Sunday, 13th November 2011 I was so delighted to get a call on Sunday morning from Rich Feldman of the Boggs Centre for Nurturing Community Leadership. He had received last night’s email and could meet me today and hoped that Grace may also be able to meet me. He sent over some reading, including a YouTube link to Grace’s message to Occupy Wall Street and a great list of contacts for the positive community in Detroit. The Centre is in a house in east Detroit, in what would be a ‘nice neighbourhood’ if half the properties weren’t abandoned…. Read more…
10pm, Sat 12th November 2011 Never let taxi drivers influence your view of a place! Their livelihood depends on scaring you out of your wits. I already knew Detroit was a strange place but I was determined to give it a chance. As Jerry Herron, Director of American Studies at Wayne State University puts it “Nowhere else has American modernity so completely had its way with people and place alike”. So much so that some of the basics of civilisation have been removed – the car is so dominant that the only shuttle services from the airport are run by… Read more…
Friday 11th November 2011, Veterans’ Day Up early to make my way to East Harlem where the Center for Neighborhood Leadership/Public Allies training would take place at the sparkly new Hunter School of Social Work building. The bright white atrium – incongruous in its scruffy, colourful surroundings – is due to become a gallery for local artwork. Upstairs in a classroom space the 10 CNL apprentices and their fellows from Public Allies gathered for their monthly joint training session. Hector Soto, the larger than life director of CNL, and Marissa Guiterrez-Vicario from Public Allies New York welcomed me with… Read more…
On Thursday I went to see whether the original #Occupy is as well organised as Occupy London Stock Exchange, which I visited just before coming away on this US trip. I was much reassured by the similarities. Apart from the accents they have everything in common – the same focus on living democracy minute-by-minute, the same witty posters, the same cramped-up tents and workshop schedules, and always the dogs of the occupation looking on with their sad, loyal eyes. But most of all: open, friendly, peaceful people with the shared knowledge that they are on the big side of the… Read more…
[From La Guardia airport on the way to Detroit, 12 Nov 2011] I have spent the last 4 days visiting a community organizing development programme in New York City which has striking similarities to our emerging home-grown Community Organisers programme in England. I am indebted to all the wonderful people involved who looked after me so kindly and made the trip so useful and inspirational. Sometimes it is said that Americans think they know it all about regeneration and aren’t interested in learning from the rest of the world. I didn’t find that at all. They were fascinated by the… Read more…
In general the Community Organisers team was happy with last night’s TV coverage. This was no thanks to Newsnight, but all credit to the community organisers themselves, to Stephen Kearney and the Re:generate team, to my excellent team at Locality who deal with the practicalities and relationships in a complex programme, to the exceptional officials at OCS and to Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society and certainly the most civil and sensible Conservative I’ve ever met. The questions to the minister were much more serious and respectful than the rest of the treatment. In return he was refreshingly clear about… Read more…
What a strange 7 days… I feel like I’ve been through a shrapnel whirlwind and there are a dozen fragments lodged in my brain, any of which could either strike gold or explode any time. One thread runs through it all – the medja. But even that has four faces. Three great positives: And then there’s…
We’re at a very exciting point in the Community Organisers programme. In a few days time I’ll be joining the first 47 organisers at Trafford Hall for their intensive introductory training. They have been recruited by the 11 Kickstarter hosts around the country. This is a ‘rolling’ programme (at a ‘Rawhide’ rather than steam-roller pace) so we’re already heading into the next tranches of hosts and that’s what I wanted to write about. We opened up to future host recruitment on 19th July. A month later we took the first of our 3-monthly ‘snapshots’ of the applications received – an astounding 220 in all…. Read more…
Various prompts have got me remembering my conclusions after five months on secondment to the civil service in 2009. @Puffles2010 at http://adragonsbestfriend.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/a-challenge-for-the-civil-service-and-large-institutions-alike/ is one of the sparks to make me trawl my archive for the memories. The experience of trying to run the Community Organisers programme in a febrile environment is another. So… Looking back on my reflections as the secondment came to an end, it felt to me that: Other conclusions from my write-up on 15/06/09 included:
It feels strange to be writing anything at all that is not directly about #riots, but while we can all pontificate easily enough, at Locality we always try to reflect what our members are experiencing so we’ve put out a call today for stories and issues and will report back later about how development trusts, settlements and other neighbourhood organisations across England are responding. See http://locality.org.uk/comment/civil-unrest-community-response/ for the initial call-out. In the meantime, the Community Organisers programme moves forwards, with more of our pioneer ‘Kickstarter’ hosts completing their recruitment ready for the first cohort of community organisers to start their training at the end… Read more…
I JUST ADDED THIS COMMENT TO THE NATCAN FORUM at http://nationalcan.ning.com/ Reply by dave berry 5 minutes ago Hi Am new to the forum so please bear with me, the last time that “government” funded real community activists was the Com. Dev projects in the seventies that eventually were shut down by the funders as the councillors who I think part funded it wondered why they were funding people who campaigned against them! Hi Dave The Government is not funding community activists, it is funding the training of 500 community organisers. The funding is focused on the trainee Community Organisers bursary year, although… Read more…
Generally I love an underdog. Schooled in Deptford with Millwall’s slogan “no one likes us we don’t care”, I live in Hastings where official research shows that once you get here you love it but those who don’t visit think it’s a dump, and my favourite town of all is Blackpool (nuff said). But I have a very special soft spot for Yorkshire. The first time I saw York its combination of grey stone and sunshine won me over and I lived there for three happy years. I returned to the region a decade later to live in Kirkbymoorside, unassuming… Read more…
Below is the comment I have just added to the NatCAN forum at http://nationalcan.ning.com/. You have to ask to join. There was a thread of 70 comments on the subject ‘How do we relate to Community Organisers’, many of them very hostile to the programme and to Locality. =================================================================== Oh the joy of #socmed and the twitchforks mob…! I could never respond to this bile and bitterness in a way that would bring you on-side. In fact, people who complain “I am unable to get into the game” may not deserve a response. And yet I’m drawn here [to NatCAN ning], partly under… Read more…
After long and tiresome delays regarding the tax and employment status of Community Organisers, we are delighted that our Kickstarters have now begun the recruitment of the first cohort of 30-40 organisers. Community organisers will listen to residents in their homes, on the street and where they gather, and they will listen to public service and third sector workers, small businesses and local institutions to help develop their collective power to act together for the common good, as identified locally. There is much more information about the why and how of broad-based neighbourhood organising on the Locality website. As planned,… Read more…
Off tomorrow to Prague to celebrate 10 yrs with DH (v dear, not quite H). Very excited, but before I go, I need to record a few fragments of conversations from today: I’ve been to JRF’s ‘Communities Under Pressure’ report launch and exhibition. Great report by CRESR – beautifully written and very clear that poor communities are not ‘broken’ or culturally different or ‘chav-land’ but in fact bastions of traditional values around mutual support, family (complex not nuclear) and hard work. A couple of niggling concerns – it’s difficult to extrapolate from 6 places (‘the plural of anecdote is not… Read more…
Today Greg Clark announced an exciting new piece of guidance but you won’t find it without dogged persistence, or a bit of help. The guidance is designed to help local communities deal with abandoned buildings and irresponsible private ownership of buildings that matter to them. I have some knowledge and experience of this field – most of all Hastings Pier, plus links with Plymouth Palace Theatre, the long-empty Rose & Young site in the heart of Tandridge and the New York pub in Hull – and I mentioned this to Greg Clark at a meeting 6 weeks ago. He said… Read more…
A strange and welcome break in proceedings – a week in a field in Wales. A very special field just 3 minutes walk (scrambling over a barbed wire fence) from the main site of the Hay Festival or a pleasant stroll along a disused railway track beside a river to the Globe, the tented site of ‘How the Light Gets In’, Hay’s fringe festival of philosophy by day, music and comedy in a rickety 18th century hall by night. Arriving foolishly without a pen I took out the trusted crackberry and wrote myself email notes from the various lectures (though… Read more…
Recently enobled Lord Glasman, of ‘Blue Labour’ fame, allegedly let fire some insults in the Palace of Westminster today: @kayewiggins @tobyblume Glasman calls Locality “toffs” – says real comm organising would create “conflict and mayhem” Kayewiggins: Maurice Glasman being v critical of Locality’s comm organising contract. Calls Locality “paternalistic” and “well intentioned busybodies”. As an unelected peer of the realm in an overstuffed second chamber, this is a direct insult to every member of the movement of grassroots community organisations connecting hundreds of thousands of people rooted in real communities all over the country. Locality is a solidarity network of… Read more…
Locality’s approach to the national Community Organisers programme is that community organisers should be hosted by local organisations. To get us started quickly we selected a set of ‘Kickstarters’ for the bid itself and are currently looking for some further specialist Kickstarter hosts who have ‘reach’ into specific communities and groups where individuals might otherwise ‘count themselves out’ as organisers. The Kickstarters (in Cornwall, Cumbria, the eastern counties, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Hull, Bristol, and Luton) are helping us to shape the programme and rising to the multiple challenges of being pioneers in such an experimental programme. There has been a delay… Read more…
I want to clarify some points in my previous blog post which have led to misunderstandings about some aspects of the Community Organisers programme. 1. I didn’t mean it to sound as if Government dictated Regenerate’s involvement – they didn’t. We had written Re:generate in from the start as lead training partner because of our experience of and admiration for their work, and their ‘Root Solutions Listening Matters’ is the core of our approach to what Community Organisers will do. I simply wanted to make clear that they were the only partner for whom specific confirmation was sought (which… Read more…
Writing this immediately after an animated meeting with Tessy Britton, whose recent blogs at Thriving Too have inspired deep and ongoing discussion about the Community Organisers programme. She is right to raise the question of transparency and responsibility. In the initial weeks after Locality was successfully awarded the contract to deliver the programme, we made the full bid available online and I began the programme manager’s blog. I was commended by many people for an openness that was seen as unusual. But I haven’t written for more than a month – partly through being busy with work and with a… Read more…
Getting my fix of seaside towns to re-energise after a hard winter of #communityorganisers and the birth of Locality. Last summer’s Seaside Tour (see earlier blogs) took in Southend, Southwold, Yarmouth, Cromer, Scarborough, Southport, Blackpool and St Anne’s, before returning to Hastings. In October I stood through the night watching the devastating Hastings Pier fire. November was absorbed working with Angela Davis on the Heritage Lottery Fund and with Keith Sadler on the Communitybuilders – putting together a future for the People’s Pier. Since December I’ve been working with Seasider and Destination Alliances on the STEP, the Seaside Towns Enterprise… Read more…
#communityorganisers #corganisers #corgs Here’s what the National Coalition for Independent Action thinks about Locality. Community revolution entrusted to Locality March 21, 2011 · Filed Under News, Newsletter The issue that has, by far and away, put the national gossips in a tizzy has been the award of the £15M community organisers contract to Locality, the pseudo-business quango formed by the merger of Bassac and the Development Trust Association. Expected by all (including Locality) to go to the Citizens Organising Foundation (which at least does community organising), the decision has caused the sector’s blogs to glow red hot. Discussion is full of the… Read more…
I liked this piece ‘The Big Society or A Big Society’ by Charlie Mansell – thoughtful and almost funny in its own search for definitions while recognising that definition-hunting is procrastination. The problem on the ground (IMHO) is the same as it ever was – lost in translation. Back in 2001 when the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal emerged after an extensive research phase which brought parts of government into contact with lots of practitioners, I thought it was superb. The ideas of ‘bending the mainstream’ (ie using all the big public money rather than the funny money associated with… Read more…
Just found these nice pics (30th January 2011) and wanted to share… Have a good look round www.hpwrt.co.uk to find out more. This is my daughter. The pier burned on the night before her birthday. Having watched it all night I had to go home and make her breakfast. She’s not happy about this sign because it mentions 5th October.
I made a comment early on in the Community Organisers programme that I assumed that a programme of this sort should be open and engaging. My colleague, Neil Berry, a longstanding stalwart of the DTA and soon to be Head of Enterprise for Locality gave a talk about the Community Organisers programme at the YCAN conference on 8th March in Leeds. I’d also like to thank other colleagues and partners who are going to meetings and events all over the country to stand up for and help explain this exciting, complex and challenging programme. It’s not straightforward because we’re in… Read more…
Whenever I write a ‘biog’ about myself for a conference etc it always says “Jess’ work bridges policy and practice”. It sounds a bit trite but it’s been the story of my life. Many years ago back in the early 1990s I was trying to write a book about Deptford’s history. Having to pay the rent made it difficult. I gave up my full-time job and got a part-time one but I still never got round to doing any research. One day I bumped into a friend’s dad who happened to be Professor Maurice Bloch, the famous anthropologist, and he… Read more…
We’re in the Development Phase for this programme so things are moving fast (I keep saying), though of course not fast enough for all the enquirers. But log your interest at www.dta.org.uk/communityorganisers or comment on this blog and you’ll be ‘in the loop’. After a 24-hour session at the weekend with Stephen & Julia from Re:generate, the training aspect is beginning to shape up: Foundations of Organising – a 5-month learning programme kicking off with a 3-day residential, followed by a parallel process of guided actions in local communities punctuated by live online sessions where COs will come together with… Read more…
(as you can tell) I just sent this out by email to a load of people, and now I’m going to infiltrate the Community Organisers blog (just to prove I’m not only a Programme Manager…). If you support local people anywhere taking control of their own big issues, then pass this link on and tweet for #thepeoplespier. * * * * * To friends in and not in Hastings, the Hastings Diaspora and Seasiders everywhere (PASS IT ON) We’re heading for MAKE OR BREAK. The Heritage Lottery Fund are visiting #Hastingspier next week and we have just FIVE WEEKS before… Read more…
Thank you all for being so nice about the blog and for retweeting. It seems obvious to me that programmes should be open and engaging. I’m just grateful that there’s a ‘modern’ way to reach (potentially) lots of people that doesn’t involve trains (having spent a fair few hours on them this week). The ‘problem’ with openness is that at times, perhaps often, we will disagree and I will have to listen and think and respond… An example – several people have said that we shouldn’t use the phrase ‘indigenous English’ because it has been claimed so damnably by the… Read more…
