Note from Changing Practices Cell 2
Note of a second Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 16 July 2020
SUMMARY
We need to stop thinking of public and charity services as ‘fixing’ people and start connecting people up instead. This means we see people not as ‘consumers’ of services or ‘beneficiaries’ but as citizens and producers.
We shared examples where traditional service provision could be shifted towards models of community self-help, which would allow positive relationships to flourish, and which would respond to the needs and circumstances of the whole person.
There are good examples of this, not least the Self-Reliant Groups supported by WEvolution.
We need to ‘re-found’ the purpose of local government away from a gatekeeping to a more enabling role. We may also need enabling legislation, such a Community Power of Competence, to encourage a more widespread change in practice.
There is also a need for different job roles for those working on the public sector, and in the voluntary sector as well, to support this change.
In our next meeting we will explore in more depth what these job roles could look like, and also what might prevent the change we want to see.
1. AIMS OF THE CELL
Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. Our Call to Action for a Better Way includes ideas around changing practices, putting humanity and kindness into services and building connection and community through relationships, not just passive services. This cell is a working group which will meet several times, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop new strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.
At the first meeting we’d noted that Covid-19 had strengthened some relationships, not least among those involved in local partnerships, and in some cases this has led to greater agency for more people, she said. Online relationships have worked well for some people, but not all. There is a short window in which to embed these changes as we come out of the pandemic, we thought. We also noted that building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state.
Following on from this, the focus for this meeting was what the state and civil society can do to build stronger relationships.
2. OPENING PRESENTATIONS
We started the meeting with two presentations:
Becca Dove, Head of Family Support and Complex Families at Camden Council referred to an article by Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project
What we need to build is the Citizen story, where the role of government is neither all nor nothing, but in between: to equip and enable us, and to partner with us; to share as much information and power as possible, so that we can work together with government and with one another to create a new normal. … If you start from there, you don’t try to serve people-as-Consumers, you learn with people-as-Citizens.
So, asked Becca, if we were to see local authorities as public servants and public learners, what could that mean for the relationship with residents? What if, rather than just recruiting professionals, local authorities were to put as much effort into enabling families to support other families, where the professional’s job was to create the space and provide the support for families to help each other? In child protection, what if local authorities which currently commission advocacy for the families concerned were to direct their resources to supporting people with lived experience of child protection to advocate for one another? What if, rather than funding food banks, the role of the local authority was to support residents to create their own food co-ops and shops? And what if, rather than commissioning care packages, the role of adult social care was to find the strengths in residents and honour and strengthen relationships so that people could feel that their next door neighbour was as much there for them as their distant family many miles away?
When we think of residents as consumers, local authorities become, as Jon Alexander has described, branches of a retailer to central government’s head office, where the highest aspiration is to provide services efficiently and ‘cock-up less often’. But it need not be like that, and local authorities’ relationships with residents can be fundamentally different, Becca believes.
Noel Mathias from WEvolution identified prevailing areas of difficulty, including the following:
A negative mind-set: Our thinking is dominated by negative mental constructs (‘deprived community’ for example suggests dodgy places, unemployed people, single parents, crime, people on benefits). This need not be the case. In India for example the term ‘slum’ is associated with ingenious, enterprising and industrious places and people. But in the UK we tend to divide people into the weak and vulnerable on the one hand, and gatekeepers, regulators and messiahs on the other. This mind-set produces an imbalance in power and an imbalance in equality.
A culture of fixing: Our dominant culture is one of fixing, and this leads to dependency and entitlement. The benefits system for example is intended to help people, but ends up with people becoming dependent and feeling entitled, and less able to determine their futures themselves.
Deconstruction of the human person: If I have a mental health problem, says Noel, this is dealt with by a mental health charity. But if I am hungry I am passed on to a food bank, if I have a debt problem, I need to go to a debt agency. Each organisation will claim they are achieving their outcomes, but the person gets left behind.
WEvolution has developed a vehicle to bring about change: self-reliant groups. These are informal groups of people who come together to save small amounts of money, support each other, learn new skills, and become unexpected entrepreneurs. There are 135 such groups, in Scotland, England, Wales and Holland, and they provide spaces for people, mainly women, to meet, save and create. Some people end up becoming entrepreneurs. Self-reliant groups produce a series of shifts:
From simply being a consumer or beneficiary to becoming a producer and citizen;
From fixing to connecting;
From being treated in parts to the whole persons being empowered to act on their own.
The Self-Reliant Groups allow people to use the resources they have, rather than waiting for resources to be handed to them. They are not issue-based (e.g. focused on mental health problems or domestic abuse) but they can address specific issues, because they are used by people for whatever they think is best. SRGs across the country also share their experiences and learn from each other.
Learning from this experience, Noel recommends a focus on context, ceding power, and getting out of the way. We must recognise that people can often solve their own problems, without formal agencies doing it for them.
3. DISCUSSION
Participants broke into smaller groups to consider what the state and civil society can do to build stronger relationships. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:
3.1 WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD RELATIONSHIPS AND TRUST
Good relationships, it was suggested, emerge from:
Parity of relationship, with an equal footing between the state and community - traditional ways of working imply control by the state.
Permission, to challenge, to do things differently, with authority and accountability.
Partnership, based on equal trusting relationships.
Good relationships are more likely to be produced when people come to the table willing to listen to others rather than determining beforehand what they want. And also when there is respect for those working on the ground.
Strong relationships are those which emerge from tension, not those which avoid tension. Keeping conflict buried is foolish and never works.
3.2 Learning from existing examples
Experience from India and elsewhere suggest that the model of self–reliance can become widespread and highly influential on public services, and financial institutions, for example. For this to happen in the UK we will need to keep things simple, easy to establish, informal, and civil society organisations will need to co-ordinate their efforts better, rather than fight for themselves.
Organisations like Groundswell are demonstrating that it is possible to create the conditions for people in difficult circumstances (in this case long term experience of homelessness) to become effective in supporting other people with similar difficulties in their lives.
In Leeds there are 37 bottom-up neighbourhood networks, often led by older people. There is a lot to be learned from models such as these, about fostering connections and improving lives.
3.3 What makes things difficult
The centre needs to get out of the way so that those on the ground can get on with things and even break the rules. This requires a leap of faith and is not an easy step to take. For those in the statutory sector formality of structures can make this difficult, and for those in the voluntary sector, the funding regimes can be a problem.
Getting out of the way does not mean being absent. There will often be a need for professionals in some shape or form to support peers to work well with each other, and to help manage stress associated with the work, and even to provide oversight and supervision.
State-based community development tends to be short term and often fails to leave a legacy, especially where things are done to a community, not with them, or where professionals do not recognise the ability of people who are not professionals.
3.4 Re-thinking the role of local government and civil society
We need to lift our sights high, and consider how to ‘refound‘ local government, moving away from a ‘gatekeeping’ to an ‘enabling’, not ‘extracting’ role – and identify the principles at its heart that we want to revive and sustain.
It was felt that in re-imagining local authorities we need to reduce the distinction and distance between those working in local government and those in community roles. Local government could be redefined as part of a common local effort, working with and alongside other local agencies. Perhaps there ought to be ‘A Chief Relationships Officer’ to help facilitate this. There needed to be a permission to challenge.
Indeed, the problems of centralising command and control practices, and delivery of atomised services, are not confined to the public sector. They are also to be found in the charity sector. Those who want to shift towards more distributed models of self-reliant social support and community building, working with the whole person, will do well to make common cause, whatever sector they are from.
What if the community had a Power of Competence? The onus would be on the local authority to provide that a self-reliant group could not make use of a community centre, not on the group to prove that it could.
What if there was a statutory requirement for local authorities to create an Easement function? In other words, if a community group could explain that a rule really doesn’t work for them, and the local authority would be required to consider easing the rule.
There is often a deeply engrained but narrow sense of what the job is. We need to identify new and better public sector and civil society job roles, specifying the types of proactive enabling functions which can help to foster and support community self-help.
4. TOPICS FOR FURTHER MEETINGS OF THE GROUP
The following topics were suggested:
What are the proactive enabling roles which we would like to see public sector and voluntary sector agencies adopt, which can enhance the ‘What If’ types of relationship building and community self-help we have described above?
And what are the Why Nots? – in other words what are the obstacles which will get in the way?
We agreed that in the meantime blogs and video interviews would be helpful for the work of the group, and to help share our thinking more widely. All members of the group are encouraged to contribute in this way. NB See this subsequent blog by Caroline Barnard.
5. NEXT MEETING
Thursday 17th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm.