Susan Downer
In the UK we are familiar with public sector strategies, targets and initiatives to tackle child poverty – along with the usual complaints that the government isn’t dedicating enough resources to the cause.
On a recent visit to New York I encountered a private sector approach: the Great American Bake Sale.
It happened after I’d spent a day in Chelsea (an area of the city popular with the gay community) and discovered that it was indeed possible to have an entire shop dedicated to cup cakes. Still, my senses were slightly confused to hear a serious message about fighting child hunger while the image of a cup cake peered at me from the corner of my TV screen.
The idea is to encourage as many people as possible to hold a bake sale in their community (this year they’re encouraging healthy baking). Share Our Strength (SOS), the organisation behind the campaign, states that 12 million American children face hunger and declares that since 2003 $3m has been raised by around one million people who’ve baked, sold or bought goods.
It adds: ‘By participating in the Great American Bake Sale and supporting Share Our Strength, you can be a part of the team creating America’s first hunger-free generation. You have the power to make a difference in the lives of children in your own community and across the country.’
Mobilising people nationally through any voluntary activity is a way of defining national as well as individual values. It would, however, be truly sad, potentially dangerous and disempowering if western democracies like ours increasingly invited people to give money to charity, volunteer, fundraise or get involved in one sponsored event or another without making a corresponding effort to inform them about the systems we’ve set up, the political decisions governments take and the political action individuals can take to change the world they live in.
Without such effort we risk perpetuating a sense of hopelessness, reinforcing the idea that there are some things we can do – bake cup cakes, run for three miles on a Sunday afternoon, sign a petition, drop a few coins into a tin – and some things that are beyond us, ie influencing governments and changing systems. We don’t know how, why or where decisions are made. Our political systems seem remote, untouchable and frankly boring. Efforts are being made to revive democracy in the UK through double devolution, citizens’ juries, community courts and so on. If it works, it will be more than just the icing on the cake.
Details: www.strength.org/what/greatamericanbakesale
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Susan Downer’s assertion (blog, 25 May), that “democracies like ours” should “make an effort to inform [people] about the systems we have set up” and about “the political actions individuals can take to change the world they live in”, was food for thought.
However, the general idea that, if people are not participating in systems, that’s because they are not informed (rather than because the systems are inadequate), seems to me debatable.
For example, when it comes to ways in which I and my neighbours can control what happens in our neighbourhood, what is lacking is any system for us to do it.
In the past few years, many structural changes have been made in the part the city where I live. The changes have all been made without my neighbours or myself being warned, let alone being given a chance to debate the changes among ourselves and express a collective view on them.
We have no system that would allow us to make, and debate, our own proposals for change in the neighbourhood. There’s no system that would allow us to decide what services we want (regardless of whether service contracts are given by the council to commercial, or voluntary, organisations). There’s no system that would allow us to decide collectively whether we wanted to issue a (so-called) “community” call for action.
Last autumn’s government white paper on local democracy did take a step forward, by saying that local authorities can set up neighbourhood councils (using the existing rules of parish councils), at the authorities’ initiative or in response to a petition from neighbourhoods. But these proposals are as yet given very low priority by the government.