Public opinion: Your blogs

Pink shoots of recovery

I bought my first forced rhubarb of the year yesterday. For those of you not in the know forced rhubarb is a bit of a Yorkshire thing - it's either grown in mysterious candle lit sheds, or, on a smaller scale, under a terracotta cloche.

The darkness tricks the plant …

The secrets to Obama’s campaign fundraising

Barack Obama admitted at last year's Democratic Convention that he may not be the obvious choice to run for president. While he could have been referring to a number of things, in this instance he was talking about his career background. With only four years as a senator, some saw …

Time for a new start

20 years of innovative casino capitalism has left us in a mess!

Coupled with the ongoing environmental problems, there are going to be hard times for our local communities and neighbourhoods.

However, let’s look to the future and start forging the upturn from the downturn.

The present situation offers us …

Ministers must provide claimants with high quality tailored support

The Welfare Reform Bill has finally arrived with new promises of tailored support for claimants couched in the language of ‘rights and responsibilities’.

While we are used to public cynicism about whether politicians are as good as their word, we would all like to believe that the promises of high …

Can personalisation survive the credit crunch?

One of the big ideas in public services reform in recent years has been the need for greater personalisation.

A key driver for this was the sense that public services had to catch up with an increasingly demanding public that expects the same options, flexibility and targeted information from their …

Stepping on third sector toes

I do quite a lot of work with third sector organisations which are exploring what they might call "becoming a social enterprise".

That tends to mean developing a new service, or selling an existing service to a new customer group.

One phrase I hear a lot is "We don't want …

Stunningly simple

The ColaLife idea starts with two quite startling facts: 1) in developing countries, 1 in 5 children die before their fifth birthday from simple causes such as dehydration from diarrhoea, that's 4 a minute in Africa alone, or 5,500 a day and 2) you can buy a Coca-Cola virtually anywhere, even in developing countries. The idea is that we use the amazing Coca-Cola distribution channels to get simple medicines, like Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS), out to the places where they would save children's lives.

Goodwill Hunting

As I write, retailers around the world will be anxiously doing their sums, wondering whether they've got any chance of making it through until next Christmas, or maybe even next week. It's obvious that Woolies won't be the last retailer to go to the wall.

The potential of local communities has been neglected in Scotland

For 30 years I was a community worker mostly in the house estates of Scotland. Since the early 1990s, increasingly municipalist Labour administrations north of the border moved against independent communities to bring them back under council control. To its shame, the community development profession up here turned its back on these communities and went to work for the state.

2009: it can only get better

I'm writing this on officially the most stressful day of the year, Monday January 5 (a psychologist says so, so it must be true) but since it will be posted on Tuesday 6 all of the stress levels should already be reducing. That's the theory anyway. But it's clear that as we enter 2009 we will all face many challenges, and readers of New Start will find that these challenges are not only personal but include all the challenges that the current economic and funding climate places on the communities we're working in.