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Archive for July, 2010

Olympics must live up to their promise of a rejuvenated east London

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Olympicbuilding2The 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.

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Posted in General, Regeneration | 1 Comment »

A Big Society… and four economy sized societies

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Community Action bannerPerhaps I’m too cynical or just insufficiently pragmatic but I urge caution in our response to government rhetoric on the Big Society, at least until we see more detail.

Matthew Taylor says the RSA could be called the think tank for the Big Society so closely are the visions aligned. So could Community Links and, I suspect, a lot of other organisations. This might signal an opportunity or it might be a warning. Few can dissemble from the warm words but is it really possible in practise to please so many people?

Thus far we’re promised some old ideas rebranded Big Society – the social investment bank for example , some reworked – the social action day was consumer tested last year and rejected , some relatively small new ones – funding the training (though not the employment) of community organisers for instance and, today, four Economy Size Societies in the Eden Valley, Windsor , Sutton and Liverpool. Worthy initiatives perhaps but scarcely amounting yet to a brave new vision. The more ambitious iterations of the Big Society are less clear and more worrying – Andrew Lansley claimed the label for his NHS reforms as did Michael Gove for independent schools.

Here my concern is less about the producer interests of the organisations on this patch – third sector agencies and social enterprises may well grow the business, but much more about the best interests of our service users, particularly the most excluded.  Some of the services on which the most vulnerable are most dependent are clearly threatened and could, under the cover of the Big Society, diminish significantly over the next couple of years. Not necessarily but very possibly.

Arriving for work at Community Links in Canning Town this morning I passed a long queue of people waiting for advice or practical support in this, one of the UKs most disadvantaged communities. The questions I ask of every government programme are the same today as everyday. “How does it meet their needs? How does it tackle poverty, not just money but poverty of opportunity, and what more could be done?” I’m not sure that what I know about the Big Society, or what its leading minister, Francis Maude, had to say about it last week,  helps me with the answers.

Criticism at this stage is of course just as empty as wide eyed enthusiasm. It simply isn’t yet time for the jury to return. We could however be thinking more about the criteria for   judgement, the basis on which we might   appraise the Big Society , challenge it, build it. Our Chain Reaction network has begun this work with a statement of principles sketching our vision of the good society, outlining the principles that might underpin that vision and suggesting the expectations, for ourselves and for government that might flow from this analysis.  We put forward this vision, these values and these expectations for ourselves and for government as a set of principles that might guide the judgements that we make and the work that we do.

We share it as a work in progress and invite others to contribute.

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Posted in Community Engagement, Innovation, Leadership | 3 Comments »

New ‘neets’ research challenges ‘layabouts’ label

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Window Image Last week the Audit Commission’s “Against the Odds” report revealed that Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) at 16-18 have poorer life chances than their peers and are more likely to be a long term cost to public finances.

In a time of austerity, government can ill-afford the estimated £13 billion in public finance costs that will be incurred by the 2008 NEET cohort over their lifetimes. The blight on individual lives is even more appalling, young men who were NEET are three times more likely to suffer from depression, and five times more likely to have a criminal record, than their peers.

This week Community Links publish our new survey of young people not in employment, education or training. Our research suggests that the vast majority want a job and are actively looking for work.  All but two of thirty five NEET young interviewed were keen to work and actively looking for a job. A significant number were also highly qualified but struggling to find work in an increasingly competitive employment market.

“I’ve applied for loads of jobs but I’m up against people with lots more experience who are going for the same jobs as me,” said one young man with ten GCSEs, three ‘A’ levels and a BSC in Computing and Business. “I’ve been to graduate careers fairs where I’m competing for entry level positions with people who have been made redundant from Lehman Brothers and other big firms. It’s incredibly hard to get your foot on the ladder.”

The label NEET covers a diverse group; whilst just over a quarter of the young people interviewed had five or more grade A-C GCSE’s, a similar number had no qualifications at all. More than half of those with no qualifications had been excluded from school.

Only half of the young people who took part in the survey were claiming benefits, relying instead on support from family and friends. The absence of the most basic level of financial support made it extremely difficult for some to stay in education.  One 17 year old described how he had enrolled on a full time course but could not find the £20 per week needed to pay his travel costs. Poverty had a big impact; there have recently been calls to reduce or cut benefits for young people who refuse work or training. But a lack of cash is the very thing causing some young people to fail. Some who simply could not afford the cost of travelling to college, for instance, were abandoning education as a result. One 20 year old woman described how she had been unable to complete a Business Studies degree because she was sharing a two bedroom flat with eight other family members. “Five of us sleep in one room,” she said. “There was just nowhere to work or think and after 18 months I had to leave the course.”

Others from poor backgrounds were giving up on higher education because they were afraid they would be unable to repay high levels of debt accrued to cover tuition fees and living costs.

A more generous level of support for young people in education and training could cut the risk of young people becoming unemployed for extended periods, and reduce the long term cost to society. Taking away financial support by cutting benefits or other punitive measures is likely to have precisely the opposite effect to that intended and lead to greater demands on public finances in the long term.

Read the full report.

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

Recognising and rewarding success

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

European Year Against PovertyMost people recognise that award ceremonies – particularly in the third sector – are at least as much about showcasing a wide variety of excellent work as they are about rewarding one particular individual, project, or organisation. This is certainly the rationale behind the Tackling Poverty Awards that we’re launching today, in collaboration with our partner Church Action on Poverty. They aim to recognise and reward projects that successfully support working age people in poverty.

Alongside Community Links’ core purpose of providing first rate services to people in east London, we share what we learn with other organisations and policy-makers nationally. Since 1989 our Ideas Annuals have collected and published hundreds of examples of successful local projects from around the country. Our Chain Reaction Project continues the work of sharing good project ideas in an online forum.

Through our policy work we have a track record of influencing government and changing the systems and procedures adversely affecting the people we work with .

One of this year’s projects, part of the European Year of Tackling Poverty, is around poverty amongst people of working age. As well as a series of local listening campaigns held around the country, we’re launching the competition to gather together innovative examples of projects working with people experiencing poverty. We believe that people who experience a problem are the experts and often best placed to develop sustainable solutions. We want to provide a platform for people who know best what it is like to live in a struggling community to tell their own story and challenge the myths about how poverty is perceived.

Four projects will be given a video camera to keep, and the chance to make a film about their work. One will win the overall award at a ceremony in November. But as many longlisted projects as possible will be included in a publication celebrating the diversity and importance of work going on around the country. Work that is often localised and unreplicated, but could have a huge impact if copied elsewhere.

So if you know of or run a project that inspires you, please do consider submitting an application.

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Posted in Innovation, Voices from the Ground Up, Welfare, Working age poverty | No Comments »

Everyday Innovators – Rethinking Public Service

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

DSCN4327A new political landscape has taken shape since the general election. We have seen a dramatic shift in thinking about public service delivery, with an increased recognition of the value of engaging individuals and communities in the reform of public services, (something that Community Links have advocated for many years).

We see this within the coalition government as Chancellor George Osborne announced £74bn public spending cuts in the emergency budget  – and launched a crowd sourcing website calling for ideas for public service savings.

And we are following with interest the emerging discussions around the Big Society Network which is calling on individuals with the local expertise and skills to step up and take part in running activities in “Your Square Mile”.

Thanks to NESTA’s recent and timely Radical Efficiency research which examined over 100 case studies across the globe, we can learn about best practices that have significantly reduced service costs and at the same time improved the quality of service delivery. The Radical Efficiency report outlines a community-driven service delivery model that encourages partnering with service users, recognising community leaders, and incorporating existing community assets. It has found that by changing the way services are designed and delivered, between 20 and 60 percent of efficiency savings can be realised.

All in all, it is about innovation. It is about looking at the communities you serve and considering how to re-conceptualise public services or programmes. For example we have blogged before about how the Community Links Everyday Innovators programme set up a volunteering project in our local Jobcentre and reduced Jobcentre delays from eight weeks to three days.

Our Everyday Innovators Programme is a step-by-step framework that inspires service providers to be more creative and strategic in re-designing and co-designing better services by effectively engaging clients. More than just being about radical thinking, in our experience, this model also reduces costs.

New thinking doesn’t mean re-inventing the wheel. The learning gained from  over thirty years experience developing and delivering services in one of the most deprived parts of the UK  has been distilled into the ‘Everyday Innovators’ approach. It is built on the idea that the communities you serve are assets with expertise, experience and knowledge. By giving them a new role in your service design and delivery, you will gain front-line insights that many marketers spend their lives to find. In essence, rather than trying to “do more with less”,  just like Radical Efficiency and the “Big Society” concept,  Everyday Innovators is, as professer David Halpern has said, “doing more with more”.

Everyday Innovators is about creating a collaborative process to work together, and about building Big Society.

Want to find out more?  Why not come to our upcoming Everyday Innovators Taster session which takes place in London on 30 July 2010.  from 10:00 – 16:00 at Community Links, 105 Barking Road, London, E16 4HQ
The cost is only £10, which includes lunch and refreshments.
More information and registration.

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Posted in Everyday Innovators, Innovation | No Comments »

Giving Canning Town a LIFT

Monday, July 5th, 2010

LIFT Canning Town Just around the corner from our headquarters building in Canning Town an intriguing new structure has been taking shape behind the hoardings over the last few weeks. Here in east London amid the Olympics building work and other huge regeneration projects we are used to seeing things change. The new building on the site of former council housing is actually a mobile performance venue – basically a big tent  – and provides a temporary home to the London International Festival of Theatre.

For a few weeks this empty patch of ground will be transformed into a venue for a diverse range of drama as well as a full programme of eclectic events stretching from boxing to haircuts by children!

As part of the fun Community Links will be taking over the space for a full day next Monday 12th July.  We will be presenting a Family Fun day with a programme of activity and taster sessions including a chance to get professional advice and help filling in forms; Keep Fit; Pensioners Bingo; Salsa Dance workshop; after-school craft activities for local children and ending up with music and street dance performances from young people in the Youth Zone until 9:00pm

It’s great to have unused bits of urban land put to community use and bringing drama to areas outside the west end of London is to be celebrated. Come and join us at our family fun day next week – or come sooner and take in a show. Highlights this week include free performances of  “She from the Sea” by Zawe Ashton from the Clean Break Company – a theatre company using theatre for personal and political change, working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system. The programme outlines the performance :

Pearl, Masha and Edlin are trying to move on.  A simple life by the sea is all they need to forget their pasts.  But when a mysterious visitor is washed up, she brings with her a dark history that threatens their new way of life. A decision must be made.   Let her stay or make her swim?

Hooked?  … I might see you there….   7.30pm, 8 July 2010 or 2.30pm & 7.30pm, 9 July 2010. Loads of other interesting and exciting things are happening and it is a great opportunity to experience something new in an unusual setting.

Have a look at the full programme and do drop-in on Monday 12th to join in the  Community Links family fun day.

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Posted in Communication, Innovation, Inspiration, Regeneration | No Comments »