Community Links

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Archive for July, 2009

LinksUK Consultancy and Training Service

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Training & Consultancy Broch Cover

We can show you how. Because we do. Everyday.

In order to succeed in today’s climate, we need to be better at what we do, clear about why we are doing it, and able to demonstrate the difference we are making. linksUK training and consultancy service draws on the learning from our everyday experience to help you achieve this.

Our practical and affordable training and consultancy services are delivered by practitioners, people who are living with the same issues as you, every day.

What do you cover?
Our training and consultancy services cover a variety of topics such as organisational development, economic development to services such as community research, fundraising and campaigning.

For full details of our training and consultancy services download our brochure.

Who is it for?
Our expertise has been developed in running successful community projects, yet we believe we have much to share, beyond voluntary and community sector partners with the business and local government sectors.

Why Community Links?
Our training and consultancy service draws on the learning from our everyday experience. All of our training and consultancy services are delivered by practitioners, people who are living with the same issues as you, everyday.

Where does training take place?
Training can be delivered in-house at your premises or at our premises in east London – depending on what suits you best.

Who delivers linksUK training and consultancy?
Our training and consultancy services are delivered by experts in their field at Community Links. In addition to the core team we also call on the expertise of our wider team of practitioners across the organisation.

What are the costs?
All of our training and consultancy services can be tailored to fit your requirements and budgets. We are a community organisation that’s why our services are practical and affordable.

How long does training typically take?
Training can be long term or short term – depending on your needs.

How to Enquire
For full information about our training and consultancy services please download our brochure.

You can also get in touch with us for an informal discussion about your training and consultancy requirements:

By phone: 020 7473 9666
By email: uk@community-links.org
You can also follow our updates on: Twitter

Posted in Communication, Everyday Innovators, General, Informal Economy, Leadership, Research | No Comments »

DWP select committee one off evidence session into Child Poverty

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

 
Following the Budget 2009 announcements the DWP select committee held a one off evidence session in June to evaluate how effective Government initiatives are in (i) breaking cycles of intergenerational worklessness and (ii) assisting out of poverty families in these groups who cannot work and whether the Government is doing enough to support  parents into sustainable employment. (Watch it here) It also assessed the effectiveness of cross-government co-ordination to address child poverty  and referred to the Take up Challenge report  . Need NOT Greed submitted evidence to the session drawn from a series of Need NOT Greed workshops based in Bromley and organised by a group of lone parent, grassroots campaigners, from Maison Enterprises.

As the theme for the Child Poverty Bill is making the most of your potential, Need NOT Greed thought it relevant to submit evidence about helping lone parents out of poverty and harnessing informal economic activity to create sustainable self employment. This is a suitable option for lone parents with childcare concerns who have an entrepreneurial ability. Yet as Faisel Rahman, director of Fair Finance points out in his regular colum ‘Becoming an entrepreneur is a tall order for someone on the breadline’  and that ‘the biggest barrier seems to be the harsh benefits system’ However, with the right support he gives the example of Jannet who started trading informally and now is off the benefits system-and paying taxes.

Around the same time there was an article in the Guardian ‘Fraught in a trap’ where Amelia Gentleman highlighted the misdiagnosis made by the architects of the current Welfare Reform which proposes that people are work shy and that punitive measures is the best approach to take to get people back to work. Amelia interviewed two lone parents who expressed their desire to be employed in a job that did not keep them in poverty and the unnecessary pressures they felt coming from JCP advisers when there was not adequate childcare available.
From the workshops we ran in Bromley and the evidence submitted is apparent that for this group of single parents motivation is certainly not the problem, the benefits system is.

“We need to invest in our future and our children are our future. Poverty means that our children have to cope with things that they wouldn’t normally have to, it makes them grow up much faster. Tensions with the JCP adviser have a knock on effect with the kids.”

To offer families a real route out of poverty government policy needs to recognise the efforts people are already making to work and build on this activity through supportive and progressive measures. Need NOT Greed hopes to participate in more evidence sessions by government to tackle poverty, effectively reform the welfare system and look at harnessing informal work in the UK as a way to break the cycle of worklessness. Get in touch if you are intersted in getting involved in our Need NOT Greed workshops or have ideas about giving future evidence.

Download the transcript of the select committee hearing and the evidence we submitted here

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, General, Informal Economy, Voices from the Ground Up, Welfare, employment | No Comments »

Cash-in- hand questionnaire

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

As part of our continuing research into the informal economy we want to investigate the impact of the last 12 months of recession on informal economic activity or cash-in-hand trading. 

This survey is being carried out as part of our Need NOT Greed campaign aiming to move people out of poverty, off benefits and into work.

Please help us by completing a short online survey.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Research, Welfare, employment | No Comments »

Introducing the National Talent Bank

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Yesterday the Daily Telegraph ran a front page story suggesting that almost one million people across the UK are now working part-time because they cannot get a full-time job. The story suggested several major employers have offered staff reduced hours or extended holidays in an attempt to cut costs. The story goes on to suggest that unlike previous recessions this time there are “more dramatic changes in the labour market, with hundreds of thousands cutting their hours and pay in an attempt to hold on to their jobs. “

 Today at a breakfast meeting with actual and potential partners we are introducing the National Talent Bank.

The NTB is an idea proposed by the Council on Social Action – a time limited partnership promoting and supporting volunteering amongst those with more time to share as a consequence of recession.

Today we are publishing a discussion paper to stimulate dialogue and engagement and issuing a call for partners to build the Talent Bank together.

A video accompanying this post outlines the plan.

The Council on Social Action (CoSA) has been considering the role of social action in recession and what might be done now to ensure that we emerge from this period with not only a stronger economy but also happier, healthier, stronger communities.  

Strong communities benefit from the engagement of the many, not the few.  They nurture a commitment to one another sharing the opportunities, the experience and the knowledge we need to shape the decisions that affect our lives, to fulfil potential individually and to live and work effectively together. These are timeless values but particularly significant today: Recession could drive division and exclusion or it could unite us, extracting greater value from all that we have, embracing new ideas and working together on common goals.

Working with The Talent and Enterprise Task Force at the DCSF, TimeBank, Business in the Community (BiTC) and CAPP we’ve developed a short list of opportunities, a framework for expansion and a call for partners to build the National Talent Bank together.

The Plan: The Bank will not be a big new bureaucracy. It will be the sum of its programmes, each run by an independent set of partners. It will offer light touch brokerage to employers, not individual employees and to NTB programmes.

NTB will have a fixed life, probably two years, and will unleash the potential from temporary circumstances. It will target those employers who are releasing employees for a fixed period or are reducing the working week.

The Need: We know that 17% of UK employers have implemented short time working programmes, with a further 13% intending to or considering the option. (CBI Employment Trends Survey: June 2009)  The “under employed”  includes employees working shorter hours,  required to take  sabbaticals, retained in the workforce  but under occupied or “deferred” – new recruits with a deferred start date.

We also know that large numbers of children would benfit from extra one-to-one literacy and numeracy support, that debt enquiries at Citizens Advice Bureaux were 21% higher in the first quarter of this year compared to last and that Child Line have experienced a comparable increase in demand.

On the one hand there is need. On the other there is the capacity to help.

The Action: We intend to build three themes. Action for Young People, Action on Climate Change and Action on Money Management. Beneath each theme we are developing a set of volunteering programmes

As recession continues more people become available and more problems become more entrenched. Employees are making choices about how they use their unexpected time when it becomes available. As the economy picks up they will once again have less time available. The need and the opportunity exist now. So should our response.  


Do please download the report and have a look at the video. We are developing a short list of opportunities and  a framework for expansion if you have any comments or you would like to be involved please leave a comment below or contact me  info@nationaltalentbank.org.uk . Website:  www.nationaltalentbank.org.uk

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Posted in Community Engagement, Council on Social Action, Innovation, Inspiration, News, Regeneration, Volunteering, employment | 1 Comment »

Brick Lane waiters get English classes but will it mean real change?

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Brick Lane

I’m definitely feeling up-beat about the Brick Lane project – the one that’s trying to help waiters stuck in dead end cash-in-hand jobs in Bangladeshi restaurants on that famous east London street. (See previous blog posts)

Last Monday we had a meeting at the Bangladesh British Chamber of Commerce (BBCC) where for the first time plans for English classes for waiters felt really concrete. Tower Hamlets Council has recruited English teachers, including a Bengali speaking tutor, and fixed a date for them to start. The BBCC is also hosting a dinner for the partners to meet restaurant business leaders where its chairman is going to ask restaurants to provide a minimum number of staff to take part in classes and encourage owners to offer staff time off in lieu for the time they spend learning English.

There is a ‘but’ though. The enthusiasm for English classes is almost in inverse proportion to enthusiasm for tackling the problems of low pay and informal working. Many of these waiters are working for much less than the minimum wage – as little as £3.00 per hour – as our “Waiting for Change” research report showed (download a copy here). Many get no holiday and don’t even benefit from cash tips left by customers. They work six days a week – 65 hours over split shifts – leaving them little time for anything else. 

There is a reluctance amongst all the partners to really address these tougher minimum wage / working conditions issues. Yes, English classes will help. It’s a first step and maybe this issue needs to be addressed at the beginning, which can then be the stepping stone to further activity in the near future. We know that trust is key to making change happen, and this takes time to develop. But it’s frustrating that things are happening at a slow pace particularly with the businesses who – to a large degree – are breaking the law and ripping of their workforce. We must continue to persuade them with the ‘carrot’ of business support to develop and improve their business practices, and maybe use the ’stick’ of the enforcement agencies to ensure they comply with employment law

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Research, employment | No Comments »

Professor Etzioni and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne MP visit Community Links

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

DSCF6563
Today Community Links hosted a visit from Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne MP along with Professor Amitai Etzioni. The renowned sociologist famed for his work on Communitarianism

Last night professor Etzioni addresses a meeting at the RSA and had dinner at No.10. Today he travelled to Canning Town for meetings with Community Links frontline staff and a small group of our friends from community organisations, business and local government. We discussed community participation; the role of community in relation to public services and the impact of globalisation.

For such a diverse group there was wide agreement amongst those present from across the different sectors that the things needed for most effective engagement are trust and confidence. 

You can view photographs of the meeting here and watch a short video of the concluding remarks here.

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Posted in Communication, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership, News, Regeneration, Voices from the Ground Up | 1 Comment »

“Working Alongside”: Community Links and ATD Fourth World’s ‘Need NOT Greed’ discussion groups on the Benefit System

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Working together for a better future for everyone

“People who experience a problem understand it best.” 

Extract from Community Links’ founding statement

 

Community Links and ATD Fourth World, are two charities both working with people who live in poverty. We jointly conducted a series of workshops with people who have long-term experience of poverty to explore their experiences, draw out common themes and develop ideas for changes to the system that participants felt would help them move out of poverty, off benefits and into sustainable secure employment.  

These are the stories of the people we work with everyday. They are the ones who have to queue for 40 minutes in the Jobcentre, the ones who never see the same member of staff twice, and the ones who have to negotiate the bureaucracy of the benefits system just to be able to feed their families whilst they look for work in this ongoing recession.

“Working Alongside“ is the latest in our Evidence Paper series. It is an account of those three workshops and some recommendations. We hope policymakers and other practioners will learn from this work  to inform their strategy and policy and go on to improve services offered by the Department for Work and Pensions, Jobcentre Plus and their partners.

Download a copy of “Working Alongside“.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Research, Welfare, debt, employment | 2 Comments »

Community Allowance: Latest News

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

We at Community Links have been a part of the CREATE Consortium since its inception. The campaign calls for changes to benefit rules which would enable community organisations to pay people to do work that strengthens their neighbourhood without it affecting any of their benefits.

In a guest blog here CREATE Consortium co-ordinator Naomi Alexander updates the campaign progress. 

Well, we finally have some news from the governments Department for Work and Pensions about the Community Allowance.

We (Steve Wyler, Executive Director of the DTA, Aaron Barbour, Head of linksUK at Community Links and me) went to a hastily arranged meeting with 6 officials from the DWP this morning to discuss our Right to Bid proposal that we submitted back in January.

We’ve got through two rounds of intensive scrutiny and evaluation from across the Department and they wanted to give us their feedback.

Because the last Secretary of State, James Purnell, said that people on Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) would not be eligible for the Community Allowance, our bid, which includes a lot of detail about people on JSA is not eligible for funding and they are rejecting our proposal as it stands.

While we are obviously, really disappointed that this is the decision after all the work that has gone into getting this far, there is still hope.

They have asked us to write another bid (!) as they are keen on the Community Allowance concept and can see the value in piloting it to test the approach. They have given us some guidance as to how we should re-shape the bid to stand the best chance of being approved.

This includes:

  • Re-shaping what we would deliver through the Community Allowance only for people who are on Employment and Support Allowance and Incapacity Benefit
  • Scaling back the pilot programme from 15 pilots across the UK to just 3 pilots as the Right to Bid process is targeted at funding small scale activity that can act as the DWP’s research and development arm to test out new ideas and add value to their existing work
  • Choosing which three pilot areas it would be piloted in and having identified lead community organisations in each area before the bid is submitted
  • Ensuring that each of these pilot areas fits within Job Centre Plus and Pathways to Work provider boundaries, which are different to local authority boundaries
  • Beginning to develop a dialogue between the community organisation(s) running the pilot and local Job Centre Plus and Pathways/FND providers in each area
  • Including more of a focus on how many people will move into jobs as a result of the activity, specifying which of these are part time, full time and sustained over a 26 week period  

We have had lots of discussions about this since Friday and we think it is worth being pragmatic at this stage and moving ahead with another bid as outlined above. At the same time we will continue our lobbying and campaigning work to convince politicians that the Community Allowance should be available to anyone on any benefit and try to get the scope of the pilots extended to include those on JSA at a later date.

What do you think?

We would like to hear if community organisations are still interested in being pilot partners under this scaled back version of a Community Allowance pilot.

If you are interested, or you’d like to discuss the practicalities of becoming a pilot partner please email me (and copy in Jess Steele the Chair of the CREATE Consortium j.steele@dta.org.uk).

Depending on the level of interest, we will set up a short selection process that enables us to choose three pilot locations and partners. The aim is to get the new bid to DWP for their end of August selection panel, so that we have a decision in September and a contract signed and monies flowing to pilot partners as soon as possible after that.

It’s a challenging timescale, especially as it’s over the summer whilst people will be taking leave, but if you’re up for it – we’re up for it!

We’ve come this far and now have an opportunity to get something up and running next year that will begin to demonstrate how the Community Allowance could work. It may not be what we know is needed in our most deprived communities but it’s a start and we have no intention of giving up. With your involvement we will keep up the pressure on politicians to realise the full potential of the Community Allowance over the long term.

We look forward to hearing what you think.

Thanks so much for your support.

Naomi Alexander

Email: n.alexander@dta.org.uk Web: www.communityallowance.org

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Posted in Benefits, Community Engagement, News, Regeneration, Welfare | 4 Comments »

Recession and supporting people back into work

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

busy day's mass punchingEarlier this week, I attended a TUC seminar focusing on the lessons from the last two recessions in the 1980’s and 90’s. Evidence from the ILO and ONS confirms that this recession is severe – nothing surprising there.

The TUC’s useful work on the recession including reports and the ToUChstone blog describes and comments upon the changing nature of this recession.

 As TUC Senior Policy Officer Richard Excel explained “predicting the future is a mugs game”, however unemployment is expected to continue to rise, maybe even to 3.5m, well after an upturn in GDP (the green shoots of the recovery). That’s typical, as is the fact that it will take years for the economy to recover to pre-recession levels of growth. The hardest hit being the lowest skilled and those in the most deprived areas, which is tough for the people we work with in east London as they are over represented in these categories.

Professor Paul Gregg (of DWP Conditionality and Support report fame) then gave an interesting analysis of factors that might reduce disconnection with the (formal) labour market and those who are long term unemployed.

Evidence shows that what works to reduce this disconnection are back to work intervention programmes which: 

  • Offer active support in getting job ready, acquiring the skills and experience to get a job e.g. job search, CV skills, job interview practice.
  • Provide a paid job with work which is valuable to the community – Paul suggested setting up community job banks – not picking up litter but doing youth work, child care etc…
  • Focus on getting the individual a job at the end of the programme – both the individual and the organisation where that individual is placed must be focused on finding them a job. 

This approach is currently applied (with varying degrees of success) in the New Deal programmes but the stages are followed sequentially. Paul suggests doing all three stages at the same time. His suggested intervention programme is called the Job Guarantee, check here for more details. In effect he’s attempting to mainstream Intermediate Labour Markets (ILMs).

If you’re a regular reader of our blog you might be thinking that this all seems familiar. Well you’re right. It is. Our Community Allowance proposes the same thing but opens up the offer to more people, not just the long term unemployed. We’ve been campaigning for many years to get government to make the link between unemployment, work and community regeneration, which were a part of the Community Programmes of the 1970s and 80s. It’s funny how things go full circle. 

We have a meeting with the DWP’s Right to Bid Team this Friday to discuss further details about how we might pilot the Community Allowance across the UK. We’re also following up with Paul Gregg to see how we might connect.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Posted in Benefits, News, Regeneration, Welfare, employment | 1 Comment »

Do you earn enough for a minimum acceptable standard of living?

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

 

 
About a year ago we wrote a piece reporting on the launch of the Minimum Income Standards research.  This is an income  figure calculated to reflect what members of the public thought people need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living.  Today the figures for 2009 have been published.

Last year the report delivered a grim analysis for those living on low incomes and claiming benefits. One  year on, after regular news of financial crisis and job losses, the picture looks even more bleak. Around one quarter of people in Britain are  living below the minimum income standard, and this is increasing as unemployment rises  People of working age who are claiming benefits remain well below the minimum income standard and far removed from an acceptable living standard. 

These findings have confirmed what we at Community Links have known for years that the current benefit system does not provide a sufficient income for people to live with dignity. In fact it pays people to stay in poverty.

Inadequacies in the benefits and tax credit systems are one of the factors that result in people feeling they have no alternative than to work informally – claiming benefit whilst undertaking cash-in-hand work. Our NeedNOTGreed campaign works to remove the need for cash-in-hand work by creating a modern, flexible welfare system.  Our work is summarised in our Social Change booklet on the Informal Economy.

But it’s more than just an argument about figures and statistics. The everyday experience of the people we work with in our own area of east London and communities like ours across the UK indicate the many ways families are struggling. The figures are translated into the child who hopes – but does not expect to get a birthday cake or the family living in overcrowded and unsuitable accomodation that can’t get away for a weekend at the seaside over the summer – or even afford regular healthy lunches whilst the free school dinners are not available during school closure. Our work on Child Poverty is summarised in another of our Social Change series.

Full details are available on the Minimum Income Standards website where a  there is also a ‘Minimum Income Calculator’ for people to check whether their income meets the MIS.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Informal Economy, Research, Welfare, debt, employment | No Comments »