Background

The Sheila McKechnie Foundation offers annual awards for people starting out in campaigning. The winner will receive help with his/her campaign in a variety of ways: notably he/she will receive one-to-one coaching from someone especially chosen with experience in the campaigner’s preferred field; participation in an interactive residential skills building weekend; and attendance at a high-profile awards ceremony, to be hosted by Jon Snow. There are nine categories in the 2011 Campaigner Awards. For more information about the Awards please visit our website, www.smk.org.uk/smk-awards-2011.

•         If you would like to apply for an Award, please visit the relevant award category via the above link 

•         If you know of anyone who you believe should apply for the awards, please nominate them at www.smk.org.uk/nominate-a-campaigner. 

Finally, if you have any questions, either have a look on the FAQ section of the website, www.smk.org.uk/faqs, or do not hesitate to contact us at temp@smk.org.uk or on 020 77008189.

Three former Scottish winners of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation Award

Ilena Day

Campaign – ‘Look Ok…Feel Crap?’

Ilena is working with young people to provide support for those struggling with depression in Scotland. By launching a website to offer resources and emotional health courses, Ilena is creating awareness about depression so that people don’t feel alone. Her goal is for young adults to connect with the appropriate health organisations and seek support early on. Ilena is working to modernise current mental health messages in order to accurately support young adults with depression.

Penny Halliday

Campaign – Kinship Care, You Are Not Alone Family Support Group

Penny is campaigning for kinship carers and for children who are looked after by them, to be equally valued and financially supported like other children with carers. After founding the You Are Not Alone Family Support Group in Scotland over ten years ago, Penny joined-up with other kinship carers to develop the campaign. She is keen to ensure that kinship carers are supported both practically and financially and that they are valued as a serious alternative to institutional care.

Dan Glass

Campaign- Plane Stupid Scotland

Dan is one of the founders of Plane Stupid Scotland. The campaign consists of a network of groups taking action against airport expansion and climate impact. They organise popular education programmes to instil community self-determination in tackling climate change. Through public events, rallies and reports Plane Stupid has instigated flight reduction policies in various universities, secured energy ‘descent’ plans, green rep-schemes and has prompted universities to create ethical sponsorship policies which supports green energy. Dan also campaigns for better education into the aviation industry to inform the younger generations of the results of increased aviation.

Committee launches new inquiry into the Crown Estate in Scotland

During its inquiry to the Scotland Bill, the Scottish Affairs Committee received a significant amount of evidence, which identified a number of concerns and issues in relation to the administration of the Crown Estate in Scotland. On 17 February 2011 the Committee announced that it would conduct an inquiry in to the Crown Estate in Scotland, and that terms of reference would be published in due course.

The Crown Estate Commissioners (CEC) are a public body responsible for the management of the Crown properties and property rights known as the Crown Estate.

The Committee would welcome submissions on the following:

• The management and governance of the Crown Estate in Scotland

• The role and mandate of the Crown Estate Commissioners

• The interaction between the Crown Estate Commissioners and UK, devolved and local government.

In particular, the Committee would welcome responses to the following questions in relation to the Crown Estate Commissioners:

• Do the CEC serve a useful purpose in Scotland?

• What is/should be the role of the CEC in investing in Scotland?

• What is the legacy of the CEC in Scotland?

• Are the current management, administration and accountability arrangements of the CEC appropriate?

• How could the CEC best act in the public interest in Scotland?

The Committee welcomes written evidence from interested parties on any, or all, aspects of the inquiry by 10 June 2011. Should you wish to submit written evidence after this date, please contact Committee staff. The Committee will be arranging public oral evidence sessions, and details of these will be announced in due course.

Submissions should be in Word or rich text format and sent by e-mail to scotaffcom@parliament.uk.

Do not send in pdf format.

The body of the e-mail must include a contact name, telephone number and postal address.  The e-mail should also make clear who the submission is from.

Submissions must address the terms of the inquiry and should not, as a rule, exceed 2,000 words.  Paragraphs should be numbered for ease of reference, and the document should include an executive summary.

To see the whole programme click here.
To receive discounted price for Scottish Community Alliance supporters quote discount code : SCA

The world of communication is changing. This is the digital age. It has still only just begun. People are spreading the messages they feel passionate about through social media and supporting causes through online giving, volunteering and social activism. More employees are using digital and social media to get their knowledge from news, YouTube channels and podcasts. Online blogs, networking sites and forums have given a powerful megaphone for anybody with an opinion. Celebrities are using twitter to support
campaigns and journalists use online content to inform their news content.

Third sector organisations have come to embrace digital communications and social media as an integral part of their marketing and fundraising strategies. With the rapid pace of innovation in technology, in online user behaviours and trends, this convention will keep you informed and your organisation forward thinking; give you the knowledge to transform your outlook and approach in utilising digital media; and help you inspire innovations and strategies.

I am proud to present to you over fifty of the best speakers and a coalition of excellent partners sharing our vision for this event and working with us to achieve it. That vision is simple: to give you the best and very latest knowledge to realise the massive potential of digital comms and social media. It is a subject better understood by marketers and fundraisers, although this convention will refresh and enhance that knowledge. But it is also a subject that needs to be well understood and embraced by all professionals, whether CEOs and Trustees or front line workers. We are now living and working in a digital age with a digital generation. This presents both enormous challenges for the sector but even more opportunities. As more ideas come forward each day we are adding to the choice of presentations and workshops in the programme, so please do check back on the website or follow us on twitter – share with us your ideas.

See you in June.

Shirley Ayres

Convention Director THIRD SECTOR 2011 Digital Communication & Social Media Convention

To see the whole programme click here.
To receive discounted price for Scottish Community Alliance supporters quote discount code : SCA

Dr. Edgar Cahn, creator of Time Dollars and one of the founding fathers of Time Banking visited NESTA for an afternoon seminar on May 10th 2011.
 
Edgar Cahn is a civil rights activist and a social innovator. He developed a radical new framework for social welfare and social justice that turns recipients of service into co-producers of change.
 
Believe in people
 
Edgar’s argument is that civil society is vastly undervalued. While markets are a great way of determining commodity prices, they are unable to put a true value on the unseen economy of mutual help and collaboration which we take for granted.
 
These support systems form the bedrock of our society: they raise families, form strong communities, maintain safe neighbourhoods, and care for our elderly. And yet because there is an abundance of these resources, they are devalued.
 
To view video of Edgar Cahn’s talk click here
 

Author: Steve Wyler, Chief Executive, Locality

When I spoke to minister Greg Clark recently about the Localism Bill, he asked me to meet the Countryside Landowners Association, to try to soften their opposition to the Community Right to Buy.
 
Well, I did try. I visited them at their grand offices in Belgravia. They were, of course, very well spoken. “Do please understand what is at stake,” said their President, “We have 35,000 members, owning half the land in England and Wales.” 
 
So, less than half of one tenth of one percent of the population still own more than half the land?   
 
They are of course “horrified” that the government is considering a Community Right to Buy, even though the Localism Bill doesn’t in fact give communities a real right to buy, but merely provides a window of a few months to help communities prepare a bid if land or buildings of community value come up for sale.
 
It turned out that their biggest objection is that ‘lifetime transfer’ might be affected by the provisions. There is already an exemption for transfer though inheritance, but that’s not good enough for these people. As they explained, the very wealthy make sure to hand down their land to their sons and daughters at least seven years before they die. “Is that for tax avoidance reasons?” I asked. “Naturally,” they said, “This for us is a line in the sand.”
 
All of which was a salutory reminder that the rich and powerful never give up their wealth and power without a bitter struggle, even if, as in this case, they disguise it with a veneer of gentlemanly behaviour (“You must realise,” they said, “We take our social responsibilities very seriously, we don’t consider ourselves owners, but rather custodians of land for future generations…”).
 
The new Locality Board met last week and started to address the question of what it will mean for Locality to ‘speak truth to power’, as we promised at our launch event last month. We are managing the Community Organisers programme, which at its heart is about identifying ways for those without power to challenge those who are powerful. If, as is very possible, the spending cuts produce civil unrest in the coming months, where will Locality stand?  What should our position be on direct action? Which are the big causes we should rally behind?
 
We will be discussing these questions with members in the coming weeks and months, leading up the first Locality member conference in Manchester, on 1-2 November, where we intend to lay the foundation for a manifesto for our movement. Do please share your views with us – as if we could stop you! You can find our comments page here.

To see conference programme – click here

The Scottish Community Alliance has a limited number of free tickets for this event – first come, first served. Email: angus@scottishcommunityalliance.net

At a UK level, the Localism agenda is being heralded as the most forward thinking of the UK Coalition Government’s plans. With the Localism Bill passing through the House of Commons, there is a visible refocusing of energy in England towards an outcomes culture and community owned, locally led solutions. In this climate, Scotland finds itself in a unique position, having already moved beyond this drive for ‘localism’ with a well progressed outcomes culture and prior devolution of power from central government to the local level enshrined within the historic Concordat.

Further engagement is occurring via local partnerships. For example, Community Planning Partnerships align the approaches taken by local public sector agencies, and increasingly seek to engage with Third and Private Sector organisations to better serve the area. To date this partnership-based approach, focused on shared objectives and effective communication, has yielded positive service outcomes. However, further emphasis is now being placed on greater community empowerment, informed by drastically reduced public sector budgets and a more critical and expectant public. Shifting decisions closer to the public and service delivery may address both issues of cost and trust, but what would this look like beyond principle?

With centralising themes dominating the Scottish election campaigns, wholesale reorganisation and devolution of authority to a more local tier seems unlikely. That being said the Christie Commission may give recommendations to the contrary, or we may see the centralisation or amalgamation of functions be complemented by increased community resourcing.

What is clear for any outcome is that there is a need for greater connection and involvement at a local level – but what will this look like?

On the same May day in 2005 that US businessman Malcolm Glazer completed his takeover of Manchester United, a group of disgruntled fans met up in the city for a curry. Across the table they discussed a vague idea to set up a breakaway football club, run as a co-operative, in protest at what they saw as the loss of “their” club. By the end of the night the plan must have sounded fantastic.

Two months after leaving that curry-house, FC United of Manchester played its first match and, despite the fact that they failed to score, the players were carried off the pitch by a sea of jubilant supporters. No one owned the club, no one got paid and everyone involved was a volunteer, from the stewards to the people making the pies spectators bought at half-time. This season, they made it to the second round of the FA Cup.

This club of self-selected volunteers is just one of thousands of small groups, associations and societies who meet week in, week out across the UK, gathering in small communities that are not defined by who lives next door or across the street.

Yet, in 2008, a rash of gloomy newspaper headlines about “lonely Britain” greeted a report commissioned by the BBC from researchers at Sheffield university. “Changing UK” argued that one-quarter of people in Britain were “lonely”, a result of a more “atomised” society. In their bestselling book The Spirit Level (2009), authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that modern Britons experience “little or no community life.” Conclusions such as these rely too heavily on the indisputable fact that many of us are indeed less connected than previous generations to our neighbourhoods. But this does not mean that people’s sense of community, of belonging, has been lost entirely – it merely comes from many different sources. The members of FC United were not neighbours, yet they formed a vibrant community with a sense of identity and fellowship.

The same goes for a mass of small groups in Britain today, be they bridge clubs, women’s institutes, reading groups, home-schoolers or any number of gatherings dedicated to specialist interests. There are knitters and quilters; doll’s house builders and Dutch rabbit fanciers; fancy rat breeders, fuchsia lovers and devoted restorers of elderly camper vans. In 2008 the National Council for Voluntary Organisations estimated the existence of 900,000 civil society groups.

Yet we hear very little about these groups other than perhaps the noisier political-protest ones. The 2011 national census that is being taken later this month will provide plenty of data that will renew debate about lonely, atomised Britain. Meanwhile, groups of people across the country will be quietly meeting, just as they did the week before. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “If men are to remain civilised or to become civilised, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”

Henry Hemming is the author of ‘Together: How Small Groups Achieve Big Things’ (John Murray)

Market competition is driving David Cameron’s ‘big society’; but it cannot rebuild civil society, says Patrick Diamond

Rebuilding civil society in the wake of the global financial crisis has emerged as one of the most insistent debates in British politics. But allowing it to be framed by the narrow terrain of David Cameron’s “big society” would be a huge mistake. No society can sustain the wellbeing of its citizens by relying on market and state alone. The agenda has to be reclaimed because the issue of how to forge a good society will not go away.

The narrative so far promulgated by the coalition government has failed to convince. For one, the big society appears to connect only tenuously with the electorate: in a recent Mori survey, 57% said the big society was merely an excuse for cutting back public services. This cynicism will be amplified when the scale of cuts in the voluntary sector becomes clear.

It is market-based competition rather than civil society that is in the driving seat: shrinking the size of government, exposing public services to the relentless disciplines of choice and competition, liberating the power of free enterprise. Financial efficiency and value for money – not reinvigorating the ties of community – have become the fundamental drivers of reform in the state. Branded private sector cartels will become the dominant providers in public services, not a flourishing voluntary and community sector.

Neither will the good society be built merely by resurrecting New Labour: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were ruthless exponents of a centralising English state. They espoused the rhetoric of pluralism and reform, devolving power and strengthening the role of voluntary and community sector organisations, but New Labour was astonishingly resistant to the empowerment of actors outside the state machine. The roots of civil society were badly eroded.

The good society concerns the sphere of life that exists beyond the state and beyond the market. It is the civic domain of equity, citizenship and service, which is forged through engagement between citizens. As such, it can be reduced neither to state edict nor the purchasing power of money. And we need a practical agenda to build it.

First, make the welfare state genuinely “affiliative”: reward citizens who help others through “time banks” where individuals receive benefits in kind. An ageing society makes wholly state-funded provision an inadequate response to supporting increasing numbers of elderly people. Second, forge a more balanced and resilient economy by promoting plural and diverse ownership: create the incentives for a new generation of co-operative mutual societies.

Third, increase democratic empowerment, restoring the freedom of local government to set business and property taxes: use participatory budgeting to give people a stake in local priorities. Fourth, encourage local production chains in food distribution and household services, backed by a living wage and a community finance levy invested in credit unions to give every citizen a stake in the financial system.

The purpose of politics must remain the cultivation of civic virtue – the “habits of the heart” that French historian Alexis de Tocqueville argued make life worthwhile.

Full article click here

Author: Michael Ungar, Ph.D. in Nurturing Resilience

I recently spent a few days in Bilbao, Spain, and was amazed to walk on streets full of children. Is there a population explosion in Spain? In the middle-class community where I was staying, I was reassured that the birth rate is below that of most parts of North America and yet the streets vibrate with life. There is no need for long SUV commutes to get the little ones to soccer practice as the children wander from their apartments after school and play in the city squares. There are always adults nearby, often sitting with neighbours drinking coffee, or a glass of wine. What looks like chaos is actually a careful dance by which a community raises its children together.

Why do we love to vacation in places like Bilbao, Paris, Savannah, and San Juan? Traffic controlled roads and pedestrian streets are people friendly. Small shops let us buy the basics as we need them. The small apartments that drape both sides of the narrow streets are havens for an eclectic mix of young professionals, young families, seniors and students.

And yet we keep building ugly mono-use suburbs. We create homes where we cloister and do everything: we have our large screen TVs in rooms big enough to seat 20, and backyards where our children only play with those whose parents drive them to our homes. We romanticize those exotic streetscapes we love to visit, but then build exactly what we and our children DON’T need. Our suburbs not only threaten our social capital (our ability to form trusting, organic, relationships with others), they also put our physical and emotional health at risk. Long commutes, less time with family, all that money we have to earn, then spend, to keep two cars on the road… Have we all lost our minds?

A community’s resilience is its social capital, which includes the physical infrastructure, and culturally embedded patterns of interdependence that keep people connected. As we’ve see in Japan, and as we didn’t see in Haiti, what we build before a crisis makes a big difference to what happens afterwards.

Gated communities make all of us less safe. Poorly funded schools endanger us for generations to come. And building more jails actually makes our society more dangerous. Every study of criminals and crime around the world shows exactly the same results but politicians ignore the facts. When we rip apart the social fabric that keeps us connected, we are all endangered. When we leave people with few choices they are forced into patterns of coping that are maladaptive.

In February, I was in Singapore where I saw public housing projects that ensure every family gets a first house, usually a condominium, at an affordable price. The purchase is subsidized, and the racial and ethnic mix of each public development is carefully balanced to ensure no group is marginalized into a ghetto. One project, the Pinnacle@Duxton, is in Singapore’s financial district and at 50 storeys high, is the tallest public housing project in the world. The towers, I was impressed to see, are connected by grassy terraces at different levels, creating parks in the sky where neighbours have a place to sit outside and meet. These housing developments are actually desirable places to live because they are closer to the city and transportation links. After five years, should people decide to sell their subsidized unit, they have the money to buy what they want, where they want. Plumbers can live next to teachers, bus drivers next to accountants. Too much social engineering? Perhaps…but there are lessons to
be learned from Spain and Singapore about creating safe communities for our children and ourselves.

So what’s gone wrong in North America? Is anyone else curious why almost 1% of Americans are incarcerated at any one time. And how did so many people lose their homes in the last two years? Why, amid so much wealth, do we still see so much poverty? While social capital is a great thing to have, research from Israel shows that it can be destroyed if there is prolonged exposure to violence. As people become more fearful, and incapable of stopping violence, mistrust and frustration grows. People withdraw from one another. Maybe this is what has happened. We’ve inadvertently been designing our cities in ways that are putting our well-being at risk. Our communities have become islands of isolated individuals who stubbornly refuse to admit that we’re all wrong. Our children have stopped playing on the streets, which, like the proverbial canary in the mine, is telling us something important.

Without even a catastrophic event like a nuclear disaster, we are edging our way to creating the post-apocalyptic world we see in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Or so it seems some days. I just don’t see how building more suburbs or knowing that car and truck sales are again healthy is something to celebrate when we could be putting our energy into thinking about future solutions to the very problems that are threatening our well-being. Subjectively, we are not happy. And a lot of that unhappiness has to do with something as simple as how we build our houses, where we build them, and the social policies that influence who our neighbours are.

If we want to live afraid, we can keep building our suburbs and vacationing in the quaint alleys of the world’s most beautiful cities. If we want to live free of fear, and feel the connections of community, let’s embrace a new urbanism and work towards integrated mixed use developments and quality public transit. Detroit needs to send every one of its city councillors to Bilbao. And Regina needs to visit Singapore.

My views aren’t ideological. I could care less about political parties. I prefer research and what it tells us about how to create communities that we have seen work. In most cases, what works is also what we intuitively know is better for us. Increasing community resilience by building in ways that promote social capital make us much better prepared to be resilient when crises, big or small, happen to us and our children. After all, what do we think our children really want? A pretty fenced backyard and endless drives to soccer games played under the watchful eye of a coach, or the freedom to play in a city square and make friends of their own choosing?

Author: Avaaz

Avaaz

New York-based Avaaz has launched huge campaigns on issues including the BSkyB takeover and Bradley Manning.

If you had been on the Strand in London on the day that the high court was considering how to proceed with scores of civil actions against the News of the World for its phone-hacking escapades, you would have seen a peculiar sight. About 30 people were gathered on the steps of the court, the palms of their hands painted red, bearing banners that read: “Murdoch’s men caught red-handed.”

On the same day, outside a Sainsbury’s store in Godalming, Surrey, where the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was holding his weekly constituency surgery, another group of 25 people had gathered. They were leafleting shoppers about the News of the World scandal and calling on the government to delay approval of Rupert Murdoch’s bid to takeover BSkyB until a full public inquiry could be held.

Both events were the work of one of the most successful of a new breed of internet campaigner, in this case a global activism network called Avaaz, which means voice in Urdu and several other languages. It put out an alert to its half a million UK members calling for activists to attend the two stunts, with impressive results.

To get a sense of what Avaaz is and how it operates you have to switch the lens 3,000 miles to a pleasantly light-filled office with great views overlooking Union Square in Manhattan. This is where Avaaz has its headquarters – if an organic network of internet activists can be said to have a headquarters.

Avaaz, formed in 2007, has more than eight million members in 193 countries and can claim to be the largest online activist community in the world. This year alone it has attracted an extra one million members and it is now wholly self-funding with about $20m (£12m) raised so far in online donations.

“We have no ideology per se,” says director Ricken Patel. “Our mission is to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want. Idealists of the world unite!”

A Canadian who holds dual British citizenship, Patel was involved in student activism while at Oxford University studying PPE and later at Harvard. After three years working for aid groups around the world and a stint at the UN, he witnessed the power of the internet as a volunteer for the US liberal campaign MoveOn.org.

What MoveOn tries to do with domestic American politics, Avaaz applies globally. Its weekly meeting of staff, held via a Skype conference call, gives a taste of its ambitions. With the Guardian listening in, several of the 35 Avaaz staffers join the call from their bases in San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico City, Rio, London, Paris, New Delhi and Sydney.

The team cheered when the US staff began by talking about this week’s news that Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks source, had been moved to a new, more lenient, prison. Avaaz had organised an online petition signed by 530,000 members calling on President Barack Obama to “end the torture” of the US soldier.

Next, the Canadian staff talked about an Avaaz campaign to force the Ottowa government to release a report into alleged misuse of G8 funds, while the Delhi staff gave an update on the health of Anna Hazare, an activist they are backing who has been on hunger strike in protest at Indian political corruption.

While most of Avaaz’s projects are initiated by the staff themselves, every few days they survey a random collection of 10,000 members to ask them which campaigns they want to prioritise.

They also monitor constantly online statistics that reveal which campaigns are attracting most interest among members, enabling the membership itself to chose the network’s focus. “Democratic accountability is hard-wired into the way we work. Each campaign is only as successful as the number of people who choose to join it,” Patel says.

The idea of a campaign against the News of the World was received with great enthusiasm by Avaaz’s members, particularly in the UK.

Patel says: “We have long seen Rupert Murdoch as a powerful threat to the health of our democracies through his domination of the media environment. When we polled our members, they were strongly in favour of trying to stop his takeover of BSkyB until a full public inquiry into News Corp could be held.”

Avaaz teamed up with its fellow online lobbying group 38 Degrees to send 60,000 submissions opposing the Murdoch bid to Ofcom.

Late last year, Avaaz members sent 50,000 messages to David Cameron and Hunt calling for a review by the Competition Commission, supported by a petition signed by 400,000 global members. To press home the point, it targeted 10 key constituencies of politicians involved in the bid decision and invested in TV and newspaper adverts arguing against the takeover.

The overall aim, according to Avaaz’s Bristol-based campaign director Alex Wilks, was to get “tens of thousands of citizens signing up, even just for five minutes, so they can express themselves and make a difference”.

But he says it is not enough just to sit back and rely on the internet to do the heavy lifting: “We have also to get into politicians’ faces and make sure they know how many people feel passionately about what they are, or are not, doing.