Neighbourhoods

Mile End Community Project's weekly Newsnite

Always reassuring to hear about an effective community project, even though in this case I'm not sure about it coming under the heading 'preventing violent extremism'... Here are some extracts from a good CYP Now article by Jo Stephenson describing an initiative in a community centre in London's Mile End:

More than 20 young Muslim men have gathered for the Mile End Community Project's weekly Newsnite session. Unlike Jeremy Paxman, the chair keeps contributors in order by shouting: "Shut up, man!"

The mood is informal as the boys relax on beanbags and sofas, downing cola and eating Doritos. Participants are expected to come ready to discuss something they've seen in a newspaper or magazine, on TV, radio or the web.

The scheme meets key government policy objectives, such as offering "a safe space for open debate" and a chance to air grievances.

"It helps us," adds Abdul Samad, 18. "Some ain't as confident. It helps them to debate and they get encouraged to say their stuff."

Summer socialising in parks: assimilating LA's gangs

Over on the Making places blog, Karen Levy reports on a new approach to gang violence in Los Angeles, by changing the ways in which parks are used. The Summer Night Lights scheme began in eight parks last year, extending hours until midnight and sponsoring night-time movies and family-oriented activities four nights a week. (Image: LA Times).

According to the mayor’s office, the program was responsible for a 17% decline in crime rates and an astounding 86% decline in homicides for those areas.

This year a total of sixteen parks will be part of the programme, with plans to serve 350,000 free dinners over the course of the summer. Activities on offer include basketball and soccer leagues, safe skateboarding programs, screening of local films, and acting, dance, hip-hop, and fashion workshops.

One component of the program is the creation of a ten-member “youth squad” for each park, which will assist in staffing events and help to create neighborhood awareness. Summer Night Lights is being sponsored by $1 million in private donations, which the city has pledged to match – a great example of the power of public-private partnerships in community placemaking.

The city has suspended injunctions for gang members peacefully attending these events:

By allowing these youths to socialize freely in the park with other community members, L.A. is recognizing that providing positive options is an essential tool in improving urban neighborhoods. As gang intervention worker Miguel Leon told the New York Times: 'You can rewrite the narrative of your life and your neighborhood. A gang affiliation is not your whole identity. You’re also part of this community.'

And good luck to them. Turning back to read what Jane Jacobs had to say - always concerned that people didn't over-romanticise the role of parks - I find her dismissive of the idea that parks could be 'community anchors':

'Parks are not automatically anything, and least of all... stabilizers of values or of their neighbourhoods or districts.'

Meanwhile, Planning resource reports an increase in weekly use of green space in Scotland from 49 per cent to 63 per cent over five years.

Volunteering: a minority perspective

I've been having some online correspondence with a blind woman from a minority ethnic group, about being a volunteer. She makes some sharp points about the receptivity of traditional volunteering agencies, and has agreed for me to pass on these observations.

When my friend lost her sight, she was invited to join the management committee of the local association for the blind.

'It did not take me long to find out that they wanted me on the committee but would not trust me with any interesting work. As I had to give up work I tried hard to get into various voluntary organisations offering my services for free just for the satisfaction of doing something worthwhile. To cut a long story short, I have always had to prove myself, sell my services hard and push myself into some roles none would like. This pushing oneself hard, selling one’s skills and experience for an outcome of insults is not everyone's cup of tea.

'Charities begging for volunteers do not seem to realise that members of BME communities do not necessarily want to work with BME members. I have been told several times that they could not give me any volunteering roles because they did not have any BME demand, until I proved Caucasians were just as happy with my work.

'Agencies using volunteers as well as employers seem to think all similar looking people are the same. So, they club together all Africans, brown skinned people etc, no matter where they are from, thinking they would be happy working together. As one African friend of mine put it, these people calling themselves clever do not realise that someone from Somalia can be as different from someone from Nigeria as an Italian from an Englishman.'

Faith schools and cohesion

It puzzles me that people continue to defend faith schools, which to me are one of the most awkward embedded obstacles to cohesion in our society. Politically, they are going to take a lot of digging out and the present government's approach has not been promising.

Signs are that the Institute of Community Cohesion may be starting to charge the debate up a bit. Ted Cantle apparently has reported a little more critically on their effect (report not yet visible on the iCoCo site, which tends to be a bit sluggish).

Peter Hall draws attention to it and offers some interesting reflections here on Regen and Renewal:

'Many parents want their children to be educated in diverse schools, but get alarmed if there's a sudden surge in the numbers of one particular group. Their reaction could be crudely caricatured as "white flight" - and, almost inevitably, that was the headline to the newspaper stories on the report. But, ironically, their motivation is almost the reverse of the popular connotation of that term: rather than leaving for a white monoculture, they are seeking a school with greater diversity...'

According to Hall, Cantle remains adamant that faith schools in places such as Blackburn, with their large Muslim populations, remain "a source of division which have to be overcome".

Our very own surveillance

Here's a new take on the outsourcing of surveillance. The Beeb reports that a ceremony has been held 'to celebrate the installation of CCTV equipment bought by residents' after two years of fundraising.

Colville Estate Residents' Association raised £16,000 for the equipment in Cherry Hinton High Street, Cambridge.

Councillor Robert Dryden from the residents' association said: "We are the first in Cambridgeshire to have bought our own CCTV."

Gosh, I'm impressed, are you impressed? When charity begins at home, people give generously.

Let's all reflect on the use of the word 'celebrate'. And ponder a few questions. Is the £16k matching funding, or the entire amount required? If the latter, it would be interesting to know why residents did not have the support of public agencies.

Did the fundraising activities not generate sufficient social capital to obviate the need, at least in part?

Who owns the data collected by these cameras?

Social exclusion across the life course

The Social Exclusion Task Force in the Cabinet Office has published some important material from its work on 'Understanding the Risks of Social Exclusion Across the Life Course'.

It includes significant new emphasis on people of working age without dependent children. In terms of their perceived detachment from neighbourhood life, it's an important group to know more about.

I have two thoughts about the key findings (listed below). (i) What do they show that was not found in the Social Exclusion Unit's initial studies in 1998-2000, and the work of John Hills and co. at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion over the years?

(ii) By way of partial answer, the most interesting key findings are the last two, because they refer to older people, consistently overlooked in the policy effort over the past ten years. Among the risk markers identified for older people were those

'who had very infrequent contact with others, low social support, and felt that they don’t belong in the area where they lived.'

There's some emphasis on the social impact of becoming widowed, although my recollection from research a few years ago is that it's a negative impact for men, but tends to be positive for women (Perren et al 2004).

These findings point again to the simmering question of quite when policy will get hold of the issue of informal social care and start to do something about it. Given the difficulty I had in getting the ageing agencies interested in neighbouring I'm not sure where the impetus is going to come from.

Key findings from the research

• There are a small number of families who experience persistent and chronic social exclusion – the study suggests 4% to 7%. (Some sleight of pen here - I agree it's a small percentage: but it's not a small number).

• Families experiencing complex problems were more likely to be lone parent families, have four or more children, have a younger mother, have a mother from a Black ethnic group, live in rented accommodation and in the most deprived areas.

• Higher self esteem in adolescence is a protective factor against disadvantage in young adulthood.

• The proportion of young people most at risk of exclusion fell from 21% to 16% over the period 2001/02 to 2005/06.

• Events such as becoming employed and finding a partner reduce the risk of falling into social exclusion.

• The research highlights the importance of responding to the needs of working age adults without dependent children.

• Working age adults without dependent children who are older, unemployed or inactive, living alone, have few educational qualifications, and are renting their homes have a higher risk of exclusion.

• Around 5% of older people had multiple risk markers of social exclusion, including poor access to services and transport, physically inactivity, fear of their local area after dark, low social support, and poor general and emotional health. Older people in this group were likely to be aged 80 and older, have no qualifications, and live alone.

• Good health and social support can protect older people from becoming socially excluded, whereas becoming divorced or widowed significantly increases an older person’s risk of exclusion.

Local events and community cohesion

I've been sifting the material I gathered from participants at the Wellcome community picnic last month. Report to follow. With the Big Lunch taking place this weekend, here's one remark which impressed me:

"For whatever reason, people don’t tend to be very engaged. There are very few activities that bring people together from different backgrounds and you’ll find people from similar backgrounds tend to stay within those social groupings. So this kind of event is fantastic because what it does, it brings people out into a very safe place where they can engage with other people who they wouldn’t necessarily normally associate with or have much connection to, and I think today’s been really, really successful. I was surprised, there’s a lot more people than I thought would come."

Community development and professionalism: time's up

Cometh the hour. There I was yesterday mumbling ineffectually about the need to defend the once-essential anti-professional ethos of community development; and today politely trying to field yet another earnest enquiry about whether my old organisation, Community Development Foundation, still has anything to do with community development. Meanwhile here's Jon Fitzmaurice of Self-help-housing.org on the Guardian's Joe Public today:

Self-help housing enables people to be active citizens, and it fights the culture of "someone should do something about that". It was once more common, but over the last two decades community development and regeneration has fallen into the hands of professionals preoccupied with management and measurement.

Yes, I saw it happening. And yes, I did protest - too weakly, or too forcefully? I don't know, but either way, CD will be reinvented from the bottom-up by people like Jon Fitzmaurice. Let's hope the others just get out of the way.

How local is local? Why the Wirral Inquiry matters

Yesterday and today I put in a couple of appearances at the biennial conference of CILIP (the organisation formerly known, more sensibly, as the Library Association). There are two handy little contrasts which have sustained my interest in public libraries from the community development perspective over the years.

One is the old nicety that a library is a resource that is 'based in the community but not community-based'. Personally I'm fine with that - local people don't have to have direct ownership over all their resources and services, that would not make sense (what would community-based road planning look like?). And I don't regard central policies aimed at pumping community engagement values into the public library sector as any kind of attempt to 'get round' this.

The second, which I covered in a short talk yesterday, is the reflection that community development depends on an anti-professional ethos, which needs defending; whereas librarianship (in the UK at least) appears to struggle with an over-professional ethos, which needs examining. What I was arguing for was more attention to the values that might underpin public library work, and less preoccupation with status.

It happens that I've been asked to prepare a policy statement on community development for CILIP, so I took the opportunity to catch up with the CEO Bob McKee who I knew, from his work in Solihull in the 1990s, as someone who genuinely understands and believes in CD. Bob reminded me of the Wirral Inquiry: following heavily-criticised announcements of local library closures by Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council, the Inquiry will report soon to the Secretary of State on "whether the Council's plans are consistent with their statutory duty to provide a 'comprehensive and efficient' library service."

Bob's blog post from the Inquiry helps explain why this is such an important case. It's not just about belated attempts to define 'comprehensive and efficient'. The process opens up much-needed discussion about localness as part of that definition.

To be sure, we could have fewer small local libraries and depend on more large central collections. The national health service went through this kind of transformation, building huge hospitals, and had to invent health centres to compensate. The economic argument is doubtless persuasive in its own terms and for many people the trade-off is not problematic.

But it would mean saying goodbye to pretensions of being a local community resource, and it would undoubtedly privilege the privileged while punishing the less well-off. Accessibility is the key.

If people have to take an awkward bus-ride or cross a busy road and walk a couple of miles to reach a larger library, there are all sorts of reasons why they might not. One is the sense of belonging and the lost association of a familiar resource with their neighbourhood. The MORI report that I blogged yesterday says that 'A sense of belonging and personal connections are vitally important to satisfaction with areas', so you'd expect this to be recognised by the officers and councillors of the Wirral.

And when I say that 'the economic argument is doubtless persuasive in its own terms' it's another reminder that we've been irresponsibly rubbish at demonstrating the social value of our public resources. Which takes us back to 'community impact assessments' and the development of social return on investment.

The Inquiry reports later this month and some statements emphasising the local significance of access to public resources would be welcome. It might help with other debates such as that around local post offices and pubs. Since the Inquiry is being led by Sue Charteris, Founder Director of Shared Intelligence which established the National Association for Neighbourhood Management perhaps there are grounds for optimism.

The pic is from a mapping exercise that I ran with Martin Dudley for Bradford Libraries a few years ago.

Local services and priorities matter

I'm never quite sure about Ipsos MORI. The last event of theirs that I managed to get into featured the Home Secretary among the speakers, security was high, and there was some strange interference on my phone when I tried to use it just before the start.

Nah, sure there's nothing in that. Nor in the fact that they wouldn't give me a place at the launch of their Local report recently. Still, the next time one of their researchers came to the door (the second in a couple of weeks) and didn't offer any interesting reflections on neighbourhoods I decided I didn't have time for his questions. (And as noted here in passing, they don't always do good stuff).

Anyway here's what the MORI folk have done with the existing place survey data, augmented with some other stuff they got their hands on, and there are interesting messages put forward:

• Local services really matter to a sense of place: satisfaction with local services seems to be strongly related to overall views of the area and other key outcomes.

• Taking visible action on local priorities is vital. The more people feel that their priorities drive local improvement, the better perceptions are of local public service providers.

• There are clear signs that the biggest impact on perceptions of influence would not be actions that involve a small number of people very deeply, but rather better communications that reach a much wider group.

• There is a clear theme around seeking out views and acting as a result of seeking those views. This is particularly pertinent to crime and antisocial behaviour. The areas that are seen as doing best are those also proactively looking for feedback.

• The feeling that local people treat each other with respect, and, related to this, that parents have good disciplinary control over their children, come out as important to a number of key outcomes. A focus on young people and family/parental support seems likely to yield particular dividends in resident satisfaction.

Do we need people asking if we need community?

At the time of its construction in the 1960s the chief architect of Milton Keynes described Melvin Webber, proponent of the notion of 'community without propinquity', as the father of the city. Hurrah, they cried.

Subsequent experience there and in similar places suggests that community without propinquity is quite different to, and does not compensate for local community. It's also apparent that many people really struggle without local support to the point where they may need help reinventing 'community' because policies imposed on them have stifled it.

The RSA has an event in London next Tuesday (fully booked) asking 'Do people need community anymore?' I'm wondering if Liam Byrne might offer some insights into whether or not government policy will finally pick up on the importance of informal care. Byrne is Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and presumably has some awareness of the economic implications of not recognising the importance of local informal support.

Over on the Connected Communities blog, Steve Broome invites questions for the speakers, so this is what I sent:

Supportive neighbourliness is still widely practised. Recent work in the UK and Netherlands suggests that the practice of local community support is still strong but more individualised than in the past. Fewer people are doing more of society’s local social work.

Unfortunately informal care is crassly overlooked in policy. In a post-welfare society we can’t afford for this to continue. The reluctance to ask for support appears to be critical. So what policies would the speakers put forward that would stimulate informal support and care at neighbourhood level?

You'd hope they'd be angry

A while ago I noted some concerns about the proportion of young people who betray a profound sense of detachment and seem never to have inhabited a democratic culture.

This was just a reflection after a few workshops, firmed-up through discussions with teachers and others; it was certainly not the conclusion of systematic research. It felt as if a lot of the young people we talked to have difficulty with conflicting ideas, and they have little experience of organising, being organised, self-organisation, or organisations.

More recently I picked up on some questions about racism among young people. Then this week, two more snippets to add to this particular pile.

In a meeting on Monday evening a teacher spoke about students, particularly Ghanaian girls, practising clear self-segregation along ethnic lines within school, 'sometimes in a quite aggressive manner'. It's an interesting example because language has nothing to do with it: all Ghanaians speak English. We need to understand more about the sense of threat to community identity that causes these contractions.

And yesterday I spoke to a Dutch researcher who has been interviewing more than thirty young people about their sense of citizenship as reflected in their everyday lives. She said that her work (with a lot of data being processed systematically) confirms my reflections on both these themes.

Going to youth clubs and 'being organised' are not cool and levels of participation in other clubs and associations seem to be low. Racial tension in the Netherlands is worrying, often played out by young people struggling for some physical or cultural territory of their own. Sometimes what seem to be clashes of power may really be defiance against lack of it, or the removal of identity.

I suspect there's a link between these themes, I just don't know quite what it is. I fear it's quite profound, having to do with the struggle for acceptable identity and a denial of access to a democratic culture - all at an age where self-respect is very much under construction. Is what we think we're seeing exceptional, among other contemporary cultures or historically? Are we fussing over nothing new?

Thinking about people aged between say 13 and 19, sometimes I want to ask (it seems to me that they want to ask) 'what's the point of being young these days?' This period in their lives is a transition: to what?

One of the teachers I interviewed recently spoke highly of her students but with some concern about the formlessness of the everyday culture they've been left with. She said:

'You'd think they'd be angry. You'd hope they'd be angry.'

Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Nesta have organised a substantial event in London next Monday called Reboot Britain, which is about how we can

'punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services.'

Paul Evans has organised a stream of sessions on political innovation. I'm speaking at one of these, alongside Nick Booth, William Perrin and Edward Welsh, which is on the broad-enough topic of Locality: Councillors, Journalists, 'active citizens', community websites and local government communications.

I think I'll focus on the ‘active citizenship’ part of the topic, keep the tech at a respectful distance, and ask ‘What's needed to stimulate active citizenship at local level?’

It'll need a rough distinction between informal and social participation on the one hand, and formal civic and political participation on the other. We need the former in order to stimulate the latter. (Well I know some people do political participation without doing social participation: I've even met folk who voted for them, but we won't have time on monday for the nuances).

To my mind, it doesn't work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

In the nick of time, with local democracy gagged and tied to the tracks and the train of public spending cuts thundering down the line, along come gallant dynamic al-action neighbourhood online networks. Hurrah. Let's get out of this metaphor and ask a few questions:

Does the economic logic of these nets imply a more appropriate geographic scale for democratic involvement than currently exists? (Consider, for example, how much difficulty some authorities have in trying to establish meaningful area forums).

Does the inbuilt interactivity imply more conversation?

Does online conversation stimulate offline activity?

Should local authorities be enabling the development of these networks? (Dunh?)