Note from an online roundtable: Coronavirus - building community and connection 1
Note of an online meeting on the coronavirus crisis and the power of connection and community, 7 April 2020
Over 40 people joined our Zoom meeting, which started with speakers who set the scene, then went into 6 breakout groups, and came back into a plenary discussion in which the groups reported back.
Steve Wyler, co-convenor of the network, opened the meeting by saying that despite the terrible events facing individuals and organisations, there were also things already emerging from the crisis which might hold out the promise of a more positive future, and he hoped we might identify some of these today. The focus would be on identifying what is changing now that we’d like to keep for good.
Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the network, said that the Call to Action for a Better Way, which was launched the previous November and reflected three years of discussion in the network, seemed particularly relevant to the current crisis. The disruption caused by the pandemic was starting to liberate the very power of connection and community celebrated in the Call to Action, in which:
Everyone is heard and believed in, given a fair opportunity to thrive, and the ability to influence the things that matter to them.
Every community comes together, looks out for each other, respects difference, and enables everyone to belong.
Society as a whole values and invests in everyone and in every community.
But the response was patchy, and power still lay in too few hands. The key to an even stronger response, she said, lay in the four action areas identified in the Call to Action:
Sharing power, including creating new platforms to enable different voices to be heard;
Changing practices, including incorporating more humanity and kindness;
Changing organisations, including creating connection and community, not just passive services;
Collaborative leadership, including becoming ‘systems leaders’ and working across silos.
One potential example of changing things for good was what was happening in the homeless sector, Caroline said, where people on the street were being provided with homes.
NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINE
Laura Seebohm, from Changing Lives, which works with people in crisis across the North of England, explained what they are doing to respond to the pandemic. They are under great pressure to fill in for public services which are at full stretch, and they are working with vulnerable groups, not least helping to resettle people coming out of prison and people in refuges. They are finding that more and more people are selling sex to make ends meet, not just former sex workers, and that many of the people they are working with do not even have a phone or internet access. So they are urgently seeking funds to enable them to connect up with them in new ways, for example providing mobile phones, and wondering how the people they support will weather the storm.
Laura said there were two things in the crisis that she would like to keep for good:
First, the flexibility being provided by funders, who have been incredibly supportive and are giving them them autonomy and the power to be responsive.
Second, the creativity and shared vision that is being shown.
Paulette Singer, from the Clitterhouse Farm Project, in North London, then spoke about how they are changing how they are operating in response to the crisis. They had already developed a strong sense of local needs and potential though through five years of door knocking in their community, and this has stood them in good stead. Barnet Council, where 70% of services have been privatised, was slow to respond to the crisis, and voluntary groups have been stepping in with a massive grass roots push.
Paulette noted the ward she works in is one of the most 10% deprived in the UK, and many people there do not have access to Wifi or technology. The new volunteers were mostly from outside and from the middle classes, and that is perhaps an indication that mutual aid has not flourished in recent years in de-industrialised areas and those experiencing deprivation.
In response to the crisis, the Clitterhouse Farm Project has had to move to a networking approach and carry out a ‘systems leader’ role, bringing different grass roots and volunteer groups together. This has had its challenges, as there is sometimes competition between different groups, and there can be problems with ego at every level.
Paulette noted that some excellent community groups and social enterprises, which have provided a lifeline to communities long before the crisis, will not survive, and she described this as an ‘unfolding tragedy’.
Looking to the positives, she said that the Clitterhouse Farm Project has been trying for the last five years to get Barnet Council to recognise and understand the work of groups like theirs and this had now been happening at great speed, although trusting in and handing over to local groups can be deeply uncomfortable for local authorities. She was also encouraged by the heroic efforts to step up and step in to deliver mutual aid across the country. ‘In chaos, there is great collaboration’ she concluded and she hoped this collaboration would continue.
Rachael Orr, from Placeshapers, explained that their housing association members across the country are those which are grounded in and committed to communities. She has just come back from maternity leave and is finding what is now happening in some ways really positive, as the crisis is pushing people to work in a better way. For example, many Placeshapers members are now phoning older or more vulnerable residents every week, and some are already asking themselves whether this new way of working should continue as business as usual when things become more normal.
The Placeshapers members, Rachel said, are being pragmatic and adaptive, for example repairs staff are now delivering goods to vulnerable people. They are also practising place-based collaborative leadership, though mostly at this point with public sector organisations..
The approach to date has been to ask ‘What do people need right now?’, but she said that this is also a moment to lift up our heads and start asking. ‘What more can we do, and how can we do things better, including in collaboration with smaller local bodies?’
CHANGE FOR GOOD
Participants then broke into smaller groups to discuss the question, ‘What is changing now that we’d like to keep for good?’
Feedback from the breakout sessions included the following points that people wanted to keep for the future:
Solidarity and a shared sense of purpose, including a shared story, though that said many people were experiencing a much deeper sense of isolation than others.
Flexibility, creativity, and speed of civil society response, with the community ‘exercising a natural power and authority’ and gaining recognition for it, and often being willing to change at pace, and funders showing flexibility too.
New connections and collaborations, including new ways of doing things online and the forging of new relationships and alliances, with more organisations willing to put aside self-interest.
Humanity, compassion, and kindness, including a generosity between individuals and also organisations that was new, and valuing the whole person.
The breakout sessions also offered some reflections on how things could be done even better:
There was a need for more coordination and knowledge sharing to ensure groups did not duplicate, and could learn from each other.
This included connecting top down/bottom up efforts better and a danger that the risk-averse public sector may at some point stifle local initiative and energy.
There was a danger that outside ‘rescuers’ might disempower those they sought to help, rather than to build and deploy community capacity.
Many people are isolated, without even access to the internet. We should use the crisis to empower people, and should beware state/big tech gaining more power permanently.
Whilst the sense of solidarity was welcome, there was a danger that people fail to understand and respond to the different needs of at risk groups, and inequalities could deepen, and so organisations of all types need to do more to ‘let diversity in’.
Collaborative leadership had grown in the crisis, but we still need to work at it.
Some participants also felt that two distinctive futures were possible, one characterised by community and connection, the other by authoritarian and centralising behaviours. We cannot assume that the former will win out over the latter, and we will need to work hard and effectively to build a convincing and persuasive Better Way story.
Caroline Slocock concluded by inviting people to send us blogs about what they were doing and the potential to achieve change for good in the crisis; and said we would be in touch about further meetings to delve more deeply into these topics.
Note from a network discussion: Re-building trust in democracy
Re-building Trust in Democracy: record of a Better Way discussion, 24 March 2020
Steve Wyler, co-convenor of a Better Way, opened the discussion by saying that trust in democracy was critical during the pandemic and so the issue was timely. Dr Henry Tam, academic and author of Time to Save Democracy, introduced the topic by outlining the three main elements which he said are needed to make democracy work well:
Togetherness, which occurs when a) there is communication of a shared mission (as is happening today over Covid-19 but which is sometimes lacking); b) commitment to mutual respect, with zero tolerance of discrimination; and c) a coherent membership (eg criteria about who you admit as a member).
Objectivity, which is created when a) there is open and co-operative learning b) built-in systems to enable critical review to question assumptions c) there are clear rules which are respected (eg respect for facts).
Power balance, which a) includes participatory decision-making b) maximising civic parity, rather than, for example, election campaigns financed by those who have more money c) public accountability.
These apply both to a whole country and to individual organisations and can be used as a template to look at areas for improvement, he said. Some Scandinavian countries are scoring highly on these indicators, eg Sweden, and also the Netherlands, he added. That said, in both countries the far right were seeking to demonise migrant populations, jeopardising ‘togetherness’.
In discussion the following points were made:
A new paradigm is needed locally. The New Local Government Network’s (NLGN) Community Paradigm sets out the shift it seeks with public services giving more power and control to local people. The NLGN were calling for a Community Power Act designed to compel public services to distribute some of their power toward community rights and improve civic parity.
The current system isn’t working for many and perpetuates inequality. It was argued that the political system we have was set up in the 1800s and needs reform. Local government, for example, is dominated by white men, and people from lower socio-economic groups are far more inclined to think democracy does not work for them than wealthier people, surveys show.
The consensus required for ‘togetherness’ is beginning to be challenged. Research suggests that a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination is increasingly being questioned in the UK, with a majority of people thinking that ‘political correctness’ has gone too far. There is also a lack of trust in politicians. Young people are reporting the lowest commitment to democracy, and an argument was developing that our democracy is ill placed to deal with a crisis like Covid-19, unlike China and Singapore. Young people also are less likely to value community, whilst being more liberal than older people. That said, it was uncertain whether young people really were expressing a loss of faith in democracy itself. They might instead be indicating a lack of trust in our current first past the post electoral system which means their vote often doesn’t count. And it was important to look at the underlying reasons why people are challenging ‘political correctness’.
The conditions needed to ensure civic parity in our democracy include building confidence and capability. Surveys show that affluent people are far more engaged, politically. Community Links was looking at what skills are required to enable everyone to participate fully: consultation pointed to the importance of digital capability and literacy as well as good health. The campaign by Community Organisers for free broadband was noted. The Call to Action for a Better Way refers to the importance of creating platforms and channels for everyone to influence what matters to them; of building confidence and capacity for individuals and communities to take more power; and to realise the importance of communities and place. In Sheffield a Better Way group was beginning to explore what would make a ‘good democracy’ in their city.
Scepticism was expressed about the value of citizens assemblies: they had become the latest fashion, they were sometimes used inappropriately, they could be a logistical nightmare, and they only worked if their decisions were heeded. Accountability was also an issue and participation needed to work at very local level. The ingredients for a good democracy were far more than just changes to existing mechanisms and involved co-production, changes in behaviour and ways of bringing in lived experience. Different things work for different people.
Devolving more power locally is desirable but requires clear parameters and commitment. The loudest voices can sometimes crowd out others and arrangements need to be inclusive and accountable. In Kensington and Chelsea, after the Grenfell Tower fire, the council was genuinely trying to engage widely and deeply with local people, including through participatory grant-making, but it was undeniably challenging for the council to achieve this, given the extreme inequality and power imbalance in the area. It is also important to apply subsidiarity so that the right things are delegated upwards, provided there is clear accountability, as well as downwards.
The current coronavirus crisis is a test of our democracy but it might also create opportunities to improve it. Would only the loudest voices be heard? Is there enough bandwidth to surface and address the specific issues being faced by different groups? Is there sufficient trust in politicians given recent issues about truthfulness and lack of transparency? However, the growth of neighbourliness and mutual aid potentially might help create better conditions for ‘togetherness’ but it might also exacerbate civic inequalities, as some neighbourhoods might be much better at this than others.
Note from a roundtable: Relationship centred policy
Better Way on-line roundtable on relationship-centred policy, 24 March 2020
1. BACKGROUND
Participants were welcomed by Caroline Slocock. She reminded us that in a Better Way one of our guiding principles is that relationships are better than transactions:
Deep value is generated through relationships between people and the commitments people make to each other. We find this first and foremost in families, communities and neighbourhoods, but organisations in every sector need to do more to treat people with humanity and as individuals and so generate deep value too.
Moreover, our November 2019 Call to Action called for:
Changes to practices in order to ‘put humanity and kindness into services’; and
Changes to organisations to ‘start creating connection and community, not just passive services, for people’.
At this time of national emergency, Caroline said, it has been impressive and encouraging that so many people have already found ways to connect and support each other within communities. But this support was still largely transactional (delivering groceries and medicine to high risk groups). Important though this is, she said that more attention needed to be paid to well-being and mental health; and she suggested we should create a national befriender service to provide personal contact and support to isolated people, not just physical supplies. She also thought that communities and volunteers needed not just to support the NHS but also the social care system; and that volunteers might help isolated people to become more empowered eg by helping them set up home delivery and other online services.
2. INTRODUCTORY PRESENTATIONS
INTRODUCTION (1) DAVID ROBINSON
David drew on his two recent blogs, Coronavirus and Social Disruption, and Inventing the Future. He spoke of his time as a community worker and his realisation that building good relationships is at the heart of effective responses to people whose lives are in difficulty. In recent years Hilary Cottam and Julia Unwin among many others have pointed out that services and policies have often lost sight of community and kindness and that this needs to change. We have seen some signs in recent years that relationship-based thinking is beginning to be taken up by politicians from the right and the left. In recent weeks, as coronavirus has spread, our world has started to change very rapidly:
We are re-neighbouring at pace. At least 2,700 covid-19 mutual aid groups have emerged in recent days.
We are learning to do things on-line in ways we couldn’t before.
There is a wealth of original activity, some of which will turn out to be superficial and will not last, but some will.
We may be seeing the signs of a fundamental shift towards a kinder society. After the lockdown, there will be a very long tail of difficulty and disruption to everyday life, but we will emerge with two new commodities:
Lists - of people we didn’t know before.
Trust – the discovery that we can do things for each other on trust.
In the coming weeks, David felt, we should identify the positives which are coming out of this crisis, the principles which underpin them, and what can be done to sustain the positives in more normal times.
INTRODUCTION (2) AVRIL MCINTYRE
In her recent blog Avril pointed out that community is alive and well, and she argued that we must learn through this crisis how to build tomorrow’s world, investing in relationally focused support, not the service-led approach we lived in yesterday. She spoke of her experience as a member of a church, as a charity leader in Barking and Dagenham, and as Chair of the Barking and Dagenham Collective, and how strong local support networks have been built.
A lot of people do have friends and families but many do not. The plan therefore was to establish a borough-wide network of community hubs, backed up by formal public services (not handing people over to services in ways that would lose community connection).
This has now been overtaken by the COVID 19 crisis and a new mechanism been put in place fast, with eight locality leads and clusters of people and agencies available to respond to needs, and willing and able not only to drop off shopping and medication but also to respond to people as human beings when doing so.
The important thing is to use this time to learn how to work better together, and build a positive environment, based on relationships, so that when this crisis ends, we have a new way of working that we can build on.
3. DISCUSSION: WHAT CAN BE DONE NOW AND IN THE FUTURE TO PUT RELATIONSHIPS AT THE HEART OF PUBLIC POLICY
3.1 CAPTURING THE LEARNING FROM THE COMMUNITY RESPONSE FOR THE FUTURE
The huge volume of unstructured and positive activity in communities in response to coronavirus is making a profound impression. This does, we felt, provide reasons to be optimistic about what the future might hold beyond the crisis.
We will need to ‘capture’ the capacity which is emerging now, so that it can be retained for the long term. This means capturing learning in real time, to help us understand the situation properly, as well as to help prepare for the longer term (some places are using citizen participatory evaluation/ 'detectorism' techniques).
Several contributors pointed out that organisations need to think not just about how they can deliver services in response to the coronavirus crisis, but also how they can help communities themselves be the response. They should encourage people to do the things they can do, not assume they can’t.
We realise that the shared sense of urgency and adversity will eventually wane, and priorities will shift from a collective effort to stop the spread of the virus to potentially an individual focus on getting back on your feet. We may have a return to blaming and targeting/scapegoating. So we need to find ways to make the positive legacy of meaningful relationships last.
3.2 BUILDING COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP INCLUDING BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND CIVIL SOCIETY
It was observed that within national government transactional methods are indeed dominant at present. The work of civil society will be critical to rebalancing this.
There is a risk that strategic agencies will fall over each other in the rush to design ways to co-ordinate neighbourhood action. One view – not shared by everyone - is that it will be best to allow the formal statutory agencies to lead the co-ordinating effort, with civil society agencies working in support, and allowing people at neighbourhood level to get on with what they can do best.
The quality of co-ordination will be very important – we may need systems at community level (perhaps equivalent to fire wardens in WWII) to ensure that necessary actions are taken and are effective.
However, Local Resilience Forums are dominated by statutory bodies, and community voices are not heard enough. This matters, because if the planning is confined to what the formal statutory agencies can do, it will fail to take account of what informal relational community activity can do. And if the statutory services are overwhelmed, community action will be needed more than ever.
Several of us felt that public agencies could consider what they can do to help mutual aid at neighbourhood level flourish and sustain. However, there was also a view that public agencies and support bodies should avoid the temptation to over-engineer; the tools for community action are actually very simple. In some cities/regions, support agencies have produced maps of community hubs or other sources of support and this was felt to be useful by some but not by everyone.
The need for effective and trusted conduits between national and local, between government and community, has become increasingly obvious.
All sides will need to work on relationships and trust. For example the initial Charity Commission guidance on coronavirus provoked an angry Twitterstorm, but this became a catalyst for better understanding and accommodation.
3.3 ADDRESSING INEQUALITY AND HELPING EVERYONE BE SAFE AND FLOURISH
There is danger, we felt, of an increasing class divide, with community action flourishing among relatively affluent groups and some poorer neighbourhoods left behind. For example there are many people who cannot afford to go on line, and so will miss out on the opportunity to build on-line relationships – in an effort to address this Community Organisers have launched #OperationWiFi calling for a free-to-use open WiFi network for communities during the outbreak.
While vulnerable children will still be offered places at school, many are not taking that up, and we should remember that home is not always a safe place to be.
We noted that Groundswell has produced advice for people sleeping rough, and for people in hostels or temporary accommodation as well as guidance for people planning a local response.
Access to welfare rights services is especially important at this time. While government has put in place measures to maintain a portion of the income of people whose work is affected by Coronavirus it is likely that many will fall through the cracks in the system, and will need help to get any support that is available.
Bridging social divides, building relationships, trust and support across people who are different as well as similar is important. We need to learn from the current situation about who is missing out, why, and what and who could help enable their inclusion?
Some tools to help people connect deeply might be useful, eg non-violent communication techniques.
The crisis is forcing us to reassess how we can create conditions for good mental health –good relationships, strong communities, establishing the conditions for people to be able to help each other, are all important contributors to mental well-being.
Civil society has a crucial role in surfacing the needs of groups who may otherwise be overlooked.
3.4 PROMOTING A POSITIVE STORY OF HOW PEOPLE CAN RESPOND TO THE CRISIS AND BEYOND
We believe we should talk about vulnerable people as contributors of support not just recipients, and talk about connection as strength rather than connection as contagion. The Frameworks Institute is producing a series of short newsletters to help advocates and experts be heard better, and help to reframe public discourse more positively.
We will need to support an inclusive culture shift which aligns with our population shifts, and emphasising 'us' and not 'them'.
We can celebrate people doing good things.
We can promote ‘love in a time of coronovirus’.
3.5 BUILDING THE CASE FOR DIFFERENT WAYS OF DOING THINGS
There is an opportunity to move decisively beyond new public management and build the evidence base for doing so. For example we should be able to discover whether those places where relational systems are strongest are most able to reduce the impact of the coronavirus.
One effect of the current crisis is a nationwide shift in perceptions of what work should be valued. Stackers of supermarket shelves, delivery drivers, front line and ancillary social care and health staff, for example, are suddenly much more appreciated than they were just a few weeks ago. Sustaining this shift beyond the crisis could have profound and positive consequences.
The Beveridge report which led to the creation of the welfare state emerged at a time of national crisis; the current crisis may provide the conditions in which a new version could win widespread support.
Some in our discussion(although not everyone) felt that the case for universal basic income is now even stronger, because it would provide a foundation for everyone to be able to participate fully within society, and there has been a call for a version of this to start now during the emergency.
3.6 THE ROLE OF THE BETTER WAY NETWORK
We need to direct our efforts to capture what is happening now, and comment with a view to influencing the medium and longer term.
Government is in crisis management so right now there is no thinking about what things could look like beyond the crisis. The Better Way network should join forces with others pushing in equivalent directions, for example the New Local Government Network, as well as think tanks across the political spectrum, putting aside tribal affiliations, to help form a future agenda for government.
Some felt we need to be more proactive to ensure that voices of different communities, including BAME communities, and social enterprises as well, are heard more within our own discussions.
4. SPECIFIC IDEAS FOR GOVERNMENT
This is a summary of ideas which emerged from the discussion which could help government and other institutions place relationships at the heart of public policy. Some relate particularly to this time of crisis, others to the longer term future we would like to see. (Not all ideas were necessarily supported by all participants in our discussion).
Introduce Universal Basic Income, and also universal access to free broadband, so that everyone has the core resources to participate in community life.
Establish a nationwide befriending service, to ensure that isolated people have a friend to talk to daily and who can also help them to develop online skills and links with others where needed.
Develop a volunteer social care support network to support the existing social care system, for people currently receiving care in their homes, akin to the one now established for the NHS, so that informal and formal carers can draw on their help.
Identify strengths and weaknesses in the community responses to coronavirus and share these so that we learn quickly how to do it better.
Develop collaborative leadership and learn to trust. Governments find it very difficult to trust, and especially to trust communities and voluntary organisations, but they will need to learn to do so.
Frame the national discourse in ways which avoid ‘them’ and ‘us’.
Work with individuals in ways that do not disempower them but build their skills and enable them to use their strengths.
Note from a network meeting: how can we contribute to tackling climate change?
How we can contribute to tackling climate change
NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DISCUSSION HELD ON 9 MARCH 2020, LONDON.
1. INTRODUCTION
The discussion was introduced by Stefan Haselwimmer from Cambridgeshire Climate Change Emergency.
Stefan reminded us of the scale of the climate change emergency, and associated events such as recent floods in the UK and fires in Australia and California.
There is a need for urgent action but we cannot rely on governments. There is a tendency to see governments as all-powerful, highly organised, and capable of decisive action, and civil society as weak, disorganised and slow-moving. However, the reality is the reverse of this: governments have little power and are poorly organised and are slow to respond to emergencies of this nature. On the other hand, civil society can (potentially at least) mobilise significant power, and act in a co-ordinated and urgent way.
We can learn from community organising models, such as the response by Citizens UK to the refugee crisis, which helped to achieve resettlement of 11,500 vulnerable refugees across the country.
We need a ‘divide and conquer’ method. In other words, in the face of an overwhelmingly large problem, we should identify specific things where people can realistically take action, which taken together, when many people act in concert in many places, can make an important difference.
Unlike fixed governmental programmes, community action has the potential to spread, without limitation.
Across Cambridgeshire attempts are being made to mobilise local people in their own local communities, training them in community organising techniques, in other words to change perceptions of what is possible, help people discover their power to act, and to take action on their own terms, according to their particular context.
This is supported by county-wide co-ordination, across civil society and the public and business sectors, as well as a climate leaders’ network and a bulletin.
In St Ives, for example, over 80 people came together in a public meeting. They don’t want to wait for the public sector agencies to act.
A methodology has been developed to undertake annual carbon audits at parish level. The intention is not to ‘name and shame’ but rather to discover what progress has been made.
In discussion the following points were made:
2. Organising at community level
Extinction Rebellion has been hugely successful in mobilising very large numbers of people, not least young people, with its powerful messaging, its sense of urgency, and its effective use of social media. However, we noted that environmental campaigns have not always been successful in appealing to people from low income and working class backgrounds, although the Green New Deal movement aims to address this by working for action to tackle climate change and to redress social inequality at the same time: the first of its objectives is as follows:
Totally decarbonise the economy of the United Kingdom in a way that enhances the lives of ordinary people, workers and communities and works to eliminate social and economic inequality.
We also observed that these big high profile campaigns don’t always ‘stick’ in local communities. And there is a risk that the environmental movement, although very vigorous, is mainly talking to itself – it needs to be supplemented by people who know how to access communities. So methods of organising for a carbon zero future that connect more directly with people in their local community are very much needed at present.
A community-driven approach can and must work alongside efforts to change the practices of businesses and to strengthen government action. All these need to happen, at pace, together. And working in combination should make the scale of the challenge feel less daunting.
It was felt we don’t need more toolkits, the principles of community organising are well understood, but there is a need for more training in these principles, and the development of a ‘community curriculum’, so that people can learn how to organise effectively with others to take action in their own local context.
Citizens UK has been very effective in bringing the efforts of faith communities to bear in social change campaigns, and we can see that in many places faith communities have potential to be leading agents for action.
People need a sense that progress can be made and is being made and that they can contribute even in a small way to that progress. But there are barriers to engagement. We recognise that traditional methods of campaigning (meetings in evenings, establishing committees) are not attractive for many people. Moreover, framing the challenge as an emergency can be problematic. We felt we will achieve more if we can shift the framing from planet to people, and how tackling climate change can be a route to better lives for more people. The dominant messages to date (don’t take flights, don’t eat red meats) reflect the lives of affluent middle class people who have dominated the narrative and these messages don’t always sit well with people from less affluent backgrounds, so there is a need for new voices and new messages to emerge more strongly. If we bring other voices into the conversation this will change the conversation.
Shifting power and resources to local communities will not be enough if only a narrow group of people (the ‘usual suspects’) are involved. ‘Door knocking’ methods, as a foundation for building wider and more diverse community leadership, are therefore very much needed. Moreover, schools can be a gateway to reach much wider groups across society. So we should consider how we can support schools to convene their communities.
The work in Cambridgeshire has potential to be an exemplar, because the principles of community organising to mobilise people to take action against climate change could be adopted by others right across the country. However, Cambridgeshire Climate Change Emergency now needs to raise funds for the next stage of its work, to train more people in community organising techniques for this purpose, so while fast progress is being made the efficacy of the model is not yet fully demonstrated.
And we will need to develop a clearer narrative, with tangible examples, of what people can do in practice at community level, from small scale actions to more ambitious ones such as community-run energy schemes.
3. Driving change through changing businesses
We should not underestimate the power of businesses, for good and for bad, as a generator of carbon emissions, but also to take action to reduce the climate change threat. Over the coming year Social Enterprise UK will be leading a campaign to encourage the 100,000 social enterprises in the UK, as well as SEUK’s corporate partners, to change their governing rules to include commitments to tackling climate change and moving to a zero carbon economy. The campaign will offer easy-to apply tools for companies to make the legal changes required.
It will not be easy to get all social businesses to take this course, as many social enterprises, in the health and social care fields especially, have been slow to see the relevance. A combination of top level change and a groundswell of demand from employees and customers will be needed.
Social enterprises are only a fraction of all businesses, but can be an influential role model for businesses as a whole, setting the pace and inspiring others to act. Moreover, most social enterprises are small scale, and a high proportion are rooted in place, so can make an important contribution to the place based community organising model described by Stefan.
4. The role of grant makers and other funders
The Association of Charitable Foundations is considering how the £70bn of assets held by its members can be made to work to contribute to zero carbon targets, and how to move forward from the present situation where only 1% of grant funding is targeted towards environmental activities.
A small group of grant makers in the Environmental Funders Network has led the way, and as a result of their pressure, the last ACF annual conference was entirely dedicated to this topic. There is now the prospect of more concerted action in future with some leading grant makers committed to including the objective of tackling climate change in all their grant programmes, and taking steps to steward their investments for a post-carbon future.
Funders might achieve most if they were to co-ordinate their activities with those taken by the wider sector, and therefore NPC is bringing funders and charities into a shared space where they can learn to be more effective responders to climate change.
Funders have been wary of funding movements rather than organisations, and many are unwilling to fund those who are not established as charities. However, a few (e.g. Oak Foundation, Blagrave Trust, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust) have shown that it is possible to push the boundaries on this. Also the ‘Local Motion’ initiative has seen six funders come together to pool resources to work with local partners to find solutions to social, environmental and economic issues on their doorstep.
5. The role of the Charity Commission
It appears that switching to carbon neutral investments can be done without sacrificing the levels of returns needed to maintain grant-making. However, work will need to be done to improve Charity Commission regulation, which requires charities to consider risk in investments and does nothing to encourage positive action in favour of tackling climate change through investment policies. A new SORP Committee has been established (to review the rules for charities to report on their performance) and this might provide an opportunity to require charities to report on environmental impact.
6. Bringing about national and international change
We should be mindful that the UK will be chairing the COP26 international climate change conference, in November 2020. This is an opportunity to influence the national and international debate on what must be done. Political leaders will only act if pushed. At present the fossil fuel lobby remains hugely powerful, in effect controlling the decisions of those in power – community action has to find ways to speak to power much more effectively.
7. Using data as a tool for change
Data really matters. People need to see what difference they are making, in real time where possible. We will need new methods for this (for example ‘carbon currency’ has been proposed as a way to establish a carbon value for everyday products).
Common data capture and reporting can build confidence not just among community activists, but also among businesses and institutions, and among funders as well, and the aim to should be to establish viable measures which can indicate how well the deployment of resources, and the work of organisations, can contribute towards the task of achieving the zero carbon goals.
This implies a fundamental shift in what we value and therefore what we measure. We have an urgent need to redefine what is meant by economic success, and build the data which can answer the questions ‘what’s in it for me?’ and ‘what difference can we make?’
8. A final word
A final word from Stefan: the only way to tackle our big problems is to find new resource among the people who haven’t been involved up to now, and then get out of the way so that they can take action themselves.