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Research suggests that children attending school breakfast clubs show improved social skills:
'Breakfast, rightly acknowledged as vital to health, offers enhanced benefits when served in a communal setting.'
The study included 112 children across seven schools in the north-east, and found that breakfast club attendees had more friends than those who did not attend.
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The living library project which I ran with Linda Constable earlier this year was shortlisted for the 2008 Awards for Bridging Cultures.
At the ceremony last night we came away with 'highly commended' - the trophy in our category was swept away by the Limeside and Clarkwell Project, a superb initiative which links two contrasting housing estates in Oldham. The whole programme was crammed with inspiring projects celebrating all sorts of diversity and cohesion activities.
Living Library pioneer Dany Abergel joined us from Copenhagen for the day. We got added value from running a 'quick-loan' living library session at the learning event during the day. This took place in the vaults at the RSA in London, with delegates popping down for a quick browse among the seven living books on offer.
On this occasion the choice included a refugee from Eritrea and one from Somalia, a vicar's daughter, someone who has experienced several bereavements, someone who was born overseas of parents from different cultural backgrounds, a refugee project worker, and 'African war-child, prison governor'.
Among the borrowers, Ted Cantle, founder and chair of the Institute for Community Cohesion, already a fan of living library, seen here borrowing our prison governor Tony Amaechi.
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Neighbourhood defined by people who upload local images to Flickr. No reason why this should not be systematised and less random. Via Nick Booth. More here.
But what will our systems call the places that don't get coverage? 'Near', I suppose. They'll take all the images tagged 'Near X' or 'Near Y' and we'll be able to identify all the planet's zones of exclusion.
Anyway it gives me a chance to nod to this paper in which Nick Sheep Dalton discusses whether or not it is possible to identify areas of potential neighbourhood without recourse to social records, using space syntax, and comparing with residents' boundary definitions.
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It's not just pirates have to look after their booty. Note how date, time and location are pretty specific for this sort of public declaration of loss. And we get a wee pic of the baby to admire as well. 'Small reward' it says at the bottom.
Good to know that little things still matter to some people. Sorry about the blurring, it was so cold, I really regret not taking a moment to get a better image.
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Following my note yesterday about representation and participation, Regen and Renewal reports some comments on the empowerment white paper made by Vince Taylor, head of strategic economic development at Sunderland City Council. He suggests that the empowerment plan could prove ineffective because 'few people are interested in playing an active role in their communities':
'The white paper focused too much on imposing the Government's view of empowerment on communities, rather than considering how people may want to be engaged.'
Not new, but valid as far as it goes: the Ipsos-MORI report on empowerment based on New Deal for Communities data noted:
‘While there is a clear push from the government towards increasing community empowerment, the extent to which people want this is far less clear cut. The evidence suggests a spectrum of interest, with only a very small minority at one end who want to be actively involved, a larger minority at the other end who have no interest at all, with most in the middle.’
Yes, most people just want to have a say or to know they can influence things if they choose to. But low levels of motivation could at least partly be explained by the fact that most of us have grown up with habitual detached indifference on the part of authorities towards us - indeed systematised discouragement of seeking to influence.
My take on this is that empowerment is not a constant commodity, but reflects its cultural context: it is capable of being increased. It's the cultural context which should be the subject of change - putting it crudely, with the objective that it should not be seen as exceptional to want to have influence on decision-making processes; nor exceptional, for those with decisions to make, to want to involve those affected.
I'd also tender the heresy that community development is not necessarily the sole essential ingedient in the mix. CD promotes empowerment among other things through involvement. Involvement is not the only source of an increased feeling of influence or of the sense of power. However, by promoting collective involvement, CD is likely to multiply that sense of increased influence more powerfully than anything else.
To my shame I never got round to spending time on it before, but it happens that this morning I sought-out and read the CLG definition of community empowerment (page 12 here) which, er, needs a bit of work:
'Community empowerment is the giving of confidence, skills and power to communities to shape and influence what public bodies do for or with them.’
'Giving'? What about the confidence and skills that residents already have but which is overlooked or stifled? I don't like to be too picky, but definitions need a bit more thought than appears to have been spent on this. Why not just say ‘bestowing our largesse on the peasants’ and be done with it?
Yes, it is about power, but increasingly I'm wondering whether 'empowerment' - presented as feeling one is able to influence - is really the best approach to bring about the necessary cultural shift.
Hugh Butcher offered some thoughts of lasting validity on the CLG empowerment discussion forum a year ago:
'the Action plan seems to lack a recognition of the multiple 'faces' of power - it focuses overwhelmingly on a) 'decision making' power and b) 'power-to' (building people's confidence, skills &c). I would like to have seen more acknowledgement of: c) power to set agendas (the proposals in the Action Plan are 90% about responding to opportunities to 'engage' with those who have already set the agendas) and d) the power to shape the underlying assumptions (the taken-for-granted 'framing' assumptions, beliefs and values) which prompts the identification of particular kinds of agendas (and ignore others) in the first place.'
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Yesterday to an ESRC seminar on democracy and participation, to hear Gerry Stoker, always good value, reminding us that most people aren't after active participation in local governance. We want the right to have a say over the issues that affect us, but most of us just want a quiet time.
'We should be cautious about our expectations about the extent and depth of engagement that people want. We need to design institutions, structure processes and develop support systems to make it easier for people to engage... without at the same time expecting them to give up their lives and become professional politicans.'
What's needed, he says, is for representatives to do a bit more representing, to be more accessible to those they represent and be required to explain their decisions.
Which echoes nicely a note from Peter Hetherington in yesterday's Guardian, referring to a system of citizen-government partnership in Delhi, known as "bhagidari":
a proactive programme where officials regularly have to explain their actions to a range of groups, from charities and residents' welfare organisations to small traders. "No decision is sacrosanct."
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From Your Correspondent's latest spam:
'We Apologies, for the delay of your payment and all the Inconveniences and Inflict that we might have indulge you through.
'However, we were having some minor problems with our payment system, which is Inexplicable, and have held us stranded and Indolent, not having the Aspiration to devote our 100% Assiduity in accrediting foreign payments.'
Was this a genuine desperate message from a beleaguered banker somewhere in financier's purgatory, squirted through the space-time rush-hour congestion during a half-hearted seance somewhere?
Or is it just a draft email from a certain client who never pays on time, accidentally hacking its own way through the psychic wickerwork into my mailbox?
What's happened is that someone almost certainly in a foreign country has sent some gibberish to an email address which is connected with me. I live my life mostly in and around my neighbourhood but happen to be on the road at the moment, so I pick this message up in a hotel and am already thinking thoughts about global issues when it pushes or draws me into psychic nonsense. Can't wait to get home to a conversation with the NDN about the loaf I baked her the other day or how she deals with the leaves from the beech tree in autumn or whatever.
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Occasionally this blog points to little changes that suggest the erosion of something we vaguely think of as 'local life' - the threat to post offices and local shops, the unjustified carriage of children to school by car, the withdrawal of older people and negative attitiudes towards younger, and so on.
It all adds up and I just came across Paul Kingsnorth's Real England, described by Portobello Books as:
'A book that makes the connection between these isolated, incremental, local changes and the bigger picture of a nation whose identity is being eroded.'
Associated blog here.
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A character on Gary, Unmarried, a new sitcom on CBS, the American TV channel, observes his son playing Second Life and says: “We didn’t have this when I was young. We had . . . outside.”
India Knight in an article on Second Life in today's Sunday Times.
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The postcard format is one of industrial society's simple-and-smart inventions - a handy size, with room for a readily-digestible amount of message, scope for expression in choice of image, and, crucially, very shareable. It symbolises non-essential but often emotionally-prized communication.
I have a few exquisite ancient examples picked up in junk sales, and I help create them too, having had three hundred printed just this morning, as it happens, for a charity job.
One of my favourites lying around near the surface of my desk shows George Elgar Hicks's 1860 image of London's general post office, at one minute to six in the evening as people watch their messages about to be taken on their way by the mighty system.
We forget too easily that there is a huge amount of technology implied in this image - not just the technologies of printing and of transport, and the administrative systems of a global (well, imperial) communications network, but also the primary essential technology of the alphabet and all the educational effort invested in ennabling citizens to use it.
So this is a delight to me - Send with Peggy, a service for sending postcards from Facebook, currently for free, with a pre-addressed, pre-stamped reply included (UK and Ireland). Via Tim Davies.
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More like this please. A thirty minute film featuring social housing tenants at their front doors, neatly linked together - 'a patchwork of doors,' the images projected onto and illuminating public buildings in Bolton.
Think of all the connections and conversations in the making of it, and add the connections and conversations in the street every evening this week as it is being shown. Brilliant.
Image from Bolton News article.
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Here's today's social capital topic. I went to the station this morning for a train to London and the service was disrupted with cancellations and delays. A few others milled around mulling the options - alternative routes, waiting around for a surprise train appearance, trudging back home?
As I chatted with Joe in the ticket office, a man came up and asked if I'd been planning on going to London - 'I was,' he said, 'and I went home to get the car to drive in, just thought I'd stop by and see if anyone else was stuck here... Can I give you a lift?' (NB it's not like this is remote outback: just 15 miles from central London).
I thanked him for his generosity but had already taken the decision to abandon my attempt to get to a meeting.
Questions for students of social capital:
Was his offer (and presumably his diversion via the station) a moral adjustment sparked by guilt at using unsustainable transport? Would he have made the same offer to a woman? To a hoodied youngster? If I had accepted, should he in turn have accepted my offer to contribute to fuel costs? How much would I have offered, and would I have seemed sincere? Would he have felt obliged to discuss options for liaising on the return journey? What do you talk about to a stranger cocooned in a car with the prospect of a traffic-harassed 90 minutes on a miserable day?
Meself, I don't take a sceptical view, I thought it was a generous and considerate gesture, and partly I regret not celebrating that by having taken it up.
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The waiting room on the platform at Lymington, Hampshire, feels like an unofficial museum with its unfinished jigsaw puzzle.
And thanks to Chris Gittins of Streets Alive for this image of a furnished bus shelter. Does the bus driver stop, get out, and come and wake you I wonder?
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Last night to an Ipsos MORI event on 'Building confidence in the fight against crime', where I found myself surrounded by representatives of the criminal justice system (or the 'public justice system' as Louise Casey, the government adviser on All Things A Bit Dodgy, suggested it should be called).
MORI's messages about communication with residents, and the need for cultural change in police forces and local authorities to engage with people at neighbourhood level, seemed to be well-received.
But unfortunately, the discussion seemed entirely based on an assumption that confidence is a rational, mechanical and linear process: ask people what concerns them, give them some information, do something about what they've asked for, tell them you've done it, and bingo, problem solved. If that were so, expression of confidence in a service could be a reliable indicator and we'd have been using it for years.
But confidence is a fluid emotional process influenced by a wide range of factors, including health, mobility, housing, the quality of the public realm, family relationships, personal social networks, and so on. My level of confidence in the authorities' handling of anti-social behaviour could be influenced variably by any of these factors from one day to the next. We know this, which is why we talk about joined-up services.
There's a related point which helps us understand the limits of this approach. People are still talking about demonstrably unsuccessful traditional approaches to 'engagement' - door-knocking, newsletters, surveys, formal meetings called by the police or local authorities. And having had a conversation with the police authority in my county (noticeably absent last night) I have some sense of how shallow the understanding of community engagement can be.
It seems to me that few authorities think about finding ways to contribute through the existing processes and structures of local groups, to which residents are already committing time and energy. Nor, I suspect, is there much recognition of the barriers to informal communication between residents which would help information to circulate. Once again, police and local authorities are talking about certain tasks purely on their own terms - we organise the meeting, we run the meeting, you turn up, you tell us stuff when we ask you to.
Community engagement is a process whereby people who have something in common are involved collectively, together with a responsible agency, in influencing what happens to or around them. It is not a bureaucratic process and should not be approached with a bureaucratic mindset.
MORI: Closing the gaps: crime and public perceptions
Engaging communities: a review by Louise Casey
Postscript: JRF this morning has published a study of Public officials and community involvement in local services.
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Policy-makers still struggle to consider the local context of changes they would like to see. Here's the Home Office announcing new investment in designing-out crime, bringing industry, the public sector, designers and crime prevention experts and victims together. The programme is expected to come up with design-led ideas and develop 'solutions to a wide range of crime-related problems,' including:
‘Hot’ products – innovations to make personal electronics more ‘crime-proof’.
Housing - embedding design-led crime reducing approaches in the planning and construction of houses.
At least there's nothing there about graffiti; but what about neighbourhoods? Does the impact of local environment not impinge on the consciousness of those who set up this initiative?
My guess, and it's just a guess, is that initial discussions among officials may have included 'Neighbourhoods' as a heading but it was thought just too difficult, too political, or too inconclusive. A pity, because a new initiative which revisited the tensions between new urbanism and 'designing-out-crime,' while taking account of the new surveillance culture, recent experience of home zones, the Manual for Streets and so on, would have been welcome.
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They carry sticks, discuss the price of bleach, and reminisce about the blitz. Some are arthritic and drink lucozade. So when they congregate on the park benches you know to expect trouble. Sometimes they stay out til three in the afternoon. They can be noisy and very intimidating.
The Telegraph reports today on a gang of pensioners aged between 69 and 96 whose behaviour, gathering on four benches on an estate in south-east London, is a cause of local concern:
'Neighbours complained of noise and nuisance and the local housing association proposed to disperse the gang by removing the benches.'
Someone's being monumentally daft, but there's a serious point. It's only possible because of some too-familiar themes - a culture of blame and assertive intolerance, and the relentless marginalisation of older people. One wants to ask how come any authority can get itself into such a mess; but of course in this low-interaction, risk-averse contracted-responsibility culture, people can complain about anything and require an agency to take action.
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