Issues discussed at Members’ Meeting

CLD and National Outcomes Jim Rooney of HMIE introduced a discussion on the need for Community Learning and Development services (in all sectors) to get better at tracking their impact on national and local outcomes. A short paper, a first draft of an outcomes framework, and an example of a logic model being developed by voluntary sector adult learning provides, showing how these things might be linked are available and comments are welcome. The CLD Managers Scotland network will be taking discussions forward.

Community Development Statement of Principle CDAS members have previously seen a draft ‘Position Statement’ on community development in Scotland. We considered the latest draft, together with a short Statement of Principle, which might, it is hoped, help to express how the overall values and approaches of community development relate to a wide range of Scottish policy and practice. Final versions are now available, and we will consult members on how to use them to build understanding of and support for community development.

‘Stronger Communities: Wealthier and Fairer Scotland’

Some of the presentations from last November’s CDAS conference on this subject can now be viewed on our website.

Better Community Engagement programme

This communications brief has been produced to inform people about the focus and progress of the Scottish Government funded ‘Better Community Engagement Programme’, which aims to develop a learning programme to support and improve practice in engaging with communities.

 

New youth work qualification

The new Professional Development Award In Youth Work at SCQF Level 6 is the first national introductory level youth work qualification in Scotland to be accredited and available to volunteers and paid staff. The unit descriptors and other information are available on the SQA website.

Embedding an ‘outcomes approach’ in community regeneration

Five local partnerships have been selected to participate in a project aimed at embedding an ‘outcomes approach’ in tackling poverty and community regeneration.
The local partnerships that will participate in the project are:-

• Dumfries & Galloway Poverty, Inequality and Deprivation Working Group;
• Midlothian Improving Opportunities Group;
• Falkirk CPP Community Regeneration Theme Group;
• Fife Sustainable Communities Group; and
• West Lothian Life Stages Strategic Board.

The pilot project is a collaborative initiative between the Improvement Service (IS) and the Scottish Centre for Regeneration (SCR).  The project will provide practical, hands-on support to the local partnerships in order to help them fulfill the potential of the outcomes approach in their work. Regular updates on the progress of the pilot project will be posted on the Community Regeneration and Tackling Poverty Learning Network.

Get Involved

The Get Involved campaign was officially launched by SCVO at The Gathering in Edinburgh on 18 February. It aims to inspire more people to become involved with the voluntary sector in more ways throughout their lifetime, from paid work to one off volunteering and campaigning opportunities.

Youth Work Toolkit on knife crime and violence

As part of the Scottish Government ‘No knives, better lives’ Initiative, YouthLink Scotland is coordinating the development of a National Youth Work Toolkit around the issues of knife crime, weapons and wider violence. There are two ways you are able to get involved: Firstly, by providing activities and good practice case studies for the toolkit and secondly by taking part in a national survey for young people and youth workers. For further information on this project, please contact Richard Cooke, richard.cooke@fairbridgetraining.co.uk 07739430307 or Lisa Hogg lhogg@youthlinkscotland.org 0131-313-2488.

A Charter for Strengthening Relations between Paid Staff and Volunteers

Volunteering England and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) have jointly developed a Charter that sets out the key principles on which volunteering is organised and how good relations between paid staff and volunteers are built. Read More.

Governance Networks

The Supporting Voluntary Action programme, supported by the Scottish Government Third Sector team, is piloting the creation of a number of local Governance Networks which bring together the board members and trustees of organisations to address common issues, share information and experience etc. More information from ACOSVO, the forum for chief officers in the voluntary sector

Adult Literacy provision reviewed

HMIE, the education inspectorate, have produced an evaluation of adult literacy provision delivered by colleges, local authority community learning and development services and prisons in Scotland. One amongst several recommendations is that “local authority community learning and development services should ensure that they have effective processes in place to capture and demonstrate … the impact of literacy provision on wider community outcomes.”

An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK

The UK Government commissioned report “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK” from the National Equality Panel, has found that the gap between rich and poor is now bigger than it was 40 years ago and that “Deep-seated and systemic differences” remain between men and women and between minority groups and others.

Implications of Equality Bill

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is conducting the first phase of a consultation on draft Codes of Practice for the Equality Bill. This phase runs until April 2 and covers three aspects of the Equality Bill – employment, equal pay and services, public functions and associations. The latter includes draft guidance on “How voluntary and community sector organisations must treat volunteers”, including:

“In the absence of a contract [of employment], it is possible that providing a volunteering opportunity for someone counts as providing them with a service.
Whether this is the case or not, as a matter of good practice you should not discriminate against your volunteers or would-be volunteers because of their disability, race or sex, because they are pregnant, a new mother or breastfeeding, or because of their gender reassignment status, religion or belief, or sexual orientation …
It is also likely that, whatever their legal status, a volunteer delivering your service would be acting on your behalf if they discriminated against a client or service user because of a protected characteristic, and you would be held legally responsible for what they did. This is true, even if you are not aware of the conduct nor approved it.”

Better Banking Campaign is Launched

The Better Banking Campaign is led by a UK wide coalition of third sector organisations. They came together during summer 2009 to run a campaign to address the problem of financial exclusion. To address the issue, it is campaigning for full financial disclosure by financial institutions, a cap on unfair credit rates for those who cannot afford them and obligations on banks to demonstrate that all who merit it have fair and equal access to credit.

New local food network

Since the local food gathering at Dunbar in October 2009, a steering group has been working to establish a national network linking people and organisations with an interest in sustainable food.  The network is called “Nourish  - Scotland’s sustainable food network”. Nourish is open to all who are actively growing, selling and eating locally produced food in Scotland – be they farmers, gardeners, Transition food groups, local markets, chefs, artisan pie-makers or just keen eaters of good local food. Information Contact

Simplifying planning policy

The Scottish Government has launched a document which sets out planning policy on topics such as housing, wind farms, flooding and the natural and built environment. It replaces 17 separate policies with one single document which is easier for communities and developers to understand and interpret.

Social Enterprise Mark leads to controversy

We have previously reported the process of establishing a Social Enterprise Mark setting criteria for recognition as a social enterpriser. This has now led to controversy, with Senscot declining the opportunity to be the Scottish partner because it feels that the eligibility criteria are being “softened to enable [social enterprise] to become a high volume/quick impact instrument”.   Lobbying from, amongst others, the co-operative movement raised the cap on dividends that could be paid by a recognised social enterprise, from 35% to 50% of disposable income.  A concern also emerged about the possible inclusion of local authority subsidiaries such as Leisure Trusts.

Meanwhile Senscot reproduces an article by Ed Mayo, secretary general of Co-operatives UK, arguing that “The term social enterprise has always benefited from its own ambiguity… A new term will be needed to evoke that broad movement that we can all feel part of.  I believe that Muhammad Yunus’ term “social business” will increasingly be used as the generic to cover everything from charities trading through co-operatives, CICs, social enterprises, housing associations etc”.

Minister backs Trust Schools

Plans by East Lothian Council transfer clusters of schools into arm’s-length trusts have been given broad backing by education minister Michael Russell. Under the East Lothian plan, management boards would be set up for each cluster, including “young people, education representatives, parent representatives, councillors, community representatives and local businesses”.

Age Unlimited Scotland

NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) has launched a new programme in Scotland called Age Unlimited. We are looking for people in their 50’s and 60’s in Scotland to come forward with new ideas that could be turned into live community projects which would improve the lives of older people. The programme aims to test how older people can be engaged in the design and delivery of innovative new services that could improve older people’s health and well-being and reduce dependency on costly mainstream public services. More information.

CADISPA

CADISPA (Conservation and Development in Sparsely Populated Areas) has been relaunched as an independent charity concerned with helping local people in rural Scotland to build a sustainable community ‘for themselves – by themselves’.

On-line resources

SROI Project  Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a framework for measuring a concept of value that is much broader than simply financial. New features on the SROI project website include an Interactive impact map which goes through each of the stages.

CLD Talking Points  The CLD Standards Council offers a number of Talking Points, which are intended to be “a series of challenging, provocative essays and papers on CLD.

Regeneration Learning Points The latest Learning Points produced by the Scottish Centre for Regeneration are:
Developing Leadership in Community Planning
Introducing Excellent Approaches into Housing Organisations
Effective Procurement and Tendering for Services to Tackle Poverty
Growing Up in Scotland (developed bringing together practitioners interested in early years development and the practical use of data to evidence outcomes)
The Centre has also produced Lessons from the Fairer Scotland Fund case studies

Take Part online resource directory  ‘Take Part’ is an English three year programme of support for active citizenship and learning. It is a national programme, run at the local level, which aims to support people and communities gain the skills, knowledge and confidence to have more of a say about what happens in their area and become involved in local action to help shape the decisions that affect their daily lives.  It provides an online resource directory, including:
Take Part – find out about the Take Part approach to learning, and how programme is using this distinctive approach to support communities.
Empowerment – get information on what community empowerment is, and how it can help develop communities and improve local decision-making.
Directory – access a wide variety of resources, organisations and case studies, which can be searched and filtered to find the specific information you need.

Publications

The art of influence The Community Development Foundation has published “The art of influence: how community workers lobby for change from within” (Free download). CDF worked with two groups of frontline community development workers in the public sector to help them more effectively exert internal influence. In Project 1, a group of CD workers tasked with building ‘stronger’ communities successfully addressed the lack of profile and coordination of their work within their local strategic partnership. In Project 2, workers mobilised local service providers to act in partnership to address complaints from residents about the neighbourhood’s physical environment.

Encouraging start for Community Initiative to Reduce Violence A report assessing the first year of Glasgow’s Community Initiative to Reduce Violence scheme shows that recorded violence among members who engaged with it dropped by almost half. There was also an 18.5 per cent decline in violent activity among gang members who refused to join the project.

How Inequality Damages all of us The 2009 book ’The Spirit Level‘, by Profs. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett continues to be a regular point of reference in debates on poverty and equality and in media articles. Kate Pickett gave the SURF Annual Lecture for 2009 and presented the main lessons from the extensive research behind the book. A full transcript of this lecture is available here.

Approach to tackling inequality and discrimination needs radical rethinking A report by the independent think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research argues that the current approach to tackling inequality and discrimination is out of date, alienates many people and is often counterproductive. People in the UK have complex and multiple personal identities, meaning that the current ‘tick box’ approach to identifying problems gives a simplistic and sometimes false picture of disadvantage, exclusion and inequality. The report calls for a new approach to monitoring and tackling inequality and discrimination, including “approaches that avoid ascribing problems to broad group identities when the real cause could be other factors (such as skills, social class, deprivation and exclusion)”

Handbook of Sustainability Literacy A collection of Papers by leading thinkers in the field of sustainability and how it can be interpreted and applied to development practice is available in an expanded multimedia version at www.sustainability-literacy.org.

Health Impact Assessment of Greenspace – a guide Developed by greenspace scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Institute of Occupational Medicine, this guide will help practitioners to assess the health and equity impacts of greenspace projects. The guide will also be a valuable tool in assisting people to demonstrate the role of greenspace in improving both mental, physical and community health.

Partnerships for anticipatory care NHS Health Scotland has published case studies of Partnerships between the NHS and Community & Voluntary Organisations for anticipatory care. They include examples of methods to reach “harder to engage” clients and of referral processes to community and voluntary services.

A Health Impact Assessment Toolkit  for social enterprises  This toolkit is designed to help social enterprises explore their understanding of health, how to improve health, and to judge how their organisation could impact on the factors and experiences that promote health.

Dimensions of diversity This report by NHS Health Scotland Public Health Observatory Division provides a concise overview of basic information about 13 characteristics or groups of the population of Scotland. It covers: age, asylum seekers and refugees, carers, disability, ethnicity, language, literacy, migrants, poverty, prisoners, religion and belief, sex and gender, and sexual orientation. The most important, recurring, theme is the damage done to mental health and wellbeing by the pervasive and insidious effects of personal prejudice, collective discrimination and structural exclusion.

Making a difference to pupil exclusion The voluntary sector Pupil Inclusion Network has published ‘10 Things We Do To Make A Difference’, looking at how the voluntary sector makes a difference to the educational experience of vulnerable, disaffected and excluded pupils.

The Engagement Ethic This ‘think piece’ from the Innovation Unit argues that supermarket-style approaches have taken public services so far, but the next phase of improvement relies on their ability to engage and inspire citizens and staff.  It appears to be a source for the debate about ‘Easyjet’ vs ‘John Lewis’ approaches which has since received considerable publicity.

It suggests that people will only encourage people to take more responsibility for their own health, learning and carbon footprint if people are given greater rights to shape the work of local public services.  It argues that public services need to strengthen their ethic of engagement by giving citizens and staff greater voice in decision-making.  If not, while public services are improving, the risk is that remain something done to the public rather than with the public.

BLF evaluates small grants The Big Lottery Fund has produced an evaluation of their various small grants schemes (Summary). 58% of the projects surveyed were first-time applicants. However  applying for small grants was particularly challenging for organisations that did not have any previous experience of funding.  71% of grant holders agreed that their project had been very successful in their local community.<p>

Understanding Britain’s Unmet Needs BLF has also published ‘Sink or Swim’, an assessment of ‘Britain’s Unmet Needs’ (Summary). ‘Implications and directions for action by foundations and policy-makers’ include:

• Support organisations providing preparation, bridges and support for difficult transitions
• Support projects that enhance resilience and coping with shocks
• Back projects that tackle isolation
• Support projects providing access with ‘no wrong door’
• Support provision of both new and old necessities
• Speed of response – pre-empting needs and understanding what’s changing
• Rethink welfare provision through the lens of wellbeing

Community Work Skills Manual The Federation for Community Development Learning has published its New Community Work Skills Manual 2009 (£30, discount to members).

Lifelong learning sector working together as ‘one system’ Lifelong Learning UK Scotland has published a report on a seminar which brought together employers from ‘all six sub-sectors of lifelong learning’. Discussions focused on how the lifelong learning sector can work better as ‘one system’ .

Participatory mapping – what works and what doesn’t Participatory mapping  plays an important role in helping marginalised groups by making visible the association between land and local communities, highlighting important social, historical and cultural knowledge as well as presenting geographical feature information. The International Fund for Agricultural Development has published a report (free download) that outlines what is involved and looks at best practice.

The barefoot guide to working with organisations and social change Another international publication, this is ‘a practical do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways’. It was developed by ‘The Barefoot Collective’, a global team of collaborating practitioners and activists. The guide, with its supporting website, includes ‘tried and tested concepts, approaches, stories and activities’.

Community Benefit: measuring the impact of arts and crafts activity The Voluntary Arts Network has produced many useful Briefings. Its latest, number 131, is on ‘Community Benefit – measuring the impact of arts and crafts activity’. In 3-4 pages it gives brief descriptions of tools and frameworks, which may well be helpful to people in other sectors.

Disability organisations in Scotland The Scottish Government has produced a series of reports into disability organisations across Scotland and their capacity to influence public authorities.
Mapping Scotland’s Disability Organisations
The Capacity of Disability Organisations to Engage with Public Authorities
Resource Guide to Engagement Standards, Guidance and Tool Kits