Author: Ben Wrey, CommonSpace

NICOLA STURGEON has spoken of the importance of the Kinning Park Complex (KPC) going “from strength to strength”, as the community centre seeks £50,000 in crowdfunding as part of its major refurbishment plans for the multi-use facility.

KPC has been at the heart of the local community on the Southside of Glasgow for over 100 years, having been built as a primary school in 1916 and converted into a neighbourhood centre in 1976 by the local council.

In 1996 council cuts left the future of the centre in jeopardy, but a campaign by local residents, including a 55 day occupation of the KPC, saved the centre, with the council handing over the keys to the local community.

KPC has again been at risk of closure in recent years, but a new charitable organisation has been established to refurbish and restore the centre as an independent multi-facility centre, used by groups, artists, musicians and others.

In a visit to the community centre earlier this month, First Minister and Southside MSP Nicola Sturgeon spoke of her fondness for the centre and the importance of community facilities like KPC in modern society.

She said: “I took part in the sit-in many, many years ago when the building was faced with closure, and that’s when I first got to know the building and fell in love with the building, my attendance at the building has been irregular since, but it’s got a special place in my heart.”

Sturgeon continued: “I think it’s really important that the work of Kinning Park Complex continues and goes from strength to strength. It’s increasingly important in the often fragmented world that we live in today that there are spaces at the heart of communities that bring people together and allow that sense of community to flourish. Places like this have always been important, but I think they’re getting more and more important, so I look forward to see the Kinning Park Complex thrive in the future.”

The KPC has major issues affecting the roof, heating and electrics which hit a critical point last winter, with the centre on the verge of closure.

After securing £200,000 from the Scottish Land Fund to enable the transfer of the building into the hands of the community and nearly £1,000,000 from the Big Lottery, plans to start major renovations are underway. These include studio space for artists, an events and performance space for community groups, a kitchen/café and a garden.

However, an additional £700,000 is needed to complete the refurbishment plans. KC staff are concerned for the health and wellbeing of regular service users when the building closes for refurbishment, particularly those who rely on their weekly community meals programme, which is open to all and based on a pay-what-you-can donation.

The £50,000 crowdfunding campaign is to help to cover the costs of continuing community projects while the building is under refurbishment and to develop a membership scheme to “put the building in the hands of local people”.

READ MORE: How a Glasgow café is repairing the planet, one household item at a time

Martin Avila, Development Director of the Kinning Park Complex, said: “We’ve taken some very important first steps on the journey, but there is a long way to go and we can’t do it alone.

Building a membership that really oversees the work we do, pushing forward with vital, renovations and keeping core services going at the same time is a big ask and we need your help to do it.

“If you believe in the work of the Kinning Park Complex, now is the time to get involved and support our work. We’re building a bigger brighter future for the KPC and every little bit of support helps bring that future closer.”

Clare McIntyre, Events and Communications officer at KPC, said: “We are actively fundraising ourselves and have raised over £5,000 in the last six months through organising events.

“We have two more fundraisers before Christmas, ‘It’s a Wonderful Rummage’, a jumble sale with a difference and ‘Just 17’ a gig with some great musicians on the line up.

“With a small staff team and little budget it is hard work but we know it will pay off. We have talented and dedicated people volunteering their time to help us do this.”

As well as donating, the Kinning Park Complex team said they are keen for more people to get involved, whether through volunteering, organising fundraising events or spreading the word.

To support the fundraiser and to find out more about the Kinning Park Complex visit their website.

Author: David Ainsworth, Civil Society

The Civil Society Futures inquiry concludes we need a change in our behaviour to deliver what is needed. This is both right and wrong, says David Ainsworth.

There’s a lot to like in Julia Unwin’s Civil Society Futures report, which correctly highlights that we need a great shift in civil society to make it relevant to today’s society.

I’m responding to it slightly late, after a couple of days out of the office to look after a sick family, but it’s important enough that it’s still worth saying.

The core message in Unwin’s report is that we need to hand down power, increase accountability, learn to trust one another, and connect more closely. It’s also about doing this at every level of civil society.

It says that civil society risks being irrelevant if this doesn’t happen, and that we must make this change ourselves, by changing our behaviours.

This is all right, and at the same time, it’s utterly wrong.

Listen to the people

Absolutely, civil society is about handing down power. It ought to belong to ordinary people. Today’s great institutionalised charities don’t feel like part of that movement. They feel too big, too distant, too remote. Too rich.

The leaders of each individual organisation can probably take the actions needed to satisfy Unwin’s strictures. Listen to the people. Hold yourself accountable. Always ask how you can do better.

But as a movement, as a whole, we can’t simply make this happen through behaviour change. We need to change the rules.

We’ve had a lot of reports saying that it’s important to do better. Somehow, even though we all nod and murmur our appreciation, nothing seems to change. And that’s because people will never change. We will always be people. Fallible, self-centred, evolved for a Stone Age world.

It’s about incentives

People will always respond to incentives. If the incentives are bad, people will be bad. But people want to be good, so we have to give them good incentives.

Civil society is in some ways a doomed mission – trying to recreate a community-based existence; trying to create a society which is essentially equitable, just and fair. My history is sketchy before the Norman Conquest, but I can tell you that people have been trying and failing to achieve our goals for at least a thousand years. Modern charities preach many of the same messages as the levellers of the Civil War, and of the economic revolution in the wake of the Black Death. When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?

We all want to be part of a little tribe, a warm and comforting community. It’s what we’re built for, what we yearn for, in the same way we yearn for beaches and warm waters and rolling hills, and polar bears yearn for loneliness and cold and snow.

But we’ve built a world that is nothing like the one we’re shaped for. We’ve built a world of steel towers and teeming multitudes and instantaneous communication.

In some ways it’s a glorious world, offering long life and vast knowledge and 48 types of breakfast cereal. But it’s also a world we instinctively misunderstand. Because it’s so vast, it’s hard to change at human scale. And the fictions we’ve built – the ideas of money and limited liability and ownership – have inbuilt flaws in them which mean that they don’t work as they should to help the people who’ve imagined them.

Society, economy and polity

It feels to me as if we are citizens of three entities – a society, an economy, and a polity. Each of those impacts on us in different ways, and when they push in different directions, meaningful change is hard.

Changing society is hardest. You can only get social change by shifting attitudes, and that means causing people to voluntarily change their own minds, which they don’t like to do. There are tools to do it. Charity campaigners know those tools. Although, in many ways the easiest way to do it, as the physicist Neils Bohr said, is to wait until your opponents are dead.

Social change is not enough on its own, though. History is littered with social changes that come to nothing because social attitudes are not always more powerful than money, or power.

And this is where we get back to the Unwin report. It is calling on us to implement social change in our sub-society, organically, by realising the failures of our behaviours.

Change the rules

But trying to change the world one person at a time is not going to work. The whole history of the human race tells us that people don’t surrender power, don’t make themselves accountable. If you want to change behaviours, you have to change the rules.

That is not to say that we should look to government to swoop in with the answers to our problems. It is not about government money.

At one level, we are pointless without government. The structural problems we are trying to address – poverty, housing, care for those at risk – can all be solved if this country was simply run for the benefit of those who live in it, and government can do that, if it wants.

But at another level, government can do nothing for us. We are about human networks. Relationships. Communities. And a government cannot build a community.

No. It’s not help solving the problem we need from government. We just need the right tools to do the job.

The problem is that the polity that we operate in has decreed rules to govern our sector which are inimical to the society we want to build.

It places the ultimate power over vast organisations in the hands of no more than a dozen volunteers. It mandates those organisations to account more to a handful of wealthy donors than to the general public they were set up to serve. It encourages competition and mistrust between charities competing for the same funds. And it inhibits, not encourages, community and communication and collaboration.

I’ve talked elsewhere about what changes we might want – greater accountability to the public, a more bottom-up structure of control, a much more powerful regulator. But the exact mechanisms are not the focus here. The main point is that if we are to serve the people, we must give them the levers to control us. And we cannot do that without forcing government to change the structures that govern us.

You cannot change our sector without changing its rules.

Author: NMS

Watch a short video describing the initiative by Nation Museums Scotland to document the progress of land reform by collecting objects of meaning

Author: Mike Small, Bella Caledonia

This year, once again, we’re going to “solve homelessness forever” according to the social enterprise Social Bite.

The problem is of course that we were going to solve it forever last year as well.

The model of a mass sleep out promises “4 cities, one night, 12,000 people under the stars”.

What’s not to like?

The project has a tremendous amount of goodwill, and it’s difficult to question its mixture of ambition, innovation and drive for social justice. I wouldn’t doubt anyone’s integrity or good intention from within the organisation, nor would I doubt that they have done a tremendous amount of good in their time.

But the project does raise some serious questions about social enterprise and social policy in Scotland that need addressed.

Despite the very many positives about the Social Bite original concept: give people an opportunity for food, training and employment, and highlight homelessness whilst increasing solidarity, the project now seems to be suffering from over-reach.

The Sleep Out projects seem mired in celebrity culture, confusing political solidarity with a pop festival and blurring the lines between having a good time and addressing serious social crisis. What many people are concluding is that we don’t need a bedtime story, a pop star, or John Cleese, we need a public housing programme. Not ‘affordable housing’, not ‘mid market rents’ but a proper solid housing policy, and this needs to be met with real jobs with real pay.

Further to that we need urgently to regulate and reform the private rental market which is dangerously and recklessly out of control, so that a minority of people who already own their own homes, own other property which they rent out at exorbitant rates. This is a national scandal and a disgrace. And it is a scandal and a disgrace that affects overwhelmingly the younger generation.

Homelessness and the wider housing crisis are part of a continuum and along that continuum lies economic precarity, uncertainty and low-pay. It can’t be fixed overnight and it can’t be fixed with a sleep out.

The system inoculate’s itself against change, and this is why the system adores Social Bite.

What we need is systemic change, not more celebrity culture.

While George Clooney and Leonard Di Caprio are great for raising the profile of Social Bite, it does seem that the enterprise inevitably gets into as game where soft media coverage is a metric of success, rather than dealing with hard intractable social realities. Some people are making a lot of money off the housing market – and this is the uncomfortable reality that needs to be confronted.

Corporate Culture

If the showbiz culture and obsession with media profile sits uncomfortably with efforts to sort the housing and homeless crisis, so to does the idea of a campaign that gives a platform for companies to virtue signal their CEO’s benevolence.

Social Bite’s corporate supporters pages feature Shell, Hilton, Barclays, Gleneagles, Marriott and RBS amongst the others jostling for attention.

No doubt well-intentioned the top managers are encouraged to vie against each other in a Fundraiser League Table.

The companies are given various incentives to raise funds.

These include: “Social Bite Co-Founder to come into your office/workplace to say thank you to staff. Josh also to give a personal tour of Social Bite village”, special VIP seats and hampers, or even, extraordinarily “A house named after them or someone of their choice in The Social Bite Village.”

How would that feel – you are long-term homeless but you’re soon to be put up in a wooden house with the Hilton logo on it?

This feels bizarre and distasteful and vaguely dystopian, confusing endemic social crisis with marketing opportunity and human solidarity with entertainment.

If the managers and staff of big corporations want to feel better about themselves or find some salve to their existential crisis, maybe they should just leave and get a job doing something useful?

Champions

The secondary issue here is how we appear to need media champions and how social enterprise becomes obsessed with a handful of figures.

The model that then gets held up to be copied and celebrated is one of ‘glory-leaders.’

This cult of the personality feeds the idea that our serious socio-ecological crisis can be solved just by Great Individuals. For food, we bring on Jamie Oliver, a tv chef. For starvation we bring on Bono. David Attenborough has plastics covered because we all watched it on the Blue Planet.

It’s a form of infantilism.

It’s not anyone’s fault that we are in this situation but we need to be alive to the deeper issues here.

Homelessness will not be solved by just raising money from private donors any more than we can fix the NHS or under-funded schools by a jumble sale.

There are lots of positive things about Social Bite.

The way it has raised the profile of the homelessness crisis. The way it created a new model in the cafe’s for work and training.

But some of it smacks of a throwback to an old era of philanthropy.

Josh Littlejohn’s idealism and ambition are admirable, so too is his dynamism. But there is a feeling that once someone is in the spotlight they are untouchable, and each idea they have is a miracle.

The cult of personality morphs gently into celebrity culture. One interview compared Littlejohn spiritually and physically to Che Guevara.

Questions about the viability and strategy of the Social Bite village abound. Is it not going to create a ghetto of people with a range of personal problems – and do we really want to be isolating people rather than integrating them into society? Are tiny wooden houses a clever innovation or a gimmick?

How does any of this get to the root of the housing and homeless crisis?

Maybe these doubts are unfounded and the world of corporate social responsibility will unlock enough resources to solve homelessness forever.

I really hope so but that company logo just doesn’t seem right.

Author: Natalie Slivinski, Yes Magazine,

Globally, more than 300 million people live with depression, 260 million with anxiety, and many with both. An estimated 6 million American children have been diagnosed with ADHD. Physical activity is known to help combat and prevent these disorders, but a walk down a busy traffic-filled street doesn’t cut it. A walk in the woods, however, works. Just 90 minutes can decrease activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex—a region associated with rumination (dwelling on negative thoughts, for example).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, exposure to nature can significantly reduce stress. It also alleviates symptoms of anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Spending even a short amount of time in green space can lower blood pressure; it can also help people develop healthier habits and form more positive relationships. People’s mental health is markedly better in urban areas with more green space.

Attention Restoration Theory helps explain why.

Urban environments are overwhelming. City dwellers are constantly bombarded with complex sights, sounds, and smells. Researchers believe that this has a negative effect on executive functioning, making us less able to cope with distractions. Captivating natural scenes, however, can restore attention and help combat mental fatigue.

Interestingly, some built environments can have the same effect. Cities that incorporate water, or “blue space,” are more restorative than those without. Monasteries and countryside cottages fit the bill because, like nature, they evoke a sense of “being away.” Museums and art galleries are restorative because they provide an escape from the cacophony of urban life. These scenes all give one a sense of space—of room to explore.

The more interactive we are with restorative space, the better; a weekend stay in a cozy wooded cabin will do more good than staring at a picture of one.

The problem with urbanization

More than half of the world’s population, and counting, lives in an urban setting. People in cities run a higher risk of both anxiety and mood disorders than people in rural areas—20 and 40 percent higher, respectively. We’re also more sedentary than ever, and green space has been shown to promote critically important physical activity.

Apartments, office buildings, subways, traffic-filled streets—we’re spending more and more time away from nature. Researchers estimate that if every city dweller spent just 30 minutes per week in nature,depression cases could be reduced by 7 percent. Globally, that’s a whopping 21 million people. But for a busy city dweller, a visit to a beautiful monastery isn’t always feasible. We all have read about the benefits of “forest therapy,” but a half-day hike in the woods is a luxury many can’t afford.

The answer lies in incorporating green space into urban planning, weaving nature into the fabric of everyday city life.

To understand our fraught relationship with urban nature, consider the evolution of big cities. Urbanization exploded in the 1800s as more people left their rural homes to look for work. With the focus on high-level priorities such as sanitation, not to mention basic transportation and housing, green space just wasn’t considered sufficiently important for human welfare.

Kathleen Wolf, a social science researcher at the University of Washington, studies the human benefits of nature in cities.

With the industrial boom and huge population influx, rates of disease went up, she says, and we focused on clearing space for sanitary engineering systems. “What we think now is that, maybe, the pendulum went a little too far in removal of nature from cities.”

Racial and class inequity in green space

Modern higher-income communities—often predominately White—have the time, influence, and financial resources to build green space and cultivate a sense of appreciation for urban nature, Wolf says. But poorer communities—including some communities of color—don’t always have the same luxury.

“There are top-level priorities in communities of need with regard to health: crosswalks, sidewalks—really fundamental needs—assurance that people have housing. I would guess that if our cities could mobilize and satisfy those high-level needs, people in those communities would then begin to say, ‘We have now a baseline quality of life; now [we can talk about] parks.’”

Yet these people need green space the most. People with less financial security often have more demanding lifestyles. “They may be working multiple jobs. They may be single parents. They may have inadequate support systems,” Wolf says. “People in those situations … benefit even more from green space encounters.”

Add to this the growing demands on our nation’s young adults—expensive housing, out-of-control student loans, unprecedented pressure to succeed—and it’s easy to see the dire need for cities to address cognitive fatigue, especially in stressed and underserved populations.

Investing in “green”

Integrating green space doesn’t have to be difficult. Someone just has to lead the charge.

“The direct integration of nature into buildings in a substantive way makes quite a difference,” Wolf says. “Biophilic design … is an intentional effort to integrate nature into the places where people work, learn, and live.”

Nor does it have to be cost-prohibitive. “With any innovation, the early adopters pay more. Once it’s more broadly accepted … best practices emerge,” Wolf says. “You reach a threshold of implementation, and costs come down.”

Already, cities are taking steps, often going beyond planting trees. Chicago; Baltimore, Maryland; Portland, Oregon; New York; and Philadelphia are all investing in green infrastructure to improve city life and reduce their carbon footprint. Internationally, cities are leading in “smart design.” In parts of Singapore, garbage trucks are replaced by chutes that vacuum refuse. In London, city planners are restructuring the city’s lighting to save energy and lessen the harm of light pollution on human health and sleep.

Workplaces are also using green spaces to address employees’ health and well-being. Research shows that companies that invest in green infrastructure and promote nature-oriented activities see reduced absenteeism, higher productivity, and better problem-solving in their employees. For these cities and workplaces, investing in green infrastructure has a clear cost benefit.

Now, greater attention must be directed to low-income communities to address racial and economic disparity—the “green space gap.” California has a number of community-level efforts. The Little Green Fingers initiative in Los Angeles promotes urban parks and gardens in low-income areas and communities of color. In Sacramento, the Ubuntu Green project helps convert unused land into urban farms and gardens in low-income communities. And the Oakland Parks and Recreation department is working with the Oakland Climate Action Coalition and the Oakland Food Policy Council to preserve green space amid gentrification.

Houseplants bring nature inside

People living without sufficient access to green space, particularly those living with anxiety, depression, or ADHD, might also benefit from bringing nature into their homes.

More robust research in environmental psychology needs to be done to tease apart the complex benefits of houseplants, but the existing literature is promising. Indoor plants have been shown to soothe mental fatigue, lower blood pressure, and improve quality of sleep. Some hospital patients who underwent surgery were found to have higher pain tolerance, less anxiety, and even shorter recovery times when they couldsee plants from their beds.

Indoor greenery also brings in a distinctly interactive element that outdoor natural space can’t always provide: the opportunity to grow and nurture something. Houseplants respond to our care and can pull us to slow down. They are living reminders of the importance of staying on track and not neglecting our responsibilities. They can help us maintain good habits. Research has shown that caring for a pet can help improve mental health by alleviating loneliness, calming stress, and restoring a sense of purpose and responsibility; for people unable to adopt a pet, houseplants may be a great lower-stakes alternative.

 This has an important caveat. As Wolf points out, lonely, isolated people are more prone to problems with mental and even physical health. Indoor plants are no substitute for community-wide solutions. Wolf encourages apartment dwellers to advocate for shared outdoor green spaces. They may benefit more from establishing “little sitting gardens” in place of “boring landscape materials” or ensuring that green stormwater infrastructure is designed “so it becomes a people space, as well,” she says. Ultimately, we benefit most by incorporating interactive green space at every level of city life—for individuals, cities, and everything in between. I look, with cautious optimism, to a future full of trees.

Author: Scottish Land Commission

Community ownership should become routine option for communities across Scotland, says new report

Community ownership should become a normal and realistic option for communities to acquire land and assets, according to recommendations on community ownership published today Friday 23 November, 2018.

The report prepared for Ministers by the Scottish Land Commission, follows a review of existing community right to buy mechanisms and community ownership in Scotland.

The report makes a number of recommendations to Scottish Ministers for the future of community right to buy; in particular, that community ownership should become a routine option for communities, so it is planned and proactive rather than reactive.

The report recommends that there needs to be a

•   clear vision for how community ownership can become a mainstream way to deliver development and regeneration in urban and rural communities

•    recognition that community ownership is not an end in itself but a means to delivering wider outcomes

•     shift from community acquisition being driven either by specific problems or a reaction to land coming onto the market, to being planned and proactive.

Informed by research by a team led by Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), the report considered the experience of community ownership in Scotland over the last 25 years since the first buy out in Assynt.

The Commission will now work with Scottish Government to bring interested stakeholders together to shape the policy tools and specific interventions needed to deliver the recommendations in the report that include:

•    embedding community land and asset ownership into local place planning

•    ensuring that targets for community ownership reflect the outcomes sought in both rural and urban communities

•     ensuring support for community ownership transfers is provided across the whole geography of Scotland

•     considering longer-term sources of financial support for both capital costs and post-acquisition development

•     supporting negotiated transfer of land as the norm, whilst streamlining right to buy processes

Speaking about the report Lorne Macleod, Scottish Land Commissioner, commented that community ownership and right to buy has developed significantly over the last 20 years and said, “Community ownership is now seen as integral to regeneration and sustainable development in both rural and urban contexts in Scotland.

“It should be seen as normal and routine, as it is internationally, for a community to acquire and own land that could provide local housing, business development, community facilities, recreation facilities, greenspace, as a fundamental way to create more vibrant communities and regional economies.”

Land Reform Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said:

“Community ownership, when done properly, has been shown time and again to deliver real benefits to communities, providing a long term sustainable future for the land and assets acquired.  

“It has been great to see such an increase in community ownership in recent years, thanks to the success of some amazing local groups working with the Scottish Government. This is unlocking potential in our urban, rural and island communities and giving local people a say in their future, and I hope to see many more communities getting involved in the years ahead.”

The Scottish Land Commission is now undertaking work looking at international experience of community land ownership to inform the long-term vision and delivery.

Author: Sarah Bedford and Aidan Harper, NEF

Full report

The current debate about adult social care is centred on funding reform, which is urgently needed. But we will struggle to evaluate funding options in a meaningful way until we have determined how to improve the system. Our approach to social care is unsustainable, not least because we wait until care needs are acute before we address them. 

Shifting towards sustainability requires innovation from creative people and organisations. Community businesses are beginning to step up to the plate. These are organisations, usually small in scale, that emerge when communities come together to address challenges they face. They are locally rooted, and trade for the benefit of, are accountable to, and have a positive impact on the local community. A small but growing number are using their knowledge of people and place to develop social care models. 

This report seeks to meet the need among community businesses and other community led care models to communicate the role they can play in sustainable social care. It also aims to shed light on the perspectives of commissioners, who shape care markets alongside providers and citizens, and therefore play a part in determining that role.

Author: Carnegie UK Trust

Kindness, Emotions and Human Relationships : The Blind Spot in Public Policy – Carnegie UK Trust

There is growing recognition of the importance of kindness and relationships for societal wellbeing. But talking about kindness does not fit easily within the rational lexicon of public policy. The Trust was delighted that Julia Unwin CBE accepted our invitation to become a Carnegie Fellow; and over the course of the last two years we have been exploring the complexity and contradictions of kindness and public policy through a series of roundtables and events.

Julia’s report, Kindness, emotions and human relationships: The blind spot in public policy, brings together our learning from these discussions. It argues that there have been very good reasons for keeping kindness separate from public policy; but that the great public policy challenges of our time demand an approach that is more centred on relationships; and, with technology and artificial intelligence transforming the way we do things, it is imperative that we focus equally on our emotional intelligence.

Author: Patrick Butler

Charities risk becoming irrelevant, warns new report

Health Connections Mendip (HCM) never set out to be a model for anything. However, this deceptively simple project in the small Somerset town of Frome is being talked about, not just as a blueprint for community revitalisation, but as a road to renewal for a UK charity sector struggling to maintain its relevance and public confidence in an age of great social upheaval and public distrust.

The work of HCM, based in a GP practice, has attracted attention mainly because of a startling research study which suggests that when people with health conditions are supported by community groups and volunteers, both they and the NHS benefit. The findings are provisional, but they show that over the three years of the study, while emergency hospital admissions in Somerset rose by 29%, in Frome they fell by 17%.

What’s striking is that there is no miracle element to what it does: no “innovation” or genius technology, no vast capital investment. There is no business plan, and no targets, no outcome measures, no big marketing pushes. HCM, an NHS body, employs a small team of community development workers and a small army of volunteer “connectors” to forge links between people who need help and those who can support them.

There is no magic, according to Jenny Hartnoll, the service lead at HCM. The energy, expertise and goodwill is already out there in the community. It brings people together; for example, through self-help groups for people with conditions like dementia and multiple sclerosis, by running “talking cafes”, or assisting people to find dog walking to debt advice. “We are often just a catalyst, the neural pathway of the community,” says Hartnoll.

The research study suggests a measurable impact. But Jenny Hartnoll, the service lead at HCM, argues that the benefits intrinsic to making social connections are just as powerful: creating friendships, reducing social isolation, building self-confidence and helping people to exert control over their lives. Social contact, it seems, makes people happier, healthier and more resilient.

Julia Unwin, chair of the independent Civil Society Futures inquiry, published this week, believes HCM’s approach should inspire the voluntary sector. The inquiry argues that, at a time of enormous upheaval, from Brexit to #MeToo, charities have not always responded well to the social changes. Too often they are regarded by a sceptical public as disconnected both from local communities and the people they exist to serve.

Parents and activists linked by social media won justice for Connor Sparrowhawk, transforming the discussion about NHS neglect of people with learning disabilities. Photograph: JusticeforLB/PA

They have prioritised corporate expansion, becoming centralised and brand-obsessed. Some have become service providers, chasing – and in some cases becoming financially dependent on – contracts from local and central government. Getting too close to the state risks compromising charities’ advocacy role – not least where there are contract gagging clauses, says Unwin. Some organisations have lost sight of their overriding mission to fight for people in need. “If you sign a contract [to provide a state-funded service] that stops you speaking out, you are probably in breach of your charitable purpose,” she says. Unwin will not name names but some big charities, she says, are “losing the plot”.

The clever ones, according to her, are reconnecting with grassroots networks. She was struck, during hundreds of meetings and conversations over the two years of the inquiry, how many charities urged her to use it to make new demands of the government. Her conclusion is that this is the wrong way to look. The real campaigning energy is in communities – both in actual places and online – and that, not Westminster, is where change happens and mission, trust and legitimacy can be renewed.

Brexit was not a shock to neighbourhood community groups in Hartlepool or Hull, she points out. Local tenants groups highlighted the risks of dodgy cladding and landlord neglect long before Grenfell Tower went up in flames. Small refugee charities fought the injustices of the Home Office’s hostile environment for years before it became the Windrush scandal. A small group of parents and activists linked by social media, not a national charity, she says, won justice for Connor Sparrowhawk, and in doing so transformed the discussion about NHS neglect of people with learning disabilities. “The big challenge to charities is not whether they become more corporate or not, but whether they stay relevant,” Unwin says.

The government recently published its own civil society strategy, which, Unwin says, is welcome but rather depends on how far Whitehall is going to devolve real power, as opposed to simply talking about it. One of the many problems of the strategy’s forerunner, David Cameron’s ill-fated “big society”, launched in 2010, was the way it cast established civil society groups as effective agents of top-down government-directed policies, while at the same time shredding the local funding available to them.

The inquiry concludes that if civil society is to respond to the massive social challenges of the next decades it must learn to devolve and share power and control, earning public trust by “speaking up to politicians and corporations”. Accountability should be refocused on the people that charities serve rather than putting the government and funders first. “Too often in civil society, size, turnover and short-term measures of impact are seen as the best measures of success. But we have heard loud and clear that real, long-lasting success comes from the depth and breadth of connections with people and communities, and the opportunity for everyone to have power,” the inquiry concludes.

Shelter, the housing charity, has already unveiled plans to switch the focus of its efforts to local level, and to sharpen its campaigning edge. Its new 10-year strategy seeks to reconnect with its founding purposes, which were grounded in community activism: fighting exploitative landlords, helping people resist eviction and speaking up for the voiceless. The aim is to create a national movement using the energy of hundreds of local activists and supporters.

Shelter’s chief executive, Polly Neate, says many big charities – including her own – have become too disconnected from reality, and too centralised and self-limiting in their ambition. “We’ve all talked so much about the ‘housing crisis’ that we’ve stopped believing it can be solved. The phrase has become like wallpaper,” says the strategy. “But this is a national emergency, and one that demands fearless, ambitious action.”

Shelter will hire more community organisers, working out of its regional hubs (there are 12 in England and four in Scotland) and extensive shop network. Their job will be to help defend the right to a home and assist individuals in housing crisis. They will work with and for local people, sharing expertise and resources, and helping them campaign on local issues.

“There’s a growing sense in the voluntary sector that the obsession with Westminster and Whitehall, and a corporate approach to scale and brand, is not driving the changes we need,” says Neate. “We can’t do it any more, because it is not working.”

Author: Liam Kay, Third Sector

A government-funded evaluation of SIBs by academics and a research organisation says they are ‘no panacea for public service reform’

There is “no clear evidence” that social impact bonds lead to better outcomes for beneficiaries or that they are more cost-effective than other approaches to commissioning public services, a government-funded evaluation has concluded.

The exercise, which was carried out by the Policy Innovation Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the research organisation Rand Europe with funding from the NIHR Policy Research Programme at the Department of Health and Social Care, says its findings show that SIBs are “no panacea for public service reform”.

Policymakers should therefore focus on the parts of SIBs that offer the most promise for developing outcome-based contracting, the evaluation says, without suggesting that SIBs are the only way of achieving this.

SIBs work by attracting investment to fund projects, often involving charities and social enterprises, and reimbursing and rewarding the investors if the project is successful.

The concept has been used in other areas of public policy – notably in rehabilitating criminals – but there have been questions about whether the SIB model could be widely replicated.

The researchers, who studied nine SIB-funded projects across England, were also unable to find “suitable quantitative data” to compare the costs and outcomes of SIB-funded and non-SIB services.

Of the nine projects studied, only one reported having any cashable savings as a result of its SIB-funded work, the evaluation says.

SIBs therefore, according to the evaluation, have a role to play in “specific circumstances” where outcomes are “uncontroversial, easily attributable to the actions of the provider and easily measured”.

But SIBs are unlikely to be widely applicable in public services, the evaluation found.

Nicholas Mays, professor of health policy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “The main demonstrable success of SIB projects in health and social care has been in helping marginalised groups who had, previously, been neglected by public services. It is much less clear that SIB-related services for other groups, such as people with chronic health conditions, have led to marked improvements in health.

“So far, at least, cashable savings from SIBs, despite early hopes and rhetoric, remain unproven. Policymakers should learn from different models, but SIBs are no panacea for better commissioning of health and care services.”