and people are connected together from within all sections of the community and local government to create positive communities” This involves careful facilitation and creating safe spaces where everyone can share their opinions and contribute positively.  There is no enemy in a community.

RULE 2

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Never go outside the expertise of your people." It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Always reject ignorance in favour of building skills and knowledge.” There are many new ideas and methods that result in creative solutions that make people and communities stronger.

RULE 3

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy." Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Whenever possible, instigate dialogue, so that everyone shares the same knowledge base to design solutions.” Look for ways to increase security, trust and responsibility.

RULE 4

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Design systems which involve two-way accountability. Design a strict ethical framework for your own behaviours – stick to them.”  Demonstrate leadership by taking responsible for the effects of your own behaviours.

RULE 5

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Respect is man’s most powerful collaborative tool.” Respect creates a climate for genuine dialogue and ensures that people have the opportunity to create shared understanding. It also works to ensure that everyone's needs are met, not just your own.

RULE 6

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They're doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Connect people through the positive.” Trying to connect through the negative instantly excludes positive people with valuable ideas and solutions to contribute. Carefully develop a thoughtful long term Theory of Change strategy, where every action builds methodically towards a shared positive goal.

RULE 7

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag." Don't become old news. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Pay attention to and take responsibility for the overall side-effects of your initiatives.  Plan for developing long-term collaborative capacity through relationships that builds prosperity and wellbeing.

RULE 8

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "Keep the pressure on. Never let up." Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Develop a trusting culture which is constantly communicating. Having permanently strong and healthy lines of communication between stakeholders reduces the chance of mistakes and errors of judgment." This leads to better decision making and is a primary tool for avoiding misunderstanding, grievance and conflict. 

RULE 9

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Develop methods which help people imaginatively co-design a positive vision of the future for the community.” Work to create a culture that promotes the importance of all members of the community, rather than creating heroes.

RULE 10

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Don’t push, don’t threaten.  These behaviours break trust, trigger defenses and slows down and reduces the possibility of dialogue and making new positive things in the community.” Communication, harmony and positive initiatives are evidence of successful high-level facilitation. Aggression and violence are of signs of failure, and people should be made accountable for them.

RULE 11

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. 

Britton (New/Collaborative): “The wellbeing of individuals is rooted in social networks. Work to mediate differences, create harmony and meet everyones needs. However earnest, never let aggressive people interrupt positive work that bridges the community.” 

RULE 12

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. 

Britton (New/Collorative): “Disagreement is inevitable and healthy, but never domonise individuals based on differences of opinion. Act with integrity.” There is no enemy in a community.

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UPDATE: Other people that have raised concerns about Alinsky-style organising.  A paper by Jayne Mills and Sue Robson here and a paper by Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service here. 

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Below are some slides about Social Spaces view of Big Society, Competition and Collaboration from our trip to the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago.

Open publication

Big Society: Mostly about the Tesco Riot and Hyperactivism

There was a riot involving the opening of a Tesco store in Bristol a couple of nights ago.  160 police officers and 300 local residents were involved.  And no doubt there will be a great deal of scrutiny over the chain of events that led to such an out of control situation – blame will be portioned out.

But don’t we have the perfect climate at the moment for this to happen: a recession, high unemployment (especially amongst young people), government cuts … and not forgetting the increasing cultural glamorisation of conflict as the tool for social and political change.

If you speak out against conflict in favour of collaboration, as I do at every possible opportunity, you tend to divide your audience instantly.  Speaking against conflict is viewed by some as weak and is often associated with ‘appeasement’ and cowardice.  But conflict is very easy in reality - finding solutions in a collaborative way is much more difficult.

My first experience with this was about 10 years ago when Royal Parks announced their plan to close ¾ of the roads in Richmond Park. The interest group, The Friends of Richmond Park had been politically highjacked by a very militant group of people and had been pressuring for this change for some time. The thing with Richmond Park is that it is the centre of an area that acts as a single community.  In terms of the community relationships Sheen, Richmond, Kingston, Roehampton etc are all interconnected through schools, activities, churches and the local economy. Many people in the local community also wished for reduced park traffic – most of which was pouring in through the one-way Robin Hood gate off the A3. It was a pretty big deal and lots of people were very upset.

The public meetings were astonishing.  One in Kingston Town Hall had to be piped out to 100s of people listening in the car park.  The people from Royal Parks were utterly bewildered and completely out of their depth.  They did not understand until that moment that they had been unduly influenced in their plans by a forceful minority group – claiming to ‘represent’ the opinion of the ‘local community’.

I remember it was quite thrilling to hear from the local Liberal Democrat office that ‘yes, of course you can start a pressure group if you want to’. Not so thrilling though when I started to get violent threats and abuse in the local paper. Perhaps I shouldn’t have called the group The Real Friends of Richmond Park, but this was my first naive outing into the world of activism and local politics of this sort.

To be very clear, although this was obviously considered by some to be a bit inflammatory, this was in fact a diplomatic mission rather than a declaration of war. I started new community group to counter-balance the opinions of another community group, where at the time there was no alternative pathway to express concerns and opinions outside of the anger and shouting that was being done at every relevant town meeting. 

I am not describing this to impress (or not) but to share a first-hand experience, which has fed many of my current views. It was indeed very heart-warming receiving £5 notes and handwritten letters of support from young families and older people who felt the plans were denying them access.  But I was very inexperienced, and being a mother of young children at the time, frankly quite scared, particularly of the anger that was fuelling the situation, so concerned in fact that I never spoke up once at a public meeting. 

I did however create a new line of communication with the Royal Parks staff and with the help of some local scientists gathered some evidence about the potential environmental effects of slower, traffic-bound cars circling the park and the stats of the number of cars cutting through the park entering through Robin Hood Gate. We raised £40,000 sponsorship for a new clean bus to provide public transport around the park.  Anyway, ultimately Robin Hood Gate was closed and the roads remain open for park access to the surrounding community. We would have made some small contribution to that outcome I don’t doubt – but certainly not the only contribution.  The solution was pretty obvious.

Since that time I have continued to encounter situations where both elected and self-appointed groups of people claim to represent ‘the community’, but in fact represent only a narrow and often self-serving perspective.  In the 4 other cases that I have seen at close quarters the patterns have been similar.  Someone makes a mistake, a community or part of community gets angered, someone wins. They have always left a wake of division and broken relationships in the community that can takes years, if ever, to repair. Sometimes it sets up a fresh cycle because the lines of dialogue never re-establish themselves well enough.

This is the real landscape into which the Localism Bill will descend.  There seems to have been some dramatic shift recently from ‘government knows best’ to ‘community knows best’.  With political and media help, a myth that sanctifies community members or groups choices and decisions and demonises everything that local government thinks and does has become widespread. In this paradigm it is very easy to manipulate situations on the grounds of social justice and easy also to make conflict and aggressive strategies look worthy and spirited. In my view this is romantic and wrong and dangerous.

The truth, and many will recognise it, is that there are silly and arrogant people everywhere, both in government and in communities, just as there are responsible and kindly people everywhere.  All our systems (democracy in particular) are designed to safeguard against the arrogant. These systems as we know are flawed, and in need of some honest overhaul,  but there also appears that what is creeping in slowly, in addition to these inherent flaws, is a sort of wilful blindness where we appear to be acting on myth and a simplistic or one side truth rather than the complex reality. This means we are currently in danger of forgetting that our elected government is responsible for the health and wellbeing of our communities and that includes being honest broker to balance the multiple needs and desires of all citizens – not just the ones that have been quick and switched on enough to seize the decision-making ‘empowerment’ about to be so forcefully pushed into communities.

This week I discovered that in my small rural village there is a new group working on a Parish Plan. Sounds good doesn’t it? Active citizens taking responsibility etc etc.  Very Big Society and all that… Except I am puzzled by the fact that their website boasts that  “To produce a truly community owned plan; it is independent of the Parish Council”.  The Parish Council is elected by the local community to look after exactly the things that the Parish Plan covers.  At what point did the people we elect to represent us atparish level become irrelevant and incapable of engaging with the local community? In the Travelling Pantry workshops all around the country, time and time again I was given examples of local community centres in the control of ‘the community’, where they had become virtually inaccessible to anyone within those communities due to local power dynamics and not-so-benign administering of this power.  And the current lack of local democratic engagement favours this dynamic, but instead of trying to fix this, we keep starting another group!

Enter the government’s plans to introduce hundreds of ‘community organisers’. And while the people involved continue to explain that not all community organising is based on conflict-style Alinsky principles (about which I have already blogged), these tactics are still reported to be part of the tool kit. Whatever the tactic - they will be trying to stimulate some sort of local activism, sometimes using dissatisfaction as a tool for doing this. They will be trying to pressure local authorities for more, more of whatever is felt to necessary.  When I attended the launch of a report called ‘The New ‘Neighbourhood Army’’ on community organisers at NESTA recently the message was clearly ‘they won’t be shying away from conflict’.  It was rather depressing to hear from several people in the room currently working in local authorities that they already had concerns for their personal safety with the level of existing activism being demonstrated towards the councils over cuts. Is this what we really want ... by deliberate design?

If you haven't read them, here are the 12 'Rules for Radicals' written by Saul Alinsky so you can make up your own mind. 

Social design (and that is what we are talking about on this scale) needs to be ethical and positive throughout the process and take full responsibility for side-effects.   Wining or achieving results, but breaking the social capital and weakening the 'collaborative capacity' in a community as a result should not be 'acceptable collateral damage' in a local setting.

Compare this to an approach that favours collaboration – something that so many local authorities really value.  You don’t have to look far to find it – here here and here for example.  Conflict and collaboration strategies find it very hard to sit side-by-side one another.  They are frequently, though not always, diametrically opposed. As I blogged earlier in this week in several posts, communities, like organisations, develop an emotional climate, and we create that climate collectively with every conversation we have.  Communities, just like people, can also take on a collective persona – sometimes calm and other times jumpy and reactive.  A national climate of Hyperactivism could be created in no time with the combination of initiatives (and withdrawal of other initiatives).  By Hyperactivism I mean 'a heightened sense of', but also 'out of control' as with hyperinflation, which develops self-perpetuating vicious circles  – a hyper-reactive, hyper-vigilant atmosphere that can lead to unconstructive activism and potentially violence. The term could also be a play on the word hyperactive, implying overly, unusually or unnecessarily active.

It is not without its ironies that the same week we have a full-scale riot around a Tesco Express, complete with hand made petrol bombs, the People’s Supermarket in Camden held their first AGM  with over 100 people in attendance – where lots of yellow papers were waved about for voting purposes but nothing actually thrown. 

It is not that I am afraid of anger any more – although it often proves to be a bit pointless, self-indulgent and destructive - and I have particularly low patience with 'the permanently outraged'.  It’s that these repeating and predictable negative human dynamics that glorify conflict simply don’t deliver. That is the primary reason I am so drawn to creative and collaborative approaches instead.  Projects that draw people together – whole communities at a time rather than pockets of confident and strident individuals – do, I believe, offer the promise of being much more effective over time at giving us the types of communities and society that we would all prefer – and the sort of society that addresses the many social justice issues so many of us are passionate about.

I am sure every Prime Minister of Britain goes to sleep dreaming of World Peace.  Having read Tony Blair’s autobiography it is easy to see that World Peace is easier dreamt than created.  In his own story you witness how a little too much information here, and little too little information there, plus a bit of general confusion and a totally overwhelming sense of personal conviction, led an extraordinary national leader to design his own political downfall.  But when I visualise this in my mind, and I have read Peter Mandelson’s and Alastair Campbell’s accounts too, I imagine a man struggling, perhaps seated at a desk, his brow furrowed, head in hands, trying very hard to get it all right.

I see the possibility of an emerging cartoon of David Cameron – perhaps seated cross-legged on a Cloud of Happiness – Steve Hilton reading out loud to him from the Wonderful Wonders of Chaos Theory – perhaps making some union jack bunting with one hand, while with the other casually lighting the fuse of a giant fire cracker created so carelessly from a lack of integrated thinking, plunged into the heart of the country’s map – perhaps in large print the words Hyperactivism Rocks – and below in smaller print the words ‘co-designed with the help of the apathy of the Liberal Democrats and the having-a-little-rest-from-all-this Labour Party’.

Big Society: Artists, Transformation and Collaboration

It took artists Jaap Verheul and Kamiel Verschuren two years to get the wording of the contacts right, but now they manage a project in Rotterdam called the NAC Foundation. The foundation now looks after 200 previously empty or squatted houses and lets artists occupy them as studios for a small service charge.  It has taken 10 years overall to develop the project to where it is now… and it started by approaching a Rotterdam housing association with an idea to start improving an area. In the Netherlands housing associations are vitally important, having built and managed whole neighbourhoods after the war.  Some of these neighborhoods have since been pulled down and replaced.  But they cannot pull down without a plan and funding in place to re-build immediately.

So in one particular area of Rotterdam the buildings had been neglected and become a problem with squatting, some with artists… but also with prostitution and drugs.  So the proposition that Kamiel and Jaap gave to the housing association was to transform the area into a place where artists could live and work.  And the housing association agreed, on condition that they had one organization to deal with…and so began the drafting of the first user contract that took 2 years to get right.

 

It also involved asking a lot of people to vacate the houses they were squatting in.  Jaap describes it as a ‘tsunami’ of bad feeling that was directed towards them during this period, but ultimately what they have achieved is completely stunning.   They have transformed the area into an oasis of beauty and calm.  Taking each house in turn they were renovated and made safe, sometimes in a whole street at a time.  The area was best described as a ghetto previously – low education and 44% unemployment.

They have reserved a number of houses as common spaces, which anyone in the local community can use for free.  These have become venues that 'generate a public life’ that was completely missing before.  People use these social spaces for events and meetings, workshops and art showings.

The foundation has spread to working in other nearby areas, setting up community gardens, after school education, language lessons (the area is only 20% Dutch).

So they have cleaned up the area and created a cheap and beautiful place for artists to live and work. They have transformed a ghetto through their imagination and grueling hard work.  And very importantly they have also been supported all along the way by the housing association.  The trusting relationship they have developed is a model for how authorities and citizens might work together in new ways to create thriving communities.  The value is evident to the housing authority: Jaap and Kamiel have transformed the area in a way they never could have. They give new meaning to the term 'social artist'.

In the post earlier in the week I questioned whether neighbourhood revitalisation of this sort, citizen initiated, rather than developer-led, still counted as 'gentrification'.  As I said - I am not sure it is - because it seems to reflect a new sense of value people are putting on 'contributing neighbourhoods', places where people are intrinsically involved in shaping the area.  It probably did move some of the problems onto another area, but it changed a neighbourhood from almost unbearable to sustaining in a very real and meaningful way.  I also described Willem's and Nol's project in Rotterdam where a 'presence' can be used to spread a warmth and sense of welcome that makes a neighbourhood feel different. Whatever these 2 projects are doing - they are doing something very inspiring in my view.

*Thank you* to Kamiel and Jaap and Maurice for giving me so much time to show me around and describe the project!

Big Society: Protective Factors, Systems Thinking and People Power

Many people don’t like Big Society because it is very easy to draw a direct line to cuts.  If citizens are more involved, then less government staff will be needed to run services.  But there are some people, myself included, who believe that if people were more involved in their communities that society would actually be better - not diminished.

Embedded in some perspectives on Big Society is the possibility of citizen involvement being the key to solving some serious intractable problems on which our systems have made limited impression.  These include things such as youth offending, substance abuse, depression and loneliness.

In education special attention is paid to environmental factors in development. Urie Bronfenbrenner integrated much of the research in developmental psychology into the Ecological Systems Theory.

This model acknowledges how important our immediate environment and the overall social culture is to your behaviours.  Further work and research has also identified that there are ‘protective factors’ involved in people thriving in the world.  Our current focus on ‘resilience’ also stems from understanding what that looks like close up.  Below is a chart I have borrowed from a paper by Colleen McLaughlin of Cambridge School of Education, which describes some of these protective factors.  The opposite of protective factors are risk factors.

I have also come to the thinking that Big Society and more citizen involvement could be better than service provision from my experiences working for Youth Offending. Here I witnessed first hand how impotent the system was to make meaningful change for many of these young people.  And the system was trying really hard to do just that.  Small infractions of acceptable social behaviours are picked up on the early warning system.  Young people are instantly surrounded by a number of different services, from education to social services to health services.  They have long meetings with their parents in police stations. 

But ultimately they are problematic and are often living is social circumstances where they are shunned by the community, the schools try their best to exclude them as fast as possible.  I know that this isn't because the schools simply don't want these types of pupils to slant their statistics, but it becomes very hard to explain to a fundamentally nice, but increasingly lost, young person who you are trying re-engage with some positive vision of their own future. There may be multiple government safety nets but there are so few community embedded safety nets.  Often these families are totally isolated by their problems.  And this is not about scolding young people for being rowdy in public places.  This is about communities knowing one another, people who are used to working together, who look for opportunities for young people (and all people) to contribute to the overall wellbeing and prosperity of those communities.  As many services I saw surrounding a young person I saw nothing that would even begin to start to replace any real sense of care, the care we give one another without being paid. 

There are some very big questions about Big Society that remain unanswered - but they are certainly worth the time and effort needed to answer them. If some of these difficult problems cannot really be touched by government services in any meaningful way, how do we foster this sort of 'community' as a protective factor? Secondly, but an equally important question: where are the plans to really understand if this 'community' does have a proper and measurable impact on these larger intractable problems? Matthew Taylor questioned this very strongly in his post The irredeemable anecdotalism of the Big Society - and many people are agreeing!

 

Big Society: Emotion Contagion, Presence and Social Objects

In yesterday’s post I talked about how ideas spread and the role of emotions in motivating us to *do* social things.  If we can effect each other’s physiology by simply being in the same room (groups start to share moods within 2 hours), then what impact do we have on one another in a community?  We have all been in meetings where one participant has lifted or supressed the mood – what if certain individuals could do this on a larger scale?

Are some people more able to effect a change in emotional climate than others? The answer is yes.  Some studies have suggested that in an organisational context about 50% - 70% of perceptions of climate can be tracked back to the leader.  Think also of the impact of a teacher’s emotional contagion on a class of students.

There are a great many experiments being done in communities at the moment – some of them on a fairly large scale.  There  are people popping up all over the UK right now armed with post-its (and lego!) trying out different ways of enthusing local people to get more involved in their communities.  Some of these models are radically different. Some are pointed more on competition for  resources and pressure. Others, such as Travelling Pantry, focus more on collaboration and drawing together existing resourcefulness to develop connecting projects. However, whatever the approach they all use emotion (negative or positive) to some degree. They all aim to excite and energise people and show them possibilities of civic involvement.

When Nick Booth, Maurice Specht and myself sat talking to Willem Giezeman (right in pic above) in a sunny room facing the street in  Stagehuis Schilderswijk in The Hague a couple of weeks ago, I was fascinated to hear about the approach they have taken.  Willem and Nol (left in pic above) occupied this large house with the Catholic Church on the one side and the Mosque on the other.  They didn’t do anything except sit visibly in the front room drinking cups of tea.  They were being a ‘presence’. And slowly but surely people started to make enquiries about what they were doing. 

Now the house is alive with people coming and going and projects mushrooming everywhere you look: sports clubs, internships, language lessons, events…

And this isn’t just another clever way of infiltrating communities and gaining trust.  Willem and Nol are citizens who volunteer to this project.  They are not imposing on this community, they are an integral part of it.  The welcoming and relaxed atmosphere they have created is not the same as a professionally run community centre – this house is truly a ‘common space’…  a new type of ‘public space’ as they describe in the Netherlands. 

As well as doing activities, their presence is clearly having other effects.  I am currently very focused on side-effects – ones that we measure, but also ones that we don’t think to pay much attention to.  It is one of the reasons I am so intent on developing new creative and collaborative methods (see some further discussion on this on Matthew Taylor’s blog), rather than conflict driven ones.  Conflict has a negative wake, often fracturing communities regardless of the results.

I suggest that Willem’s and Nol’s benign presence is creating bridging social capital and a contagious and soothing balm in this neighbourhood.  The position of their building is literally forming a bridge between 2 faiths.  Nick Booth described their presence as ‘taking the tensions away’.  They are certainly changing how the neighbourhood 'feels' - their gentle approach to leadership is having an impact - one that emerges slowly from the connections and relationships that their social space has created.

For Women’s Day 3 years ago they made this outdoor sofa.  Women from both the church and the Mosque, and lots of others, came together for weeks to mosaic this ‘social object’.  Literally Making is Connecting!

What motivates and drives Willem to do this work?  “When I saw a Moslem girl and a Catholic girl giggling together in the doorway the other day … that makes this worth while”

Naturally I gave both Social Artist in Residence badges!

And how many people have keys to the building?  We are sworn to secrecy!

Watch out for Nick Booth's interview with Willem which I am sure he will be posting soon!

 

 

Big Society: Admiration, idea spreading and gentrification

(Pic FARM:shop)

I don't know if this is more or less than the average person but immersed as I am in people's socially driven creative projects I am probably more exposed to experiencing admiration than average. This blog, Hand Made and the Travelling Pantry project have all been deliberate efforts to uncover and share new and interesting projects by people from around the world (via positive deviance approach), but these stories and ideas have had profound effect on my own work, most of which have been around spreading ideas and observing the effects of this.

In Travelling Pantry workshops I describe this as almost being ‘infected’ by ideas. And if violence can be spread like a virus (see disease specialist Gary Slutkin's Pop!Tech video for his work in reducing violence in Chicago), can positive action work the same way?

I have been thinking quite a lot about this recently in the context of my work around cognition and emotion and I was prompted to write this by the Mindapples training session Andy Gibson and I ran last week in Cardiff.

There has been a lot of research published over the last few years about socially related behaviours in networks on health and wellbeing. Levels of happiness have been shown to effect not only our friends but our friends friends.  On an even more subtle level we effect people physiologically by simply being in their company.  Research has shown that our blood pressure and heart rate synch with people when we are in the same space – and even when asleep patients have been seen to benefit physically from the presence of another person in the room.  There is lots of evidence that emotional contagion impacts us physically on an unconscious level and some of this understanding of cognition and emotion is embedded in ‘nudge’ strategies.  [If you want to delve into your unconscious and discover if you have some hidden biases, even to yourself, try the Implicit Association Test.]

What about more important deliberate and conscious human mechanisms – ones which drive you do big things, not simply choose salad or tick the right box on life insurance – how exactly does that work?  Andy wrote recently about the misalignment between unconsciously ‘nudging’ and the sort of motivations and drives that Big Society will require to be successful.

Last time I looked you couldn’t be ‘nudged’ to commit to large projects, even in the most exciting circumstances many involve long and frequently excruciatingly boring meetings.  You have to have a really good idea why you want to be doing these things – a vision in your own mind about how your efforts might transform, not just push paper around or talk about how to make others transform.

Which leads me to introduce one of my favourite neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Mary Helen works as assistant Professor, unusually across two departments,  Education and Psychology, Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.  She is pretty awesome I can tell you.  When I attended the Mind, Brain and Education conference in  a couple of years ago, Prof Jennifer McCrickerd from Drake Uni and myself spent the whole two days following Mary Helen's talks, stopping *just* shy of asking her for an autograph (yes, nothing sadder than neuro-groupies). Not only is Mary Helen a particularly engaging speaker she has an incredible combination of knowledge, having first worked as a high school teacher, then receiving her doctorate from Harvard University Graduate School of Education before moving to USC to work with Antonio Damasio, who is the formost researcher on emotion and the brain.  She also does a lot of research on topics that really interest me.

Two studies that she has worked on examine the effects of the complex emotions associated with ‘admiration’. Evidence has shown that having admiration for another person’s good work can act as personal motivator to behave in a similar fashion.

“Social emotions like admiration for another person’s virtue play a critical role in interpersonal relationships and moral behavior, and often lead to a sense of heightened self-awareness that is profoundly motivating (i.e. the desire to be virtuous and to accomplish meaningful actions despite difficult obstacles; Haidt & Seder, 2007). Our recent study of the brain and psychophysiological correlates of experiencing admiration revealed that the feeling of this complex, culturally constructed, motivating emotion involves not only high-level ‘‘cognitive” systems, but also the neural systems for the feeling of one’s own body, especially the gut and viscera (Immordino-Yang et al., 2009)."

You can read the two published studies here and here. 

I found the experience of going into communities and groups around the UK, hearing people’s ideas and feeling the energy incredibly inspiring, so much so that I was relieved to take a break around Christmas.  It was almost overwhelming. I was reminded of exactly this powerful feeling last week in Rotterdam at an event where several people described their social projects in detail.  Nick Booth and I had been invited to the Netherlands for 3 days of presentations and workshops on the Bottom Up aspects of Big Society by marvellous Maurice Specht - pic below from our breakfast presentation. We were fortunate to visit a couple of totally amazing projects which I will blog about in detail very soon. 

The point I wanted to make here is that admiration is really motivating. So why do I find nearly all concepts of ‘motivational speakers’ so unappealing?  It is not that I don’t admire people sailing around the world or walking to the north pole.  They are often expressions of fortitude and inner human strength and this is admirable in itself.  But if these efforts aren’t directed towards the good of other people I find them a bit pointless to be honest.  The studies around ‘admiration’ also firmly point to a very biological human response to ‘meaningful’ and ‘virtuous’ actions.

Yvonne Roberts wrote very memorably in 2008 “Diffusion is the valley of death for social innovation.” This is very true in many ways and is the core of our current frustrations with ‘scaling up’ - both for social enterprise projects and community-led activities. “Can it be replicated?’ is the first question asked of any idea… as if a social project’s only hope of impact is to model itself on Starbucks growth principles.  I have spent some considerable time (and many emails) considering ideas around ‘social franchising’ myself.  How do we maximize the genius effects of ideas that connect communities so creatively such as Pie Lab or Trade School?  How do they protect their ethical and creative integrity?  How do they use replication as a model for sustaining their projects without commercialising them a way that negatively effects the core of what they are doing?

But there are also some very interesting things going on in some communities.  David Gauntlett (Co-founder of Social Spaces - please see his fantastic new book Making is Connecting) and I had the great pleasure of meeting Rob Hopkins of Transition before Christmas.  Among many interesting things he said was the point that the house prices have gone up in Totnes, Devon, home of Rob and Transition, and that this has been attributed at least in part to the high density of community activity. 

And there are other places which show similar signs of activity inspiring further activity. Places such as Brixton, Brighton, Brooklyn, Bristol, Sheffield … where creative citizen-led activity is spreading.  Are we encouraged by the social artistry of others? And are we slowing beginning to really recognize this?  I was so delighted to hear that Dan Thompson of Artists and Makers has won the award of ‘Unsung Coastal Hero’ in the Coast Awards 2011 and that Melanie Bryan from Why Not Change recently won a Big Society Award.  What I like about Melanie and Dan is that they are doing the *work* on the ground, not just talking about it.  They are of course brilliant people, but they also focus on doing really meaningful but simple projects, which anyone with the motivation could do themselves. They aren't trying to be heros, or build 'tribes', or any of that nonsense... they are doing their *thing*... which happens to have rather wonderful effects.

There are signs that certainly some people want to live in vibrant communities where they can have some role in making and shaping those places - rather than in more 'serviced' communities? If the house prices are going up in these areas because people obviously enjoy the fresh opportunities to contribute created by these simple but imaginative projects, isn’t that ‘gentrification’?  The effects are pretty similar, and likely over time the negative effects of regeneration might be similar i.e. prices become prohibitive to local people.  Time will tell. What is different though is that these communities are beginning to look and feel homegrown and handmade - very different to ones that have been regenerated by developers. There is a whole new aesthetic developing around these communities too – which is quite far away from the ‘hippy’ look and feel we are used to associating with community and environmental projects (except in Totnes perhaps where there seem to quite a lot of *lovely* hippies).  I don’t think it is ‘open source’ place-making which David Barrie describes so well in this fantastic article either?

So what is it – how do we label it, dissect it and describe it? 

If installing solar panels is contagious, can even our smallest positive actions have motivating effects for others? Are we actually inspiring ourselves and each other by what we are *doing*?

I was reminded again of the description from InCUBATE in Chicago (currently spreading Sunday Soups for community micro-granting), that they are interested in 'experimental practices that assume responsibility in making the world around us instead of critiquing it from afar.'

[Poster below from Anthony Burrill]

Open publication - Free publishing - More big society

The Laundry Project

The Laundromat Project is a community-based public art non-profit that brings arts programming to laundromats in the Greater New York area through two core programs: Create Change Public Artist Residency and Works in Progress. Both programs seek to raise the quality of life for people whose incomes do not guarantee broad access to mainstream arts and cultural facilities.

Totally brilliant!