A blog by Hastings resident Jess Steele, recording her reaction to hearing the news that Heritage Lottery Fund had just agreed to £11.4 million funding to restore the Hastings Pier.

Ba-Ba-Boom! Huzzah! Wow! OMG! Thank the Gods!
Sometimes when things work out well we can hardly believe it’s because of us. We want to feel the thunderbolt and praise Thor!
But you know what? It wasn’t Thor. I know for definite that it’s all down to the dogged persistence of local people. Tell the story one way and it’s a classic Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” but tell the true story and it’s actually loads of people – the whole of Hastings and our allies far beyond.
This pier is going to make a lot of differences. It’s a catalyst, and it’s ours, all of ours. That’s what’s so brilliant about it – it’s classless, ageless, baggage-free, it really is for everyone.
This will transform Hastings, slowly and with lots of help. I know that there are business people thinking of investing; there are artists who want to make something happen; there are local residents who met their husbands and wives long ago on the pier who want to rekindle; there are people waiting for jobs and the chance to learn something right here at home, there are anglers who will catch the biggest fish; there are teenagers wanting to snog; and somewhere there’s a couple who love each other very much who are waiting till the pier is rebuilt to get married.
The People’s Pier is on its way. I’m just fit to burst with pride and happiness.
Jess
Click here for the report from the Hastings Pier and White Rock Trust’s website and a glimpse of what the new pier will look like

Volunteers from communities within the National Park were honoured at an awards ceremony in Drymen at the weekend.
The awards, which recognise the amazing work being carried out at a grassroots level in communities across the park, were held as part of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs Community Partnership annual Gathering event.
More than eighty people representing local development trusts, community councils and other community groups got together to share experience, information and to celebrate their successes.
The volunteer awards acknowledge the work of individuals and groups within the park who have contributed greatly to the development and enhancement of their communities.
This year’s winners were Gartmore Hall Development Group for their tireless dedication and success in raising one million pounds to completely refurbish their community hall and Croftamie Community who as a whole have worked together to build a strong and vibrant community in Croftamie – both won the Volunteer Team of the Year award; Callander Youth project who won Initiative of the Year for the redevelopment of their newly acquired Bridgend premises to create an innovative youth hub; Jimmy Quinn and Isla Craig both won Community Volunteer of the Year – Jimmy for his time and commitment in keeping Aberfoyle’s public toilets open and operating in all weathers and Isla from Crianlarich who has driven forward their Crianlarich into Action plan.
The awards are sponsored each year by local businesses and organisations This year’s sponsors included: The Co-operative Group; Forestry Commission Scotland; The Green Welly Stop; Callander Enterprise and Friends of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.
Commenting on the winners, chair of the Community Partnership, Celia Burn from Gartocharn said: “These awards are all about acknowledging the fantastic work happening across the park to enhance, promote and develop our communities. The theme of this year’s Gathering event was ‘Realising Your Community Assets’ and there are no greater assets than the people who make our communities what they are.
“The Community Partnership works with individuals, groups and organisations providing support, advice and information to help them achieve their goals.
“When I see the wealth of talent, commitment and determination shown by our winners and all those communities nominated, it illustrates just what a valuable resource we have in our people. And it is essential that we continue to support them and to highlight the work they do.”
“Realising Your Community Assets” was the theme of The Gathering event this year. Speakers included Pam Warhurst from Todmorden in Yorkshire who founded Incredible Edible campaign. Pam inspired the audience to look at ways of growing and eating locally. She was joined by a number of communities from across the National Park who are looking at new and innovative ways of harnessing their community assets to bring direct benefits to Park people.
The audience also found out about Scotland’s Rural Parliament and about the Community Partnership’s new Apprenticeship Project which aims to bring opportunities to young people and small businesses in the Park in the tourism, land and food sectors.
Read more about the Community Partnership

Author: Scottish Environment Link

Executive Summary
 
This paper is a plea for a national consensus on a new goal of government.
 
Government faces an array of challenges, in environmental, social, and economic spheres.  Getting the relationship between these right is crucially important in a time of crisis and upheaval.
 
LINK argues that the current pre-occupation with economic growth is unduly distorting priorities; a shift of emphasis is required in the government’s ‘core purpose’.   The natural environment is the envelope in which we all live, relying on its many resources; all social and economic progress depends on the healthy functioning of this global commons.
 
Scotland shares a responsibility of environmental stewardship with other countries in the world. Failure of this stewardship means that the whole world now faces a catastrophe of mounting ecological debt, for which there is no bailout available.  
 
Scotland’s consumption patterns (double our fair share) are unsustainable and morally indefensible. Government acknowledges that this cannot continue; and yet it continues. 
 
As we wrestle with a crisis of financial debt, the pre-occupation with economic growth is allowed to take precedence over our duty to the rest of the world and future generations.  In what may seem an honourable quest for prosperity to fulfil our aspirations and meet our obligations, we are making matters worse. 
 
Scotland is not alone in this; it is a real dilemma for governments everywhere  – how to reconcile development aims with environmental obligations. But Scotland’s government aspires to lead the world, and in some respects is doing so. 
 
Taking the government at its word, LINK challenges it – and of course aspiring future governments – to do better, to match rhetoric with more effective action, starting with a re-definition of the core purpose of government to focus on sustainable wellbeing.
 
This is LINK’s contribution to an urgent and important debate about getting priorities right, and getting the economy back in perspective.
 
See full document  here

Author: Jennifer Wallace and Katie Schmuecker , 2012

At a time of economic turmoil it is perhaps unsurprising that the minds of policy makers focus on the question of how to restart economic growth.  But in recent decades people have begun to question the adequacy of GDP as the primary indicator of the progress of societies.  A number of governments, local, devolved and national have begun to explore how to measure wellbeing as a complement to traditional measures such as GDP.
The project was carried out in partnership with IPPR North and provides evidence from six case studies of experiences of measuring wellbeing in France, the USA and Canada.
The report concludes that wellbeing measures are at their most effective when they are supported by a combination of strong leadership, technocractic policy processes and building momentum through wide buy-in from civil society, citizens and the media.  Where these elements come together, we have seen benefits for individual and community wellbeing by identifying policy gaps and innovative ways of working.  It can also provide a valuable tool for holding governments to account.
To obtain copy of full report click here

Author: New Start Magazine

Extract from interview by New Start magazine with Malcolm Fraser .

To read full interview click here

Can you talk through some of the main areas of change in the review?
Well it’s early days, but these are some of the areas we’d like to see brought forward. Firstly, housing. I’m interested in increasing the numbers of people living in towns, and in particular in unoccupied flats above shops. Residential leaseholds in Scotland at the moment are set at a maximum of 20 years but we want to get that raised so that there’s more financial incentive. We’re also approaching housing associations to discuss whether they might take the redevelopment and management of units on. The housing associations could use the flats to bring young people to live in the town centre, people who currently can’t access a mortgage and would love to be at the heart of their communities.
Second is community assets. We want to bring estate agents with vacant properties together with community groups to find new ways to fill them. Estate agents are interested in any use of property and with a microfinance fund in place to assist the community groups – from the Church of Scotland, the Grameen bank or even Tesco – we can get, say, the local creche working with a local community business and the local bridge or dance club to all move in together into, say, an empty hall. And would the government consider such a microfinance fund, that will grow as a new community business is successful? Banks won’t act like proper, traditional lending institutions these days so what are community businesses to do?
Thirdly we want to streamline planning to make it easier for developers and retailers to move into the centre of towns. We need to understand how cities and towns evolve. I like Patrick Geddes’ view of towns as ecosystems, which is very different to conventional idea of build and then conserve. His view is more subtle and creative and allows shopfronts to be knocked about, sites to be redeveloped in different ways. We need to accept these things and do them joyfully.
The fourth area is the very important area of rates and retail and I urge the Scottish Government not to put off its rates review, as Westminster has done. Everyone knows that a review of the rates landscape is needed and a rebalancing, to reflect the reality that many town centres are struggling, would greatly assist their recovery.
A fifth area is around accessibility to public services. We’d like to see the planned community empowerment bill encouraging local authorities to consider how people get to and use public services. If you move services out of town you put a burden on the person trying to use those services who then has to access a car to reach them. We’d like to talk about how to make the best use of public buildings so that old town halls can be done up and improved and used, rather than services moved out of town.
A sixth area is about digital towns, how broadband can link within and across towns.

See short video of interview with the head of social innovation at Twitter,Claire Diaz-Ortiz,   here

Social media is part of how the world now does business and communicates: in the UK alone there are 41 million people on Facebook, and 10 million on Twitter. But has social media become a critical part of how the world does good?
At Unity Trust Bank and Social Misfits Media, we engage every day with charities, social enterprises, and other organisations who are dedicated to making social change. And yet, many of them are not strategically using social media to broaden their audiences, spread messages and, crucially, fundraise. That’s why we’ve put together  “About that First Tweet” – a practical guide to social media for charities and social enterprises. 
In our Guide, we assemble the thoughts of nearly 200 small and medium-sized charities and social enterprises on social media. The Guide also includes interviews with social media experts from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, all of who give tips on how to best engage with the platforms they provide; case studies of organisations who’ve successfully used social media to achieve off-line goals; a checklist of reminders and tips; and further reading.
We hope you’ll find the Guide helpful, and we look forward to hearing from you about your own social media experiences, success stories, and questions. Enjoy and make sure you share!
Now, for Social Enterprise Day and Global Entrepreneurship Week, Twitter’s head of social innovation Claire Diaz-Ortiz gives an exclusive film interview, providing advice to civil society organisations about using Twitter and to young people considering a career as a social entrepreneur.
Adrian Oldman, head of marketing at Unity Trust Bank, said: “Following the well received ‘About that First Tweet’ social media guide, Unity is really pleased to be able to bring further insight and advice to social enterprises and charities on how they can improve their social media output and in turn deliver increased powerful and sustainable social change in their communities.”

Author: Harry Reid, The Hearld

We will have 32 local authorities but just one police force. It seems a peculiar mix, an uneasy disparity, and there are bound to be concerns about the neglect of local sensitivities.
The man who will be our national police chief, Stephen House, is well respected and has served in six different forces. Nobody could question his wide experience of policing in various communities. And the force he currently runs, Strathclyde, serves over half the population of Scotland, including many remote rural areas as well as Scotland’s biggest city, Glasgow.
Nonetheless I have considerable concerns about the implications of a national police force. Maybe this is sentimental, but I associate the notion of honest and decent policing with what might be called local continuity. It’s an organic concept; the police are part of the community they serve. Of course I accept that occasionally local forces simply cannot cope; in the aftermath of the Lockerbie atrocity, the local force understandably required immediate support and assistance form the bigger force to the north.
Back in 1984 and 1985 the prolonged miners’ strike split the UK industrially, politically and socially. It was an intense, vicious dispute and the scars remain to this day. I think the main reason for this residue of bitterness and distrust is the way the dispute was policed. The defeat of the miners was predicated on police tactics which many observers thought amounted to the creation of a national police force by stealth.
“Co-ordination” of the police effort across the country entailed huge numbers of police being deployed far away from where they normally worked, hundreds of miles from their own communities. The policing of the dispute would have been a lot less confrontational – and possibly more effective – if, say, South Yorkshire police had been left to deal with South Yorkshire miners. Even more controversial was the use of national intelligence: police were deployed to stop miners moving freely around the country to sites where they allegedly intended to picket. This amounted to an undoubted breach of civil liberties.
Altogether it was a rancid, acrimonious dispute that left a very sour taste. After the year-long strike, most of the outstanding charges against pickets simply collapsed. I’ve always thought that while most people in Britain realised the Thatcher Government had to prevail, they were not at all happy about the way the long battle was won. In some areas of England, the police have never recovered the respect and regard they enjoyed prior to the dispute.
Of course it is unlikely that in the near future Scotland will face an industrial dispute of such intensity and divisiveness. But the implications of a national force are nonetheless there for all to see: the potential deployment of many police far from their local areas, and the concomitant centralising of power. That’s maybe the key point: a national police force is clearly not about the dispersal of power. This is surely counter to the idea of policing that we have enjoyed for generations and that has, incidentally, gained worldwide respect.
Indeed it is ironic that just when Scotland is about to have a national force, there has been south of the Border an exercise in the opposite direction. The election of local police commissioners across England and Wales has been much derided because of poor turnouts.
Even so, there were some positives. The election of no fewer than 12 police and crime commissioners who were genuine independents was encouraging; the two major political parties lost out more often than had been predicted. And talking of predictions, I reckon next time the commissioners are elected, the turnout will be considerably higher.
Indeed I have a strong hunch this experiment south of the Border is going to work. It’s an exercise in authentic localism. Meanwhile here in Scotland we are moving the other way, away from localism. In this context I’m not convinced we are wise to do so.

Guardian

Britain’s largest union is mounting a challenge against payday lenders with plans to establish a nationwide credit union network.

Unite has pledged to abolish the “Wonga week” phenomenon whereby families use payday lenders to head off cash shortfalls at the end of the month, amid widespread criticism of Wonga and its 4,214% APR interest rate charge. A typical credit union – which normally recruits from a local area or workplace – uses its deposits to make small loans to members, making the model a viable alternative to payday borrowing.

Steve Turner, Unite’s director of executive policy, said it plans to use the recently launch of a Unite-backed credit union in Salford as the model for a nationwide network. He said: “We are in discussions to try to establish a UK-wide credit union that will give access to cheap finance and cheap credit to millions of people. We are trying to get to the point where you can get emergency loans through credit unions, to stop that third week being Wonga week. And that is for the working poor, let alone those people who are not in work.”

The UK has 400 credit unions, with more than 950,000 members, and Unite is seeking links with some of them as well as considering forming its own branches. Restrictions on the take-up of credit union membership have also been relaxed by the government, so organisations such as community groups and local authorities can join.

But a report commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions warned this year the credit union sector is “not financially sustainable”. The study recommended the maximum annual interest rate for a credit union loan should be raised from 26% to 42%. It also called for more taxpayer support for the sector.

The Consumer Credit Counselling Service, one of the UK’s largest debt charities, said that the number of people experiencing difficulties with payday loans more than doubled in 2011, as the number of calls to the CCCS related to short-term borrowing rose from 7,841 in 2010 to 17,414. Last year the average debt on a payday loan was £1,267, according to the charity.

Adding to the drive for community-focused measures to alleviate squeezed incomes, Labour has launched a SwitchTogether campaign that aims to reduce utility bills for communities by bulk buying gas and electricity. The party has also proposed a regulatory limit on the duration of short-term loans and the interest charged.

A credit union push is one of the economic alternatives being highlighted by the Future That Works march in central London on Saturday. The march, organised by the Trades Union Congress to highlight counter-austerity policies such as a financial transactions tax, will be attended by tens of thousands of people.

Gerry Hassan, Scotsman

Centralisation has resulted in people being disconnected from public services. It’s time for radical reform. Scottish devolution was always going to produce centralisation, such as the Procurement Reform Bill, along with single police and fire forces, and at the same time the rhetoric of change seen in the current Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill.

It is more than a year since the publication of the Christie Commission on public sector reform and as financial circumstances tighten, never has the time been more ripe for radical reform. One approach is already on offer: the English marketisation route beloved by Andrew Lansley when he was Health Secretary; an alternative is the Scottish attitude of emphasising professional interests, integrated services and equity.

Yet while Scots professionals and politicians universally baulk at the idea of free schools, academies and foundation hospitals, they have to acknowledge that they tap into a wider public agenda than just that of marketisation and outsourcing. Instead, they address people’s desire for more of a say, for personalisation, diversity and 
choice, if not for the full “choice” agenda of competition. And this is where the Left, across the UK, and the Scottish consensus need to respond more imaginatively and less cautiously.

There is a disconnect in Scotland over public services as well as our wider society. Only 22 per cent of respondents in the recent Scottish Household Survey said they felt that they could influence local decisions; 36 per cent wanted to have a greater involvement; and only 23 per cent thought their local council was good at listening.

Scots are going to have to prepare for what is going to be a public sector revolution. This is going to come about because of peoples’ greater demands for having a say, being treated with respect, growing expectations and demographic changes. 

The old Fordist systems of centralisation and standardisation cannot deliver these. And yet for 
all the pretences, this is what still drives the dominant ethos in much of our public services. Old-fashioned, or new-style, social democracy 
thinks this way; trade union protection is the same: and even 
the apostles of the Right conform to this with their contracting-out culture and pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) rules, creating new vested interests such as G4S, Atos and Serco, which are even more unaccountable than public services. 

Government already talks much of the language of decentralism and populism, of “participatory budgeting”, “community rights” and “community compulsory purchase” in the Community Empowerment Bill for example. It does so without the philosophy of centralisation being checked, or any emerging new set of decentralist values, which recognise the need for government to have the confidence to “let go”.

Scotland has been centralising for a long time. The 1940s welfare state advanced and ennobled most Scots lives, but it removed lots of local arrangements in the name of defeating ill-health and poverty. The 1973 local government reorganisation abolished a mosaic of ancient burghs and town councils while breaking the local link many communities had with their common good funds. 

Then the Tory gerrymandering of 1995 abolished the regional tier of local government, and halved the number of councils. The result is that whereas Scotland had more than 200 councils in the 1940s, today it has a mere 32, producing one of the most centralised, standardised countries in all Western Europe. To put a halt to this isn’t to return to some patrician golden era of local government. What is required is a different path, philosophy and practice for public services and the public realm, rather than marketisation or the conservative inertia of much of present day Scotland.

A Self-Government Bill could be Scotland’s answer to free schools and academies, drawing on 1980s examples of decentralisation such as Walsall, Sheffield and the GLC.

Two options are available. The first is to offer a facilitative framework to local communities and public bodies to allow them to become self-governing; the second would be a comprehensive nationwide decentralisation.

The first carries with it objections that only the affluent, prosperous and confident middle classes will seize the “means of production”, so to speak. The second, that it would force places and organisations to govern themselves when they don’t currently have the capacity and resources to do so. There are also practical considerations. One is that it would break apart systems of redistribution that central government has spent years developing. 

Yet we know that redistribution isn’t very effective, that middle class people gain most from public services, and all this would actually aid a culture of transparency and empowerment where we could “follow the money” through the system.

Another issue would be defining communities and public agencies that could become self-governing. There would be problems with boundaries, and a particular challenge for public bodies would concern governance and who could control them: workers, consumers or people living in their vicinity, or a mix of these groups. This is a debate that has to be started in Scotland and the UK. Otherwise what we are effectively saying is that only champions of reform are the new vested interests. And that is a marker we should not easily give them. 

Scotland has barely begun its democratic revolution. We have a parliament and 129 MSPs but we have not begun to democratise society or blow the cobwebs and dust away from much of public Scotland. Such an approach would be devolution morphing into self-government and self-determination. Strangely, it is an approach that the early days of both Labour and SNP have much sympathy with, the former with its guild socialist roots, and the latter, with its localism and suspicion of institutional Scotland.

Public services and local authorities have to be owned by “the public” and “the locale” and to do that we have to move away from a mix of centralisation and standardisation. 

One-size-fits-all isn’t good enough. Nor is a parliament shifting from London to Edinburgh enough democracy. Scotland needs a long overdue democratic revolution.

At first glance, Maurice Lim Miller’s formula for fighting poverty sounds disconcertingly simple – if not downright utopian. Give people on low incomes a financial incentive to work together and they will build strong local networks that help lift them out of poverty. A plain speaker who is pleasingly devoid of professional jargon, Lim Miller says his approach is common sense. “You have to let families deal with [the problem] in their own way.”

As chief executive and driving force behind the Family Independence Initiative (FII), an anti-poverty, not-for-profit organisation based in Oakland, California, the former youth worker has been assiduously rewriting the rulebook on combating entrenched poverty. He has been garnering considerable attention in the process from policymakers and the media, which was fuelled further when he was awarded a coveted MacArthur “genius” fellowship this month. And with the latest figures showing that one in five children in the US live in poverty, he stands to attract even more interest in the months ahead.

In a nutshell, Lim Miller explains, FII challenges the conventional notion of “needs-based” poverty interventions and the stereotype that low-income families are not capable and rely on outside guidance. To this end, the organisation recruits small groups of struggling low-income families in poorer communities (they must know one another already) and incentivises them to work together to improve their circumstances. Regardless of any state benefits they receive, each family is given a computer and a modest stipend – no more than $500 (£312) per quarter – in return for documenting and reporting any progress they make by working with the other families.

These small steps, says Lim Miller, can be anything from learning leadership skills to increasing savings, to pooling resources for childcare so that parents can get out to work. But whatever form it takes, the point is that there are no professionals on the ground stipulating what their goals should be, or instructing on how to reach them.

Dependency

The idea, Lim Miller stresses, is that low-income households are steered away from dependency on welfare programmes, which, he says, “no matter how well meaning are disempowering”. It is taken for granted that the families “will spend the money much more efficiently”, he adds, if it is simply handed over and left up to them. He says the guiding principle is that people from poor backgrounds are neither the “victims” they are often portrayed as by people on the left, or “lazy” and undeserving as they are frequently labelled by the right. “Just like anyone else, these families want some control and choice in their lives.”

The project, which Lim Miller acknowledges was a bold experiment when it launched with a small cohort of families in Oakland almost a decade ago, has grown steadily. There are now more than 350 families participating in Boston, San Francisco and Oakland with further expansion planned, including an online social networking hub. “In the first two years [of the project] in Oakland, incomes jumped among the group by 27%. Savings were up by 300%. Nine out of the 23 families had bought homes,” he says. The latest data from the initiative shows considerable progress in San Francisco and Boston with average incomes up.

Lim Miller talks too of a “ripple effect” within communities. “People can see that somebody achieved something … Expectations change.” The perception people have of their life chances is critical, he argues. “If you are in a community where no one is getting ahead, what does that do [to you]?”

The participants are not families in crisis but those trying to get a foot on the social mobility ladder. “I’ve been working with low-income families for over 20 years. These are families who are trying, who want to get out [of poverty] but are stuck,” he explains.

Lim Miller speaks eloquently about how his background as the son of an impoverished immigrant Mexican mother propelled him to find new ways to tackle the cycle of extreme poverty. “This approach is very personal. My mom was a single mom who was determined for me to get out of poverty for good. Pride was important to her,” he says. However, FII was also born of professional frustration. “I came into [FII] from doing non-profit work. When I saw the kids of the people I worked with, when I started out, coming [to services for help], I thought: ‘Whatever we are doing, it isn’t working’. I began to question why.”

Just as Lim Miller was beginning to probe into why anti-poverty strategies had failed for so long, he was asked in 1999 by the then mayor of Oakland and current governor of California, Jerry Brown, to come up with alternative ways to channel money already set aside to tackle poverty. Brown asked Lim Miller why, when so many social workers and professionals were being employed to run schemes to help poor people, the problem remained so intractable. “Jerry said to me: ‘Doesn’t this seem like poverty pimping to you?'” When he went back to Brown with the idea to give money directly to poor families to see what they did with it, the mayor took an unexpected leap of faith and FII was born.

Lim Miller’s work has been recognised at the highest levels and his input is being sought by thinktanks including the rightwing Heritage Foundation.

In 2010, he was appointed to President Obama’s White House Council for Community Solutions, an advisory board exploring fresh approaches to mobilising people to work together on addressing community problems. In 1999, even before FII was up and running, Miller was honoured by the then president Bill Clinton at the state of the union address for his youth, race relations and poverty work. A string of other awards has also been lavished on him.

Yet, for all the accolades, Lim Miller is clearly a pragmatist. The recognition means nothing more than an opportunity to bolster FII’s work. Cuts to social services have ensured that spare cash is in short supply – although it is doubtful state money would be forthcoming even without cuts. In his experience, officials are not amenable to an unorthodox project that deliberately does not prescribe its outcomes. Some funding has been secured from private foundations, but many remain reticent for similar reasons to government.

Lim Miller suggests that, despite such obstacles, a combination of factors has coalesced to mean attitudes to tackling poverty might be shifting. Among these is the evidence of FII’s success and that the most severe recession since the 1930s has hurled a multitude of families into poverty. Important also, he says, has been the growing awareness of the widening wealth gap between rich and poor and the decline of social mobility.

So, does he think his approach might translate to Britain or to other countries? He says one of “the most important lessons” he learned when the project moved beyond Oakland was that cultural, ethnic and local differences may exist, but the very fact that families set their own goals makes the programme uniquely adaptable. “People in Britain concerned about poverty in the future need to look at the social context,” he says. “Lifting people above a poverty line is not enough. People must have a stake. There has to be something tangible in the long term. That’s what gives people hope.”