Public opinion: Your blogs

Phoenix from the flames: the rebirth of Rhyl

It is my sad duty to report the closure of the West Rhyl Community Company (WRCC) due to financial difficulties and lack of funding.

WRCC has, for the past eight years, worked very positively for the community of Wales’s most deprived ward, providing the local community with a voice, a voice that may otherwise have gone unheard. The company has taken on all issues of concern ranging from livability issues to environmental concerns. The work they have done has been outstanding.

In a ward where child poverty is currently 80% it has provided a children’s activity project, a parent and toddler project and activities for children during the school holidays. It has provided computer access to all members of the community at their premises. Its neighbourhood workers project, that has been active for the past three years, has provided the community with a link to the authorities as well as other local and national organisations and during this time carried out an in depth survey of the needs and desires of the local community.

Indeed, the project appeared on the Channel 4 programme The Secret Millionaire and its neighbourhood workers were honoured as community champions by the prime minister at 10 Downing Street in 2009.

Having been employed by WRCC for almost four years as a neighbourhood worker, I would like to say a big thank you to my partner in crime Tony Cheetham, our company secretary Julie Simmonds and a very special thank you to Lynne Hudson our managing director. Lynne has put in hundreds of unpaid volunteer hours and has been the mainstay of the company from day one. I sincerely hope she will continue to be involved in community work. We cannot afford to lose her expertise.

Self-sustainability has always been a major problem for third sector organisations and much larger ones than WRCC have failed due to lack of funding.

Rhyl has seen a great many changes during its relatively brief lifetime. From the halcyon days as a Victorian seaside resort to the ‘cheap and cheerful’ boom in domestic holidays during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Sadly, the current situation of poor quality accommodation, a high proportion of Houses in Multiple Occupation, absent landlords, poor facilities and high levels of poverty all add to a bleak landscape with poor street lighting and litter strewn alleys.

A once thriving area, it now defines perfectly the term Dickensian. Housing, accommodation and the visual appearance of the neighbourhood now make us a poor relation to other seaside resorts along the North Wales coast.

However, all is not lost. The Welsh Assembly Government is injecting millions of pounds into its Strategic Regeneration Area and Rhyl is a priority. Poor housing is being bought up and either demolished or retro fitted and new green spaces developed. At the same time a new community company called West Rhyl First is being formed, of which I am proud to be one of the founders.

I look forward to writing about the rebirth of a seaside town and I hope you will follow the story as it unfolds.

The March issue of New Start magazine reported on Rhyl in its feature Revisiting the poorest.

 

Social franchising - replicating the ‘magic dust’

I’ve been involved in the replication of social enterprises and co-operatives since 1998: as a member of a worker co-op that was licensed from another successful original worker co-op (which led to my being asked by some to comment on the failure of the Whole food Planet franchise that was based loosely on it earlier this year); as a manager of one of the regions of the ill-fated Aspire: the first attempt at creating a formal franchised social enterprise in every region of the country; involvement in the national social franchising programmes that ran in the early 00’s; and in supporting groups to evaluate social franchise offers as well as developing their own.

In all these instances I’ve been struck by the baggage associated with the phrase 'franchise' – people seem to think that the only way to replicate a successful model is to do a McDonalds on it, but actually there are lots of ways that such enterprises can be replicated and duplicated elsewhere.

I recently participated in a 2-day residential on social enterprise replication run by Unltd Advantage – a welcome opportunity to reflect on my own knowledge and experience built up from firsthand experience and self-directed learning (especially as I’m currently writing a 5,000 word essay that will be critiquing current theories, models and tools for social franchising).

And while the formal content may not have offered much new that I hadn’t already educated myself in, including how we identify and recreate the ‘magic dust’ that makes our enterprises successful, the opportunity to spend some time exclusively immersed in the subject matter, and to share stories and ideas amongst the other participants did make me realise something.

Despite there being a multitude of models through which successful models of social enterprise can increase their impact in ways that they could never do if they remained as a single entity, the biggest threat to this being achieved is our egos.

People can be extremely precious about the enterprise model they’ve developed and aren’t always happy about the chance that in offering it ‘out there’ in some way for replication in ways other than in very formal command and control ways on their part, perhaps there’s a fear that they’ll lose control of it, that maybe others may be able to improve on it, and that it will mean less reward and kudos for them personally and individually.

But if, as social entrepreneurs, we’re motivated primarily by the needs we see in society, shouldn’t we welcome any and all opportunities to increase the impact in addressing those, even if that means copying someone else’s model or accepting that our own approaches can be improved on?
 

Beyond the cloak and dagger approach to cohesion

Measuring community cohesion is never going to be a straightforward task. People and their intricate circumstances are difficult to place into tidy tick boxes.

It is widely recognised among regeneration organisations and local authorities that there is a nervousness about sharing findings about cohesion. It seems that unless research results are wholly positive with crystal clear recommendations, we are reluctant to promote them and open ourselves up for attack or expose our neighbourhoods as anything less than harmonious.

But this cloak and dagger approach to cohesion could mean that valuable lessons are being lost and that shared issues that could give warning signs about vulnerable communities are going under the radar.

At the housing market renewal pathfinder in Oldham and Rochdale we’ve taken up the challenge to change the culture on the complex conundrum that is community cohesion.

Transparency is the name of the game. With matched funding from the Tenant Services Authority’s innovation and good practice fund, with contributions from our two local authorities, we commissioned seven different cohesions projects which will be independently researched and evaluated. The findings will be revealed at a special conference in Manchester this month where we will launch a best practice website. The aim is for other organisations to use the website to share their findings and start a peer community where we can openly discuss what works and importantly what doesn’t.

We don’t expect this to be a quick fix to the challenge of creating cohesive communities. It’s a start towards getting a better understanding of some of the issues that can make a difference whether it be around the design of a housing development, mediating a dispute within a community or a philosophy project that builds bridges between the young and old.

We know that there are risks. Some of the findings will no doubt confirm that certain projects have not worked as expected and may expose some harsh realities and others may show some positive surprises. If we knew the answers from the outset, we wouldn’t be scrutinising them.

Striving to find and share best practice is even more relevant in a time of falling public sector resources. And now that all local authorities are expected to measure the impact of their activity for the new comprehensive area assessments (CAA), we think the conference and website will be extremely informative for anyone working in this field. We are mirroring the questions used in the national Place Survey, so that we can clearly demonstrate if perceptions have improved around those issues such as sense of belonging and satisfaction with a local area as a place to live.

The timing couldn’t be more crucial. It is widely assumed that the fall-out from the recession will strike the hearts of poorer communities and it’s likely that from next year a lot of public sector support for these areas could also be withdrawn. There is a serious concern that this increased polarisation could have detrimental effects on cohesion, creating tensions between communities as the allocation of resources comes into sharper focus. The best practice learned from organisations around the country will hopefully help us all to get smarter about how we invest in and tackle those tensions.

To find out more about the Cohesion Counts conference on 25 March visit www.cih.org/events/conferences/CohesionCounts10.

 

Parish councils: an unlikely hothouse for community development?

I know participatory budgeting is, to many, a rather artificial, over-engineered and fashionable an approach to community development.

To a ruralist, like me, it might also appear to be exotically urban with its case studies and heritage from Porto Allegre, Berlin, Seville and closer to home in London, Newcastle and Southampton.

But last month I spent a few hours hearing how participatory budgeting is beginning to flourish in the perhaps unlikely hot house environment of parish and town councils.

In a small seminar hosted by the National Association of Local Councils and the Participatory Budgeting Unit I heard how parish councils in Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Cheshire and Herefordshire are exploring participatory budgeting. The results are leading to more interest and engagement from previously apathetic local residents. It is resulting in the novel situation (for some places) of local people actually talking to each other about local issues. Sometimes it is also bringing together the principal local authorities and the parish and town councils, together with their respective councillors, in more supportive relationships than before.

County Associations of Local Councils are finding participatory budgeting a great way of energising their member councils. And the more I hear of their experience, the more it makes sense. Parish and town councils are often the right scale to deploy participatory budgeting. They usually cover distinct geographical communities and their councillors know many local people and are able to mobilise them into participating, into deciding how public money should be spent locally. Whether this is local people’s own money (the parish precept added on to their Council Tax bills) or else some external pot of money.

Yes, there are still challenges aplenty. From suspicious councillors to dyed in the old wool parish clerks. But the results are starting to confound sceptics. In particular, participatory budgeting, when done well, leads to plenty of enthusiasm for projects and those projects being far more rooted in and owned by their local communities than would have been the case if they had been decided by public officials and by ‘the council’.

Some of us at the seminar began to explore whether this same approach to direct democracy could in future be applied to the Total Place initiative we keep hearing so much about. For example, using the structures of parish and town councils to pull local people together to help decide how public budgets should be spent locally. And ‘locally’ in this context should mean a defined geographical community such as a village or a town rather than a more distant local authority level.

Could directly involving local people in budget and allocation decisions, particularly during these tough times for public expenditure, be part of the answer to the democratic deficit evident in local representative democracy?

Further information on how participatory budgeting can and is working in rural England can be found in the recent report from the Commission for Rural Communities, ‘The experience of Participatory Budgeting in rural England’. This is downloadable from: http://www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk/events/participatorybudgeting
 

Is green consumerism a numbers game?

Lies, damn lies and statistics – the famous phrase popularised by Mark Twain popped into my head during a recent conference.

Not, I hasten to add, because I thought anyone involved was lying.

It was, in fact, as a result of the way one of the speakers at the Economist’s third annual sustainability conference used some statistics that, on first glance, looked really impressive, before going on to reveal the bigger picture.

Unilever chief executive Paul Polman told delegates how the super-brand, and home of everything from tea bags to toothpaste, had cut its direct environmental impacts. Since 1995, he said, Unilever had slashed CO2 emissions from energy by more than 40%, waste by nearly three quarters and water by 65%.

Pretty impressive figures. But put them in context, as he went on to do, and the rest of the story is revealed.

The company’s direct environmental impacts make up just 3% of Unilever’s total carbon footprint.

Around a quarter comes from Unilever’s raw materials and the supply chain. But the main chunk, some 70%, is generated by consumers using Unilever products to cook, wash their clothes and clean their homes – and then disposing of them.

That’s a big figure. And here’s an even bigger one - on Unilever’s website it states that ‘160 million times a day, someone, somewhere chooses a Unilever product.’

Hundreds of millions of products plus 70% of total carbon footprint is quite an alarming equation.

Mr Polman’s point was clear. They may have made inroads into cutting the carbon contribution of their facilities but it’s not just the environmental cost of sourcing, making and distributing these products – it’s we, the punters, using the detergent or heating and eating the soup and what we do with the packaging afterwards.

‘We know that consumers will not compromise on price, quality or convenience for “greenness,”’ Mr Polman claimed. ‘Sustainability has to be built in to the design of the product.’

So how do you do that? Both Mr Polman and fellow speaker, Julian Walker-Palin of fellow brand behemoth Asda/Wal-Mart, talked about ‘choice editing’ whereby companies or governments make the climate change choice for consumers, such as Australia phasing out the standard light bulb from the market in favour of energy efficient alternatives.

If an entire continent switches to energy-saving measures and 160 million people opt for the detergent with a third less packaging, therefore taking a third of trucks off the road, then those choices start to add up.

Or to put it another way, Mr Polman suggested a slightly more upbeat equation:

Consumer products X Small everyday actions X Billions of people = A big difference.

Which is the kind of ‘math’ we should all like.