Community Links is tendering for two pieces of work as part of our Deep Value project. We’re looking for individuals, organisations, or academic institutions to undertake some research into the power of individual relationships in public service provision, the first from a psychological perspective, the other from an economic one.
It’s an exciting piece of work – if you think you might be suitable for one or both, please do download the full details or pass them on to others.
Jude Simmons is the head of Community Links’ Children, Youth, and Community work.
Our new report, Strengthening Communities, outlines the achievements co-ordinated over just two years by Cecilia Jaros, our part-time community development worker.
We start from the belief that everyone has potential to play a part in their local community themselves, and make things happen. Sometimes people need a little support to identify the right places to get started, people to contact, available sources of funding, or just the confidence to have a go.
Community Links provide the catalyst; we encourage people to organise their own activities. Starting off locally and small scale – holding an event where people can get together and begin talking about the issues that concern them – is sometimes all that is needed to ignite a spark that leads to new community activity. Just filling in a few gaps can ensure the enthusiasm for shared action becomes contagious.
From outside, our area might be identified as one experiencing multiple deprivation, child poverty and a range of other negative issues, but we take the view that our community has tremendous assets. Key amongst them is the energy, enthusiasm and enterprise of people who live locally and, given a bit of support, can make things happen.
Whilst much of our work is intense and at a micro level, often our input will be for only a short time as we put people in touch with each other and watch things take off. However we are equally happy to support people on small scale activity or far bigger more ambitious ventures. One young lad at one of community hubs was really interested in Street Dance and also concerned about young people on the estate where he lived.
Cecilia talked with him over a period of weeks introducing ideas to him – maybe teaching dance to the very young people he was concerned for. He now has his own street dance group, has fundraised for rehearsal and studio space, performs at events and is going to university to study music. The difference in this quiet young boy is incredible.
We also helped seven different communities in Newham organise Big Lunch events this Summer, where neighbours get together one Sunday to have lunch outside. This is part of a national event and once the idea was aired with local people they just took over, coming up with a whole load of ideas to get people involved. This event happened with four groups last year and next year I’m sure it will expand again. It has now gained its own momentum with local people, streets, and clubs already planning events for next year.
Our centres or “hubs” house a number of different activities under one roof so progression from one thing to another is easy, organic and not forced. Our approach at all of our centres is to have an open door and welcome visitors just to come in and have a look at what is happening. Often in the remote isolated estates where we work what little activity that does take place is restricted – just for pensioners or just for teenagers. We take the view that any activity is available to all who want to participate, and we’d encourage everyone to take part in setting up something new.
Our centres are also places where we connect with other local agencies and organisations, schoolteachers and heads participate and Police Community Support Officers are likely to be sat across the table and engaged in the same project – not a demanding authority figure. So if a parent needs to speak to the school about behaviour or attendance, it’s likely that one of our staff can make the introduction directly, passing on the connection from one trusted professional to another and widening the circle of social contact.
it is an approach to community development that permeates all we do at Community Links.
Just under two years before the Olympics arrive in east London, Mo Farah’s spectacular double victory
in the European Championships last week is about more than the obvious recognition of his skill and dedication. Reading about his background, and looking at the photos from our own Community Links sports day held the same week – arguably less professional but certainly no less competitive – I realised Mo’s story tells us something more about how success comes about.
Mo was born in Somalia, came to the UK aged 8, set off in the wrong direction in his first race aged 14, trains just down the road from Community Links at the Newham and Essex Beagles, and is the first Britain ever to win gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m at a European Championship.
This Independent article explains that one of the biggest influences on Mo’s success has been his school athletics coach, who recognised the potential in an otherwise difficult young man, and over several years mentored him towards his first gold medal, ending up best man at Mo’s wedding. We’ve often said and shown how this kind of deeper one to one relationship has the potential to transform lives, and Mo is a high profile example.
In “Britain’s Everyday Heroes” a book we published three years ago with then PM Gordon Brown we celebrated the work of Dave Green, a local man who has been a coach with Newham and Essex Beagles for over fifty years, volunteering to support others and sharing his passion for athletics with succeeding generations. Dave has worked with hundreds of young people. Some, but by no means all, have gone on to be champions but each was treated seriously and supported by Dave – he said “ We have had youngsters over here who have been in trouble, but it has worked out once you get them really interested. A lot of them are good kids anyway right from the start. The kids that come on their own are the ones that really need to be looked after more, because they have no encouragement from their families or anybody else… The kids are all very keen, and the more input you give to them the keener they get.”
The coaches running our own sports day – most of whom first got involved when they came along to play as kids – are having a similar effect on the lives of the hundreds of young people taking part. They might not all go on to win gold, but they’re all benefiting from the kind of tailored, encouraging support that most people take for granted from friends and family, but some live without.
When east London won the Olympics bid we said we wanted to see young Newham residents running the Olympics and running in the Olympics, not just picking up the litter. Sadly, Mo (and let’s claim him as an east Londoner), might be the exception in a borough where most have found it hard to get jobs or get involved in the games. In Newham – the youngest and most diverse borough in the UK – Mo the young, black immigrant growing up in a poor household would not stand out. But the uniqueness of his story, both amongst the UK’s potential Olympians and those running the games, shows just how far we have to go before the Olympics really do transform east London.
The 2012 Olympics – just two years away – were won for east London on the strength of a story about their potential to transform one of the most deprived areas in the UK. The preparations are going well, as the buildings go up on time and within budget, Stratford station readies itself for the arrival of Eurostar, and Europe’s largest urban shopping centre takes shape next door at Westfield. It looks like the games themselves will be a huge success.
The danger, as always, is that those with least to start with – often those that come through the door of Community Links – end up no better off. On the Today programme this morning, Newham’s Mayor Sir Robin Wales spoke up for 18,000 people in Newham who have never had a job, and it was pointed out that so far only 4% of the construction jobs on the Olympic site have gone to previously unemployed east Londoners.
Last week I went to a talk about the Olympics, given by an incredibly enthusiastic Newham Council employee. We were on top of a tower block not far from the site, with a group of young jobseekers on our back-to-work scheme. The views were fantastic, but many of the young people felt like it was a long way away. Shahid told me:
“I’m looking forward to watching it on telly, and coming down to Stratford to see the atmosphere. There’s going to be a lot of different people coming from all over the world – it’ll be nice. Job wise, Jobcentres all talk about it, but there’s not much information. I don’t know what the first step is. The only thing I’ve done is go into Newham volunteers. I haven’t heard of anyone getting a job. It hasn’t had any impact – I’ve got lots of friends and families around this area, I’ve lived here my whole life, and I haven’t got any connections with anyone who’s involved in the Olympics. “
When east London won the bid, we hoped people from Newham would be running the Olympics and running in the Olympics, not just picking up litter. Yet even litter picking is proving an elusive aim. Developers find it hard to recruit and retrain young local people who have often not been employed before. As the Mayor pointed out, this should be a spur to providing more intensive in-work support, overcoming these hurdles, not abandoning Newham’s youngsters altogether. Our recent research with young unemployed people in Newham showed that young people overwhelmingly want to work, but are held back by a lack of jobs and a lack of proper support.
If the new houses being built on the Olympic site are filled with people moving in to the area, and the jobs at Westfield don’t go to local jobseekers, then a once in a generation opportunity will have been lost. Tower Hamlets residents saw almost no gain from the development of Canary Wharf, as the much heralded but deeply unambitious ‘trickle down’ benefits to local people failed to materialise. The rhetoric around the Olympics has been much more positive, but there’s still a way to go before it becomes a reality.
We hope that in the Autumn of 2012, you will we be able to stop every resident in the five Olympic Boroughs, ask them ‘how did the Olympics impact on you?’, and get an enthusiastically positive response – whether it’s a new house, a new job, new shopping opportunities, new attitude to sports and healthy living, or just a new and positive experience. That would be a truly powerful legacy, but there’s a lot of work to do before it’s realised.
There has been so much macro-analysis of the emergency budget this week that we wanted to see how it will impact on local people in the London borough of Newham where we work. It’s difficult to analyse the changes as they are going to be introduced over the next few years, and we won’t see the detail until the 20th October when the Comprehensive Spending Review is published.
Newham has worked hard to get off the bottom of the league tables when it comes to multiple deprivation, but we have seen the consequences of the recession over the last two years as demand for our services has soared – those seeking debt advice have doubled, and those seeking employment support have tripled in last 18 months.
So here’s a snapshot of what these changes mean for local people in east London.
Benefits and Tax Credits
Housing
Current LHA rates for Newham top out at £350 for a 5-bedroom house, so Newham residents won’t be affected by the cap.
Tax
We welcome the government following up on one of our policy recommendations to increase the personal tax allowance threshold. This latest increase to £7,475 will take about 10,500 local residents out of the tax system (15.8% of Newham’s working age population), putting more money into the pockets of those who need it most.
However the VAT increases will adversely affect those poorest in our society. The richest 10% spend £1 in every £25 of their income on VAT. The poorest 10% spend £1 in £7.
Jobs
Where are the jobs? The assumption in the budget is that the private sector will fill the deficit by providing more jobs. And that it will be easier for people on benefits to move into work. But again where are the jobs now?
Public Sector
Newham residents rely more heavily upon their public services than other more affluent areas. Some local services are already at bursting point as demand outstrips supply. When these are cut where will local people turn to?
It’s early days to see how this budget will actually impact on local people in east London. But we do know that as belts have tightened in the past it has often been those with least that suffer most. Let’s hope this coalition government’s rhetoric of fairness and support for the most vulnerable actually plays out into reality.
The consultation process for the Comprehensive Spending Review should be launched today (24th June) and the timetable runs through to the autumn – so get involved, we will be.
Note: Current data sources have been used where possible, and can be provided upon request.
Tuesday’s news that Refugee and Migrant Justice has gone into administration is devastating for tens of thousands of asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants who rely on their expert services every year, and a chilling taste of what might be to come, unless the new government quickly learns some lessons.
Under reforms introduced to the legal aid system, providers are not fully paid until a case is closed. In complex asylum cases this can take several years, but in the meantime charities like Refugee and Migrant Justice still have to pay their 300 expert staff, cover their rent, and keep going. Since charities rarely have assets, they find it very hard to secure commercial bridging loans in the way a business might, leaving them incredibly vulnerable.
RMJ says they are owed over £2m by the Ministry of Justice, £2m that they cannot find from other sources, and £2m that has forced them into administration. They are the largest supplier of vital legal assistance to asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants, they have done excellent work, they’re just not getting paid for it in time. And the victims, alongside RMJ’s staff, will be those who have already suffered the most, those who are often fleeing victimisation in other countries, the most vulnerable. The most vulnerable, who all governments pledge to protect, but who are often those most cruelly let down.
Fast forward 2 years, and there is a dangerously similar story emerging in welfare reform. Government is planning to move to a ‘payment by results’ model whereby providers of back-to-work services are only paid in full once someone has in a job for a year. Community Links is the most successful back-to-work provider in London and the South East, but we certainly couldn’t afford to be £2m out of pocket. We specialise in helping those who have been out of work for a long time, often among the most vulnerable, those who government has pledged to protect.
Iain Duncan Smith has indicated that he’s aware of the importance of ensuring charities like ours can take part in the new system, but until we see the details of how that will happen, we remain worried. That’s why earlier this week we sent this short briefing paper to Duncan Smith and others, outlining how we felt the new Work Programme should be structured.
RMJ’s plight is a disgrace, and government should be doing all it can to ensure RMJ can continue its vital work. But as importantly, government must learn from the experience, so other charities are not forced into the same situation in the future.
Click to enlarge
There’s a simple formula running through the diversity of projects we run at Community Links. Whether it’s young people making music videos or playing football, pensioners enjoying a game of bingo, or most recently families looking round a farm, that common theme is that we’re building communities. Bringing people together to enjoy an activity, but perhaps more importantly, providing the space, the time, and the encouragement for people to meet and get on, for community to grow and society to become richer.
That was the theory behind us taking on, at the start of the year, responsibility for Newham City Farm. For the next 20 years it is ours to develop into a true community hub. Yes, part of the aim is to give children the chance to see where milk comes from. But even more important, to us, is the chance to strengthen a local community. And if it takes some piglets and horses to get people together, that’s absolutely fine.
We already run a children’s playscheme and part of our school provision from there, and farm manager Theresa regularly hosts Community Links volunteers who help out around the place, most recently by building the beginnings of a market garden, with which we hope to raise money for Community Links.
But we have ambitious plans. If you click on the picture above, you should find a large map of the current site, with all the changes we’re proposing. Please do let us know what you think, or if you can help. They are only provisional, but they do begin to give an idea of the scale of our ambition.
There’s a simple formula running through the diversity of projects we run at Community Links. Whether it’s young people making music videos or playing football, pensioners enjoying a game of bingo, or most recently families looking round a farm, that common theme is that we’re building communities. Bringing people together to enjoy an activity, but perhaps more importantly, providing the space, the time, and the encouragement for people to meet and get on, for community to grow and society to become richer.
That was the theory behind us taking on, at the start of the year, responsibility for Newham City Farm. For the next 20 years it is ours to develop into a true community hub. Yes, part of the aim is to give children the chance to see where milk comes from. But even more important, to us, is the chance to strengthen a local community. And if it takes some piglets and horses to get people together, that’s absolutely fine.
We already run a children’s playscheme and part of our school provision from there, and farm manager Theresa regularly hosts Community Links volunteers who help out around the place, most recently by building the beginnings of a market garden, with which we hope to raise money for Community Links.
But we have ambitious plans. If you click on the picture above, you should find a large map of the current site, with all the changes we’re proposing. Please do let us know what you think, or if you can help. They are only provisional, but they do begin to give an idea of the scale of our ambition.
Politicians local and national will be making tough decisions in the months ahead. It would be easy to prioritise acute services and reduce investment in prevention. Easy but wrong.
For more than 30 years at Community Links we have been persuading policy makers, commissioners and independent funders to think about fences at the top of the cliff rather than ambulances at the bottom. It may seem a difficult argument in these straightened times but spending more now on, for instance, detached youth work with young people who aren’t a danger to themselves and others would be better by far than waiting for the really expensive problems to develop. There is scarcely any area of health care, education or social policy where prevention or early intervention doesn’t make best sense – socially and financially.
It is for this reason that Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws’ largely unreported answer to MP Graham Allen’s question on Wednesday was particularly significant. “Will the minister,” Allen asked, “seek to address some of the problems of the structural deficit by ensuring that we invest in babies, children and young people, so that they do not later require billions of pounds of remedial treatment for drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and a lack of aspiration in education and work, and so that we can build the type of society that most of us in the Chamber want to see?”
Laws replied, “The honourable gentleman is absolutely right. As we take tough decisions and come towards the spending review at the end of the year, we will have to try to maintain the services that we particularly value and that protect individuals in society who are on very low incomes. We need to protect investments that have the potential to pay off in the future, and I promise him that I will examine carefully the matters that he mentions”.
We do what we do because we believe that we all have an equal right to fulfil our potential. Some need help; advice, training or practical support. We haven’t hitherto framed it as a contribution to the structural deficit. Perhaps we should.
Community Links has joined a group of other charities today in calling for the main party leaders to commit to a Fairness Test, to ensure the poorest in society do not shoulder the burden of reducing our national debt.
The test, which is supported by organisations including the Child Poverty Action Group, Barnardo’s, Save the Children, and the Equality Trust, would ensure that major tax or spending changes are rigorously assessed for their impact on inequality. Carried out by the Treasury, the Inequality Impact Assessment would mean that governments cannot make major changes without being aware of the consequences for inequality and the knock-on effects on the cohesiveness and wellbeing of the whole society.
At Community Links we are all to aware that even small cuts in seemingly-small budgets can have dramatic effects. For example, we provide welfare and benefits advice to over 12,000 people every year – a vital service that last year ensured they received an extra £1.3m they were entitled to. Cuts to services like these might go unnoticed next to much larger spending decisions, but would be devastating to the people we work with. An inequality impact assessment would help safeguard vital services like these.
Latest from Chain Reaction
The dangers of summer holidays
Monday, August 16th, 2010“It’s no secret that David Cameron’s new government is seeking radical and rapid change: by their own admission they are hitting the ground faster than either Thatcher or Blair. With consultations spewing out of every department, on everything from welfare reform to bank taxes to government websites, there is a danger that organisations or individuals with something valuable to contribute will be caught napping, or off on summer holidays, leaving unscrutinised policies wreaking havoc in two years’ time.”
Read the rest of the article here
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