Big Society: principled protest or vested interest?
The default position in much of the larger charity sector seems to veer between falsely claiming it has always and forever championed local unpaid community action, or a visceral resentment that there in no longer any money to be had as preferred arm’s length contractors of the state.
As we all now know, that particular gravy train has left the station and won’t be coming back anytime soon. I’ve been surprised by how many smaller groups have been saying good riddance in the face of the demise of their larger peers.
And this is precisely because there is a serious lack of humility and reflection on how well the voluntary sector shared its wealth, and pushed power downwards, at a time when it had plenty of it. Likewise there is often a lack of planning for cuts that any and every government would make, regardless of party ideology.
These are horrible times for public and voluntary sector folk alike as the redundancies come in waves of misery. But by protesting about the unexpected scale of the cuts we may be missing the point not only about the internal voluntary sector monopoly market, but the wider global one.
At a recent talk by Danny Dorling at Cabe he made the memorable comment that we could get rid of the deficit in many ways if we had a mind to; simply taxing the thousand richest people in our country more proportionately would go a long way. I’d add that closer attention to money laundering, which accounts for 5% of global financial transactions, might be an idea, along with closure of the most gratuitous off shore banks and tax avoidance industries, rather than recent encouragement of what amounts to little more than white collar crime. (Peter Mandelson: New Labour is deeply relaxed about people being filthy rich).
We need a radically different set of economic arrangements and this is what we should be putting our energies into. The Better Banking Coalition shines a light on an aspect of this; what we need is the social movement across society to demand change, which would mean a new set of behaviours from our sector beyond being organisationally predatory, mimicking the more unhealthy elements of private sector practice.
Some of us have always been political; others may have to go on crash course of activism. And not only the activism by formula brands and government are now turning to but hard won experience that comes from fighting in a much wider inclusive way.
For years the old school community workers saw any kind of politics stripped out, and were labelled as dinosaurs. The bland market and management models packaged as community capacity building were sold to the sector and then rejected by community groups who didn’t see the point.
There has been a massive failure of inappropriate top down voluntary sector infrastructure – we need to own that before we think about complaining about cuts. Credit to the great work that has taken place, by many small, medium and occasionally large outfits, but in the scheme of things, most local groups, most of the time will tell a different story about how little support was on offer and where the money actually went.
Sadly that local support and development will inevitably become even less and is worth fighting for but if we are going to fight and win, we need to know exactly where we have reached, and know when we are on strong ground, and when we are weak.
All of society would benefit, including the Big Society, from a confident, determined and united voluntary and community sector, but such a force would need to need to be far more reflective, innovative and equitable in its dealings with itself and others.
Posted on Wednesday, 28th July 2010 | This entry has 6 comments
Maria Harvey | Wednesday, 28th July 2010 | 03:50 PM
I’d be interested to find out more about the author, e.g. his experiences of working in the voluntary sector, and some examples of what he’s talking about. This just reads to me as vague whining with a slight bitter tone.
matt scott | Wednesday, 28th July 2010 | 04:15 PM
Happy to explain more; (email (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) sorry if it came across as negative. I’ve worked in the VCS for over 20 years in different parts of the country so some experience though not saying that makes me right. Plenty of places to go for evidence about some of this
shamsher chohan | Wednesday, 28th July 2010 | 06:13 PM
I think we will find more people in the voluntary sector whining due to the demise of their funding than community groups who never had any in the first place and who by and large will be unaffected by the cuts directly. They will be affected indirectly in addressing the gaps that come out of the cuts. I keep hearing people talk about the need to reinstate the case for infrastructure. Well, to be honest, I would say 10 years worth of capacity building still sees VCS infrastructure crying for more resources, still saying they need to prepare groups for commissioning and asset management. When is someone going to answer the question ‘What did the last 10 years achieve? Who has had their capacity built?’.
Maria Harvey | Thursday, 29th July 2010 | 08:55 AM
@Shamsher - the last ten years has also seen a massive rise in the bureaucracy attached to bidding for public sector funds. I’ve seen instances of smaller agencies having to close services simply because they couldn’t spare the work hours to make the applications. And all this in spite of The Compact. Each public sector fund has its own set of bidding rules and monitoring and evaluation procedures, usually completely different from each other and quite often measuring things which tell us nothing. The reason capacity building is still necessary is largely to do with this moving of the goalposts. Ask anyone who’s recently bid for Supporting People money and you’ll see what I mean.
Georgina Anstey | Friday, 30th July 2010 | 12:12 PM
The impact of investment in infrastructure is indeed a hot-topic at the moment. In my opinion and from anecdotal evidence, infrastructure has had an impact but has struggled to demonstrate it. Being a step, or sometimes 2 steps removed from the impact ‘on the ground’ has made it especially difficult for infrastructure organisations to show their ultimate impact.
Many Infrastructure organisations recognise the need to get better at knowing, showing and growing their impact and have been working with us on The Value of Infrastructure Programme to improve this. Together we’re creating online tools for infrastructure organisations to use to show their impact going forward. If all kinds of infrastructure organisations feed in their impact information through these tools then hopefully we can go some way to building the national picture of the ‘value of infrastructure’.
There needs to be an open and honest discussion about the value of infrastructure but this needs to be backed-up by real and considered evidence. If this does not exist already then the best we can do is work to build it from now.
andy benson | Saturday, 31st July 2010 | 06:27 PM
well I think you’re all right (‘cept challenging Matthew’s credentials - he has been round the block Maria). The history of the last 10 years is that the ‘community sector’ has been largely unsupported but greatly patronised by politicians and the ‘capacity building’ brigade, whilst the ‘voluntary sector’ has been made ‘fit for purpose’ by the ‘world class commissioning’ brigade. If you want to see the results of the latter have a look at our report on commissioning in WestSueesx - http://www.independentaction.net/?page_id=6223#more-6223
keep on keeping on,
Andy Benson