Author: Marie Osborne, Guardian Professional - The truth about being a community organiser

We’ve heard a lot in recent weeks about the “big society” from politicians and commentators, but what is it really like to be a “community organiser” in an ordinary place in middle England? And what sort of support should Locality – just awarded the £15 million big society contract- be giving to the army of 5,000 professional community organisers?

I have been working for the past 11 years as an unpaid community organiser in Wolverton, a small town now part of Milton Keynes. I am not unique – every community has people who do a huge amount of this kind of work unsupported and unpaid. Where I do differ is that, before I had a family, I did much the same work as I do now as a paid job, so I have a pretty good idea of what I am doing. I should start by saying that the lot of a volunteer community organiser is not an easy one.

Once people know you for this, it becomes your brand. You’re viewed as a resource – a free resource, for others who, bizarrely, often think you are paid for what you do. The practicalities of everyday living become complicated. For example, going to the post office has often taken me over an hour because I’ve been answering questions from people who see me as kind of walking Citizens Advice Bureau. The school gate can be a minefield of questions and queries. Everything going on in the area feels like it leads back to you. And this is where it gets tricky, because when you start to take responsibility and lead on projects it starts to take over your life and you begin to wonder why.

There actually isn’t a natural support network to draw upon. You can end up feeling a bit used-up and isolated. Much of what you do as an organiser is emotionally draining. After a while, you can feel jaded about things that before felt tolerable: local councillors for not taking on issues which you have identified as important; local authority officers who assume you will do all the “community consultation” elements of a project; paid community development workers who seem to do a lot less than you.

It can, if you’re not careful, burn you out very quickly. So how can it be made better? And will the Coalition’s efforts to support us actually work? Under the planned model of community organising, professional community organisers will be trained with the skills they need to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, helping people in neighbourhoods take control and tackle their problems.

While I feel I will know much of what might be shared in such “training”, having a support mechanism can’t help but be useful. To be invested in will be recognition of sorts. Indeed, I am privately hoping that the skills and expertise of people like me – who have been doing award-winning community work for years – will be put to use to help others learn. Who knows, I might even get paid! In my own case, I couldn’t personally wait for the Government to come along to help me. For the past year I have attended the School for Social Entrepreneurs Action Learning programme.

Through the programme I have been able to see the value in what I do, and to consider how I turn myself from simply a community organiser into a social entrepreneur. What’s the difference? In short, a social entrepreneur goes beyond merely pulling the community together to get things done.

They also do things off their own back, working alone if necessary, against the grain if that’s what’s required. They can and do work with others, but they are also creative, visionary and ambitious, even when those around them aren’t. That, in my view, is how we need to view community organisers – not just as ‘good eggs’ and ‘uniters’ within their localities, but social entrepreneurs who are invested in and have small (very small) amounts of financial resource to deploy around them in order to make thing happen.

We need to trust community organisers, give them status and micro-budgets to get things moving. A vision of community organisers based on the village fete is out-dated and irrelevant. We need proactive people who get things done – and can operate whether the community is willing and able or not. What I, and many of the social entrepreneurs I have met in the last year want, is to be believed and trusted as individuals with a passion to make change happen in their neighbourhoods.
It’s not just mass action that matters but individual action too. That is what I hope is to be the legacy of the big society.
 
Marie Osborne is a community organiser.

Health professionals estimate our ageing population requires the construction of a new hospital every 18 months. That cannot be afforded – and it should not even be contemplated. Margaret Thatcher once said money in the NHS should follow the patient. 40 years later the patient still follows the money. And the money is locked up in hospitals. It’s a terrible Catch 22 – the same kind that kept people with mental illness inside institutions or locked up in jail.

In 2005 the Kerr Report tried to break out of this vicious circle by switching cash from hospital provision to ambulatory care centres – local outpatient units. Lanarkshire was one of the first to attempt the switch and to fund it, one of three fully staffed A&Es in the area would be closed. But which one? The choice was coloured by a political reality.

Senior health professionals agree funding needs to be turned on its head. But which politician has the courage to remove £800 million from hospital budgets and risk the wrath of local voters to make local health care investments which may not visibly yield dividends for a decade? Hospitals are tangible. Services that help diabetics stay out of hospital are not. And yet 40 per cent of people aged 75 or over live with at least two such long term conditions. Audit Scotland projects a rise in the over-75 age group of 75 per cent by 2031, a rise in COPD (respiratory problems) sufferers of 33 per cent and a rise in patients with dementia of 75 per cent.

How will society cope? A solution may lie in housing and community care – not in health. Take Whitlawburn. In 1988, Glasgow Council was given £6.6 million to refurbish this run-down estate on its southern outskirts. West Whitlawburn had hard-to-fix high rise flats. So the council spent the repair money instead on the easier-to-fix low-rise blocks of East Whitlawburn. Outraged, the tenants’ association in the West opted out and set up a co-operative to own, improve and manage their 540 homes. Phil Welsh MBE chaired the first Co-operative; “People fae miles away sit on a Housing Association Board. Only folk fae the neighbourhood sit on a Housing Co-operative. It was an opportunity to do things for ourselves.”

Personal contact replaced distant bureaucracy. Dampness, security and renovation were made priorities. All homes were refurbished, an old school was turned into a healthy living centre and a team of concierges was hired to monitor 28 external and 185 internal CCTV cameras and 70 homes fitted with alarms. Elderly, disabled or vulnerable tenants can buzz down to the concierge base if they’re lonely, frightened or ill, and can have a chat, a basic health check or a cup of tea with company – even in the middle of the night.

Eleven deaths have been averted by swift responses from the camera/concierge team. The Co-op refuses to turn its health success into cash savings.

But they know higher-than-average management costs must be defended in straitened times. So they’ve produced social accounts instead which list the ways in which a well managed, self regulating community protects dignity and saves cash.

The West Whitlawburn Housing Co-operative is the salvation of its tenants and the envy of its council neighbours. It’s also the saviour of local A&E departments – including Monklands. And yet healthcare is not a formal part of housing’s remit.

Two reports will land on the new health minister’s desk in June demanding change. Campbell Christie and Sir John Arbuthnot will both report on better delivery of public services. It’s likely both will back self-management against hospitalisation – and hospital wards will have to close to finance such a shift.

Scottish politicians have just six weeks left to tell voters otherwise. Prepare for U-turns aplenty.

The organisers of a major north-east maritime festival are confident they can clinch a deal to take control of a caravan park from Aberdeenshire Council.

Negotiations are under way between the local authority and the Scottish Traditional Boat Festival group at Portsoy about the town’s seaside site. It is one of 11 caravan parks in Aberdeenshire the council wants to offload at the end of this summer to save money.

Festival chairman Roger Goodyear revealed that meetings to discuss a long lease have taken place already between the two parties. He said: “These meetings have been productive and we are now developing a business plan. We have looked at the figures for the site, done some calculations and we are confident this site can more than wash its face.”

The popular site has more than 30 stances for static vans, tourers and tents. Mr Goodyear said the festival group regarded controlling the park as a logical extension of current activities.

He said: “It fits in with our plans for the nearby Salmon Bothy where we are looking to develop a catering facility. It would also tie in with our boatbuilding and restoration plans at the harbour. We think it is a terrific caravan site and a major feature of the town.”

The group’s interest in the site mirrors that of the Banff and Macduff Community Trust for the Banff Links park. The trust has obtained financial details for the links site and will study them before reaching a decision. In 2009-10, the 11 sites controlled by Aberdeenshire Council ran with an operating deficit of £64,000.

Last month, councillors decided to offer them on long leases to community organisations or private sector operators. If that strategy fails, the council may consider trying to sell the sites. The local authority will run the sites this summer, but hopes deals to offload them can be completed by October.

In August 2010 Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society supported by the Glasgow Allotments Forum (GAF) was awarded a grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund to research and record the history and stories of Allotments and Community Gardens in Glasgow.

Why did we get a grant?

Allotments and community gardens are part of Glasgow’s culture and heritage, they are rooted in the land, the politics, industry and the people.  The land owners included the Maxwells, the Campbells, the Corporation and the Railways.  All kinds of people from different backgrounds and cultures – including labourers, judges, teachers, firemen – cultivate plots.  In the second world war we grew leeks, kale and potatoes, today we also grow exotic vegetables and flowers.  Our huts reveal the creativity, skill and ingenuity of our community. But….

There is no permanent record of this history.  We need to record it for ourselves and for future generations.

What are we doing?  Volunteers – plot-holders, members of the local community, schools, playgroups – are working together to preserve and record our Glasgow heritage by:

• Exploring estate documents, minutes, newspaper articles, photos, event records, maps
• Recording the stories of plot holders, their families and friends – capturing the wellbeing, the social importance and the passion for their plots.
• Developing and sustaining this web site to ensure the project continues

We will produce leaflets for at least 10 sites and share information through a Spring Event and a community launch in the Autumn.

Today, 130 projects have been announced as the latest community initiatives to receive awards totalling over £8 million from the Climate Challenge Fund (CCF).

Since 2008, 345 communities the length and breadth of Scotland have received a share of the £37.7 million made available under the popular CCF initiative to help reduce their carbon footprint.
Minister for Environment and Climate Change, Roseanna Cunningham today announced the 130 successful projects. Successful applications include:

• The Tarland Development Group will complete the Tarland to Aboyne Cycle Path in Aberdeenshire. Completion of the cycle path will enable Tarland residents to safely cycle the six miles to Aboyne to use the many facilities in the town reducing car use and consequently reducing the local ‘Carbon Footprint’. This project is awarded £84,860
• The Balanced Bountiful Buckhaven programme creates a platform for transforming this community into a more self-reliant transition town. The programme seeks progressive reductions in carbon emissions through mobilising local volunteers and groups to promote energy efficiency, grow local food and enhance waste collection and recycling. This project is awarded £74,940
• The new Housing Association working in Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow is leading the way in demonstrating how putting people at the heart of local decision-making can reduce carbon emissions. Bridgeton Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP) will enhance the energy efficiency of local housing by helping residents to better manage their energy use and reduce their fuel bills. This project is awarded £95,420

Ms Cunningham said: “The Climate Challenge Fund (CCF) continues to inspire communities all over Scotland and underlines the nation-wide commitment to reduce our carbon footprint and meet our carbon reduction targets. Since CCF launched, it has attracted huge interest and I am delighted that our decision to extend the initiative into 2011-12 has encouraged so many high quality applications. CCF really does help communities to act on their desire to do more to enhance the environment and develop our low carbon economy. CCF has empowered 345 communities since 2008 to tackle their carbon emissions at local level. I have found it truly inspiring during my visits to several CCF funded projects to see community spirit in action, tackling climate change from the grass-roots up.”

Simon Pepper, OBE – CCF Grants Panel Chair said: “These exciting projects illustrate the high level of commitment to tackling climate change in communities throughout Scotland. They show just how strongly people feel and how keen they are to make a difference in their own locality. Their example is simply inspirational.”

Full list of projects to receive funding under round eight of the Climate Challenge FundGreen projects get £600,000 boost:

Full list of Climate Challenge Fund projects receiving funding:

• Carluke Development Trust, South Lanarkshire – £22,980
• Bute Community Land Company, Argyll & Bute – £41,000
• Edinburgh Community Energy Co-operative, City of Edinburgh – £50,145
• Lochgoilhead Community Development Trust, Argyll & Bute – £32,701
• Golspie Community Power, Highlands – £43,600
• Applecross Community Company, Highlands – £57,600
• Isle of Kerrera Development Trust, Argyll & Bute – £41,000
• Paisley West & Central Community, Renfrewshire – £21,087
• Kilmadock Development Trust, Stirling – £23,100
• TraM (Transition Mearns), Aberdeenshire – £26,536
• Bannockburn Community Trust Ltd, Stirling – £20,000
• Stewarton Community Allotments Society, East Ayrshire – £14,750
• Midlothian Voluntary Action, Midlothian – £13,013
• Forfar Dramatic Society, Angus – £18,582
• Birse Community Trust, Aberdeenshire – £11,650
• Healthy Roots Ltd (Aberdeen), Aberdeenshire – £20,000
• Mallaig and Morar community centre association, Highlands – £14,659
• Kilmaurs Community Council, East Ayrshire – £25,000
• Strachur Memorial Hall Committee, Argyll & Bute – £7,500
• North Uist Development Company, Western Isles – £10,000
• PUT Community Co-operative, Aberdeenshire – £4,580
• Kibble Education and Care Centre, Renfrewshire – £30,538
• Carn Dearg Mountaineering Club, Angus – £12,886
• Edzell Village Improvement Society, Angus – £1,900
• Killearn Community Futures Company, Stirling – £5,000

Author: Press release from Jura Development Trust

It is with great regret that we must announce that the Direct Passenger Ferry linking the Isle of Jura with Tayvallich in Knapdale, Argyll will not operate from Easter, 2011 as had been planned. The inability to run the service has been caused by the unwillingness of public bodies to provide the necessary operating subsidy.

Direct appeals to Argyll & Bute Council and to the Scottish Government have met with indifference. In January, Sandy MacTaggart, Argyll & Bute’s Executive Director of Development and Infrastructure Services failed to attend a meeting with representatives of Isle of Jura Development Trust to discuss future financing of the ferry. The meeting had been arranged to suit Mr MacTaggart, cost over four hundred pounds and 60 man-hours for the Jura representatives to attend and the only information imparted was that Argyll & Bute Council had no spare money for the Jura Ferry.

Councillor Robin Currie, (Kintyre & the Islands) has since established that £275,000 exists in a Discretionary Transport Fund, but, as of mid-March, no directive on how that money can be accessed has been issued by Argyll & Bute Council.

The response from the Scottish Government is worse. Direct appeals to them in November, 2010 and February, 2011 have been sidelined. Eventually, responses were received from junior members of staff dismissing any further discussion on funding because the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure considered the ferry to be a locally supported service and not part of the remit of Transport Scotland.

This argument is inaccurate. The successful, and award winning, trial of the ferry over the past three years has established that the link is feasible and effective. Passenger numbers are rising and there is a proven economic benefit to businesses in Jura and Tayvallich. In addition there are demonstrable social benefits to Jura having a direct mainland link once more. The Scottish Government dismisses these benefits as being insignificant when it should be willing to enter into an extensive discussion on how the ferry can obtain immediate funding, to allow the ferry to operate in 2011, and sustainable funding for future years. The ferry will always require a subsidy, but this is true for most transport links in Scotland. However, the percentage of subsidy required by the Jura Direct Passenger Ferry is less than most other ferries and has been declining year on year. The economic benefit derived from the subsidy is almost 3 to 1. That is, each £1 spent on subsidy increases the local economy by £3.

Jura needs a direct mainland link and that as the only feasible link presently available, the Passenger Ferry should qualify for support from Transport Scotland and, considering how little money is required relative to the overall budget, support should be immediately available. An island without a direct ferry service is an island without a heart. Transport Scotland should recognise this and enter into discussions on finance for the ferry. They should not dismiss the Jura Ferry as being insignificant and unimportant and should be willing to discuss openly why they will not fund this vital ferry.

Martin Sime, of SCVO, asks whether abolishing local government would increase accountability and reduce bureaucracy.

Maybe I’ve just been over-exposed to it recently, but I can’t be the only one who’s fed up with the sterile debate between local and national governance. Who knows whether there should be one fire service or eight police uniforms? Boundaries between health and care for people who use services don’t exist so why is there an endless discussion about which tier of government should orchestrate services? It’s obvious to me that we are over-governed and waste too much energy on this stuff. It’s not just the task in hand but the need to engage with each other that soaks up time, energy and money. We’ve built a whole ’community planning‘ infrastructure – a real misnomer – to orchestrate this public agency ‘partnership’ at a local level. There are interminable complexities of process and ideological debates about accountability which sustain this elaboration and which produce… almost nothing of use. In China, Scotland as a whole probably wouldn’t qualify as a single tier of government let alone the three we’ve got –
we’d simply be too small.

Well, the party’s over. A lot of the noise just now is the various vested interests trying to preserve their role at the expense of others. But these really ought to be the last cries of a dying regime. We’ve run out of money and there are some really pressing needs to be met – real people needing real help. My idea is to abolish local government. With one less layer we can have a more rational conversation about what we need, how to make our public services more accountable and how to plan for a sustainable future. We’d save a tidy sum too in not having 32 council tax bureaucracies and all the other paraphernalia of this so-called localism. And we could, at a stroke, close down the whole conference industry set up to discuss (but never to deliver) shared services. Of course we’d need new ways for people to express their views about the things that matter to them in their communities. But, like Norway and Finland, these could be very small and more concerned with engagement than delivery.  And we’d need to beef up the accountability processes for major services such as health and education – but we need to do that anyway.

Subsidiarity – taking decisions at the lowest possible level – was a buzzword of the 1990s but we’ve learned a lot since then. As the flawed Scotland Bill process shows us, power devolved is really power retained. We can call our politicians to account if we can get a clearer sight of who is responsible for what.

Extract from Thinking Differently – a collection of think pieces published by SCVO

The biggest news about the government’s community organisers programme, a major part of its big society concept, is who didn’t win the £15m contract to run it.
 
A consortium headed by Locality, an organisation formed by the merger of the Development Trusts Association and Bassac, the umbrella body for community organisations, has been selected to train 5,000 community organisers and set up an independent Institute of Community Organisers after 2015. But they weren’t the favourite to get the contract – another organisation seemed likely to canter home.
 
Citizens UK, which has been training community organisers for 25 years, was widely assumed to be the obvious choice. On the day the big society manifesto was launched in March last year, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, even visited the group’s offices in east London.
 
Neil Jameson, executive director, Citizens UKLondon Citizens, a member of Citizens UK, was also named by Cameron as an “independent group” that was a candidate to train the organisers. His policy adviser, Steve Hilton, had been seen taking notes at London Citizens’ public assemblies. “We believed the tender was written for us,” says Neil Jameson, executive director of Citizens UK.
 
So what changed? Citizens UK says it lost out on price, but there is evidence to suggest that the government’s expectations of community organising might have shifted.
 
When the initiative was unveiled last year, the plan was that the 5,000 organisers would all be full-time professionals and the programme would be based directly on the US community organising movement founded in Chicago by Saul Alinsky, who died in 1972.
 
In the event, 4,500 of the organisers will be part-time volunteers and the methodology they will be trained in owes as much to the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire (1921-97) as it does to Alinsky.
 
Citizens UK works on ‘Alinskyan’ principles. The method is very specific: creating a ‘power organisation’ made up of other groups. Most commonly, these member groups are faith organisations – churches, mosques or synagogues. But community groups, schools and trade union branches can also be members.
 
Member groups identify the issues they want to campaign on and the main group then tries to establish a relationship with people in power, in the public or corporate sectors, to achieve the desired changes. Since 2001, London Citizens has worked in this way to convince the Greater London Authority and more than 100 companies, including KPMG and Barclays, to implement a living wage for their employees.
 
The method is confrontational and political. “It’s not about partnership working – it’s about establishing new relationships with people in power,” says Mark Waters, participation and empowerment programme manager with Church Action on Poverty, which has sponsored community organisers in Manchester, Stockton and Bradford.
 
Though groups negotiate and compromise, separation and independence are cherished. There is no collaboration with other voluntary and community organisations. The idea is not to run services, or to get local people to take them over, but to challenge those in the corporate and public sectors that deliver the services.
 
This Alinskyan version of community organising does not mix well with Conservative big society aims, such as encouraging people to bid to run local parks or take over public services where the state is retreating or leaving gaps. The 5,000 organisers who will be trained in the government programme will follow a more consensual, broader concept of community organising.
 
Steve Wyler, chief executive designate, LocalityLocality has promised a “modern, indigenous English version” of community organising, and its chief executive designate, Steve Wyler, says it is particularly interested in the approach of Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He was opposed to traditional education and saw the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. His thinking emphasised critical reflection and the self-confidence that marginalised groups gain by achieving social change.
 
“Freire tends to use concepts about community animation rather than organisation,” says Wyler. “It’s a way of bringing out those things that are suppressed and hidden within the lives of ordinary people. The reason that basic approach feels right for us is based on our experience of working with community organisations around social action and community enterprise over many years.”
 
The group that will train people as community organisers is RE:generate – the Action to Regenerate Community Trust, working as a partner of Locality. RE:generate describes its work as community organising and animating. This involves listening to a community’s concerns, building trust between members, developing projects that might involve setting up social enterprises and writing a charter that clarifies a new power relationship with public agencies. The method is a combination of Freire and Alinsky that avoids the polarisation of the Alinskyan approach.
 
“Part of our enthusiasm for doing this is that we believe we can combine some community organising practices with what we see within our movement – the positive, problem-solving, entrepreneurial, can-do approach of development trusts and other organisations,” says Wyler. “Community organising might involve challenge, but it will also involve finding solutions and working constructively with other agencies, service providers, people in power and people in local authorities.”
 
Mike Harrison, a community organiser with Together Creating Communities in Wales, says he suspects that the kind of community organiser the government is looking for would fit into the model of councils for voluntary service. “They would become the animateurs, effectively supporting new, small organisations to provide services where the government is leaving holes,” he says.
 
This wider concept of community organising permits a role for the community sector. Alinsky-style community organising groups form discrete organisations, such as London Citizens or Thrive in Stockton. Community organisers are employed by these groups and the relationship with the voluntary and community sector is minimal.
 
By contrast, the people to be trained as community organisers under the government’s programme will be found by existing community groups, such as Community Links in east London or the Barton Hills Settlement in Bristol. They will, however, remain independent. Community groups will provide assistance to the organisers through practical help, such as office space. “To be effective, they have to be seen as non-aligned,” says Wyler.
 
“But it’s nevertheless important to them to have some structure and a base to operate from. There are certain kinds of community organisation that can provide that kind of base.” And after the financial support for the 500 full-time organisers runs out after the first year, they might be funded by local community groups or charities.
 
The effect the organisers will have remains to be seen. Waters of Church Action on Poverty says that if 5,000 were trained on the Alinsky model “you’d have a very potent political force in the country”.
 
He says: “I’m not sure the government has got its head around that yet, although whether what they call community organising and what they want out of it is the same as us, I don’t know. I don’t know if they know.”
 
Jameson of Citizens UK says he wishes Locality well, but anticipates teething problems because the organisation has not been involved with community organising before.
 
“The statement put out by the Cabinet Office would have alarmed us had we won,” he says. “To imply that the organisers are part of the government big society machine wouldn’t have been our intention.
 
“We are very serious about civil society, not about delivering the government’s programme. We deliver what our members want – that’s bottom-up organising, not top-down delivery of the government’s big society programme. There’s a contradiction there.”
 
The Chicago Connection – How Obama worked with an Alinskyan group
 
Community organising “agitates individuals to get off their butts and act”, says Greg Galluzzo, senior organiser with the Gamaliel Foundation in Chicago. “We challenge people to act in concert with others. We help people to understand how the public process works and create actions that will force public officials or corporations to listen to the people.”
 
As founding director of the foundation, which follows the principles of Saul Alinksy, Galluzzo worked with Barack Obama in the 1980s. “When Barack was 22 years old, we recruited him to come to Chicago and be trained as a community organiser with one of our projects,” he says. “He worked for us for three years.”
 
Gamaliel has a presence in 18 US states and works with Church Action on Poverty to train community organisers in the UK. Galluzzo says community organising in the US is responsible for local and national policy changes. “It wins simple victories such as getting abandoned buildings torn down, and national victories such as forcing banks to lend in the communities in which they do business.”
 
He is not convinced that the UK government’s community organisers programme is real community organising. “You can do almost anything and call it community organising,” he says. “We have a very specific definition. It is clearly different from what the UK government is talking about.”

Election Hustings – Housing, Regeneration and Community Empowerment
Glasgow, 7 April 2011

Sponsored by : 
Scottish Community Alliance,
Glasgow and West of Scotland Forum of Housing Associations,
Chartered Institute of Housing, 
Scottish Federation of Housing Associations

What kind of policies do you want the next Scottish Government to put into action on community empowerment, on local regeneration and on housing?

The Scottish Parliament elections take place on 5 May.  This “Question Time” meeting is the ideal chance to put some straight questions to five of Scotland’s political parties. 

We have a great panel lined up:
Robert Brown, Scottish Liberal Democrats
Patrick Harvie, Scottish Greens
Johann Lamont, Scottish Labour
Alex Neil, Scottish National Party
Martin MacIntytre, Scottish Conservatives

In the chair will be Stephen Naysmith, of The Herald newspaper.

When and Where?
Thursday 7 April 2011, 7pm to 8.30pm at the Reidvale Neighbourhood Centre, 13 Whitevale Street, Dennistoun, Glasgow G31 1QW.   Refreshments available from 6.30pm.

You can get directions to the Centre at
www.reidvaleneighbourhoodcentre.org.uk

The hustings meeting is open to all.  The meeting is not ticketed, so come early to get a good seat!

This is a great chance to put the politicians on the spot – don’t miss it!

Urban areas of Scotland are being urged to take advantage of up to £60m of lottery funds through a similar scheme to the one which helped transform the island of Gigha.

Gigha was bought by islanders nine years ago after the lottery funded Scottish Land Fund gave them £3.5m made up of a grant of £2.5m and a loan of £1m which was subsequently repaid.

The Big Lottery Fund in Scotland is now launching the second phase of its Growing Community Assets (GCA) fund, which is designed to have the same transformative effect in Scotland’s towns and cities. An event in Glasgow on Friday will bring key figures in the area of community asset development together with existing GCA grant holders.

The first phase of the programme saw more than £48 million spent between October 2006 and April 2010, funding 127 projects, and Big expects to hand out another £60m by 2015 after applications for GCA reopen in June 2011.

Existing successes include Glasgow’s Whiteinch Centre, which was taken over by members of the local community after they received a grant of £116,092 in 2009 to help the centre support 80 local organisations and offer learning, health and employability services to 850 people each year.

Jackie Killeen, director of Big in Scotland, said: “These projects work because local people themselves are best placed to identify what their own community needs to develop. Our job is to support them in doing this, not just through awarding funds, but also by using our experience of supporting communities through the Scottish Land Fund and Growing Community assets programme.”

However she urged public bodies to see the bigger picture and support communities to take over local assets. Ms Killeen said: “It’s clear that Lottery funding should be used to directly help communities and people most in need, and not to fill the coffers of councils and public landowners.”

Glasgow City Council, for example, has embraced the opportunity by enabling buildings such as the Whiteinch Centre and Maryhill Borough Hall to move into community hands, she said. “We want communities to have the best deal possible. If councils can help ensure communities take full ownership at a significant discount or no cost, that means funding from Big is not swallowed up before the community gets to work.”

Other councils have been less quick to take advantage of the funds, Big says. Awareness of GCA-funded projects remains highest in rural areas, reflecting perhaps the success of the Scottish Land Fund, and while Glasgow received one of the highest number of grant awards in the first phase, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh received relatively few.

Friday’s event aims to showcase successful projects so others can learn from them. “Urban and small town Scotland can learn a lot from the successes in rural areas,” Ms Killeen added. “The important thing is that communities we support can make sure what they are taking on really is an asset, not a liability in disguise.”

In an increasing number of cases, GCA is funding renewable energy schemes such as windfarms, which can help generate an income and make a project more sustainable. “This is about not only ambition and confidence, but the best projects are like a slow-burning chemical reaction–in time they can bring social, economic and environmental benefits,” Ms Killeen said.

One advantage is that urban communities will often be taking over assets from some form of public ownership, which can mean the existing owners are more proactive – or as Big’s director puts it: “Dialogue is much more possible when the owner is a public body, rather than an absentee landlord registered in Lichtenstein.”