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Pre-election karaoke

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Amid the din of election coverage, it’s nice to be reminded that most of the world is carrying on as normal – working, volunteering, even dancing. Today, for example, is Community Links’ annual pensioners’ tea dance and karaoke party, organised by a group of volunteers from one of our corporate supporters. The hubbub emanating from the hall, right in the middle of our office, is a nice if distracting reminder that the good society is being supported every day, and no doubt will continue whoever makes it in to government.

Something that might not make it through the election period, however, is our proposal for a Community Allowance, which has been sitting with DWP for months, and is in danger of disappearing completely. After the election, expect to hear much more about it, as we try and persuade whoever’s in government of its obvious merits.

Until then, however, it’s sobering to remember that for many of the pensioners downstairs, the people coming through our doors for advice, or the young people we support into work, the next few years are going to be pretty tough, irrespective of tomorrow’s result. The recession hits the people we work with hardest and longest, and it’ll take more than some karaoke to sort that out. Proposals like the Community Allowance, which rewards work that strengthens communities and supports people back into work, could be crucial.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, Volunteering, Welfare, Working age poverty | No Comments »

A Year of Social Change

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

As we reach the end of 2009 the national team at Community Links have been reflecting on the last year … and begining to plan for 2010.

In 2009 Community Links has seen more and more people come through our doors, as people struggle and demand for our services increased. In Newham Community Links  carried on running much needed local services -  youth clubs, the New Deal, our own school, provided advice and support to families struggling with debt and welfare, and much more. And we’ve continued to share our learning nationally, achieving considerable success.

Projects that our national team have worked on this year include
The Parliamentary launch of our Need NOT Greed Campaign in February, to the National Talent Bank in June, Chain Reaction in November,  including the launch of three more Council on Social Action reports and much else besides.

We have produced a short report on our activities: you can read it here.

To all those with whom we’ve worked, a warm thank you. To those with whom we haven’t, how about next year? The election, unprecedented regeneration, the European Year Against Poverty all provide us with enormous opportunities for social change. We look forward to seizing that moment with you.

Wishing you a peaceful Christmas and a joyful New Year
The Community Links national team.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Communication, Council on Social Action, Informal Economy, Innovation | No Comments »

Four good reasons to pay people on benefits for working in their community

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Yesterday saw the parliamentary launch of two new reports into the Community Allowance. It’s a fairly simple proposal – allow local people on benefits to earn money doing part-time community-building work, with no impact on their benefits – yet there are so many good reasons why it should happen.

Most of them are outlined in the new booklet, with contributions from Lord Adebowale, Will Hutton, Philip Blonde, Julia Unwin, Barbara Stocking, and more. But it never does any harm to spell out the benefits yet again.

Addition: Here’s Naomi, from the campaign, spelling out them out even more clearly than I did in writing.

It can be the first vital step back into work.
Benefits can act as a trap. People trying to move into the available jobs, which are often part-time, temporary, and badly paid, usually end up worse off than had they stayed on benefits. There is little opportunity to develop skills or build a career, and little recognition of the barriers people face. A part-time job which doesn’t affect benefits, gives a bit of extra money, skills for a CV and experience of work can be a vital first step back into work. That’s the Community Allowance.

It supports community organisations and strengthens communities
Badly underfunded community organisations often rely on dedicated members and volunteers to do crucial work. Giving them a route to employing local people in part-time work would benefit the community and the organisations working in it.

It saves money
Social Return on Investment is a tool that assigns a monetary value to the social good achieved by investing in social projects. A study by the New Economics Foundation also launched yesterday, suggested that every £1 invested in the Community Allowance would generate £10 worth of social value. The problem, of course, is committing government to spending upfront on projects it doesn’t know will work.

It challenges the stereotypical view of poverty
As Julian Dobson clearly explains in the booklet, the general public have a distorted and damaging view of those on benefits, which government often regrettably panders to. Evidence of people on benefits doing valuable local work in their community could go some way to addressing this. (In actual fact a huge amount of valuable community work is already done by people on benefits, but we just don’t hear about it.)

Community Links is heavily involved in the campaign, and many of us were there at the launch yesterday. There have been some significant steps forward in the last few years, culminating yesterday in the announcement of three organisations who will pilot the Community Allowance in their communities next year. But until the proposal has been adopted for all those on benefits, we’ll be hearing a lot more about the campaign.

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Posted in Benefits, Informal Economy, News, employment | 1 Comment »

Community Allowance Pilot Partners Wanted

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009


We (the CREATE Consortium) are looking for three community organisations to pilot the Community Allowance with us. Could you be involved?

Background – the Community Allowance proposal
A Community Allowance would allow benefit claimants to supplement their income without incurring a penalty – this month’s New Start magazine has a useful overview of the idea, which is starting to be picked up by government. We hope to be involved in piloting the idea, and would welcome your involvement.

Under the government’s Right to Bid scheme, any organisation can propose to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) a new way of delivering any of its services. We thought this was a good opportunity to work with the DWP to pilot the Community Allowance. We developed a Right to Bid proposal for a £2.2 million pilot programme in 15 areas across the UK, and submitted it in January 2009. In April, they asked us a number of questions about our proposal, and you can read our answers here.

In July 2009 they called us to a meeting where they informed us that the Right to Bid process was looking for much smaller scale pilots. They also said that the outgoing Secretary of State, James Purnell MP, had made it clear that the Community Allowance could not be piloted for people on Income Support or Job Seekers Allowance.

They rejected our bid but asked us to submit another proposal for a smaller scale pilot operating in three areas anywhere in the UK. They also said our bid would stand a greater chance of success if we restricted the people who could participate to those who are on Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance.

We asked all the organisations that had already expressed an interest in piloting the Community Allowance if they would be prepared to go ahead on that basis, and over 30 organisations said they would.

Aims of pilots:

  • To test the feasibility and impact of the Community Allowance on participants and their communities in a range of settings across the UK.
  • To capture learning and evidence that could inform further development of the Community Allowance to people on other benefits (e.g. Income Support and Job Seekers Allowance).

Want to be involved in the pilot programme?

We are looking for community organisations from across the UK that are interested in becoming a partner with CREATE in order to run the Community Allowance. We would like to work with organisations that are:

  • Local community based charities, social enterprises or community interest companies
  • Trusted locally, with a track record of working with ‘hard to reach’ people
  • Equipped with the capacity and skills to support the Community Allowance participants
  • Able to generate local paid work (e.g. community research or youth work) or identify and place people in paid work that strengthens their neighbourhood (e.g. School Crossing Patrol)

We’d like these pilots to be in a range of rural and urban areas. In each area we anticipate identifying and working with one or more partners, each of whom would recruit, employ, and support people. We have estimated that in each area the Community Allowance could create around 80 part time jobs.

If you wish to develop a proposal for how your organisation would deliver a Community Allowance pilot programme in your area, please download a proposal form and guidance notes. Completed forms need to be back to the CREATE Consortium by 5pm on 1st October 2009, either to CREATE Consortium, 33 Corsham Street, London N1 6DR or to n.alexander@dta.org.uk

Type of Jobs: Eligible jobs on the Community Allowance would be restricted to those that contribute to strengthening the neighbourhood. This would be defined and refined by the CREATE Consortium over the duration of the pilots through dialogue with the CREATE partners.

Real Time Evaluation: The CREATE Consortium will contract with an independent evaluator to carry out a real time evaluation of the pilot programme.

 Do get in touch on aaron.barbour@community-links.org with any suggestions or questions.

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Posted in Benefits, Community Engagement, Innovation, Regeneration, Welfare, employment | No 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 »

CREATE Consortium – Community Allowance news

Friday, May 29th, 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. 

I’m writing to let you know that the CREATE Consortium’s Right to Bid proposal for a £2.2 million programme of activity in 15 different areas across the UK has got through the latest stage of assessment from the DWP.

At a two day meeting held in Sheffield on 27th – 28th May, civil servants from across the Department considered several Right to Bid proposals and the Community Allowance pilot programe was one of the few to go through to the next stage.

A civil servant from DWP said they were “very keen on the Community Allowance proposal, but could give no guarantees at this stage that it would definitely go ahead”. The bid will go through a further scrutiny process within DWP with operational and policy staff exploring the impact a pilot programme would have on the DWP’s work. DWP indicated that they are more likely to approve a pilot of ESA/IB client groups rather than JSA as there have been so many initiatives aimed at people on JSA in the recent budget.

The DWP indicated that the Right to Bid process should come to an end in a matter of weeks, but is unable to give a definite date as this is the first time the Department has run an initiative like this.

We still have a way to go and there will be a period of detailed assessment and negotiations to get through, but this is another really positive step forward for the Community Allowance.

We’ve set up a blog for the CREATE consortium this week so you can keep in touch with us and let us know what you think.

Thank you for all you have done to get it this far.

Naomi Alexander
www.communityallowance.org

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Create: a Community Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Jess Steele is Development Trusts Association Head of Consultancy and currently on secondment to the goverment Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) working on community assets, such as the Asset Transfer Unit the “meanwhile use” policy, and rethinking community finance. Jess has been instrumental in developing Create: the Community Allowance, which we at Community Links have been involved with for the past few years, and have been blogging about over the last year.

Jess sent through some thoughts about the newly announced Future Jobs Fund and how this opportunity relates to the Community Allowance.

Here they are:

“OK, so I’ve seen Secretary of State for Work and Pensions’ James Purnell’s YouTube video and had a good look at the guide to the DWP’s Future Jobs Fund; and I think this is a major step forward, not necessarily as exactly what we asked for, but a step in the right direction thanks, in part, to our intensive lobbying, with the help of all our supporters. 

The important points of the Future Jobs Fund (FJF) are:

  • create additional jobs for long term unemployed people;
  • benefit the local community; and
  • create a significant proportion of jobs quickly.

DWP have accepted the ‘benefit the local community’ aspect (an enormous step forward from 2001, when I joined the National Community Forum).

They want the Fund to:

  • include proposals for training to develop an individual’s skills;
  • contribute to the creation of a significant number of new green jobs; and
  • provide value for money and / or include additional funding from other sources.

They have accepted the idea that these jobs should include training to develop an individual’s skills. The ‘Green jobs’ reference is interesting, though I feel that more detail is needed to determine exactly what they mean by a green job. In other places they’ve talked about ’socially useful’ work. Their third bullet point talks about ‘additional funding from other sources’. One of the unique selling points for the Community Allowance is getting the wages paid through local programmes.

They want to involve other parties. It isn’t all local authorities.

  • Other large organisations such as social enterprises and voluntary sector bodies will be able to bid as long as their proposals meet the criteria set out during the bidding process.

They have been increasingly recognising the need to involve other providers since the influential Freud report (and before). The door is open. (They hadn’t heard of social enterprises in 2001!).

However we need to continue influencing and shaping the criteria set out during the bidding process.

As well as making a significant contribution to the Government’s guarantee for young people, it will also provide much needed and valuable support to other people who have been out of work and on benefit for around a year, helping to ensure they do not lose touch with the labour market. This dual approach ensures that young and disadvantaged people do not lose touch with the labour market….We are particularly interested in hearing from organisations in areas of high unemployment to understand how we can best create new jobs in these areas. 

The importance of deprived neighbourhoods is clear. They haven’t got the idea yet that new jobs can be created specifically to deal with the problems of deprived neighbourhoods but we’re getting there. We need to influence the kinds of bids that go in from Local Authorities (as the main bidders).

  • We want to get this up running as soon as possible, with some jobs in place as early as October 2009.

Things are moving fast. The ideas, values and innovation behind the Community Allowance are too important – we won’t let go of the idea of our own pilots, or let them ignore the Right to Bid approach just because they’re going to be busy with this latest initiative, but we do need to move quickly to be part of this ‘Future Jobs Fund’ as well

OK, so what do we do from here? We need to continue with our DWP Right to Bid application, to be able to pilot the Community Allowance in 15 pilot areas; and we need to prepare for a Future Jobs Fund bid which will mean submitting our ideas outlining what we could do.”

If you’re interested in getting more involved with the Community Allowance contact our co-ordinator Naomi Alexander and visit our Community Allowance website: www.communityallowance.org

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Posted in Benefits, Community Engagement, Regeneration, Research, Welfare, employment | No Comments »

CREATE: the Community Allowance: latest update

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Over several months we have been blogging about the progress of the Community Allowance that would allow unemployed people to do paid part-time work for community groups without losing their benefits.

Today, Third Sector Magazine has published an article about CREATE: the Community Allowance. Read it here (full article requires free log-in summary available) 

It would be useful to give a quick update of what’s happening with the Community Allowance:

Proposal for pilots submitted to DWP
We have submitted a Right to Bid proposal to DWP to run a pilot programme across the UK. The proposal builds on the Government’s commitment to pilot the Community Allowance for people on Employment and Support Allowance, which was in last year’s Welfare Reform White Paper and outlines what could be achieved if the Community Allowance was available to people on any benefit. You can see the bid in full on the Community Allowance website 

Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Social Firms UK join CREATE
The Consortium has been joined by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Social Firms UK, who will be bringing their expertise to the work on the Community Allowance.

The CREATE Consortium is now made up of:

Entering into the world of Social Media
We now have a CREATE Consortium profile and a Community Allowance page on Facebook – become a fan! We’ve also started tweeting on Twitter. under our username: CREATE_tweets. Follow us!

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Posted in Community Engagement, Innovation, Regeneration, Welfare, employment | No Comments »

Community Allowance: TV coverage

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Jess Steele, Chair of the Community Allowance, took part in a panel discussion about the recession on this Sunday’s BBC Politics Show, along with Conservative MP, David Willetts (ex-shadow Minister for Work & Pensions). Watch the discussion on the BBC i-player.

If you haven’t time to see the whole programme scroll through to the 38th minute to the panel discussion and see Jess detailing the proposed Community Allowance which will allow community organisations to pay people to do work, that contributes to their communities, without affecting their benefits.

What do you think of the show? Continue the discussion here or leave a comment below. 

This adds further publicity to the Community Allowance all of which helps us with our ‘Right to Bid’ application, which will enable us to pilot the Community Allowance across the UK. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is looking “to capture and explore innovative ideas from external organisations which can provide measurable improvements in the way services are delivered”. We firmly believe that the Community Allowance is such an idea and look forward to discussing this with DWP officials shortly.

The details of the Community Allowance are included in the CREATE report and the campaign has a dedicated website at www.communityallowance.org We’ll keep you posted with news of further developments.  

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Communication, Informal Economy, Regeneration, Welfare | 1 Comment »

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