Neighbourhoods

Formality and informality (2 of 2): a new paper from Alison Gilchrist

Last autumn I referred to Alison Gilchrist’s work on formal and informal modes of operating. Alison’s main paper is still under revision, but the TSRC have just published a 4-page summary which – albeit necessarily somewhat theoretical – offers a wealth of insights into a theme that is both broad and complex. It’s also downright fundamental to community development.

This paper crystallises a range of aspects in very clear language and I think it will be read and referred to for a very long time.

Meanwhile I can point immediately to one application, by referring to my recent post about formality and informality in relation to Good Neighbour schemes. Alison rightly draws attention to the significance in community development work of negotiating between and managing these modes. She calls this practice ‘blending, braiding and balancing’:

‘Astute choices are needed as to how formal and informal modes are blended or balanced against each other. The study revealed a praxis – bringing together skills, judgements, techniques and understanding - that is applied in specific situations. This praxis may be a ‘knack’ acquired over a lifetime’s experience or it may be a deliberate strategy implemented through a combination of conscious decisions, group exercises and behaviours. It involves judicious braiding of informal processes with formal procedures to create the optimal conditions for collective discussion, agreeing goals, making and measuring progress, involving people, keeping going, being fair and so on.’

 

Formality and informality (1 of 2): Good Neighbour schemes, and the shadow of coercion

I’ve been interviewing several development workers in rural areas, about how they develop and support Good Neighbour schemes. Inevitably, a key set of tensions that they have to negotiate is around formal and informal arrangements.

These schemes sit sweetly in the space between the ancient informality of neighbouring and the post-industrial formality of organised care services.

Central to the tensions that arise in this space is a widely-anticipated (though not always evident) negative response from community groups to expectations that they should adopt formal procedures. Formal procedures can range from requiring safeguarding checks to maintaining monitoring records.

There are a couple of issues to disentangle here. The first concerns the unpredictable variety of responses at the area level, which I do not think can readily be explained by the worker’s approach.

Thus in one county, in helping about half a dozen new schemes to become constituted, one worker told me that there had been no difficulty in getting groups to accept the requirements of systematic evaluation, for example in administering questionnaire surveys; in another county, I was advised to reduce my expectations to the minimum, because the groups would not take to it. In a third county, one of the schemes was not interested in any form of preliminary information gathering about client needs or availability of volunteers, they just decided to get on with it. I was told of another scheme whose representatives had decided to go beyond just a committee and constitution, turned their first meeting into an agm, and were set on applying for charitable status. It also seems to be the case that most groups expect if not demand safeguarding checks, and this can extend to some non-risk roles for which it is illegal to have someone checked.

It's not clear to me how this variation can be explained.

The second issue is even more nuanced and rather more tricky. It concerns the risk that sensitivities to community groups’ responses can come across as patronising: you don’t want to be implying that they should be protected from some kinds of information because it’s too complex for them or too demanding.

Within the groups that express an interest in forming Good Neighbour schemes, it’s common to find retired people with professional backgrounds – often from the medical and care professions – for whom the generation of a little administrative bureaucracy is an expectation not an issue; who would anticipate the requirement for monitoring data; and who, if it were not provided to them, might well invent their own system for evaluation because they can see in advance that it would help to demonstrate their achievements with a view to future funding. I am told that this configuration and outlook can often be found in low income areas as well as the more affluent neighbourhoods.

At the same time it’s unsurprising that many groups might find administrative tasks a burden; and anything that threatens a group’s sustainability might need rethinking. But it’s fair to say that lack of funding in the future could be as much of a threat as the burden of collecting evidence to justify that funding.

The establishment of a Good Neighbour scheme depends on local volunteers coming forward, with time, energy and commitment. We cannot predict with accuracy what kinds of people these will be, although with an open and empowering approach we can inform and seek to influence what they choose to do.

What one of us might call encouragement or support, another might call coercion. Much of the professional rhetoric may be filtered of dusty heresy, but I’m not sure it’s possible in community development to allow light in, without casting the shadow of coercion. As I recall, Jeremy Brent was very good on this.

 

‘Superficial’ relationships: near-strangers, weak ties, and older men

Back in 2009, in government guidance on meaningful social interaction, we were told that

‘for interaction to be meaningful it needs to go beyond a superficial level and be sustained.’

I was never satisfied with this and have occasionally wondered if there was a missed opportunity to champion non-meaningful interaction. I have long argued that superficial interaction is the essential ingredient in neighbouring.

It could be time to return to this theme. I’ve been exploring some of the social benefits of Good Neighbour schemes, and this has encouraged me to dust-off another, related theme – gender differences in the sense of aloneness among older people. In one scheme for which I happen to have figures to hand, 79 per cent of clients live alone.

Here’s how the two themes seem to come together, incorporating recent research I have come across. First, two papers by Sandstrom and Dunn published in 2014:

• Is efficiency overrated? Minimal social interactions lead to belonging and positive affect
• Social interactions and well-being: the surprising power of weak ties

In the first, they found that ‘people who had a social interaction with a barista (i.e. smiled, made eye contact, and had a brief conversation) experienced more positive affect than people who were as efficient as possible.’ The authors conclude that people ‘are happier when they treat a stranger like a weak tie.’ No surprise there, but as so often it is helpful to have some things confirmed by robust research.

As an aside, it may be worth noting that the sincerity of the exchange could be important. When a supermarket checkout assistant asks me ‘How are you today?’ the most they are likely to get in return is a grunt, because I know they won’t really want to know but their wretchedly-unimaginative managers have decided it’s a good idea to fill the air with unwanted vapours. There is a difference.

In the second paper, Sandstrom and Dunn report on three further experiments and note that

‘community members who had, on average, more weak tie interactions than others reported greater feelings of belonging. Furthermore, people reported greater feelings of belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual.’

The sampling in this study leaves me wanting further research, but still it’s tempting to say – ‘it’s official’: weak ties are good for you. Of course they are.

Next, here’s a recent paper by Sorensen and Poland, exploring ‘the space between acquaintanceship and strangerhood’. It starts by quoting Francesca Cancian who suggested that, in relationship research in later life, ‘men’s behavior is measured with a feminine ruler’. A little light went on, for me, when I read that.

Sorensen and Poland’s research used photographs to explore nuances of everyday encounters of older men living alone. The men attributed significance to what might seem to others like fleeting interactions; and all were exposed to various opportunities to form other closer relationships and friendships but ‘they sometimes described specifically choosing not to do so.’

The authors suggest that it is not the case that the men had no meaningful relationships,

‘nor can their relationships be considered inferior compared with women’s relationships, but they are clearly different, in terms of mutuality and intimacy, from the reportedly more meaningful relationships that women may enjoy and may be much less visible.’

Which brings us back to the meaning of 'meaningful' interactions.

All this makes perfect sense to me. Interactions that are apparently shallow and ephemeral, to some observers, not only have benefits in terms of social capital (and hence in terms of health and well-being); they may also be a chosen, deliberate strategy to retain human connection with what Sandstrom and Dunn call a ‘minimal cue of belonging’.

Perhaps this kind of behaviour is sufficiently strongly evidenced to characterise older men who live alone in particular, I don’t know. But either way, it is something that practitioners need to take into account, for example when it comes to designing ‘age-friendly’ environments, or when trying to organise social support at local level.

Notably, for me, it helps us to start challenging the way that as a society we have come to pathologise aloneness. Which reminds me, in my book on Neighbouring and older people I quoted the striking example from Tony Parker's The people of Providence, of 87-year-old Mrs Williams:

‘The person I like best is my neighbour next door, the one who goes and gets my pension from the post office for me. She never says anything apart from “Good morning…” She comes back and comes in and puts the money on the table and says “Good morning” again, and then out she goes.’

Previously:

• on meaningful interaction (on the Joe Public blog)
• Try a little MSI
• Untraceable near-neighbours
• Acquaintances: book review

 

‘Thou shalt not ask’?

Recently I’ve had the privilege of meeting several clients of good neighbour schemes. I thought I’d share a couple of insights.

I met I man, I’ll call him Danny, who had experienced mental health difficulties for many years following crushing in a crowd incident, which left him so damaged and with so many broken bones that he was assumed dead. He now can’t face people very easily, yet spoke to me with a lively, if battered, intelligence. Vulnerable to encounters on a difficult estate – he’d had an intruder a few nights previously - he lives with his dog in dismal poverty. He could do his shopping on the internet but makes himself go out to get it, between three and four in the morning.

So how does he use the internet? His next door neighbour lets him use his wifi password. Isn’t that brilliant? I’d love to know about the conversation that led to this. Talking about poverty, Danny said it’s a blessing he has no relatives, Christmas would be such a trial if he had to buy things for people.

Danny told me he’d like to go and live at the sea-side. “Even if I lock myself away I could still open the window and see people.” When was the last time you saw the sea? “I’ve never seen the sea.”

“Without the helpers from the scheme, I don’t see anyone, except once a fortnight I see my mental health worker.”

The organiser told me he had said to her – obviously reluctant to make demands of the scheme,

“I need someone to come round once a fortnight, in case I die.”

This relates to the ‘request scruple’ – the reluctance to ask for help – which I have mentioned before with reference to the research of Lilian Linders. This arises also in the second instance. One woman who uses the scheme, I’ll call her Annie, talked about her hesitation:

“Why should they have the time for me? … I grew up the old-fashioned way, ‘thou shalt not ask’. It’s not pride. It’s just not proper. You don’t beg… I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I’m just frustrated because I can’t do the things I used to do.”

Following a serious fall, Annie needed help of various kinds, and first had to overcome the misunderstanding that the scheme was just about providing transport. She takes care not to risk over-demanding: “I work out what’s important, don’t pile it up.” She spoke with delight about how a simple bathroom shelf had made so many things easier for her.

Annie says she has learned that

“If you have a problem, talk to them about it. If they can’t help then they will tell you what you can do.”

This points to the importance of information-sharing and advice that arises in the way the schemes work. The scheme organiser told me it is not uncommon for people to assume they could make only one request of the scheme. Under this misconception they could be holding back from making a modest demand for help, reserving the option for the possibility of a more serious need in due course.

 

The interplay between formal and informal modes of operating

How much do tensions between formal and informal modes of operating affect what happens in the community sector? People in community groups tend to feel more comfortable with informality and may be intimidated by formal processes, codes and context. But formal regulations, structures and policies, as Alison Gilchrist made clear in her William Plowden Fellowship lecture at NCVO this week, can rightly be seen as ‘necessary mechanisms for mitigating risk and maintaining standards’.

Red tape and the sins of bureaucracy can restrict, delay and hinder progress. But if emotions are curbed and personal biases constrained, sometimes that can be a good thing; and formality may well protect collective goals so that these can be pursued regardless of the individuals involved.

Likewise, reflecting on the effect of informal processes we may see that while they can be liberating and creative, allowing people to nurture trust and loyalty, they can also mask and perpetuate hidden power imbalances.

Alison set out to challenge the default position of ‘formal as normal’ and concludes that

‘informal and formal modes are best regarded as neither opposite ends of a spectrum nor a dichotomy. A more nuanced, dialectical approach is needed.’

Watch out for her report and hopefully a few short articles expounding on this work. For the moment, I’d select the following from her recommendations:

• For policy: seek to enable, not control

Informal as valid and valuable;

Be aware of power/status issues;

• For practice: uphold responsive flexibility

Encourage opportunities for informal learning and exchange;

Use ‘just enough’ formality where functionally useful;

Build in conviviality - fun, food and face-to-face interactions.

 

Communal living and neighbouring: time for ‘re-co-operation’?

I had a fascinating conversation the other day with Tobias Jones, author of A place of refuge and this recent Observer article on communal living. I am in quiet awe of what Tobias and his family have achieved at Windsor Hill Wood and how they have gone about it. I’m also hugely impressed by the openness of his thinking and the clarity of his writing.

Tobias is exploring commonalities in different approaches to ‘community,’ from communalism to community development to neighbouring in its most manifest - and presumably least manifest - forms. As I understand it, he is searching for ways of strengthening those commonalities. We scratched the surface of a few issues. While I would have my doubts about attempting to package insights into evidence of a lasting contemporary grassroots movement – I’d love to be proved wrong – I think there is much to be said for a more systematic sharing of understanding. I look forward to what Tobias is writing next, an essay for New Statesman.

Just thinking about communal living in comparison with neighbouring is helpful. The amateur anthropologist in me is immediately muttering about how communal living is where we all came from: in the evolution of humankind, neighbouring is a rather more recent way of organising social relations. Tobias neatly offers communal living as ‘an alliance with the past to critique the present in the hope of a better future.’

This lived experience of time eludes most of us, however neighbourly our locality. In the contemporary neighbourhood context, it is much harder to remain immersed in ways of doing things that are mutual and sustainable. Allotment gardeners might have a grasp of it, commuters are less likely to. We struggle to appreciate how to do things sustainably in the sense of reducing emotional and spiritual damage as well as environmental damage. It’s no coincidence that gardeners do most of what they do outdoors, and commuters do most of what they do indoors or cocooned in vehicles. We often get the pace of living wrong and we lose much of the vocabulary of stewardship. I’m reminded of a quote from the wonderful Erri de Luca:

‘Holy man of Africa, I think, you come to impart your wisdom to a European savage who follows the moon on the calendar and the clouds on the radio and can’t read a word without an alphabet.’

Communalism comes with the category heading ‘Lifestyle’: neighbouring does not. I note also that the settlement co-residents described by Tobias are there at least partly to establish or regain a sense of stability in their lives. The context of neighbouring is different: much of it is about asserting and retaining – and often defending – stability. Tobias and his family welcome ‘visitors’ – some for a day or two, some for months: this is about transience – again, acknowledging the natural passage of time, not the generally implied permanence of neighbourhood relations.

There is much to be learned I think from this path of enquiry that Tobias is opening up. A healthy society needs a range of ‘community-related’ institutions functioning smoothly, and we should be exploring commonalities across them all:

• a public realm to maintain the principle of commonality across many aspects of life;
• a democratic structure that allows for reflection and deliberation and reflects the involvement of all participants;
• formal care services for particular needs;
• semi-formal and informal processes (like Good Neighbour schemes and other voluntary initiatives) that provide social support, association and other opportunities;
• third places at local level so that people can encounter one another informally and serendipitously, and by arrangement for specific purposes;
• recognised forms of neighbouring that contribute to a sense of security, belonging  and identity; and
• communal environments to help people recover or establish stability, and to articulate the broader context of humans living together on a fragile planet.

The image above, with its delightful pun, apparently refers to a number of refugee chickens that are taken in at Windsor Hill Wood. I was wondering if anyone thought that the message of communal living is also about ‘re-co-operation’ (not to be confused with ‘eco-operation’) – about refreshing our ability and readiness to co-operate and collaborate. I’m up for it if you are.

 

 

Appreciating kindliness: informality in neighbourhoods

JRF’s programme on risk and trust in everyday relationships was designed to break new ground and it has done so, with a range of stimulating papers. The latest is Landscapes of helping, an absorbing report on informal helping – ‘kindliness’ - at local level, by Meg Allen, Helen Spandler, Yvonne Prendergast and Lynn Frogget. It’s based on an extended case study in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.

Perhaps because the theme overlaps strongly with issues of neighbouring and neighbourliness, I was privileged to have sight of a draft of this report. I admire the way the authors have drawn out a number of mechanisms that foster kindliness while simultaneously contributing to neighbourliness and sociality. These they describe as:

• Making kindliness palatable
• Nurturing bonders and bridgers
• ‘Creating a shared myth’ and ‘Building common cause’
• Third spaces and ‘Hubs of helping’ as ‘ways of connecting communities’; and
• Creating kinder economies.

Some of this we know about: for instance, community development practice and the literature of social capital already give us insights into how bonding and bridging capital can be nurtured, and we know quite a bit about third places, or think we do. But the first and last in the above list are striking as barely-charted areas for potential enquiry.

Talking of barely-charted areas for enquiry, this paper helps us realise how little the notion of kindliness is discussed, reflected on or researched. Here’s how the authors came through the entangling thicket of definition – acknowledging several difficulties in distinguishing concepts:

‘It was often difficult to identify boundaries between help within the family and outside; and low level help between neighbours could easily transform into longer-term more intensive support and care. We also found it difficult to distinguish between informal and more formalised (or semi-formal) help and our exploration of kindliness involved going through, and observing, semi-formal organisations who often mediate more informal relationships.

‘Similarly, while we started this research trying to distinguish between giving and receiving help, we increasingly realised that this distinction was hard to sustain. In everyday life it is not always possible, or desirable, to separate out the needs of the self and the needs of others (Munn-Giddings, 2001). People practise kindliness, not only to help others, but to help themselves, and to improve the communities in which they live.’

Ah, I recognise this part of the landscape: we’re back at the corner of Altruism Avenue and Reciprocity Road.

And it’s good to know that informal and semi-formal relations in neighbourhoods are receiving a  bit of attention at last. While JRF continue pursuing their programme, my good friend Alison Gilchrist has recently won a Plowden Fellowship to explore the theme of ‘informality’ in relation to good governance and social justice. And less gloriously, I’m currently working on a project for Nesta to produce a process evaluation and impact evaluation of Good Neighbour schemes. More on that in due course.

 

Informal support: I ask you

JRF has some fascinating work going on at the moment under the heading of ‘Risk, trust and relationships in an ageing society’, which includes a theme frequently covered on this blog, ‘everyday, informal support between neighbours, friends, and in communities.’

One of the striking features of this JRF thread is the refreshing focus on the notion of ‘kindness.’ You might not see it being fitted into current government policy all that smoothly, but that’s no reason not to treat it as worthy of research and likely to generate insights.

And let’s pay tribute to the fact that this is not a new departure for JRF, they’re building on a decent track record. Two examples: in 2004 they published Building a good life for older people in local communities, a delight which I’ve cited many times; or you could go back to 1998 for their superb study on the importance of ‘low level’ preventive services to older people.

Now here’s a recent example of the way this work is going, an interim report by Helen Spandler and colleagues on perceptions of giving and being in receipt of informal help. The work so far is based on a quick and not-all-that-dirty street survey, apparently designed to harvest a range of attitudes (and the associated language) to frame subsequent investigation. What the researchers are trying to do is get at the implicit ‘rules’ surrounding the giving and receiving of help.

They note that ‘only a small number of people felt completely comfortable in receiving support from others.’ Religious and cultural contexts have a strong influence, and the tensions around mutual interdependence vs independent individualism soon emerge:

‘Many participants … made reference to Northern working class backgrounds, which they felt valued relationships over material wealth. Yet, that same culture also taught a strong sense of individual independence, which could make the need for help seem like a weakness. In this way, cultures could be experienced as both supportive, and simultaneously as harsh and inflexible.’

A few years ago I drew attention to the work of Lilian Linders in the Netherlands, exploring the significance of the reluctance to ask for help. Lilian’s research highlighted the fact that the imbalance in the provision of informal care lies on the demand side, not the supply side: the extent to which we live in a caring society is constrained by the ‘request scruple’ – a widespread reluctance, for various reasons, to ask for help.

It looks like the present project is finding similar issues. ‘Giving and receiving support’, the researchers note, ‘is constantly negotiated within a complex 'moral economy' of familial, local and societal expectation.’ They describe this as an ecosystem that requires cultivation. Families can be fortresses of support, implicitly discouraging help from elsewhere, but there can be examples where asking is disouraged even within the family. One correspondent said:

‘It makes me feel vulnerable to ask. I reckon my family would translate asking for help as weakness.’

At the heart of all this is the tension between not being seen as 'weak, needy, demanding or ‘undeserving’’ and ‘a strong sense that giving was a good and moral thing to do.’

As we know, social care policy is concerned with the supply side, whether it be support for carers, the uneven provision of personal home care, encouragement to volunteer or whatever. But the challenge for JRF at the end of this programme may be in articulating a call for much broader cultural change: change that will help in overcoming the scruples that people have about asking for help.

 

Interdependence and a different kind of care in the community

Some years ago I wrote a piece on neighbouring and older people in which I placed some emphasis on the concept of interdependence. I certainly didn’t invent the principle but I was puzzled as to why it did not feature much in the literature nor among the expressed values of agencies working to promote the interests of older people.

I’m currently taking another look at the literature around neighbourhood support for older people and I note that the relative lack of interest in interdependence seems to prevail.

I’m not talking about the narrative in the popular press and broadcast media which problematizes the ageing population and implicitly presents older people as over-dependent on others and a burden on society. (This narrative is punctuated with patronising gasps of widespread astonishment at the occasional discovery of an older person who is active and involved). Nor do I deny that many older people are dependent and need committed care: looking after them is a social responsibility which should never be seen as unwelcome.

Researchers and commentators on ageing do not endorse the condemnatory ‘burden’ stereotype; but neither do many of them seem to grasp the fact that older people contribute to local neighbourhood life in many ways, subtle or emphatic. Nor do many seem to grasp the potential for even more older people to contribute, if the culture was supportive.

I don’t think it helps that policy is blind to the concept of informal support. As far as government is concerned, if you’re not volunteering formally – preferably under the aegis of a registered charity – you may as well not be doing anything for your fellow-citizens.

So it was with some delight that I came across this paper in the Journal of ageing studies, based on focus groups and interviews in Aotearoa New Zealand, which highlights the contributions made by older people to the places where they live (which the researchers call ‘care for place’). The analysis results in a framework of four categories of activity: volunteering, activism, advocacy, and nurturing – ‘helping and representing others, giving advice and support, or facilitating action, whether individually or as part of a group.’

This has always been the case I believe – from litter-picking to emotional support to informal childcare or taking in post or maintaining vigilance over local amenities, articulating public concern and spearheading campaigns and so on – but it needs to be described and acknowledged before the gravity of ‘the burden discourse’ drags us all down. So this is a very welcome piece of research.

And perhaps this is one of those rare occasions where some kind of locally-applicable ‘toolkit’ could be developed (sorry, I try not to use the word), to help community agencies demonstrate the extent of the ongoing contribution of those who society would readily discard. Quantifying the number of volunteer-hours would allow an estimate of financial value, in line with the WRVS study which showed that people over 65 made a net contribution to the UK economy of £40 billion in 2010. WRVS noted:

‘Our research shows that every year, each older volunteer spends an average of over 100 hours 'informally' volunteering and more than 55 hours in formal volunteering roles. This is worth £10 billion to the UK economy.’

 

Policy rushes in, where commonsense fears to tread

Occasionally in my commentary on neighbouring and policy I’ve had a go at sketching out roughly how close policy and regulation can get to the everyday practise of neighbouring. Area-based league tables of neighbourliness, for example, in order to shame the less genial neighbourhoods...? Don’t snigger, it could happen.

Here’s an example where policy makers have decided that people should care more for their elders. In China it has been deemed necessary to introduce an Elderly Rights Law to address the growing problem of lonely elderly people, by ordering adult children to visit their ageing parents. The law has been applied immediately: the BBC tells us that a 77-year-old woman brought the case against her daughter and the court in Wuxi has ordered the latter to visit her mother once every two months.

Imagine the visits, if you will – their excited surprise and warmth after one month and thirty days, their light humour, the imaginative gifts so sensitively thought-through, the hours passing in laughter and delight… er, no? What do you mean, you think the daughter might be reluctant and the elderly mother somewhat vindictive? Hmm, one might almost think family relations was a domain unsuited to policy intervention.

 

Low level interaction

Hello, what’s this? Someone else who thinks that sense of community doesn’t necessarily require strong or dense local social ties? A year ago I mentioned the initial thoughts of Queensland sociologist Lynda Cheshire on community resilience in the 2011 floods. Now here she calls for more participants for her study and offers early reflections:

‘Even outside of emergencies, a good relation with neighbours has been shown to increase individuals' sense of community and attachment to place, and to improve health and well-being.

‘This doesn't necessarily mean we have to become close friends with neighbours or organise street barbecues. Low levels of interaction - such as friendly greetings when you see them, keeping an eye on each other's properties while away, and exchanging telephone numbers for emergencies is all that's really needed.’

The point being, I think, that these low level connections require much less effort to establish and maintain than do close ties, and we all have more of them, so our chances of mobilising help in time of need are going to be more efficiently increased through recognition than through close relationship.

Cheshire has been interviewing residents from flood affected streets and I’m looking forward to reading papers from the study in due course.

Looking out for neighbours: resilience, recognition and responsibilities

The Atlantic has a piece by Sarah Goodyear on the contribution of social connections to community resilience in time of crisis, picking up on a New Yorker article (£) by Eric Klinenberg. Hurricane Sandy came close enough for some policy makers to have their suits splashed with a little nasty reality, in turn legitimating (for a short while at least) some public discussion of these issues:

‘As cities prepare for climate change in earnest, they’re going to need to harden infrastructure, change building patterns, and overhaul government emergency procedures. But they’re also going to have to put a greater value on the human connections that can be found in walkable neighborhoods where people know each other and support local businesses.’

The assumption that walkability might be a key criterion is an interesting one, and one of the comments to the article expresses scepticism about it. I’m aware of one study (Du Toit et al 2007) which found that 'walkable neighbourhoods are not necessarily more sociable places in which to live'.

However the researchers in that, south Australian, study were looking for 'strong' social ties between neighbours - a mistake in my view (and a very common one) because you don't necessarily need strong connections, or to feel you belong to a close-knit community, to have someone look out for you in time of crisis (although they help of course).

We can’t all be, and some of us definitely do not want to be, part of a close-knit community, as I’ve suggested often enough. What might help all round would be higher levels of neighbourly recognition – meaning, having been seen around the neighbourhood from time to time, perhaps with a smile or a few words: being accessible in time of need without invading others’ privacy. It's reasonable to assume that walkable environments are more likely to give rise to what I call sequences of informal recognition, which accrue to provide a form of social capital that has largely been overlooked in study and policy.

The point also needs to be made that when crisis strikes, and there are residents who happen to lack social connections, they are going to stand a better chance of being picked up and supported if there is an active local online network that people use to communicate openly and fast. If authorities anywhere in the world really are looking to invest in community resilience, they should be looking to facilitate the development of independent, citizen-led online networks.

Meanwhile back in the UK, not dissimilar themes have been raised following a claim by Care Minister Norman Lamb in the Telegraph that:

‘We have lost the extended family because families have become dispersed. We need to rebuild that neighbourly resilience that helps people stay independent. If someone is living on their own never seeing anyone, that is a dismal existence, and it often ends up with it all collapsing and them going into a care home.’

This is followed of course by the urging of us all to do more neighbouring; and a possible new slogan – this is not ‘big society’ but (tada!) the ‘decent society.’ Capitalisation and branding to follow, presumably.

The minister said that councils should lead the way in encouraging people to help their neighbours stay out of care. ‘I want local authorities to be giving people guidance about how they can maintain their own resilience, using their friends, their neighbours, their community and in that way build resilience and reduce the burden on the state.’

Lamb’s remarks aroused some contemptuous counter-argument from Sarah Ditum on Comment is Free. And to the extent that this is about caring, she has a point – the amount of unpaid care that is being carried out for people with an illness or disability has increased and is likely to keep increasing. Her riposte resonates perfectly reasonably:

‘It's not the populace that's resigning from its responsibilities to the vulnerable; it's the government.’

The minister has generalised unhelpfully and not taken the time needed to catch up with any thinking that anyone else has been doing, or to find out what is the current state of play. And we need not dwell on the trite assumptions about 'the neighbour support that used to be there'. But still, there is a worthwhile message here if it weren't so badly packaged. It would be responsible for local authorities to issue guidance which takes account of what is already going on – if they have the time or funds to get this done.

What seems to me problematic in the language Lamb uses is his hard-wired political compulsion to individualise the response, rather than acknowledge an obvious role for community development. This is typified in referring to 'independence' without entertaining the possibility of interdependence.

This is routine political contortionism I suppose. The government would like the beneficial consequences of community development without having to accept either that some people experience disadvantage or misfortune that is not their fault, or that they can address those disadvantages by themselves (without the disempowering arbitrariness of philanthropy) if supported in doing so.

 

 

Older people and informal neighbourhood care: an issue that won’t go away

JRF are starting to crank up their thinking about informal neighbourhood care and older people, and I’m starting to sit forward in the expectation that something really useful will emerge from their work over the next couple of years.

I was reminded just yesterday that we’re well behind the Dutch in our thinking and action on this theme (although they have a general election coming up with plenty of potential to go backwards fast).

Nearly three years ago I remember offering a somewhat disillusioned post after running out of steam and failing to get anyone interested in the issue of neighbourly support. Even Age Concern, who had supported my research and publication, could muster no interest. At the time the problem seemed to be that the ageing agencies were all preoccupied with what they saw as the ‘countable’ issues of pensions and benefits. Crisis, what crisis?

The crunch may be not so much whether high quality research and policy advice emerges – it surely will – but whether JRF manage to get any purchase on policy itself. High stakes, in an ageing society with its formal support systems being rapidly dismantled.

 

Our letterboxes aren’t fit for purpose: so involve neighbours

Royal Mail today announced that it will be rolling out its ‘Delivery to Neighbour’ initiative which I’ve mentioned a few times. With Ofcom’s approval, they’re pre-empting the consultation, for which the deadline is a week today.

I’ve just been talking to Nikki Bedi on Radio London about some of the neighbourliness issues. I made the point that some people will have genuine good reason not to be taking-in a neighbour’s packages, and we need to avoid their being stigmatised by the opt-out sticker (‘Neighbours not trusted here’) on their doorway. Technology, as I’ve suggested before, can surely be used to advantage, for instance through QR-coded digital instructions on the package.

The scheme obviously implies a potential increase in neighbour interaction. The Ofcom consultation document reminds us that ‘in the trial areas there was a reduction of approximately 40% in the numbers of undeliverable items that were returned to delivery offices’ (emphasis added). That might be interpreted as a non-trivial increase in the number of neighbourly conversations that might not have happened before.

Hopefully we’ll hear of more neighbourhoods with an informally ‘designated’ older person who is at home most of the time and known to the postal worker – and in return for the neighbourly service the recipients readily stop for a chat and catch up when they go round to collect their package.

Online technology has helped to reduce the number of letters we get, but contributed to an increase in the number of packages being transported. We live in smaller households and there is less likely to be someone at home during the day, so there’s an increase in the proportion of packages not being delivered.

Our letterboxes aren’t fit for purpose. The market solution is the external security box or parcel pod, with the deliverer placing the package into the unlocked container and usually being expected to ensure it is locked afterwards. This is part of the ongoing not-entirely-tasteful extension of secured privacy beyond the home, and Kev's Automatic Door Principle (which I referred to here) applies - another example of technology confiscating tiny social interactions.

I’m sure the market for such boxes is set to expand, although our house-builders and architects might yet come up with alternative solutions. I much prefer the simple social alternative of the ‘Delivery to Neighbour’ scheme.

Previously:

Further footnote on taking in neighbours’ post

Footnote on taking in your neighbour’s post

Neighbours not trusted here

20 per cent of us don't want neighbours to handle our post

The hidden wealth of informal activities

Instinctively I flinch at the phrase ‘hidden wealth of communities’ because I just think, here they come, the Haves want to take that as well.

Well it’s been tough for the rich and powerful lately and they’ve started to get a little uneasy about the rate of return on their enormous investments. And really, one can’t help thinking that poor people just have to work harder, it’s not good enough, let’s see what else we can plunder from them. What’s this social capital they have, couldn’t we make something out of that?

The model’s straightforward: if only poor people would do more with their social capital – all those network connections made in clubs and pubs and community centres, my dear fellow, places where they laugh at stuff one simply wouldn’t comprehend – public services would become obsolete or cost less to run and profit would be easier to make at the top.

Yes, it could be deemed offensive for people with lots of money to describe the social capital of people on low incomes as ‘wealth’, and then to try to exploit it. Having said that, semantic niceties aside, it does matter how local social connections give rise to informal and formal participation; and how they in turn relate to formal governance. I’d subscribe to the view put forward back in 2005 by Paul Skidmore and John Craig in Start with people (an unacknowledged precursor of some elements in current policy thinking):

‘we need to create greater value from the connections popular participation creates between public services, civil society and our structures of democratic representation.’

But it’s taking so long to get policy recognition for the value of those interactions, while all the time the third places we need for this associational life are increasingly threatened. Even the stoutest defender of the current government, and they do exist, stout ones anyway, could hardly deny the assertiveness (some might call it wanton vandalism) of its deconstruction of the public realm. It doesn’t help.

Start with people explored the connections within and beyond civil society that are forged in community organisations. So, more broadly, does this recent report from ResPublica, Clubbing together, by Keith Cooper and Caroline Macfarland, sub-titled unfortunately ‘the hidden wealth of communities’. It explores the potential for a greater ‘club-culture’ in the UK. It offers a review and a very welcome discussion of the largely forsaken place of local clubs and community centres in associational life, mostly well-written, if clearly rushed.

Will this report push the pace among policy makers, to help protect and promote local civil associations? There’s a crucial section on page 31 which refers to social impact statements and cites a Public Administration Select Committee report, ending – you might almost think inspirationally - with these points:

‘A better recognition of the hidden wealth of informal activities [that’s more like it] requires this more sophisticated understanding of how casual connections contribute to our national social capital stocks… Leisure pursuits, as ‘crucibles of casual connections’ that are purposive, pooling, and encourage inclusive social mixing, should be recognised and promoted in policy implementation as vehicles for cultivating social value.’

Yes, more please. And among the report’s recommendations there’s a strong and much-needed case made for social value impact statements. Coming from this source, it may be heard, and if there’s anything left of the public realm by the time it gets processed, some good will come of it.

Meanwhile, back on page 31, the authors break down the category of 'casual connections' and point out the need

‘to distinguish between the kinds of connections we form when engaged in purposive activity from (sic) non-purposive types of chance activity, such as bumping into friends or family at the shops or striking up conversations with strangers at bus stops.'

They note that

'Purposive casual connections are forged and fostered in situations where people indulge in activities for a particular purpose and social outcome, when engaging in sport or team activities, other competitive games such as bingo, or educational leisure such as arts classes.'

Which of course has long been one of the arguments for adult learning, so wretchedly underfunded by recent governments. I merely mention. It doesn't mean that we can dismiss ‘non-purposive casual connections': we're told that these more informal encounters

'are unlikely to lead to social actions.’ 

The word ‘directly’, inserted about four words from the end, might have helped saved this sentence, otherwise it’s an unfortunate remark which weakens the whole approach. Non-purposive casual connections are fundamental – everything else would fall over without them. It would be difficult to describe or account for social life (adapting a phrase used by David Morgan which I quoted here) without passing and fleeting acquaintances. Apart from anything else, they give rise to a lot of other encounters and activities. In social relations, the trivial is massively significant. The 2008 CLG guidance on ‘meaningful interaction’ made the same mistake. We have been here before a few times.

That is not to say that casual connections in purposive surroundings are not important, of course they are. Just don’t diss the superficial, ok? You see why this paper is such a frustrating read, by turn informative and insightful, then inadequate and misguided.

As an example of the latter, and I’m really not worked up about this, there’s a shallow section on ‘From online to face-to-face interaction’ which embarassingly fails to grasp the extent or nature of local online interaction. This would not be a problem if the authors didn’t decide to pronounce on the subject with such assumed authority.

Local social technologies have moved on a long way from ‘cyber balkanisation’ – the phenomenon whereby online participation is perceived to cluster around interest not locality (and no, Putnam didn’t coin the term, it goes back at least to Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson in 1996. I published something on this in New statesman in about 99. It's past).

Just a glance at Keith Hampton’s work, well-known as the leading researcher in this field, would have helped; or even some extensive, well-respected, ahem, home-grown UK primary research carried out a couple of years ago. After that, when chapter four begins on the premiss that 'individuals have adapted their group behaviours to changing socio-cultural and technological environments' without reference to Barry Wellman and networked individualism, it's hard to retain much confidence.

Where I feel this paper fails most, however, is at what may be the most difficult task, which is explaining what the traditional concept of membership means in the network society. Is association through membership, with or without the tradition of unionism, co-operatives and mutual societies, an anachronism or a social necessity? Personally I suspect it's a characteristic of hierachical societies dominated by organisations rather than networks, but I'm ready to be persuaded otherwise. In spite of an interesting section on ‘From consumers to members’, this paper doesn’t get near an answer.

My sense of disappointment in the squandered opportunity of this paper is barely allayed by the possibility that ResPublica's access to policy makers might have some effect. Perhaps shrewdly, they adopted a smart technique to promote the report among people in positions of power, while discouraging those in community development or community action from taking any notice – they got Eric Pickles to launch it. 

But still, the unexpected attention on clubs is welcome. My excellent friend Ruth Cherrington, an authority on working men’s clubs, will doubtless be as pleased as the rest of us that at last some policy attention might be paid to the ‘untapped value’ of ‘membership environments’. But only a big society sleepwalker would overlook the likelihood that there would be attempts to capture and exploit a celebration of ordinary people’s community lives mutually-constructed against the odds.

With a couple of exceptions, the recommendations are disappointingly unambitious, characterised by the customary passing of the buck to local authorities, using the standard reality-blind formula of ‘local authorities need to consider [insert  favourite topic] as an alternative to closure’.

Maybe that last phrase, ‘alternative to closure’, needs a little more reflection among right wing think tanks. Taking the right's approach to public libraries as an example - often offered as one of the key reasons for the tories to get a thorough hammering as soon as moderate middle class people can get to the polling stations – it’s worth noting that an alternative to closure is sometimes, ahem, keeping things open.

(My dear chap, why didn’t we think of that?)

And that's it really - arguing for investment in informal social networks is vital but seems pointless in a policy context dominated by the demolition of the public. 

One last thought. I mentioned Skidmore and Craig’s Start with people, an uneven work but one that should not be overlooked. With all the recent fuss about the ‘innovation’ of localism as if it were an invention of this government, you might be surprised to read this on p88 – published seven years ago:

‘subject to certain safeguards, if local communities can demonstrate sufficient popular support they should be granted a right of initiative to propose a local intervention and require local authorities to bring forth a proposal and vote on it.’

Even their best ideas aren't new.

 

How does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past?

Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours, Cheek by jowl, which I’ve already referred to a couple of times, is packed with little anecdotes of neighbour relations in England since the late medieval period. I’m left in awe of her achievement in accumulating so much absorbing evidence. The pace is sometimes a bit breathless as story follows story; and the author is never in a hurry to offer a theory or generalised conclusion from what she’s shared. But the style is very readable, laced with occasional dashes of light humour.

So come on Emily, we all want to know: how does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past? In spite of her general coyness as far as conclusions are concerned, this bit sounds pretty confident:

‘Active neighbouring has declined, but latent neighbouring has remained. Most neighbours still trust each other and will help out in an emergency. Who would want to return to traditional neighbouring, if that came with the hardship and lack of privacy that fostered it? Modern neighbouring has a different character because the context is different. We rely on neighbours less; we can be passive neighbours.’

Sounds about right to me, and it pretty much fits with other conclusions such as those of Mary Godfrey and her colleagues. My take on it would be something like this:

One form of neighbouring that has almost certainly declined is what we might call ‘negative neighbouring’ – a moral governing culture typically referred to now under the label ‘curtain-twitching,’ which had evolved to establish and reinforce norms, and those norms extended into gender, racial and other stereotypes.

Of course there are plenty of contemporary anecdotes about this form of neighbouring but I don’t think anyone is putting forward the argument that it is more prevalent and influential today than it was 60 years ago.

If we think of some forms of neighbourliness in more neutral terms – just knowing and recognising people whose help could be mobilised in time of need – it’s probably fair to say that the numbers of local people we know in this way have decreased. But that may not be at all critical if, as for most of us, the number of people we know whose help we can summon readily has not decreased. Even if some or many of our contacts are not going to be physically within reach in a home-based emergency, their power to engage appropriate neighbourly support may still be strong.

Finally, what about what I have called ‘supportive’ neighbouring, the sort of behaviour between co-residents in which people go just a fraction out of their way to be supportive and imply readiness to help in time of need, without transgressing the norms of privacy? I really have my doubts that this has declined to any great extent if at all.

Where Emily and I probably differ though is in the weight given to the welfare state as having ‘crowded out’ people’s readiness to offer support. It’s obvious that to some extent, formal services have taken over occasions such as childbirth when in the past neighbours were more or less forced to depend on each other. We’d expect that the nature of neighbouring would change as a consequence; but it wouldn’t necessarily have declined significantly.

My sense is that if neighbourliness really did decline over the past generation, then of all the contributory factors, the crowding out by the welfare state was not one of the most important. The availability of organised social care for those who needed it not only made life more liveable for millions, it probably had far less of an impact on positive neighbouring than did the availability and use of cars; television; new forms of housing; comparative wealth; population diversity; and a cohort of women in the labour market.

And so, as I wrote here:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

I do believe that when residents connect through neighbourhood online networks, where those are collectively-oriented, the potential to resolve this challenge is significant.

Against that, as I’ve said before, investing in formal initiatives in order to generate local social connections may be of limited value, being back-to-front. Emily's pretty emphatic on this:

‘Good Neighbour societies are founded on a notion that organisation will bring about a return to traditional neighbourliness. It will not.’

So with all this in mind, I’m proposing a meeting about the past, present and future of neighbouring, in London in about a month’s time – just before the jubilee street party brouhaha swamps us all with romantic representations of community and soppy insistence on formal mechanisms as the key to revisiting a past golden age of neighbouring… More on that very soon.

Keeping ourselves to ourselves

So much of contemporary neighbouring is about noisiness, but this is about nosyness.

A survey reported as part of the Digital Switchover Help Scheme has found that for 27 per cent of the 2,000 respondents from across London, ‘fear of appearing nosey’ was the reason for keeping themselves to themselves. Disparaging terms like ‘curtain twitcher,’ ‘nosy parker,’ or 'sticky beak' have damaging cultural ramifications.

Fear of appearing nosey might be seen as a consequence of the way we emphasise privacy. We are not allowed to build or extend our houses if they allow us to see each other within. My house was built before such legal insistence, and fortunately a healthy relationship with our neighbours is reinforced by being able informally to keep an eye out for each other.

In the Netherlands, a curious culture of window dressing evolved through the late twentieth century, whereby it was frowned upon to use curtains or shutters, so homeowners would restrict what was visible internally through elaborate decoration (see 1989 article by Hernan Vera).

I’m reading Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours and finding various examples of intimate details shared unintentionally in previous ages, due to ‘the thinness of pre-modern walls’ – complicated no doubt by lower expectations of privacy.

The determination to avoid accusations of nosyness obviously reduces people’s availability to respond in time of need; and as soon as a critical mass of people with the same attitude has built up, it’s likely to have an impact on the other side of the equation, readiness to ask for help. This is one of the explanations for what Lilian Linders terms the 'request scruple'. As I noted a year ago, her research shows that this reluctance is more problematic than the assumed shortage in the supply of neighbourliness.

Dilemmas of interference in neighbouring are persistent unless you choose not to occupy your neighbourhood. Here’s my own example, after which I started to wonder if my neighbour thinks I'm nosy for having advised him that his downstairs window was open overnight in the rain.

 

Neighbourhood care groups

Neighbourhood care groups and organisations provide an astonishing social resource which seldom penetrates the policy-media consciousness. Some I know a little about, such as Brighton and Hove Neighbourhood Care Scheme, and Tower Hamlets Friends and Neighbours (where I was a trustee for a while). Now, thanks to Bernard Leach, erstwhile head of sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, I’ve been learning a little about a group which has been active in Chorlton, Manchester for 44 years.

Chorlton Good Neighbours (CGN) was established in 1967 by local people and has evolved to become a well-established charity offering a range of services to local older people. It currently has over 250 users and 70 volunteers. The group offers a range of practical support including transport and odd jobs for example; and various activities such as exercise classes, cooking sessions, and trips out.

CGN recently carried out their own research with a view to capturing the benefits that are generated by organising care collectively and providing a context for volunteers. The research was based on a survey which asked about levels of confidence to meet and socialise; health, well-being, independence and self-worth; sources of information and advice; sense of safety; and feelings of involvement. This exercise illustrates the great value in having high quality informal local arrangements for people in need of help and support. Take this quote for instance:

‘there is also a policy of ringing up people if for example, they don’t turn up for sessions they normally come to, or if a volunteer notices when delivering a newsletter that there is a lot of mail uncollected... We go the extra step, not just because it is the correct professional thing to do, but because volunteers and users know each other and care for each other.’

Or consider the chart below, which hints at the benefits felt from the range of activities run by the group:

The report suggests that:

‘Overall, the evidence base points to the conclusion that CGN’s activities do change users’ attitudes, lifestyles and their mental and physical wellbeing. It is reasonable to go on to conclude that such care services can lead to significant savings for both the NHS and the Local Authority’s Social Services…

Core activities such as home visits, wheelchair support, coffee morning, Sunday teas and day trips will remain at the heart of what we deliver as they provide a haven of friendship and support – neighbourliness – which enrich the lives of all those involved with Chorlton Good Neighbours.’

 For more details about the report, contact Bernard Leach – btleach { at } gmail.com.

Christenings and funerals

Striking story from Steph Jennings on Podnosh about Mosies, a resident of Handsworth in Birmingham, who is working with a group to help influence people who are stuck with the perception that joining a gang is their only option.

'The girls have babies and the boys shoot and stab each other. I’ve lost count of the amount of christenings and funerals I’ve been to but I’ve never been to a wedding that’s just not what we do.'

And Steph is right in observing that you're unlikely to get this kind of story or insight from the prescribed training session format. Semi-formal community-based occasions, like the social media surgeries Podnosh are involved in, are more likely to nurture the sense of camaraderie and ownership that stimulates a shared determination to bring about change.

 

 

Let there be strong networks

Here’s another report calling for policy to bolster social networks – this one is from the International Longevity Centre UK, Can localism work for older people in urban environments? In this case the call is ‘to strengthen interpersonal, intergenerational, and multigenerational networks, particularly in urban areas.’

This accumulating acknowledgement that our dependence on institutions has left us vulnerable, as a society, is not misplaced in my view. The echo is familiar, as is the echo of the echo. Network poverty was worthy of more research attention than it got in recent wealthier times. Now that we really need some data on it, I suspect we’re going to be leaning heavily on the RSA study because I’m not sure there’s a great deal else to go on.

So what does it mean, to a policymaker, this call to help strengthen social networks? How should policy respond?

I’d start with a requirement that local policies should avoid doing damage to existing local social networks, a bit like the duty to involve. Vicki Nash suggested something similar, ‘community proofing,’ some years ago.

It would mean for instance that a new supermarket or road widening or library closure could not be approved without an intelligible analysis of its impact on local social networks, an analysis that in turn would inform public consultation. It wouldn’t take us long to develop the methodology, once we had to. I’ve suggested before, the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of local amenities that stimulate social networks is because no political value has been placed on human processes that are informal and organic.

Will that change, with all these calls to strengthen networks? Is there the political will to acknowledge that local social interactions have value which plays out in, and profoundly affects the costs of, other social provision?

The requirement to avoid network damage does not have to be accompanied by a given standard of social network strength, to which all neighbourhoods should be expected to aspire. Wrong approach, don’t go there.

But yes it should set us thinking about other ways of enhancing informal interaction, for example through the design of local spaces and dwellings; placing more than crudely economic value on local third places; support for local online networks; policies that discourage unnecessary car use and encourage walking; promotion of the principle of local (walkable) services and local (walkable) schools… All these will seem eminently sensible, if they don’t already, once there is government-level recognition of the essential value of informal interactions and the local social networks that they represent.

All this has drawn me back to a book chapter I wrote on policy and local social relations, here, in which I noted that

‘social relationships in neighbourhoods are organic, requiring a healthy ecology that reflects informality and also requiring that most of the time formality keeps its distance.’

And in which I quoted Robert Ellikson’s observation that

‘…lawmakers who are unappreciative of the social conditions that foster informal cooperation are likely to create a world in which there is both more law and less order.’

 

 

Loneliness, isolation and social media

JRF have published a useful and clear literature and practice review for the Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme.

It's worth reiterating a few points. As I've noted before -

• loneliness is not the same as isolation - it's an unwelcome form of isolation which has social (and by extension economic) consequences;
• loneliness is not age-related (the Gulbenkian Campaign to End Loneliness is focused on people in old age, and I fear this serves to perpetuate the social dismissal of the issue among other age groups);
• loneliness is quite separate to the sense of belonging or not belonging to a place; and
• the way we address it could be influenced by the power of social media in strengthening and sustaining local connections.

There seems to be a widespread assumption that loneliness is increasing. The Mental Health Foundation's excellent report last year suggested as much but does not seem to confirm it. I think we should be alert but sceptical.

As it happens, with a little time to do some catching up over the past few days, I've managed to read one of Keith Hampton's recent papers, on the relationship of internet and mobile phone use to network size and diversity. Among the points made with characteristic thoroughness are the following:

• reports that social isolation has increased significantly in the USA since 1985 seem to have been exaggerated and in fact isolation may have declined; and
• there is no evidence that the use of internet or mobile phones diminishes the size or diversity of people's core networks. Specific uses of social media were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity.

The Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme includes a question about new media, but JRF's approach to technology has always been tentative, not to say reluctant. It would be good if they would grab the initiative in this case, and really open up the potential here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the evidence on local online channels gives us plenty to go on.

Previously:

• Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?
• Loneliness and mental distress

 

'I need your help'

I wrote a few weeks ago about the 'request scruple' and people's willingness or unwillingness to ask for help. Now here's Amanda's engrossing tale of neighbouring from Boston, Mass. 'I need you to help me pick up my motha,' gasps the passer-by. I can easily see this one getting taken up by the neat but cringingly-yclept good gym.

For me it brought back memories of being in Boston for the marathon and for some seminars about neighbourhood relations at MIT, in 2003.

It also made me think about occasions when I've been approached for help by people on the fringes of my neighbourhood or theirs. Usually they're wholly trusting encounters, for example when as I was passing I was asked to go into a house not far away but outside my immediate neighbouhood, to help shut a window - the owner was away and their keyholding neighbour was anxious about security. I didn't know her but maybe she recognised me as a local, as a regular pedestrian hereabouts for many years.

One encounter not long ago rather nonplussed me, when I was asked when passing a bus-stop - the guy suddenly up so close I felt his breath on my face - for a pound. I asked what for, he said so he could buy a book in the charity shop.

The ‘request scruple’ and the demand for neighbourliness

Our society seems to be crying out with a perceived need to stimulate neighbourliness. The assumption is that the supply of neighbourliness in many residential populations is simply inadequate for the demand: people are not neighbourly enough, it seems, and the entire social structure is in jeopardy. The hunt is on to invent ways of stimulating neighbouring. So here's the Campaign to End Loneliness starting to capture ideas for instance, and we have one or two over on the 50 Ways site also. Is this the right approach?

Back in 2009 I had the privilege of editing the English language summary of a Dutch PhD thesis submitted by my friend Lilian Linders.

The study was about ‘the significance of proximity’ and looked at the nature of informal care at neighbourhood level. What Lilian found and describes is starting to excite the social welfare field in the Netherlands, and there are good reasons to reflect on her conclusions.

The research was carried out in a low income urban area, perceived as fairly cohesive in the traditional sense, with a population of about 2,400, clamped between an industrial zone and several highways. (I was driven close by last week, as it happens). Lilian speaks of ‘informal care’ in a very broad sense, she means I think the full range of informal support provided, including informal care and some very intimate tasks carried out by known co-residents repeatedly.

‘Apart from the willingness to help a neighbour, a plethora of problems like poverty, alcoholism, incest, disease, divorce, debts, domestic violence and loneliness was found. Therefore the dividing line between givers and receivers of informal care is blurred. The model is one of mutual aid.’

She found that most support was provided one-to-one, not on a collective (‘community’) basis, but simply because people knew each other. It had everything to do with trust at a personal level.

One of the things that Lilian latched onto, with keen insight, was the reticence in requesting neighbourly support. She calls this the ‘request scruple’ – a reluctance to ask for help. This contrasts sharply with the ‘support scruple’ – the reluctance to offer support.

Neighbours prefer social distance and are surprisingly reluctant to ask for support. Nonetheless, they do help each other, on an individual one-to-one basis, in personal and sometimes demanding and intimate circumstances.

The reluctance to ask for support extends to friends, acquaintances and family members, largely because of the fear of dependency and the social ideal of autonomy.

Lilian’s key finding is that the request scruple is far more of an impediment to informal care than is a shortage in the supply.

This helps to clarify the argument that informal care is not a consequence of neighbourhood cohesion: it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you have a cohesive neighbourhood, people will care for one another in time of need. That depends on personal relationships.

One last point. Lilian draws attention to the significance of mutual support between vulnerable people. This is a tidy example of the difference between the Dutch approach and the English. Big society thinking clobbers away at notions of charity and philanthropy, thinking those of us with some kind of surplus should be supporting those without. In the Netherlands, as I have been describing in recent posts, there is serious policy impetus behind the principle of informal care and mutual support.

You can see a clear English language presentation summary of Lilian’s work here.

Speaking to the study tour group last week, Lilian's colleague Rick Kwekkeboom had some important points to add, particularly around the invisibility of informal care. She noted that informal support only becomes visible when it is over-loaded. The role for formal services is to help people to care for one another and not get overburdened.

I don't see the request scruple as a peculiarly Dutch phenomenon. In the UK we could do with an approach to social support that acknowledges these nuances of mutual support, and is less obsessed with some kind of charitable or philanthropic motivation.

Previously:

Social networks and informal support

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

Other posts tagged 'Informal support'

 

Mutual support and ‘primary care’

In Eindhoven the other day I had the privilege to meet co-ordinators of an extensive self-help network, hear about some of the ways in which the groups work, and gain insight into the importance of the experience for sufferers. There are about 80 mutual support groups in the network, covering a range of shareable problems including mental health, addiction, sexuality, and so on. One of the promotional leaflets proclaims:

‘Secretly, many tea parties are self-help support groups’.

Our discussion was framed by the broad social policy context of how a society provides care for its citizens; what are the responsibilities of individual and state, what is the role of the professional, and so on.

Someone mentioned ‘primary care’. What ironic language, in the circumstances. There we sat at a focal point for several hundred people who come together semi-formally to help themselves and others as fellow-sufferers to just about function, not disparaging professional care but claiming and reserving an independent space. And we were using the language that characterises part of the problem.

I suggested a while ago that most 'primary care' is self-administered by individuals or administered within households. It was suggested that perhaps that’s ‘zero care’. Fair enough. Listening to the members of the self help network, I thought, this is primary care.

So it would be helpful if the care system were re-oriented to acknowledge, structurally and constructively, the role that people themselves play in co-producing each others' health and care and quality of life. That would also be likely to save money, though not for the insurance and drug companies.

 

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

It’s obvious that informal support and social networks can be critical to the way society looks after its members. When people can use their social networks to get support without going through formal agencies, there are social and economic benefits. Has the time finally come for this logic to be recognised in policy? (Image from Viil Lid).

I happen to think this is quite a big deal. I’m just back from an utterly absorbing study tour in the Netherlands, organised by my friend Jan Steyaert for researchers from the Centre for Social Justice in the UK. We were exploring policy issues around the changing nature of social care in the post-welfare society, and Eindhoven is replete with thought-provoking initiatives and articulate people who have been reflecting on the significant shifts implied for practitioners and citizens. I tagged along to make wonky observations in the background, a role to which I seem to be peculiarly suited.

The basis of lots of urgent fresh thinking is the 2007 Social Support Act (known as the Wmo) which requires a shift in care work and social work towards what is known as ‘welfare new style’. Of course, as in the UK and elsewhere, much of this is driven by the mismatch between increasing care costs and shrinking public funds; but here, unlike with big society, there is immediate and valuing recognition of people's pre-existing connections.

The main points that dominated discussion of Dutch care practice were these:

• Focus on the strengths and resources of the individual, not on their problems
• Map, stimulate and involve the individual’s social network as a key resource
• Emphasise collective rather than individual support solutions
• Use professional care as a ‘last resort’.

I think this is both radical and exemplary. Quite apart from the community development principle of bringing collective solutions into the frame, here we have at last got governmental justification for stimulating social networks, with policy makers pushing care agencies of all kinds to pay due attention to people’s social connections. For example, one disability adviser who visits people with particular needs begins with a conversation based on a simple social network mapping template. Expect to see rapid standardisation of social network mapping in the Dutch public sector.

No-one seemed to know how the idea came so marvellously to be given such primacy, but here it is. And the logic is straightforward. For a long time it has been apparent that formal care is too dominant, has unacknowledged negative effects, and is provided at unaffordable levels. Ergo, we need to recognise and invest in informal support; ergo, we need to emphasise and encourage social networks – especially at local level. Why has this not happened before or elsewhere? Is it because we don’t make measureable claims for the part played by social networks, because we can’t see the results? Is it because no budget gets attached to them, so no-one with influence wants to ‘own’ them? Incidentally, this is not about consigning professional care to insignificance, but about re-establishing an appropriate balance between formal and informal.

In theory the Wmo seems to use the term ‘informal care’ with reference mainly to long term intensive carers. But the term seemed also to be used to imply what we might call informal support, thus covering a broad spectrum from low-commitment, dip-in dip-out five minute neighbouring; through something regular perhaps like weekly shopping with or for a frail elderly person; to high-intensity 24x7 unpaid care for someone with physical disabilities. This breadth of meaning may reflect developments in thinking since the act, and would account for the emphasis on social networks.

One advice worker rationalised the process by saying that as a society,

‘We have to go back to normal and look after each other.’

And so philosophical and anthropological questions about ‘community’ get raised. On what scale and under what circumstances is it 'normal' to provide informal support to others? The nostalgic plea doesn’t work very well, I suggest: some people challenge the mythology of the close-knit community, others point to the downsides and the basis in necessity neighbouring, and so on. Against that, we need some basis on which to establish the levels of trust that can in turn give rise to useable network connections.

An acknowledged problem for the Dutch approach is that many people are reluctant to ask for support, to make claims on their social network, to invest in their social network or exploit it for such purposes. One observation we heard was that in some cases ‘the social network is broken’. Another story concerned an individual who appeared at first to have no appropriate sources of support, then when they went out onto the street with the social worker there was plenty of recognition by others and the individual acknowledged,

‘yes of course I have a network, but I didn’t want the network to know my situation’.

We heard about this on several occasions and in particular in the significant research of Lilian Linders – which I happen to know a little about and which I will describe in a separate post in the near future.

 

 

Informal volunteering continues to decline

I missed this when it came out a month ago but it's worth going back to. We now have Citizenship survey figures for informal volunteering for the first half of the present year (April - September) and the decline ought to be of real concern to policy makers.

Over a year ago I pointed out a five per cent decline within the space of a year. The proportion saying that they volunteer informally at least once per month is now down to 27 per cent; and once per year, 54 per cent. These compare with 37 per cent and 68 per cent respectively in the bumper year of 2005. I devised this chart from data supplied in Table 5 here.

I've suggested before that this trend might just be a bit critical in terms of care for older people. I'm writing this in the plush comfort of the night ferry (yes, free reliable wifi) on my way back from an insightful study visit to the Netherlands. Two intensive days of learning have clarified the argument for me sharply. The Dutch are well in front of us: their Social Support Act (2007) has led to a radical emphasis on informal support and social networks, which I want to cover in my next post.

Harvest, neighbourliness and altruism

I generally treat narratives of the decline of neighbouring with cautious respect. Here's a comment responding to a post on the global Irish Central site, raising a valid point about the impact of technology on local social relations, which I don't recall having heard before:

'When I visited Ireland as a child, saving the hay was a community event. The neighbors would pitch in and help each other. The mechanization of farming has removed that shared sense of community gained from helping one's neighbors.'

There's no doubt that community involvement in the economically-critical harvest applied in many countries over centuries. We think of Levin over-exerting himself with the serfs, in Anna Karenina. Excluding imaginative aristocrats, most of the participants in such scenes would have experienced intermittent mutual dependence which defined community for them. The basis was necessity neighbouring: individuals had self-interested motivation for co-operating with their neighbour (and coercive religious practices often did the rest). Failure to maximise the harvest, perhaps with too few hands available to bring it in before the weather changed, seriously threatened the chances of the whole village getting through the winter.

We might also ask about some of the oppressive social structures under which this sometimes tortuous labour was unavoidable (no apols for sounding momentarily marxist) - who was benefitting most from this skilled, physical, coordinated effort? - and therefore the conditions under which the mutual commitment that we call 'community' arose.

By all means we should reflect on the contrasts (and similarities) between local social relations in other societies and those that prevail today. But let's at least recognise that versions of 'community' which may have become scarce and and are now regretted, had their basis in motivations that were not necessarily altruistic, and in economics that were not necessarily inclusive.

The contemporary challenge might be expressed thus: how does neighbourliness and sense of community emerge in societies that lack identifiable, manifold mutual dependence?

 

Philanthropy, community action and 'economic activity'

In the debate at yesterday's launch of nef's paper on big society there was a lot of confusion about philanthropy, mutual aid and community action. Each of these at some point seemed to be implied by speakers and comments from the floor in using the short-hand but inadequate term 'charities' (or 'small charities'); and sometimes covered by the term 'volunteers'.

Each of these forms of involvement tries to compensate for the shortfall in formal support or otherwise complement the role of the state, and is assumed to be unpaid. However, they may differ very markedly - in political ideology for example and obviously in the degree to which they aspire to empower or in practice disempower. It's also obvious that they are unevenly distributed in localities across the country. As I've suggested before, in some places it will be relatively easy to mobilise philanthropic volunteering while in others it could prove very hard to sustain even the proudest tradition of mutual aid.

Guardian Society editor Patrick Butler was the only one to come close to unpacking this in his short talk, sending me back to a seminal paper by Gabriel Chanan called Taken for granted, published in 1991.

Taken for granted was important because it revealed the distinction between volunteering based on a philanthropic tradition (ie something which comes from the surplus that 'well-motivated people' donate to others who they see as less fortunate than themselves); and community action which arises from people's own life-support needs, being

occupied in looking after children, elderly people, sometimes people with disabilities, and in doing the whole range of unpaid work which is taken for granted in the running of society - cooking, shopping, cleaning, maintaining social networks, 'emotional housekeeping', protecting local interests and the many other forms of essential activity which we take for granted as the basis for our common existence.

Gabriel went much further, locating the cause of the confusion over the community and voluntary sectors in the economic value placed on unpaid work:

All this tends to confirm the conventional definition of economic activity and to reinforce the image of the 'inactive' half of the population as being passive dependents of the 'active' half.

Sounds sort-of familiar. Twenty years on, here we are contemplating a forced revision of that conventional definition of economic activity against a cacophony of complaints about the economically 'inactive'. It's not a good time to be blurring our understanding of the different agents who can bring about that revision.

Patrick Butler warned yesterday of the possibility that before too long

'many of the charities that the big society will rely on will be dead, dying or missing in action.'

This brings an urgency to the necessary examination of that word 'charities', and perhaps we have to move the big society emphasis away from philanthropy that disempowers, to mutual aid and community action that drives and makes possible the development of skills, confidence, trust, tolerance, co-production, and local economies that include caring.

 

What makes a neighbourhood network?

How do local connections between residents get fused into an effective communicative network that comes in time to underpin everything else that happens?

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday at Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where I was lucky enough to be picking up wisdom from people like Paul Slatter and Hannah Worth from Chamberlain Forum, Ben Lee from NANM, Elke Loeffler from Governance International, plus Dick Atkinson and the folk from the famous Balsall Heath Forum.

I'd heard and read plenty about Dick and about what had been achieved at Balsall Heath, and this was my first visit. It's a hugely reasuring place, unpretensiously displaying the commonsense of ordinary people getting stuff done locally.

But I wanted to know, how come? There are active street 'stewards' (with or without the title) in 15 sets of 3-4 streets. I liked Dick's remark that

'With a bit of support and encouragement people do more than they think they can.'

This gives the forum a firm foundation of local people who are continually ferreting away at issues. OK let's be clear: we're talking about unpaid, unelected active local citizens, who 'have emerged out of street life' (Dick's words) in numbers that are sufficient to cover an area with a population of 14,000, loosely linked through neighbourhood management and an elected forum. According to the website

There are 22 residents groups, and 70 Street Stewards. So the whole neighbourhood is covered. Everyone knows someone and the sense of mutual self-help is fostered.

So I'm slightly enviously think about why this hasn't quite happened in Shipley, where I've tried to help out every so often over the years. Having a resident-employed resident, Abdullah, who supports the street stewards and takes some of the pressure off them, must make a difference. He tells us about the advantages of living in the neighbourhood where you work - you get a better response, people don't think you have a hidden agenda: 'they don't see me as a threat'.

And this can be very proactive work. We heard a story of two residents doorknocking because of an eyesore front garden, to discover a man on his own who badly needed, and was given, support.

But none of this, nor the recorded history of Balsall Heath Forum, quite explains how local networks grow and strengthen in some places and not in others. Informality is obviously crucial. But how come the initial connections, presumably between a few willing, motivated, slightly uncertain folk, have ramified and come to underpin a significant amount of what can be done now without the clumsy machinery of the city's formal services?

We didn't come up with an explanation, but I certainly came away with a clearer sense of the fundamental significance of an informal communication network in driving social change at neighbourhood level. For sure, if I'd been shown a unique ingredient I wouldn't have trusted it anyway.

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

The amount of emotional or instrumental support that you receive from your social network, and the amount that you give, can be calculated and represented on a reciprocity scale.

So you might give a lot of practical help to others and not need much yourself at the moment, scoring positively for instrumental reciprocity. You could have been going through a hard time and be needing more emotional support than you've been able to offer others, scoring negatively for emotional reciprocity.

Back in 1992, as I've been reading, some Dutch researchers plotted these scales for a large sample of older people. As we'd expect, instrumental support given decreases sharply with age. The researchers found that instrumental reciprocity began to decrease at the age of 64, echoing that rather crummy Beatles song.

More interestingly, they identified a turning point, where a relative surplus of instrumental support given changes into a relative deficit, at approximately the age of 66. Of course, you can expect your social network to decrease in size as you get older, and your reciprocity scale will also be affected by living in a care home where most of your instrumental needs are going to be catered for. The research seems to suggest that a sizeable minority of older people do deliberately seek to increase the amount of emotional support they give as their ability to provide instrumental support declines.

Unfortunately, as a society we're not very good at providing contexts for emotional support, so that too many older people experience a sense of dependence rather than interdependence, submerged below the hoizontal line in the graph.

I'm hoping there has been some follow up to this research: I've not found it yet, but would be keen to learn of it.

van Tilburg et al. Flow of support. In: Living arrangements and social networks of older adults, VU University Press, 1995.

Nutrition and community meals

Recently I've been building a wiki on neighbourhood support for older people, to try and focus information and understanding on this crassly-overlooked issue. I'll open it soon, but meanwhile if you're interested in contributing please get in touch.

Here's the sort of thing that goes into the pot, so to speak: ILC-UK have published a paper by Lisa Wilson on Personalisation, nutrition and the role of community meals. It notes that there is a strong underlying economic argument for supporting older people to remain independent and in their own homes, and for ensuring good nutritional status. It begins with a striking statistic:

'There are currently more people in the UK receiving meals in their own home than there are older people in care homes.'

Hence one of the main arguments:

'Meal provision and access to food must be considered a core part of social care packages and meals must be provided to at risk groups, not just to those who have reached the point of being unable to manage themselves.'

Unannounced visits: family, friends, salespeople

I remember my old mum used to delight in an unannounced visit, if I happened to be out for a long run or nearby with some time to spare. Many of us live highly-organised lives now though, and we have our technologies to check ahead for convenience. We don't do surprises. Saga recently published results from the Saga Populus Panel survey of over-50s, in which they asked about unexpected visitors popping in.

The unsolicited attention of salespeople (nowadays they always start by telling you 'it's alright, I'm not going to try to sell you anything...') is always unfortunate as someone who works at home and my sense is that the practice has increased noticeably in the recession. Thirteen per cent of panel respondents say it happens 'often' and the proportion is higher (17%) in the over-75 age group.

But the figures for family (35%) and friends (36%) are encouraging. The regional differences (eg family in London, 25%; in Northern Ireland, 49%) are stark if unsurprising.

The survey also asked how well people know their neighbours. Here too the figures are interesting, with just 1% in all age groups and all socio-economic groups saying that they 'don't know them at all'. (See my previous tentative conclusion that for the general population, about 5% of us have no contact with our neighbours).

According to the Saga Populus Panel data, about one third of over-50s say they know their neighbours well 'and often socialise together', while 64% say 'we talk and say hello sometimes'. For those over 75, the proportion who say they know their neighbours well and socialise is a stomping 44%.

I note that this was an online survey: does this mean the sample is biassed towards people who are more communicative?

Informal volunteering

Here's the trend in informal volunteering in England, which I flagged up last October. Just something to keep an eye on.

Source.

Informal local support in severe weather

Two cheers for CLG who have rushed out a short document called Volunteering and neighbourliness: helping out in severe weather.

It's an odd mixture of advice about hypothermia and frostbite, some useful suggestions from Volunteering England, and encouragement to 'call in regularly on elderly friends, neighbours and relatives to see if they need help staying warm or getting provisions'.

It feels like some of the content should be on posters in shops, banks and post offices etc; some belongs in press releases so that local newspapers and other sources reproduce it; and some might even belong in leaflets for more general distribution.

Perhaps it's also worth thinking about a more considered version in advance of the next cold snap. Things like neighbours placing a home delivery order with a supermarket for an older person who may not have internet access; thinking about the welfare of their pets, which often worries them; walking in the house with an older neighbour - up and down the hall to get a bit of exercise can be very important. And CLG could be thinking about getting messages like these out through hyperlocal sites: by next winter please.

Informal care and older people: time for a campaign?

News of the year? The importance of neighbourly informal support for older people has been recognised in the Department of Health. From yesterday's press release:

With many older people living alone and more than 180,000 saying they have gone for a whole week without speaking to friends, family or neighbours, Care Service Minister Phil Hope is asking the public to make a New Year’s resolution to visit older neighbours more often.

Social interaction can protect older people’s mental health, helping to do their shopping will prevent falls and injury and keeping an eye on their health will stop them developing serious health problems and ending up in hospital.

What are the chances of this recognition being turned into some kind of strategic initiative, exploring ways of both stimulating and measuring levels of informal support (without booby award schemes for innovation, please) and promoting interdependence?

A year ago we had the results of some work on meaningful interaction (admittedly it all went quiet from the moment of publication). But against that, I have not forgotten that older people were short-changed in the report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

Would a change of government help? Will the recession cause people to revert to a more localised way of life? At the risk of seeming naively bubbly at the start of a new year, would anyone care to join me in working out what is needed under the broad heading of a campaign?

Previously: Copenhagen for the ageing crisis

A Copenhagen for the ageing crisis?

Short moan. This past couple of years I've been at quite a few events about social policy and older people, and on each occasion conscientiously made a point from the floor about the ageing population and the looming crisis of informal care. I've written to people in think tanks and the Guardian and so on, and blogged about it. Policy concerning older people in this country is largely concerned with pensions and benefits, and those themes dominate the debates and the thinking.

Back in July I sounded more patient, referring 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.'

Just for reference and as an indicator, the recent government consultation on the Ageing Strategy had just two questions in the section (ch.8) on communities and neighbourhoods:

Q9. When you stopped driving, what helped you stay mobile and active in your community? What options would have helped?

Q10. We want to improve attitudes towards ageing across society. What more could be done to challenge outdated stereotypes and tackle negative perceptions about being old? Can you share good examples of where this is already happening in your local community?

I'd feel even more disillusioned if it weren't for the fact that in the Netherlands they're doing something about it, running several pilot projects on how to stimulate informal support at local level, and I'm lucky enough to be involved in that work. In the UK, policy blindness to this growing crisis is a disgrace.

End of moan, for the time being, because here's Jackie Ashley in the Guardian with more influence, arguing that 'It could be as serious a threat as climate change, yet so far politicians have barely considered what needs to be done about our ageing population.'

How long will the politicians leave it before any Copenhagen-style twelfth hour consideration, I wonder?