Report from Members’ Meeting

At the CDAS Members’ Meeting on19 August, Colin Mair, Chief Executive of the Improvement Service gave a presentation on ‘Communities and Wellbeing: Opportunities and Challenges’. This raised some important questions about how building the strength of communities may be affected by the forthcoming gap in funding for public expenditure, but also how it could contribute to a response. A summary of the presentation and discussion is available here.

Thoughts on empowerment

“The social and economic costs generated by crime, unemployment, ignorance, environmental damage will all outrun the managing capacity of the state unless they are also ameliorated directly by people”. This view – similar to those expressed in the discussion at the members’ meeting – is expressed by Gabriel Chanan, reflecting on the experience of the English community empowerment programme, in a short article (from New Start, reproduced by Local People Leading).

England funds community anchor organisations

As part of that community empowerment programme, the Communitybuilders investment fund, match funded by Unity Trust Bank, is being launched by the Department of Communities and Local Government in England to ‘strengthen the resilience of multi-purpose community-led organisations through a mixture of financial and advisory support’.

Scottish Government policy directions to the Big Lottery Fund

The Scottish Government has issued new policy directions to the Big Lottery Fund. These guide the Fund’s spending in relation to all devolved areas of responsibility. They include a direction to “ensure that the Fund achieves over time, the distribution of money reasonably equally between the expenditure on or connected with:

(i)   the promotion of community learning;
(ii)  the promotion of community safety and cohesion; and
(iii) the promotion of physical and mental well being.”

You can find more information at the Big Lottery website.

Action Plan on Children’s’ Rights

The Scottish Government   has issued ‘Do the Right Thing: For People who Work with Children or Work on Their Behalf’,  an Action Plan on the Rights of the Child in response to the comments of the United Nations Committee monitoring UK compliance with the UN Convention on that subject. ‘Action areas’ that may be of interest include:

• Participation of children and young people in schools (including a recognition that ‘the difficulties experienced by children with disabilities and other children with additional needs were … often marginalised in current participation models’.
• Promoting positive forms of parenting (including ‘mutual support networks for parents and other carers; community development programmes including parenting and early years’.)
• Tackling negative perceptions of children and young people (including implementing the new antisocial behaviour framework Promoting Positive Outcomes: Working Together to Prevent Antisocial Behaviour in Scotland, ‘which includes countering negative stereotypes and promoting positive role-models as one of its key strategic aims’).

Do the Right Thing: A Report for Under 18s is also available.

Scottish civil society and the global crisis

A civil society roundtable, chaired by the Convener of SCVO, was held in Edinburgh in June to test the appetite for a shared response from civil society to the global crises: economic, environmental, of civil liberties and of poverty. This paper aims to capture some of the key elements of this discussion.

There was agreement that the normative role of civil society, in offering alternative visions of the good society, had been neglected and could be recovered and developed. It was also suggested that the principles of sustainable development could underpin a shared response by civil society to the multiple crises affecting our economy, environment, and politics.

A worldwide movement?

Some of us heard John McKnight, Co-Director of the Asset Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, Chicago, speak recently at Glasgow University. Senscot have reproduced a short piece in which he argues that ‘there is a new worldwide movement developing, made up of people with a different vision for their local communities’ and taking responsibility for ‘health, safety, economy, environment, food, children and care’

It was John McKnight who first recruited Barack Obama to work as a community worker. Here he is on YouTube telling the story.

‘Rediscovering Scotland’

A diverse group of 22 people met by invitation in Edinburgh in July at a “Rediscovering Scotland Event” aimed at inspiring new thinking in Scotland. Those invited were from the world of business, Community Development, Community Learning and Development, Social Enterprise, Government, Universities and related agencies. A summary of the presentations is available here.

Equality Measurement Framework

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been working with stakeholders across the UK, including the Scottish Government to develop a measurement framework that can be used to assess equality and human rights across a range of domains relevant to 21st century life.

These domains focus directly on those things in life that people say are important for them to actually do and be, such as enjoying an adequate standard of living, being healthy, having good opportunities for education and learning, enjoying legal security, and being free from crime and the fear of crime. The framework is particularly concerned with the position of individuals and groups with regard to characteristics such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, religion or belief, sexual orientation, transgender and social class.

It is not a performance measurement framework, but provides a baseline of evidence for evaluating progress and deciding priorities.

Future Jobs Fund

The Scottish Voluntary Sector Consortium’s bid to the Future Jobs Fund scheme has been successful. Over 200 voluntary organisations from across Scotland joined the collective bid to provide six-month-long posts for 18 to 24 year olds who have been unemployed for nearly a year. The voluntary sector consortium will provide 1020 jobs in the first six months, making the consortium’s allocation the biggest in Scotland and one of the largest in the UK.

Online resources

Recession support
ACEVO (the Association for chief officers of voluntary organisations in England) provides a ‘recession support’ website to help support the third sector in the current situation.

Youth Work Blog
The Youth Work Blog is an online space for youth workers, managers and those interested in youth work and working with young people.

Publications

A future for community development
This new paper from the Community Development Foundation examines how the community development field and profession is likely to be affected by the recession, and after a general election. The analysis is based partly on how the community development profession has responded to previous recessions. It looks at current funding trends in local authorities, and how political and economic factors are affecting community development workers.

Community ownership and management of assets
A report on ‘Community ownership and management of assets’ by Mike Aiken, Ben Cairns and Stephen Thake, has been published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and available as a free download. Summary. Evidence was examined from a wide variety of sources in the four UK countries.

In addition the Big Lottery Fund has published a first year baseline report by SQW Associates on the evaluation of their Growing Community Assets Fund in Scotland.  A key lesson that is drawn is that a community group may not need to own an asset to be able to use it to its advantage.

Healthy Living Centres – case studies
The Community Health Exchange (CHEX) has published ‘Breaking Through’ a series of case studies of the work of Healthy Living Centres.  HLCs demonstrate that one of the most effective ways of addressing health inequalities and increasing the health and wellbeing of a community is to listen and act on needs identified by the communities themselves.

Health and Social Enterprise
A whole series of publications have come out looking at the relationship between social enterprise and health improvement. NHS Health Scotland and CHEX have produced a report that looks at ‘How does the Social Enterprise Model fit with Community-led Health Initiatives?’ through a series of case studies.

Senscot have also produced case studies, entitled ‘Fit For Purpose: Social Enterprise And Health 2009’ , and a paper ‘Health and Social Enterprise’ by  John P Boswell, Margaret J Douglas and Noelle P O’Neill which explores the impact of social enterprises on improving the health of the population. This paper uses a rapid impact assessment guide to explore the issues with a number of different social enterprises across Scotland.

Community Engagement in Health Improvement – lessons from England
‘Reaching out – community engagement and health’ is one of a series of publications from the Improvement and Development Agency’s Healthy Communities programme in England, this time written in conjunction with NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence). The document explores the importance of engaging communities in health promotion and health services, and the health benefits that this can bring  and builds on the NICE guidance on community engagement and health previously published.

Participation of people experiencing poverty – European case studies
Small Steps – Big Changes is a new publication of the European Anti Poverty Network (EAPN) on the participation of people experiencing poverty. It presents 10 case studies from members of EAPN about the participation of people experiencing poverty and social exclusion. The case studies address participation in community work and in organizations, but also in policy and decision-making.

Poverty and gender in SOAs
Engender, the organisation that campaigns on behalf of women in Scotland, has carried out a gender and poverty analysis of the first round of Single Outcome Agreements that were published in April 2008. Engender looked at all 32 SOAs for references to poverty in the strategies or to people who are likely to be affected by poverty. They also looked for the relationship between references to poverty and gender.

Whilst poverty is mentioned in all SOAs the authors of the report have real concerns about the approach and how it is shaping it up. There are questions about the availability of data that would allow for a meaningful assessment of progress in tackling poverty at the local level. Engender also questions whether there is strategic leadership from the Scottish Government in relation to the equalities duties that local government must discharge. It is accepted in the report that this is an analysis of the first round of SOAs, that the process is still relatively new and that guidance has been improved.

The Experience of Poverty in Rural Scotland
New research from the Scottish Government, The Experience of Poverty in Rural Scotland – Qualitative Research with Organisations Working with People Experiencing Poverty in Rural Areas aims to increase awareness of poverty in rural areas and to find out in what ways it is distinctive from urban poverty in Scotland.

The findings are based on the perceptions of a small sample of service providers working with five groups: lone parents, pensioners, migrants, people with mental ill health and disabled people. The study found a mixture of distinctive rural issues which cut across many of the five groups, such as the problems associated with infrequent and expensive public transport, along with other issues which impact on specific groups such poor employment terms and conditions for migrant workers.

Poverty, Inequality and Human Rights
This Joseph Rowntree study (free download) looks at how other countries have used human rights to tackle poverty and how this could be applied in the UK.
The report covers:

• how human rights have been used to understand poverty;
• how communities experiencing poverty use human rights to act against injustice, build alliances between disparate groups, and articulate their conditions and claims;
• the tools that communities and their allies use to hold the state accountable for its human rights obligations;
• how human rights have been implemented in practice in anti-poverty work by governments and other organisations;
• lessons for integrating human rights and anti-poverty work in the UK.

The Cultural Pathfinder Programme
The Scottish Government  has published an evaluation of the Cultural Pathfinder Programme.  This Programme was developed to support local authorities and their partners to explore ways of widening access to, and participation in, cultural activities across diverse communities.

It finds that:

• The Pathfinder projects made a strong and effective contribution to encouraging participation in cultural activities amongst under-represented groups
• They performed well in the development of effective consultation processes but their performance was more mixed in ensuring that the outputs of the consultation process are captured and used to inform wider planning and action. Some struggled to engage with Community Planning Partnerships.

Evidence from OSCR
The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator has published its Stakeholder surveys for 2009 and its summary report on Public and Charity Perspectives 2009

Go Well Briefing Papers
The Go Well programme (a partnership between the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, the University of Glasgow and the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, which looks at the health impacts of neighbourhood change) has launched six briefing papers:

Public Health, Housing and Regeneration:  What Have We Learned From History?
Health, Wellbeing and Deprivation in Glasgow and the GoWell Study Areas
Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Glasgow’s Regeneration Areas, 2006-07
Environmental Employability Programme Evaluation
Community Engagement in the Initial Planning of Regeneration in Glasgow
How will regeneration activity impact on the health of residents of Glasgow?  Policy and key informant interviews in 2007

Cohesion and Migration
The Community Development Foundation (CDF) has published a new briefing on Cohesion and Migration (free download). It outlines the interim findings of an ongoing piece of work with community development practitioners to explore community development approaches to building cohesion in areas affected by migration.

The issues it looks at include:

• How community cohesion can be built in areas with transitory migrant populations
• How CD approaches can bridge language barriers
• The difficulties involved in gaining access to migrants in isolated areas
• The ongoing issue of responding to tensions triggered by negative and inaccurate media reporting
• The effects of the recession on migration and community cohesion