Holding onto hope
I always thought I was a pessimist – a label perhaps too often ascribed to the Scottish psyche – but, during the COVID-19 crisis, I have found myself clinging to optimism. Yes, I am one of those lucky ones who is part of the professional, technical, information cadre, who can work from home. But looking up from my daily tasks, I believe that the nightmare of the pandemic might be the catalyst needed to make change happen. To put caring for each other at the top of the agenda: above economic growth and consumerism.
One reason I have hope is that the policy makers and practitioners in my policy bubble are talking about a shift in power from institutions to communities. The report from Danny Kruger MP to the Prime Minister, Levelling Up Our Communities: Proposals for a New Social Covenant, supports a ‘more human’ society, and there are positive sounding initiatives across the UK too, such as the Citizen Assembly and New Blueprint for Local Government in Scotland. More hopeful still are the stories of connection and caring that many of us have experienced and have been gathered and shared by organisations and researchers.
At the Carnegie UK Trust, for years we have been researching and thinking about the process of shifting to an Enabling State, where the state gets out of the way when needed to allow communities to step up. The steps to an Enabling State overlap in many cases with the Call to Action for a Better Way: we are asking for a shift to a more relational, kinder state where people’s assets and capabilities are supported.
The pandemic has shouted out what our society has refused to hear for many years – the inequalities: in health, in employment status, in voice, in personal resilience, in income. At the same time it has shown what we can do as families, neighbours, friends and organisations. I think it has highlighted that people do not just want to wait for the council, the public sector, to solve their ills.
Our collective dynamism was brought home to me in the first months of the pandemic when I was lucky enough to hear stories from across the UK of where communities and local organisations had responded to the pandemic. Stories of listening to what people wanted; distributing food, toys, books; supporting people to get online; gardening; and walking dogs. This was through a series of conversations that several of us in the Trust had with voluntary sector and local authority employees, across 16 different areas of the UK from the Western Isles to London.
The conversations revealed the many positives we have (neighbours, creativity, green spaces etc.) and what we need more of to allow people to access and realise those communal and individual assets.
The crisis brought home that people’s needs are holistic – food, fuel, friendship – and planning for the future should go beyond narrow boundaries and focus on wellbeing in the round. This is something that the Trust has argued for many years. In the crisis, it was heartening to hear so many organisations talk about how in the initial, frenzied first days they set up food distribution schemes, but soon realised that what people needed went beyond food, or at least food availability. Several talked about people’s human rights and providing food with dignity, as well as the evident longer-term needs, such as secure employment.
Local authorities and funders gave people permission to take control. This happened as the communities were often the first to help as the crisis hit – visiting neighbours and setting up groups overnight. It was cemented where large organisations realised that the community organisations and voluntary sector knew local people best. In these cases, established voluntary sector and small groups, often not previously funded, were given money, which could be used flexibly without being tied to targets and monitoring procedures.
Partnership working ‘really took off’, as people came together to tackle a shared crisis. And what we often heard was the growing COVID-19 partnerships were defined by the ‘equalness’, between organisations. Some areas had a history of partnership working between the voluntary and public sectors, and often this was fertile ground for developing initiatives like community hubs. Hubs combined a range of actors, such as community development, libraries, active school, health and social care staff and volunteers. They and other initiatives were described as ‘true partnership’ because people were working together regardless of their profession, their seniority, their organisation. The nature of the risk was such that large organisations changed how they worked, for example, speeding up no cost disclosure checks for volunteers, or changing commissioning procedures to be less target, and more collectively, driven.
This meant often we heard examples of radical kindness, because the need for a rapid response allowed large organisations to become more fluid and pay less attention to hierarchical norms and sectoral targets. Staff from large organisations often were redeployed, which gave people the opportunity to use different skills. The relaxation of rules also meant people were able to respond more personally to people’s needs. For example, whereas before you could only contact a local authority with a complaint and the interaction might be kept to a minimum, now helpline telephone numbers were widely advertised and people could phone up with a request and the council would try to help with whatever it was. People were listened to and several employees told us their organisations had come to know their communities better.
One person we talked to in May said:
“It’s community development on steroids: the partnership working, communities empowered, the generosity, the kindness.”
Our conversations gave people a little time to reflect on what these changes meant for the longer term. There was a strong feeling that if we want to tackle the wicked issues such as poverty and climate change, organisations need to maintain this style of relational working. That means changing from the too common situation where partnerships are simply funders and the statutory sector handing over to the VCSE and asking them to deliver outcomes. It means seeing people as more than service users and finding the space and time to connect with communities and individuals.
But over the period of our conversations, people were increasingly concerned about relationships going back to how they were before, despite good intentions. Interviewees in August and September saw a return of targets, red tape and staff in large organisations thinking about their direct accountabilities and performance management.
Can we afford to let that happen? After the pandemic communities’ needs will increase and the social sector will fall short if it lurches from one strategy to another, and has to compete for funding, rather than working together to maximise our strengths.
We have seen how we can draw on each other’s strengths in an emergency. The truth is we all have gifts and knowledge, but we need to develop a society and state that allows these to flourish every day.
As Amartya Sen said, ‘Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one's full potential as a human being’.
My hope is that as the positive stories of help in pandemic are told this learning will be heard and acted on.
This blog is based on the Carnegie UK Trust COVID and Communities Listening Project. The report of the project was published on 1st December 2020, COVID-19 and Communities Listening Project: A Shared Response.
