Author: Malcolm Fraser

Jeremy Paxman may well have come over all emotional when he saw the east-end tenements where his forebears lived. But with a successful 2014 bid under our belt, and a vast east-end moonscape of dereliction available for our athletes-village “legacy”, it seems that we are not to let a few streets of – in the words of architects RMJM – “…really depressing looking” old tenements stand in the way of a clean sweep of their “…aspirational housing for young people” across this vast site.

Maybe I’m no longer a proper “young person” but I’d like to be able to choose between old and new. As a modern architect I fully-appreciate the virtues of new building, with its concentration on light and views, and interior space that opens out into gardens, all set within a neighbourhood planned to encourage sociability and community; and I have a high regard for the work of RMJM and their ability to achieve this.

But with the best will in the world we do not build, today, with the solidity, integrity and longevity that we took for granted in the past. All today’s construction will last only a fraction of the lifetime that these several hundred tenement flats, properly repaired, still have left, and I value the solidly-crafted red sandstone they are constructed from and their high ceilings and general craft and grace. And, to take-up RMJM’s vision, a community based only on these “young people” would be a yuppie monoculture, and would benefit from some venerable Glasgow “old folks” still being around – old buildings as well as old people – to achieve a balanced community.

The bigger question is why, after the catharsis of the latter half of the 20th century, we still think that there is some sort of virtue in a site scraped clean of its culture and history. Is there any great world city that has indulged in such lacerating self-harm, on such a massive scale, as Glasgow? While Edinburgh’s tenements are largely intact, loved and occupied, the buildings that replaced those torn down in Glasgow have often been torn down themselves, and I suspect that our retained and repaired old tenements will outlast these replacements’ replacements too.

It’s not all about architects wanting the big canvas though. Government policy is heavily-biased towards comprehensive redevelopment, which can be passed over to the Banks and big construction conglomerates that are their friends, rather than be carried-out as small repairs and redevelopments, by small builders, local authorities, and you and me. VAT on demolition and rebuild is zero, while on repairs and alterations it is 17.5%: a massive imbalance which all the Government’s wee exemptions and initiatives do little to alter. Such an obscenely un-level-playingfield is then “justified” with a bit of spin and official “doublespeak”, with “sustainable building initiatives” that start with solid old buildings cowped into a landfill site, “Regeneration” that involves wasteful destruction, and PR Consultants like the Games’ who smugly-observe of Paxman that “… it’s a good job he saw Ardenlea Street when he did because it’s a gonner”.

I doubt that there is a city, town or village in Scotland that does not have a good, solid old building sitting boarded-up – without the benefit of celebrity tears on the box to draw it to our attention – near to a wafer-thin new one, already looking tatty, because of such policies and such attitudes. So here’s my proposal for a Games “Legacy”: the red sandstone tenements of Glasgow’s Ardenlea, Sunnybank and Summerfield Streets and Springfield Road should be beautifully-repaired and set within RMJM’s aspirational modern housing, in a model of truly-sustainable, mixed Regeneration… oh and I’d also like, please, a fiscal regime that no longer penalises buildings for being old, and a Government that understands that “value” is not just a site cleared for business.

Author: Scottish Government

Making Community Empowerment a Reality – Getting your Views
Scottish Government
01.11.07

The Scottish Government is committed to doing more to empower individuals and communities to have more control over their own lives and more choice in how their needs are met. They are particularly keen to see people living in areas of deprivation more empowered.

To turn this into a reality Ministers want to hear the views of a wide range of people. They have asked us to organise a dialogue across Scotland from now until the end of December 2007.

This paper sets out the key issues that we believe have an impact on empowerment. It also makes some suggestions about what might be done to ensure that more communities become more empowered. The paper has been shaped by early discussions with a few people with a key interest in empowerment. [DN include names if we can get agreement in time]

The questions in each section are designed to help us understand your views on our suggestions. Your views, along with the views of everyone else who will be involved in the dialogue, will help to inform the decisions Ministers take to make community empowerment a reality.

What is Community Empowerment?

Community empowerment is very complex. It can mean different things to different people. Over the years community empowerment has often proved difficult to achieve. Also, trying to achieve empowerment can lead to increased tensions in the relationships between the people involved.

Any attempt at making community empowerment a reality that does not recognise these complexities or the scale of the challenge will not succeed. However, we believe that community empowerment can be achieved with the right level of commitment, and practical skills and understanding.

Our vision of community empowerment is based on the upper levels of what is often called the ladder of participation. In the 1960s, a woman called Sherry Arnstein described these as citizen control and delegated power. Here is a description of what these two ideas can mean:

Delegated power: Citizens holding a clear majority of seats on committees with delegated powers to make decisions.
Citizen control: Public handle the entire job of planning, policy making and managing a programme.

Community empowerment should offer opportunities for everyone living in a community regardless of their background or personal circumstances. The promotion of equalities must be at the heart of any community empowerment work. An approach that empowers some people in a community at the expense of others is not community empowerment.

Question: Are the concepts of delegated power and citizen control helpful?

Why Community Empowerment? – Strategic Context

Our proposal is not to develop a stand alone community empowerment initiative with a separate grant scheme attached. Neither do we want to impose another level of bureaucracy or governance. Our suggested approach aims to recognise the long term nature of empowerment and to achieve sustained change.

We see community empowerment as part of the broader agenda of community engagement in service delivery. It should be seen as part of a wider debate on how people engage in decision making and influence what happens in their communities. It forms the community led dimension to that agenda. It is about developing models that will see people deciding for themselves what should be done to achieve positive change in their communities.

We also believe that community empowerment should be a shared agenda across Government at national and local level and across the public and voluntary and community sectors. We believe that there is currently widespread support across a range of sectors for delivering a higher degree of community empowerment. However, being serious about community empowerment will mean real culture change across a range of sectors.

Question: Is this the right context for community empowerment?

Suggested practical models

To help make a concrete reality of empowerment we believe that we need to identify possible models that could be developed locally. We have suggested three possible models here – but there may be more. We believe each of these models fits within the upper levels of ladder of participation. We know that across the country some work along these lines is already taking place and our aim is to see more of it happening.

Model One

Budgets and other resources, for example assets like land and buildings, are identified locally and devolved to local community led organisations. This model would use the concept of Community Anchor Organisations (CAOs) as the catalyst and driver for change. CAOs are described later in this paper.

Model Two

Communities would scrutinise services. Public sector service delivery agencies (and perhaps parts of the voluntary sector) would make a binding commitment that communities would assess the quality of the delivery of agreed service within an area. Careful consideration would have to be given to existing scrutiny regimes and legal accountability for service delivery.

Model Three

Devolved decision making to neighbourhood level with the community in the majority on decision making structures. This could build on existing models of governance at community level and could involve community bodies like community councils, community forums or Registered Tenant Organisations.

Question: Are these models helpful and do you know of others that might work?

Role of the Scottish Government

Our proposal is that the key role for Scottish Government is to provide leadership at National level to encourage and promote community empowerment. This is in line with the Government’s determination to avoid duplication at local level and to take a strategic approach to supporting change in communities. This role could involve leading discussions with other key sectors, for example Local Authorities and other public bodies, to ensure there is explicit, strategic level buy in to community empowerment.

The Scottish Government could also develop and resource a national support programme for community empowerment. This might include support for skills development, for evaluating the impact of empowerment and to help networking across Scotland to make sure people learn from each other about what is working. Any programme along these lines would be developed in partnership with people involved in community empowerment.

Question What do you think the role of the Scottish Government should be?

Role of Local Authorities

Communities can’t be empowered by someone else. Communities must empower themselves. However they will often need help and support to achieve their goals. In each of our proposed models we see Local Authorities as having a key role to play to create the conditions where communities can empower themselves. This will be true of both elected members and officials.

We want to encourage Local Authorities to make firm commitments or pledges about what they will do to help local communities empower themselves. In doing this we would expect Authorities to think very carefully about the complexities involved and how empowering communities fits with their overarching strategies on community engagement and service planning and delivery. In particular we would see Local Authorities having a key role in co-ordinating the Community Capacity Building that underpins empowerment and in identifying resources which could be devolved to local community led groups.

However, Local Authorities should not be seen amongst the public sector as responsible for community empowerment As we said earlier this should be an agenda shared across the public sector. Local Authorities in turn need the support and commitment of the wider public and voluntary sectors. We believe that the key mechanism for co-ordinating public sector support for community empowerment should be Community Planning.

Question What do you think the role of Local Authorities and Community Planning should be?

Role of Community Anchor Organisations

One key element which could make a lasting, long term difference to community empowerment, is the role played by locally based, community led organisations.

These strong community led groups are sometimes referred to as Community Anchor Organisations. We think this could be a helpful term to identify a particular kind of local community led group. The attached draft definition is being adopted by the Local People Leading campaign and is based on an existing definition produced in England.

Community Anchor Organisations could play a number of key roles on a day to day basis in community empowerment. They could ensure that local people have a say in identifying the priorities for change in their neighbourhoods; they may deliver services directly themselves; and they might influence the public sector on behalf of local people.

In particular, in the first of our proposed models they would be the bodies who control devolved resources.

The type of organisation that would play the role of a Community Anchor Organisation would vary from place to place across Scotland, but crucially they would have a fairly high level of existing capacity to work on behalf of the wider community. We think models might include Housing Associations, Development Trusts, Community Councils, Registered Tenant Organisations, Community Forums, and other forms of locally based social enterprises.

Question: What do you think about the potential role of Community Anchor Organisations?

Outcomes and evaluation

We obviously want to see community empowerment making a difference to communities. From previous research the kinds of outcomes we would expect to see from community empowerment would include:

More innovative and responsive solutions to local problems;
Increased confidence and skills amongst local people;
Higher numbers of people volunteering in their communities;
A greater sense of pride in a neighbourhood; and
Higher levels of quality of life in a local neighbourhood.

Some of these would be more immediate outcomes related to the process of community empowerment and some would be longer term outcomes.

The issue of measuring empowerment and the change that is brought about in communities because of empowerment is tricky. There are issues around establishing baselines, identifying indicators and the process of monitoring and reporting on progress that need to be resolved. We are interested in people’s initial views on the challenges of measuring progress in community empowerment and any experience they have which may be helpful.

Question What do you see as the main challenges in measuring progress and do you have any experience that might help?

Making Community empowerment a reality – How to make it happen?

As we said earlier, communities cannot be empowered by other people. But others have a clear role in developing the right conditions for empowerment and in supporting communities. This suggest that to move forward to a Scotland where more communities are more empowered, the first step will be a process of local negotiation between communities, often led by Community Anchor Organisations and the local statutory bodies through Community Planning Partnerships.

As a catalyst and framework for those local negotiations, it would be possible to build on the outcomes of this dialogue to develop jointly owned guidance on what we would expect to see from community empowerment.

Question Do you think that issuing jointly owned guidance is a helpful step in starting the process of community empowerment? Are there other ways you could see the process working?

Author: Scotsman

INFANTS as young as nine months will be introduced to music across Scotland when the country becomes the first in Europe to sign up to Venezuela’s grass-roots approach to youth music, The Scotsman can reveal.

A Scottish delegation in Caracas will next week finalise a five-year partnership to import El Sistema, an initiative that has taught music to 400,000 Venezuelan children.

When the project gets under way next summer four or more Venezuelan tutors, graduates of the teaching system, will be brought into the deprived Raploch area of Stirling.

Teaching methods for the first group of children, aged 0-8, range from group music, rhythm and singing sessions, to making papier-mâché models as a way of getting to know violins, cellos or wind instruments.

Infants may be taken to concerts or have instruments played to them. The idea is to instil an early love of music and a feeling for playing in an orchestra.

The Scottish delegation is taking two music advisers to look closely at El Sistema’s methods.

Pioneered by the revered maestro Joe Antonio Abreu 30 years ago, its intensive tuition system has spread across the country and delivered spectacular results. Children caught up in the drug dealing and gang warfare of the barrios have reached the highest level as musicians.

Until recently, it seemed the Scottish side was swept up with enthusiasm for the system, with little clear idea of what methods lay behind it.

But the advisers will carry out “focused observations”, said Nicola Killean, the young music teacher picked to lead the Venezuela in Scotland project.

“We believe it’s a philosophy and approach to using music for social development. It’s using music as the tool to transform people’s lives,” she said.

The Scottish delegation includes Peter Stevenson, a former investment banker and musician, and Irene Tweedie, former head of finance at BBC Scotland, on the project’s board.

The visit will coincide with the triumphant return of the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, El Sistema’s showcase, from a United States tour. This summer, its performances were highlights of the Edinburgh International Festival and the Proms. It is the flagship of some 300 youth orchestras in El Sistema’s network.

Raploch has suffered poverty, high unemployment and low educational achievement, but is the focus of a £120 million regeneration project.

Ms Killean said most of the music teaching would be done in groups, not sitting alone with a tutor in a room. In the system, after children choose what instrument they want to play, they make a papier-mâché version, then progress on to the instrument itself. “That’s one of the steps, and it’s fun for the children,” Ms Killean said. “There is a big early emphasis on singing.”

In Raploch the programme will begin with children aged 0-8, expanding to work with all children of primary school age.

“We are looking at children from age 0-2, singing, introduction to musicianship, and working with parents, developing positive parenting skills through the music,” Ms Killean said.

In Venezuela, children have worked their way through the system to become tutors themselves, Ms Killean said.

The start-up Scottish Arts Council funding for the Venezuela project has been £120,000 – enough to hire perhaps four Scottish music teachers for a year. In Venezuela, it costs £16 million a year, and employs 15,000 music teachers.

Since the Simon Bolivar Orchestra’s Proms performance, the Scottish project has been flooded with calls from other orchestras.

“For years there have been lots of organisations inspired by El Sistema but we are the first that have said we want to do it with you,” said Ms Killean. The link would include exchanges of musicians, teachers, and technology, she said. The Venezuelans were very proud of what they had created and wanted to share it.

“The partnership with Scotland is one of their most exciting developments. A lot of them can speak English. A lot of the tutors speak English. The majority of their teachers were raised through the system.”

Of the Venezuelan system, she said: “It’s a combination of so many different elements. It’s using the power and beauty of the orchestra as an instrument for positive development, and give the children, regardless of where they are from, the best start in life.”

PUPILS ‘MUST STICK AT IT’
JUST one child among 190 at Raploch Primary School takes private music lessons.

For the rest, music is limited to a lesson every two weeks, on the one day a full-time music teacher visits.

In one measure of the area’s circumstances, almost half of the Raploch children receive free school meals.

Few parents want to pay for music lessons for more than a term, said headteacher Anne Stewart.

Ms Stewart’s pupils will be first in line for teaching under el sistema imported from Venezuela. She said the idea of intensive teaching was “absolutely tremendous”, but said Scottish conditions were very different from the absolute poverty in Venezuela.

Ms Stewart, who first came to Raploch as a class teacher in 1970, said old-fashioned practice was still the key. “The biggest challenge will be that the children commit to practice that is necessary. If you are going to learn any musical instrument, you have to stick at it,” she said.

She supported the idea of teaching music to the very young “to get them into the mindset” with percussion or clapping along.

“In this project tuition is entirely free, musical instruments are entirely free, so children who do want to learn a musical instrument would have every opportunity to do so. This is much more intensive than what children could possibly get from an hour’s session.

“I would hope there would be a big take-up of it, but that remains to be seen.

“There will be initial enthusiasm, whether that can be sustained is the big question.”

Author: Senscot

In summer 2001, 18 hectares of land on the outskirts of the village of Port Charlotte on the Isle of Islay was put on the open market. The land contained a relatively informal yet frequently used and highly valued football pitch that was maintained and utilised by the local football team, Kilchoman Football Club. The possible loss of the football pitch galvanised community members to research the possibility of purchasing the land for community ownership. To this end, in October 2001 the community created a Company Limited by Guarantee with charitable status, namely Iomairt Chille Chomain (ICC).
Iomairt Chille Chomain is entirely community led, with six Directors assisted by a part-time Development Officer driving the project forward. The Company presently has over 170 members from throughout the UK and overseas, with the majority paying a life membership fee of £50.

The Port Mòr Centre, run by ICC, is a brand new building situtated just outside of Port Charlotte on Islay and was opened in May 2007. It is a community project and aims to provide many and varied facilities to both visitors to Islay and residents alike. The building is carbon neutral and uses a 6KW wind turbine to generate electricity, a ground source heating system to provide heating and solar panels to provide hot water. Insulation of the building is to a very high standard.

The Centre features a café and a spacious seating area with spectacular views across the Lochindaal. Also available is Internet access, meeting rooms with videoconferencing facilities and a campsite with toilets, showers and laundry facilities. In addition, a modern and well-specified children’s play park is situated right next to the Centre.

For further info`, contact:

Port Mòr Centre
Port Charlotte
Islay,
PA48 7UE
Tel: 01496 850441
E-mail: warden@islandofislay.co.uk
Website: www.islandofislay.co.uk

Author: Edgar S. Cahn

I have met that person whom you just heard introduced. We have a nodding acquaintance. But that’s not who I am. Because the person speaking to you today is a troublemaker, a malcontent. My guess is that there is some of that in every one of you. That you chose the career you did because you too are troublemakers. You want to make a difference. You want to leave this world changed for your having been here.

You are here because you have been devoting yourself to helping people who are having problems, people who are at risk, people who are vulnerable or fragile. To me, they are like a canary. Not just any canary, the canary that miners carry into the mine along side of them. You know why they take that canary with them. It’s because the canary has a fragile respiratory system that will collapse from toxic gases long before human beings are affected. And that alerts the miners to danger.

Well the children, the young people, the families, the elders you help care for are like those canaries. They are the fragile ones, the at-risk ones. And the question is: what do we do if we see them starting to keel over?

I’ll tell you what we do. We put respirators on them. We rush in all kinds of services. Intensive services. That’s expensive – and we never seem to have enough respirators or enough experts who know how to use them or to put everyone on life support.

And so, I’m here to say to you: isn’t it time we stopped just putting respirators on canaries? Isn’t it time we asked: where does the toxicity come from? How do we get at it? How do we stop it, clean it out, restore health? And who can best do that? Is it just professionals? Or is it professionals and the community working together?

That’s when I came up with the concept Co-Production. It’s my way of saying, if we can enlist the community as partners, maybe we won’t have to worry about putting canaries on artificial life support. Maybe it’s time we realized that all the specialized professional intervention and professional programs cannot supply

an extended family

a best friend

an informal support group

a peer group

a network

ongoing help after the program ends

Co-Production is a hypothesis:

To realize its full potential, a program must enlist those being helped as partners, co-workers and co-producers of the intended outcomes.

Co-Production requires

A partnership on two levels: between professionals and those that they serve

And between two economies: the monetary economy and the core economy

The first is monetarized and has 2 major components: the private, market economy & the public purpose economy (government & philanthropy)
the second is not monetarized: Family, neighborhood, community, civil society

Aristotle called that second economy Oekonomika. Economists took the term (or more precisely, hijacked it), then expressed their appreciation by demoting the household economy with a negative and calling it the non-market economy. Neva Goodwin, a noted environmental economist, reversed the hierarchy by calling it the Core Economy. We have adopted her term: the Core Economy.

Economists ranging from Nobel winner Gary Becker to MacArthur “Genius Award Winner” Nancy Folbre estimate that at least 40% of economic activity takes place in the Core Economy and is not reflected in the GDP.

The Core Economy is critical – and it is vast:

Redefining Progress, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, has pegged the value of household work in 1998 at a total of $1.911 trillion – about one quarter the size of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) that year.

The national value of informal care giving in 1997 was $196 billion, a “figure [that] dwarfs national spending for formal home health care ($32 billion) and nursing home care ($83 billion).”

A multi-million dollar, multi-year study undertaken in Chicago concluded that poverty and joblessness could not account for the differences in crime they found in largely black neighborhoods. “By far the largest predictor of the violent crime rate,” the study concluded, “was collective efficacy” – a willingness by residents “to intervene in the lives of children.”

What does this Core Economy do? What DOES any economy do? It produces and it distributes.

So what does this economy produce and what does it distribute?

Infants, Children, teenagers and peer groups, families, care for seniors.
It produces safe vibrant neighborhoods, community, democracy, civil society
It produces love and caring and coming to each other’s rescue and sharing 24-7.

That economy, the Core Economy, uses a different production model and a different distribution model from the Market Economy

Production

Specialization and Division of Labor (Market) versus Interdependence, self sufficiency
Distribution

Pricing (Market) versus equity, need, contribution, love, reciprocity, moral obligation – guilt

There is no family that I know where someone holds up a drumstick and asks: what am I bid for this – or divides the mashed potatoes based on the market value of the tasks performed (walking the dog, putting the garbage out.)

Our real job, our real challenge is to rebuild that Core Economy, to make it healthy. But how do we do that, how do we rebuild and restore the Core Economy? What does that really mean: rebuilding the Core Economy? When the Core Economy breaks down, when families, neighborhoods and civil society cannot do what we count on them to do, charities, foundations and government are called upon to pick up the pieces.

How can we best restore the Core Economy to health? That answer is NOT exclusive concentration on massive professional service programs to meet needs and to rescue at-risk groups and individuals. That’s putting respirators on canaries. We need to take a different approach.

An Analogy —

Computers run powerful specialized programs: spread sheets, word processing, data base, graphics. Behind those programs is an operating system.

No matter how powerful the specialized programs, if the operating system crashes, none of those powerful specialized programs works. They can’t fix the operating system and they can’t function at peak capacity if the operating system is on overload.

Like computers, society has specialized programs: schools, police, courts, prisons, mental health agencies, gerontologists, drug detox agencies, hospitals and, of course, all the specialized industries that comprise the private sector.

Like computers, society has an operating system. That operating system is family, neighborhood, community, civil society. The Core Economy.

The problems stem from the malfunctions of the operating system – the Core Economy.

But, if we are going to be candid, the operating system that is still sputtering along ran on free and cheap labor – exacted from the subordination of women, exploitation of immigrants, and discrimination based on ethnicity. So we can’t just go back to the old operating system and we can’t just do a patch job. We need a strategy for rebuilding and upgrading society’s operating system – based on valuing all human capacity, honoring all contributions, generating reciprocity, and building social assets.

4 Operating Principles for the New Operating System –

A. Definitions

1. Assets. The real wealth of this society is its people. The real wealth of any community is people. Every human being can be a builder and contributor.

2. Redefining Work. Work must be redefined to include whatever it takes to rear healthy children, preserve families, make neighborhoods safe and vibrant, care for the frail and vulnerable, redress injustice, and make democracy work.

3. Reciprocity. Giving is most powerful when it becomes a two way street. One-way acts of helping and largesse must become two-way transactions. To avoid creating dependency, acts of helping must trigger reciprocity: Giving back by helping others. “You need me” becomes “We need each other.”

4. Social Capital. “No man is an island.” Informal support systems, extended families, social networks are held together by trust, reciprocity and civic engagement. Progress in any context requires a social infrastructure generated by investments of trust, reciprocity and civic engagement.

B. Examples & Explanation

Assets: Do we really value as contributors the very people whom we are charged with helping? I can’t accept this statement a senior gave me. She declared: I have nothing left to give – except love. As if that wasn’t the most precious thing in the world. Or the teenager charged with UUV (unauthorized use of a vehicle – or joy riding) who had come before a youth court run by other teenagers. When the jury was out deliberating, I went to talk to him. I said: your community really needs you – and he looked at me as if to say, “White man, what planet are you from? Don’t you know why I’m here?”. Then I asked two questions, “Do you know how to tie your shoes? Don’t you think a child in pre-school would rather learn that from you than from me?” and “Do you have a grandmother or grandfather you know how to hug? Did you know there are seniors in nursing homes who haven’t had a visitor in six months – who would give anything for a visitor to come and hug them?”.

He knew I knew something he couldn’t deny, that he had the capacity to help someone else in a way that mattered. Until I asked those questions, his father could not look me in the eye. He was ashamed of his son. Now he was looking at his own child in a new way. Both knew the youth had value. We – all of us — have value far beyond those skills that the market values. What percentage of the real you do you put in your resume? 5%, 10% at most.

Redefining Work: What does that mean? One example: the five year old with pigtails who went up to a gang leader (complete with gold teeth, chains and tattoos) after a truce had been negotiated and said: “We have trash cans here – and we use them”. That was her Time Dollar job – Time Dollars or Time Credits are the currency that Time Banks use to reflect the work that we really need and that we can honor, even if we don’t have “real money” to pay them. (She could get the dancing lessons she wanted with those Time Dollars.) Martin Simon from Timebanks UK can tell you about how Timebanking has been used in the UK to cover the services involved in a wedding, a funeral and in the US for a child birth by midwives. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of real work paid for with Time Credits, provided by people whom the economists don’t consider to be in the work force.

Or in both your country and mine, there is a very special organization called the Youth Advocate Program that works with teenagers who otherwise would be in some institution. There’s one 13 year old, returned home from a secure detention facility for possession of a firearm. He was too young to be eligible for supported work but not too young to develop an orientation program in the language of a 13 year old. Like my colleagues in Time Banking, the YAP staff can load you down with stories about the offenders who are now emerging as youth leaders, or who are advising other young people about what path not to go down. Others are proving themselves experts who can actually lead workshops and discuss community alternatives to custody.

Redefining work means honoring people for what they can do, recording it, validating it and rewarding it. That doesn’t mean paying market wages. But it does mean developing incentives that send the message: by helping others you can shape your own destiny. In Chicago and Washington DC, youth with special learning problems are tutoring younger children in the first and second grade and so far, 4,500 have earned recycled computers by tutoring. Grades have gone up; test scores have gone up; attendance has gone up and the fighting after school has stopped because we didn’t realize we were also creating a protection system. Apparently you don’t beat up your tutee and you don’t let anyone else beat them up either.

Before going on to the next “Core Value”, I need to say something about what it means to rebuild the Core Economy and why Time Banking is working out to be just the right tool to use to do that. It’s because of a characteristic of money that we take for granted without realizing what the consequences are. All of us know that money has something called price built in. We just assume that’s how money should be so when I first developed a kind of money that treated all hours equally, people (I mean my mentors at the London School of Economics) thought that was crazy. But think about how price works in the market. It means that things that are in short supply cost more and things that are plentiful cost less. If they are scarce, they are valuable. If they are abundant, they are either dirt cheap or worthless. But take a look at what that means. It means that everything that defines us as human beings is worthless. Because we all are human beings. Except I guess for the Martians in the audience. So all of us can reach out to each other, care for each other, come to each other’s rescue, come together to reach an agreement, celebrate together, and teach each other the basics. In market terms, that abundance brings price down. It is worthless. But we know it is priceless.

So the basic things that the Core Economy requires is something we all can do for each other. I know it comes as a surprise that it was possible for our species to bring forth children without a gaggle of PhD’s in child development being available or that people actually could get old without guidance from gerontologists. But if we let price determine value, then we have to devalue everything that enabled our species to survive. Maybe, just maybe that’s why we’re in a bit of trouble now as a species.

Time Banking reverses that. It honors those skills, those universal capacities that define us as human beings; our willingness to come to each others rescue, to care for each other, to share, to help out, to listen, to hug, to pay for others who are less fortunate, and to reach agreement. Time Banking says: it’s possible to honor that, value it, reward it – regardless of what the market says. That’s what we need to rebuild the Core Economy. That’s why those of us in Timebanking have recently adopted the saying, “We have what we need – if we use what we have.” Now I come to the third Core Value, the third principle.

Reciprocity: We need to rethink how we go about helping others. We need to ask them to give back in some way, not necessarily to us, but to someone else. Some of you may have seen or heard about the movie Pay it Forward. It’s that idea. We can always pay it back because there is always someone else out there we can help.

This is probably the most controversial principle to implement because we think help should be given based on need and that it is somehow wrong or inappropriate to ask a person who needs help to help someone else. All of us went into the helping professions in order to help, and no one taught us that we needed to ask people to give back, unless they had money and could afford to pay. But think of the message we are sending. Without meaning to do so, we are saying to people, “I have something you need but you have nothing I need or want or value”. And we are also saying, “the way you get more of my time, help and resources is by having more problems and being less able to take care of yourself”. So we are really sabotaging ourselves without meaning to.

I confronted the consequences of doing things this way in the mid-nineties. I had been the co-creator and founder of the national legal services program. For the first time, the U.S. federal government expended large amounts of money to provide free legal services to people who could not afford a lawyer. And then in the nineties, Newt Gingrich and a conservative congress tried to kill the program. By that time, over 30 years, we had helped over 100 million families, really dedicated lawyers doing all they could to stop an eviction or overturn a bad ruling or stop spousal abuse. We barely survived that fight but not a single family we had helped turned out to help us in that fight. I realized that for all the valiant effort, we had not created a constituency for justice and for all the money we spend on helping people, we have not created a constituency for social justice in my country.

There’s a Time Banking program that enlists prisoners to fix bicycles that are then sent to third world countries and the Time Credits earned can then be spent by their families to get help. Likewise, in the Youth Advocate Program I described earlier, young people who have committed offenses are helping out on a community bus, ensuring that young people with learning difficulties get to school safely. And in another community, the Youth Advocate Program has youth who have been in serious trouble helping local fire fighters to distribute fire alarms and teach fire prevention to local residents. In return, the local parks and recreation department has just agreed to expand a skate park for neighboring teens. In still another community, youth who committed offenses take jobs that earn a small wage, half of which goes to a victim support fund.

But I learned, in meeting with the Strategy Unit in the Home Office, that there is another kind of bias, and even greater bias, against asking people to give back in this country. People on disability cannot participate in Time Banks without losing their benefits. The “contributory principle” has been abolished. Yet, even if disabled, they can visit nursing homes and orphanages.

We have to find a way to have a different set of rules apply in different contexts. The Core Economy is NOT the market economy. So why can’t we let people contribute to rebuilding the Core Economy even if they are legally disabled and cannot work in the market economy. That’s one place where your help and creativity will be critical if we are going to expand reciprocity and enable everyone to contribute in any way they can.

Fourth, and finally, comes the concept of Social Capital. We have to invest resources in helping rebuild a sense of community, that you above all know enabled communities to survive World War II. In Washington DC, we are creating a club for the youth who were in the Youth Court, so they can create a peer culture based on helping others. I am working with the Youth Advocate Program in Houston to create an alumni club so that these youth and their families can provide help to each other, after the funded services end. In Seattle, a group of families with children who suffer from Severe Emotional Disturbances, who may be violent or suicidal have banded together to provide mutual help and to form a new kind of extended family where no one need be ashamed of their problems and everyone can provide each other with mutual support. In Texas, the families who have formed a Time Bank called Banco del Barrio are now teaching each other about everything from health and diabetes to how to become a citizen. They are now engaged in voting registration and turning out the vote. They earn Time Credits and the health clinic provides some funding for monthly socials and pot lucks and for the first time, families are developing a knowledge of how to cook healthy meals and are exercising together to lose weight or to control diabetes.

That’s the kind of world we need to rebuild. You have in your a kind of self-assessment instrument that enables you to assess whether and to what extent your agency is putting these values into practice. It asks simple questions:

Do you ask your clients what they like to do?
How do you record contributions?
Does your program/agency budget funds to create special programs and/or to provide goods and services as rewards or incentives for clients to contribute.
How do you reward contributions by clients?
Do you require, request or encourage clients to help others in return for services you provide?
How do you support clients in finding ways to help others?
Is there a key person who is responsible for helping to see that it happens?
Does the organization help to create mutual self help, or social action groups as an expression of agency mission?
In what ways does your organization support client-based membership groups which can function as an informal support group, peer group or extended family?
What supports and resources are provided for social events and celebrations that are organized by client-based membership and peer groups.

Rebuilding the Core Economy can actually help you further your agency’s mission and statutory purpose. Co-production can

(1) supply a critical missing element

(2) change relations with clients from dependency to empowerment and contribution

(3) create a constituency that will fight for your program and generate additional resources

(4) create feedback loops and early warning systems that amount to real system change

(5) advance social justice by empowering disempowered groups and reducing barriers based on national origin, gender, age, language or ethnicity.

We are talking about genuine system change, change that formally enlists the clients you serve as co-producers, as partners and co-workers. That’s a big step. It involves major system change but if you go down this road, new possibilities will emerge. Co-Production expands the range of the possible. If this is undertaken systematically, problems that have long remained intransigent will suddenly become manageable.

That’s my message to you today.

Co-Production means we can stop lamenting the fact that we don’t have enough money to put respirators on all the fragile canaries. But maybe, just maybe, if we clean up the toxicity, if we enlist our clients and the community in getting at the sources of the problem, we won’t need all those respirators and those who do need respirators can be taken off in a shorter period of time. That’s the message; that’s the hope. Let me end with a passage that says it all better than I can:

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?”

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”

What will you answer? “We all dwell together

To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.

O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,

Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

(T.S. Eliot, Choruses From the Rock)

In case you hadn’t noticed – the Stranger from the desert has arrived. What happened on September 11 has profound implications and the bottom line is what will we answer?

We all dwell together to make money from each other.

Or

This is a community?

Co-Production provides that answer. It declares unequivocally:

This is a community. We are a community. I think that’s why we are here. Not just here, here.

But here, on this planet.

Author: Upper Eskdale Development Group

The Upper Eskdale Development Group after lengthy negotiations with Dumfries and Galloway Council took over ownership of the former Eskdalemuir primary school for £1, with a symbolic hand over of the keys from Councillor Archie Dryburgh to UEDG Chairman Nick Jennings. UEDG is a ‘not for profit’ organisation run by its members and membership is open to residents of Eskdalemuir and Bentpath. It aims to further the regeneration of the community and community spirit within the local area and at its open day last month another 30 members signed up. The group has ambitious plans to set up a community café and resource centre at the school which will be run for the community by the community. Nick says ‘in buying the school we achieved just the first small step but we’ve got a exciting journey ahead. We have an enthusiastic group of volunteers and they’re now ready to set to forward. To find out how to join in this adventure visit our website www.Eskdalemuir.com’.

Eskdalemuir is one of the remotest settlements in the area and over the years it has seen the loss of its shop, pub and many public services but the community are determined to see good things about living there can be built upon and shared with residents and visitors alike. The Group has recently applied to the Council for 3 year funding to help kick start the project by employing a part-time worker to help the volunteers. They hope that the project will become self-financing and generate jobs and business opportunities. They hope not only to help the community maintain and develop its self reliance but also create reasons and opportunities for young people to stay or move into the area. The group is keen to use the local timber which is in abundance to heat the school and have solar and other renewable technologies. There is strong interest in sustainable development and using local goods and services and helping to develop local suppliers are central to the project.

Author: Steve Wyler

In 1954 Michael Young, who created the Open University and the School for Social Entrepreneurs and much else besides, wrote an article -‘Changing Life in a Village Community’ -after a visit to Joseph Rowntree’s model village of New Earswick. Even then, Young felt that transport and mass communication were eroding a sense of place, of belonging. In the modern age, he said, we all belong to the world, but ‘the trouble is, the world is too big. It is too big a place for anyone to feel at home in.’

So community of place still matters, but what does it really consist of? Young identified three ingredients. The first was length of residence, a place where people have lived long enough to put down roots: ‘they have not had to change their friends or their grocer and milkman every few years or so.’ The second was a place with a character all of its own. Houses, shops, open spaces should be distinctive: ‘a place you can belong to because it is different.’ The third was a place where people share a common, history: ‘the shared knowledge of old experiences, or old stories of experiences handed down, is one of the intangible things which make people feel they belong somewhere.’

If this is what it takes to provide a sense of community, what does it take to make a community thriving and confident? Young pointed to one answer: active self-determination. He said that Rowntree did not set up a village council, but rather allowed residents to do it themselves. ‘Consciously or unconsciously he knew that people must be allowed to make their own history and create their own community.’ Nowadays we might add that, because every community is so extraordinarily diverse, the challenge is to create a community of communities, building bonds within groups and bridges between different groups.

If Young were alive to expand his article, I feel sure he would draw attention to the revitalising nature of community enterprise, where organisations trade for social purpose and reinvest surpluses into their community. Within the development trusts movement, £97m of trading income was produced in this way in the last year. Such activity stimulates the local economy, creating wealth and locking it in. It reduces dependency on grant handouts and so reinforces a community’s scope for self. determination. And it builds skills and common bonds among those engaged in the enterprises, in times of adversity and in times of triumph.

Finally, I think Michael Young would have celebrated the power of community asset ownership. As a means to bring underused or derelict land and buildings into productive and beneficial use, as a foundation for trading activities and income generation, and as a beacon of hope in places where people have been written off, sometimes for generations, the value of asset ownership in creating confident communities is hard to overestimate. With £430m of assets in community ownership across the UK, development trusts and others are showing that this approach works and is sustainable. But if we are to create confident communities everywhere, we do need much more of it.

Author: Local People Leading

In Ferguslie Park, Glasgow the role of anchor organisations is fulfilled by its own community based housing association when operate the Tannahill Centre as the hub of commercial and community activity

See full profile here

Author: Govan Workspace

Community-buyouts of industrial land
Govan Workspace

One of the largest community-buyouts of industrial land in urban Scotland has
been completed by Govan Workspace with the purchase of a five-and-a-half acre site
on the banks of the Clyde. The acquisition marks the start of a new era in the
continuing development of the company.Read about their plans forthe next 10 years.

Read their annual report here www.senscot.net/docs/govananualreport.pdf 

Author: BBC

An island community has secured the funding it needed to buy a filling station, shop, vehicle repair workshop and a house.

Sleat Community Trust in the south of Skye has been awarded £280,000 from the Big Lottery Fund and £42,000 from Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE).

The Skye Ferry Filling Station was managed for almost 40 years by Donnie and Colleen MacKinnon.

They placed the business on the market following their retirement.

The filling station is close to where cars come off the Armadale ferry.