Waving the flag for connected communities
Yesterday I was linesman for my son’s under-17 football team. Today, I chaired a seminar on the RSA’s Connected Communities project. What’s the link?
One of the ideas behind Connected Communities is that regeneration strategies in deprived communities should start not by creating new state-sponsored capacity, but by understanding existing capacity and exploring how it could be enhanced. This is why we are spending the first few months of the project looking at the understanding of people in our research areas of existing organisational and interpersonal networks. One question is whether, if the community understood the existing pattern of networks better, would it be more able to make new connections and spot and address gaps? If people are already doing good things in their community, can they be encouraged and supported to extend their mandate?
Being linesman for an under 17s game is no fun. Many of the players and parents are fine but far too many are not. Being called a ‘f…g cheat’ by a sixteen year old boy who doesn’t like an offside decision is bad enough, but when the parents and coaches join in you really do wonder why you bother. Each Sunday now it feels like the whole match could kick off, with insults, fights and even death threats being bandied about (I’ve seen all three and the season is less than a month old). Yet this very volatility underlines what a lifeline organised football is for these kids. Without it where would the energy of fit, aggressive young men (many of whom clearly have huge issues with authority) be channelled?
As I stood yesterday weighing up whether to report the boy to the ref – which might provoke a riot – or put up with it, I wondered why more couldn’t be put into designing the context for the match. Three simple measures could make all the difference:
1. Players could be banned from making comments directly to officials, having instead to channel them through the team captain.
2. Parents could be banned from making any audible negative comment about any official or player (including their own team and their own child).
3. More radically, the two teams could be required to come into a mixed huddle before every match for a five minute conversation in which two or three players from each team are required to talk about what the game means to them and how committed they are to it being played in the right spirit.
It is really tough running a football team, particularly with challenging kids. With the pitch fees, the ref’s fee, the kits, hiring somewhere to practise, transport etc the costs rise all the time. It’s especially hard in the inner city where there is less space for pitches (I won’t be holding my breath for help from Boris Johnson’s invisible sporting participation plan!). And as the kids get older, as they get harder to organise and as their parents tend to opt out of responsibility, most teams seem close to folding, and many do. So, I admire all the adults who give their time to organise youngsters’ football. But just as the saying goes ‘if you want something done ask someone who’s already busy’ so I wish we could squeeze even more out of this commitment, building a culture around the game which meant young people learnt a bit of character alongside the ball skills.
Welcome Boris – some questions while you are here
The RSA House is hosting London Mayor Boris Johnson today. So it would be impolite and bad business for me to criticise him in my blog.
But I can’t resist raising a couple of questions about the leadership of this great city.
The first goes back to a theme I wrote about last winter: sporting participation and the Olympics. I won’t go back to the whole affair. Suffice to say an initiative at the RSA had lined up a very impressive group of sponsors and supporters for the idea of an independent campaign to deliver on London’s pledge to make these Olympics a catalyst for mass participation in sport. Our idea was rejected on the grounds – surprising given Conservative national policy – that the Mayor didn’t need an independent campaign; it could all be done by local government. Instead Labour MP Kate Hoey (Boris’ sporting advisor) announced the establishment of a new committee, the London Community Sports Board.
That was April and as far as I can see it hasn’t thus far met. Assuming it won’t meet in August, this looks like a lead-in time for a committee meeting of a minimum six months or, to put it another way, a fifth of the time left between now and the Olympics. But have I got this wrong? Is the strategy out there and already making a difference to sporting participation in the poorer areas of London (which, last I heard, was stuck at a level way below most other parts of the UK)? If not, it is not clear how London will live up to the pledge of social inclusion and mass participation that it made when the bid was won.
The second issue is broader. What is the big plan for London? Maybe I’ve missed something but I don’t sense what the capital’s story is, aside from delivering the actual Olympic events. Whether it’s the economy, the environment, community relations, young people or old people, there are big changes and challenges ahead. But I would be hard-pressed to articulate the London vision. Some people say this is Boris’ strength; that he pragmatically goes about things like the abolition of bendy buses or the building of Crossrail without resorting to overblown visionary language. There is something to this but isn’t it also important for places to have an account of where they are going to which residents can relate at some level or another?
Boris can be a brilliant communicator and he has real star appeal as he goes around meeting the people of London. But maybe it will take a little longer to show he can be the leader London needs.
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