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Eliminating false economies

June 19th, 2013

Alarming rumours were trickling out of Whitehall last night. Could it be true that the 2015 Spending review will cut £2bn from children’s services?

It could be mischievous, it could be simply mistaken but we think it is unlikely to be very far from the truth. Cuts of the magnitude now being sought across government can only dodge the ring fenced school budgets by biting deep into related activities.

It is difficult to imagine a more perfect example of the proverbial false economy. You cannot take a sum of this size out of services which predominantly support the most at risk without incurring much greater costs, social and financial, within a short time and then for many years there after.

We know, say officials, but cuts of this sort, and there will be more in this one year Review, are inevitable.

Indeed. We pointed out in this blog that a very foolish question inevitably attracts a very foolish answer. A one year Spending Review asks a lot of very foolish questions.

A shortsighted cut of this sort can look almost manageable over a twelve month frame: raise the threshold for an essential service and short term costs will fall quickly. Job done, money saved for this year but, of course, the original problem hasn’t gone away. On the contrary it becomes steadily more serious before soon reaching the new threshold. Resolution is then more difficult and almost certainly more expensive, albeit perhaps next year, not this.

Budgeting and planning over a longer period – we recommend 10 years but even 5 would be a big improvement – would produce an entirely different set of answers. Ten year planning is not a cavalier “spend more” approach – the total spending envelope for the extended period could adhere to existing targets – but the policies would need to take account of all the consequences, wherever they may fall, costs and benefits, over 10 years. In short policy would have to add up over the longer term, not fix the books for the next few months. Early action and preventative projects would shoot up the agenda with benefits for everybody eliminating the false economies and, instead, supporting and incentivising the reduction of need.

A £2bn cut in services that support our most vulnerable children? What more has to happen before politicians on all sides recognise the need for long term planning?

 

EVENT: Investing in Prevention: 

Jon Cruddas is leading the Labour policy review. Referencing our work, he told the Local Government Association last week and NCVO yesterday that a Labour government would work on 3 principles:
1) Power for local people, to shape their services and communities,
2) Investment for prevention, to avoid the costs of failure,
3) Collaboration between public bodies, not wasting money on bureaucratic duplication.

There is an opportunity to discuss and contribute to the development of this approach at an event this Monday 24th June. Three Early Action Task Force members will be speaking. Come and have your say. It’s free but you need to book:

Innovation and Community: How should Labour govern in 2015?

4.30pm – 6pm
Committee Room 6
Speakers: Dan Corry (Chief Executive, New Philanthropy Capital), Caroline Slocock (Director, Civil Exchange), Ben Jupp (Director, Social Finance)
Chair: Ivan Lewis (Shadow Minister for Overseas Development)

Given the fiscal constraints, what kind of statecraft does Labour need to develop for governing in 2015?

If you would like to attend please email onenationregister@gmail.com and write STATE REFORM in subject header.

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Good Evidence is a tool, not the goal in itself.

June 13th, 2013

Any farmer will tell you that you can’t fatten a pig by weighing it – but weighing is vital when it is that little piggy’s turn to go to market. Evidence matters.

In the less agricultural location of east London we at Community Links have been working with Project Oracle – London’s youth evidence hub – which is helping practitioners and funders understand and share knowledge of what really works when trying to work with children and young people.

I spoke this week a Project Oracle discussion panel alongside Lord Victor Adebowale, CEO of Turning Point , Deputy Mayor of London for Policing and Crime Stephen Greenhalgh and Geoff Mulgan CEO of Nesta. The event was celebrating the many community organisations which are improving  the life chances of young Londoners in a way that can be demonstrated and shared. In a challenging economic climate, being able to evidence our impact and learn about what really works is crucial.

Project Oracle is performing an important function in coordinating a shared understanding between academics, researchers, commissioners and providers. It also provides the vital role of translating between the theorists and the practitioners; developing a common language. Overall helping organisations generate better evidence, and use evidence better as a tool to overcome the bigger challenges:

Reflective practice in youth work is not new and there are many working in youth work who are both theorists and activists.  But for our youth managers who attended Project Oracle training, the theory of change approach has been mind opening, the tools and ability to articulate clearly the transformation they are trying to bring about has been empowering.

And for commissioners too; good commissioning practice is not new. But as a delivery organisation, it is sometimes hard to see a clear link between the evidence about what works and what is commissioned.   It is sometimes frustrating that commissioners are doubtful about the objectivity and rigour of internal evaluations, exacerbated by their increasing unwillingness to pay for them. Evidence Champions in every commissioning organisation would transform the environment in which we work.

So, in the next phase of its development, here is a challenge to the leaders of Project Oracle:

There is a danger that impact measurement becomes all about the measurement, and less about the impact. Evidence is a tool, not the goal in itself. The increasing focus on measurement entails a subtle but substantial risk that evaluation and evidence becomes an end in itself – that we strive towards what we can measure because that’s where the funding lies, and not necessarily towards our own articulated vision or mission or towards the real need.

We see this at Community Links in the shift of funding towards acute interventions and away from early action provision the preventive, the long-term, the patient interactions with young people over many years.  We can give good evidence on the individual interventions and with Project Oracle’s support we will all get better at this.  What is far harder, but in the long-run more important, is:

  • tracking a young person through a number of interventions, identifying the factors that enable them to thrive or mean they need further/ongoing support.  We find some young people easy to track because they come back to us (and often volunteer or work with us).  It’s the ones that we lose track of who might end up costing a lot in future.  How can Project Oracle help to look at the sequence of interventions as well as each project?
  • learning from this sequencing what could have been done earlier so that we are not dealing with the consequences of failing young people, but developing young people who are ready for anything – thriving lives, costing less, contributing more. Can Project Oracle help to build the evidence base for intervening one step sooner?
  • demonstrating the impact of what we call the ‘deep value’ relationship.  When young people come back to us, they talk about Tracy or Chaz or Jason, rather than the specific intervention.  We know that it’s not just possible for one human being to change the life of another, it’s often the only thing that does.

What can Project Oracle help us to learn not just about what works but also about how it works best?

When the big, bad wolf is at the door its essential to know that bricks, not straw, will offer the protection we need.

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Canon Samuel Barnett: Celebrating a Social Pioneer

June 11th, 2013

East London has over many years been characterised as a place in need – a place of poverty ill-health and worklessness. Whilst this impression is not entirely fair or accurate it is true to say that some of the streets marked on Charles Booths “poverty maps” of the 1890s – (The Life and Labour of the People in London) are still the neighbourhoods facing hardship today.

Samuel Barnett and Henrietta Barnett Toynbee HallWhilst the east end of London has long been an area with much deprivation – it has too been the location of several innovative and ground breaking projects to tackle the poverty and deprivation that characterise it. One of the first – and most influential – was the settlement movement which originated in 1884 at Whitechapel’s Toynbee Hall by its first Warden Canon Samuel Barnett. Along with his wife Henrietta, Barnett understood that  much-needed social improvement could only be realised through a radical move to develop a coherent set of practical solutions, rather than the existing individualised and piecemeal approaches.

Barnett’s innovative idea was to establish a University Settlement in Whitechapel populated by a small community of ‘settlers’ who lived and worked alongside local people. The settlers were resident volunteers – students or graduates – mostly from Oxford University with many of them drawn from Balliol College where Barnett had developed close connections. The impact of those who studied and taught at Oxford and Balliol echoes down the years. Clement Attlee had a long-term association with Toynbee and William Beveridge starts his autobiography, Power and Influence, by referring to his graduation in 1901:

‘Four years at Oxford left me at twenty-two with no clear idea as to what I should do next. But of the things said to me by my elders in those years one thing above all stuck in my mind. “While you are at the University,” said Edward Caird, Master of Balliol, to me and to others, “your first duty is self culture, not politics or philanthropy. But when you have performed that duty and learned all that Oxford can teach you, then one thing that needs doing by some of you is to go and discover why, with so much wealth in Britain, there continues to be so much poverty and how poverty can be cured.”  *

Following this advice Beveridge began his career by working as Sub-Warden at Toynbee Hall from 1903 to 1905, bringing him face-to-face with poverty. Alongside his affluent fellow students Beveridge worked with, and learned from, those Londoners whose circumstances were less comfortable than his own. His time at Toynbee informed the way he thought about welfare and collective support in his later working life.

Barnett, Beveridge Attlee and all the many other Oxford fellows developed several new and different approaches to working with those experiencing poverty – setting up the “Poor Man’s Lawyer”, or free legal advice, providing training and education, building decent quality “working men’s housing” – and also to allow recreation and enjoyment for the “Labouring classes”. These schemes are familiar to us now,  but were radical in their time – and developed outside statutory agencies by volunteers and charity workers.

This year 2013, marks the centenary of Barnett’s death and whilst much has changed – some of the circumstances facing east Londoners would be all too familiar to Barnett and Toynbee’s early residents. Toynbee Hall have organised a series of events to commemorate Barnett – including an event on June 20th where Community Links co-founder David Robinson will be speaking in a panel with a new generation of social pioneers who are building on Canon Barnett’s legacy.

panelists will talk about current approaches to tackling poverty and what we can learn from our Victorian predecessors… they will consider again that century old question: why, with so much wealth in Britain, there continues to be so much poverty?

*(Lord Beveridge, Power and Influence, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1953, p.9)

 

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Delivering the Cruddas Principles

June 10th, 2013

Jon Cruddas told the Local Government Association today that a Labour government “will reduce costs on the public purse by reconfiguring services and reforming the economy”. Its approach, he said will be based around three organising principles:

1) Power for local people, to shape their services and communities,

2) Investment for prevention, to avoid the costs of failure,

3) Collaboration between public bodies, not wasting money on bureaucratic duplication.

Community Links welcomes each of the three principles. The second is particularly, potentially transformational. It isn’t always possible to prevent a problem from occurring but where it is possible it is almost always preferable. The Audit Commission have shown how a child with behavioral problems at 5 and dealt with through the criminal justice system will cost £207,000 by the age of 16. Alternative interventions diverting them from crime cost £47,000. From youth offending, to homelessness, literacy and numeracy, drug or alcohol abuse, debt, domestic violence – the evidence is the same, earlier action yields a triple dividend – thriving lives, costing less, contributing more.

Cruddas’ speech follows closely on the heels of Labour’s ‘relaunch’ speeches last week: on Monday Ed Balls gave more details of the ‘zero-based spending review’ he has penned in should Labour win in 2015, saying that it would ensure “…preventative spending – early years spending, support for troubled families, public and mental health services, scientific research into new cures and treatments – areas where spending now saves billions in the future – is given a high priority.” Ed Miliband followed this up on Thursday with a very similar phrase to Cruddas’ arguing that one of planks of Labour’s welfare policy would be “investing for the future, not paying for the costs of failure.”

As we have commented on this blog before current spending trajectories particularly in health and social care will soon be unaffordable if they aren’t already. More broadly our patterns of consumption are environmentally and economically unsustainable. Applying the preventative principle that Cruddas describes would involve removing the structural obstructions that get in the way of this common sense approach. What might that look like? Here are some suggestions to start the ball rolling:

  • As we have been suggesting for some time Ten Year Spending Plans published in each Spending Review should include firm plans for the first few years, as now, and the implications of every spending decision, over the next ten years. This would be a firm way of embedding early action firmly at the heart of Labour’s zero-based spending review.
  • Linked to this a more ambitious role for the Office of Budget Responsibility to publish independent assessments on this would better allow us0 to hold government to account. As its chairman Robert Chote has noted “By international standards, the OBR has a relatively narrow remit, focusing on fiscal rather than broader policy analysis. ….we confine ourselves to analysis of the current policies of the current government”. “It will” Chote said “be interesting to see if there is any demand for the OBR to look at alternative policies once we have established ourselves”. Government should respond to the chairman’s hint and ask the OBR to examine longer term plans and options
  • Protection for preventative spending. As Miliband and Cruddas noted early action is an investment in the future, forestalling future liabilities and creating growth. It should be treated in the same way as capital investment and protected against short term raids
  • A Ten Year Test for all spending decisions across government, so that the implications over ten years are assessed as far as possible and made transparent – including where costs or benefits fall to others.
  • New statutory duties on public bodies to apply the Ten Year Test and to collaborate with other bodies. The Welsh government is introducing legislation to make sustainable development its central organizing principle. The UK government should do the same.
  • New, pooled, early action funds, formed from existing budgets, and other mechanisms to enable collaboration and investment. The Community Budget principles of “joint investment agreements” and “social profit sharing” could be applied more widely. This might include Responsibility Charging – fining organisations that push costs on to others – and rewards or “prevention premiums” for organisations whose early action saves money in other parts of government.

Over time and in aggregate these and other systemic measures would breath live into Cruddas’s preventative principle and establish the capability for a different kind of politics, a different kind of government and a different kind of society – one that valued sustainable solutions above short term crisis management.

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Legal aid funding under further threat

June 10th, 2013

Last year we wrote a lot on this blog about Government’s cuts to legal aid. Despite determined campaigning and unprecedented defeats in the House of Lords, government forced through most of the cuts and from this April organisations like Community Links have lost almost all our legal aid funding; in our case this means capacity to provide 850 people with legal advice for serious debt and benefit problems. We have managed to find money from elsewhere to cover some of this in the short term but many are missing out, the solution is not sustainable and many other organisations haven’t been as lucky.

But while we were getting to grips with the changes Government began a consultation on another round of reforms. Most of this tranche are focused on criminal legal aid which is dominating the headlines but two changes could have important consequences for people in Newham and our clients. Shelter’s Ellie Robinson has explained them in detail on the Shelter blog:

Here is a typical scenario of someone who turns to Shelter for help:

A family is faced with the horrifying prospect of homelessness. This can happen surprisingly quickly, as a small thing – like job loss – can rapidly create a spiral that leads to arrears and possession proceedings. They approach their local council to ask for help.

Despite their legal obligation to find the family a place to stay, the local authority refuses. In desperate circumstances the family turns to Shelter for help, because they don’t know where they’ll be sleeping that night or the next.

Shelter advisors ask council officers to reconsider but the local authority sticks to their guns, so Shelter issues a Judicial Review. At which point either the local authority concede and accommodate the family, or the Court issues an emergency injunction forcing them to do so. The family now have a roof over their heads and are safe for the night so the Judicial Review is withdrawn.

The government’s new proposals would remove the funding for a case like this; where permission to proceed with the Judicial Review (JR) is not granted by a judge.

…

Under other aspects of the changes, many other people will not be eligible for legal aid at all, regardless of how desperate their situation. The proposals demand people prove they have lived in the UK for 12 months – even if they are British citizens, refugees, victims of trafficking or destitute children.

Read the full details and their consultation response on Shelter’s blog 

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Ask a better question, get a better answer

May 30th, 2013

This is an edited version of a blog that first appeared on Labour List

In four weeks time the Chancellor will announce the results of the 2015 spending Review. Already this week we hear that seven departments have agreed their spending settlement. There won’t be many winners but some will have lost more than others. Political commentators and discussion forums will pass judgement and public sector managers will, yet again, pick through the debris, making do and mending from what ever they can salvage.

Before we get overtaken by the detail we should reflect on the bigger picture. What ever the chancellor says on June 26th it will be an answer to the wrong question. Protecting this and cutting that for one year only isn’t just rearranging the proverbial deckchairs, its putting up the parasols and setting out the nibbles.

Current spending trajectories particularly in health and social care will soon be unaffordable if they aren’t already. More broadly our patterns of consumption are environmentally and economically unsustainable. Deficit reduction and simple common sense cry out for the prioritization of sustainable solutions above short term crisis management. Now more than ever we need to be reaching for the goals of the governments own fiscal framework – “sustainable public finances… promoting intergenerational fairness.” A one year spending review, driving short term thinking and in year savings will inevitably generate a parade of false economies. This will be the very antithesis of a sustainable approach and the opposite of what the Treasury itself was calling for in its spending review framework, published in 2010. Future spending reviews it said must ‘Look beyond near-term pressures to support reforms that better position the UK for meeting long-term demographic, economic, environmental and social challenges, any of which could imperil long-term fiscal stability if left unaddressed.’

This goal is unachievable without changing a spending review process which sets the parameters for planning and budgeting in government and beyond. It normally takes a three year outlook, better than the one year 2015 folly but still not enough when, as the Review Framework insists, we need policies that add up in the longer term.

We know, for instance, how many 12 and 13 year olds are likely to leave school without basic skills in four or five years time and we know the price of unemployment. We know also the cost of reading recovery programmes and the percentage that succeed. A society that applied a longer term perspective to its public finances would be investing more in literacy work with school age children. In reality spending on reading recovery has always been limited and is falling fast incurring an imminent liability, reducing the nation’s capacity for economic growth, and so contributing to increasing, not decreasing, the national debt. It helps to balance the books in a single year but is exactly how not to ‘ensure sustainable public finances.’

Government and opposition should commit to introducing ten year spending plans published in each Spending Review. Each should include firm plans for the first few years, as now, and the implications of every spending decision, over the next ten years. The plans would of course be subject to regular review and updating, as circumstances and governments change but the projections would enable current priorities to be established on the basis of longer term value.

There are precedents. One year spending plans were extended to three in the 1990s, and decisions have often been made with implications beyond elections. However, there is a radical difference between introducing new policies that may have long-term implications and routinely justifying expenditure over ten years.

Of course other factors, particularly the electoral cycle, also contribute to a short term bias in public policy but it is in the processes of government, as much as it is in elections, that choices are framed and, and, almost by default, options constrained and decisions made. Without ten year planning little else will ever change. Spending reviews will come and go but public policy will continue on the unsustainable trajectories that are barely meeting current needs and accumulating impossible liabilities for the future.

No one will mount the barricades for ten year spending plans or list the promise on a pledge card but this simple change – it wouldn’t require legislation – would unleash a measured revolution with profound and lasting benefits.

Image courtesy of Chodhound

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Support is better than punishment for small businesses operating cash-in-hand

May 29th, 2013

This post first appeared on the JRF blog

When Community Links interviewed Phillip, 58, from east London about cash-in-hand work in 2006 he said:

‘All I can say is that people around here are poor. Taking informal paid work is their way of doing something about poverty. They try to make their lives and that of their families a little better by earning a bit on the side.”

He featured in a report we wrote, funded by JRF, which concluded that people on low incomes and on benefits working cash in hand do so out of need not greed, but that informal work can also trap people in poverty, leaving them open to abuse and struggling to progress. We found that it’s not a small problem, hidden though it is: the UK’s informal economy represents about 12% of GDP, and there might be two million ‘moonlighters’ and ‘ghost workers.’ Twenty per cent of people have traded informally at least once when starting a business.

If you’re caught working cash-in-hand you are punished, particularly through the benefits system. But through our work in Newham and research since Community Links knows that all this does is plunge people further into crisis. We felt there must be a better alternative, to harness the work ethic and entrepreneurship for the formal economy, creating opportunities for business growth and progression unavailable to small businesses restricting themselves to cash-in-hand work.

So in our latest research, again funded by JRF and launched today, we interviewed charities already quietly supporting people to ‘go legit.’ We asked them whether it works and how to do it, and found highly successful examples around the country where budding small business people are surreptitiously and seamlessly slipping from the informal to the formal economy.

From these stories we developed a best practise model for organisations wanting to support people who are trading off the books: building trust, displaying empathy, and understanding and working in a collaborative and positive manner in order to build the necessary trusting relationships.

We provide employment support in Newham and come across every day the entrepreneurial potential of people living here. When people come to us looking for help to start up a business we can see the potential they have, but we also see a glass ceiling on this potential for those trading informally – if they’re discovered they’re sunk.,

From carrying out this study we are even more convinced that there is a better way: for an average of £2500 spent per client on formalisation support, you get local businesses trading formally, employing locally, paying tax and claiming fewer benefits.

To coincide with the launch today a cross departmental Hidden Economy Expert Group is meeting to develop a clear consistent strategy on addressing the informal economy in the UK, acting on one of our recommendations. Their work is vital if we are to move away from a system that sees punishment as the only response to cash-in-hand work towards one that considers the potential of offering good quality support, harnessing potential, creating businesses and jobs.

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Growth depends on more jobs and better personalised support

May 28th, 2013

A Guardian article this week spoke about the incredibly difficult task of moving people into work when the reality is that there are just not enough jobs.  With the focus on a particular visit to a Work Programme provider in Hull, it seems that it is not just customers who are depressed about the lack of opportunities coming their way.  Advisors, who in previous years were able to access more jobs and match them up with suitable candidates, are finding it difficult to deliver results in such a challenging labour market and are having to be more creative about where they look for opportunities.  The advisors quoted in the Guardian article talk about how they used to find work in the retail and construction sectors.  However, with a shortage in investment to kick-start building projects and 1 in 6 shops on the UK high street now lying empty, it might be a bigger challenge than Mary Portas alone is able to tackle.

At a recent Resolution Foundation event, we learnt that although data shows that the UK labour market has performed reasonably well in recent months, looking at the employment rate, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go.  By taking population growth into consideration, the Resolution Foundation argues that we would need to create 850,000 new jobs in order to return the UK to pre-recession employment rates.  Linked to this, we need to make sure that employment programmes are giving people the right support to enable them to secure jobs when opportunities arise.  Thus the challenge is set!

At the same event, two words, ‘enterprise’ and ‘innovation’ were referenced as being essential for an investment-led recovery.  Aside from encouraging the government to bring forward spending plans, (which is what the IMF recently proposed) it seems that organisations need to be supported to adopt versatile business models, innovate and grow.

In the same vein, more should be done to help people starting out on this road.  Supporting clients to start their own business is one strand of work that Community Links has recently started to prioritise.  The Enterprise team are working hard to give people the skills they need to go it alone, including securing a partnership with shopping centre giant, Westfield.  Amongst a range of bespoke training courses and one-to-one support, clients  have  the  opportunity to experience what it’s really like to trade in a pop-up shop  in one of the most exclusive retail spaces in the country.  It’s a great example of how both delivery staff and clients are working together to bring fledgling ideas to life in a real-world context.

Support for entrepreneurs is important, but alone, it will not restore the country to a state of pre-recession ‘full employment’.   Employers, policy makers and providers need to think carefully about how they engage with particularly excluded groups, especially in light of recent evidence which finds that the government’s flagship scheme, the Work Programme is not supporting those furthest away from the labour market.

Taking NEETs as an example (as numbers of unemployed young people currently hover just below the million mark), a simple package of good quality support and preparation for the world of work is what is needed.  It has been suggested that policies like the Youth Contract have struggled to scratch the surface of the NEET problem.  Perhaps now is as good a time as any time to re-think how we give young people the right skills to help them enter the labour market.

Community Links has previously argued that provision for young people needs to be simple, accessible and tailored enough to meet the needs of the individual and our experience shows that this approach works very well.  If we really want to empower people to take up employment when growth comes, it is essential that we have the right support in place, which is easy to navigate and tailored to the needs of the individual.

Image courtesy of coolfreshair

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Playing by the Rules

May 13th, 2013

We’ve regularly noted on this blog how a surprisingly small amount (if you believe what you read in the papers) of the benefits budget is taken up by fraud, and how ministers and newspapers frequently conflate the amount lost to fraud each year with the amount lost to fraud and error, the latter costing considerably more. We make no apologies for repeating ourselves; the latest statistics back this up again, with fraud accounting for a mere 0.7% of the benefits budgets and error a further 1.4%.

To put this another way, almost all of the benefits paid last year were received by people ‘playing by the rules.’ That phrase is, of course, significant because it’s usually preceded by ‘hard working families who…’ and usually succeeded by announcement of some policy or other concerning the welfare system. The implication is that changes will only affect those people lazily breaking the rules and they, usually, are those of us on benefits.

Yet in actual fact, according to DWP’s own statistics, 99.3% of benefits go to people ‘playing by the rules’, which I’m sure Ministers will be keen to announce in their next speech.

Meanwhile a considerable proportion of people on benefits are actually working hard in a job for very low pay and in our experience most of the rest are working hard looking after children or disabled family members or looking for a job. And even the tiny minority who are working hard and not strictly playing by the rules aren’t necessarily to be blamed; cash in hand work is primarily motivated by need, not greed.

Iain Duncan Smith got into trouble last week for misusing statistics, so in order to set him a good example we should be rigorous and point out that the fraud rate is actually a bit higher for Jobseekers Allowance claims (2.9%), Income Support (2.6%), Pension Credit (2.0%) and Housing Benefit (1.5%). The overall fraud level is so much lower because the fraud rate for the state pension is (unsurprisingly, since it’s universal) 0.0%. And, as ministers occasionally and conveniently forget, the state pension consumes almost half the entire benefits bill.

So next time a Minister appeals to those ‘working hard and playing by the rules’ think those of us on benefits as well as those of us lucky enough not to need them just at the moment. We almost all play by the rules, and we almost all work hard; so say the statistics. And as Iain Duncan Smith knows, if you argue with the statistics too much, you get an angry letter from Andrew Dilnot.

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Working through THE FEAR….

April 30th, 2013

In this guest post James Crawley, advisor on the Community Links, Links 2 Enterprise programme sets-out how this new project is supporting and encouraging local people to establish their own business or new enterprise.

 

Links 2 Enterprise Boot CampSpiders, heights and clowns. All rational and valid fears that many of us suffer from, but success? Success won’t splat you on the ground, sink fangs into you or form a recurring trauma that has plagued you since your 5th birthday party. What could possibly keep you fearful of success, paralysed with self doubt and terrified to make the next move, especially when the focus is your recently started business?

More than enough, according to the first batch of fifteen participants of the Links to Enterprise Business Boot Camp.

The Business Boot Camp is part of our new Links 2 Enterprise project supporting enterprise amongst local people – particularly young people –by providing opportunities to develop and practice skills and build confidence to enhance employability.

The project is supported by Barclays and provides guidance to those wishing to set up a business or new enterprise. Our Business Boot Camp is a two day intensive workshop which equips budding entrepreneurs with the tools (research and business planning) to enable them to secure the growth and survival of a new-born business and in a challenging business environment.

Basing our support around an individual, not a business idea, we encourage all participants to gain vital enterprise and practical life skills, assisting them to become more independent and skilled. The ‘Campers’ are a mixed bunch with slightly more women than men and an age range of 17 to mid 50′s (my mum always said its rude to ask a woman her age so I guessed) and the business ideas they represent are just as varied including cosmetics made from food (www.skindeli.co.uk), bespoke jewellery (www.zayunubydesign.com) and designer cakes among them.

All of The Campers are creative and inspiring people with total focus on earning a living – but very little time on their hands to sit and reflect about their plans. Handily, this is exactly what we are here to do… The two days are split into sections (marketing, finance, etc) that together form a business plan with which to fight “THE FEAR”. This process of writing down the challenges, negative thoughts and actions that have to be addressed allows The Business Boot Campers to remove the unknown elements and re-take control.

The apprehensive feeling that permeated the room at the start of day one, the ‘how can I sit here for two days when I’ve got so much to do’ gave way to a much warmer atmosphere of support and cross pollination of ideas.

Community Links are running several Business Boot Camps throughout 2013, to find out more about the programme contact the Enterprise Team on 02074739643

e-mail James Crawley, for more information on Links 2 Enterprise.

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