Stoking the flames of renewal
I hate Stoke on Trent. It is a place of pain, rain and misery. Before Fellows and friends from the Potteries denounce me, I should admit that my feelings are totally unreasonable and entirely based on having watched my beloved West Bromwich Albion get repeatedly beaten – usually in the bleak mid-winter – by their bogey team Stoke City.
But today I associate the Staffordshire metropolis with inspiration.
On Saturday the RSA – some great Fellows and enthusiastic staff – were honoured to join with Stoke Community Action Fund in hosting Stoke Stories. Rather like the recent Our Leicester event this was a day dedicated to bringing together a wide range of active local citizens and civic organisations to discuss how the city can survive and thrive in these difficult times.
RSA colleagues will be posting more detailed accounts of the day on the Fellowship blog but I want to explore the wider issues generated by events like this. In essence, the attempt to mobilise civil society (which includes public and private organisations with a commitment to place that goes beyond legal responsibilities and profit maximisation) can be seen to have three sets of objectives.
The first is to some extent accomplished in the very holding of the event. It is to strengthen connections and create a context for new initiatives and collaborations. If the Stoke event achieved nothing more, it would have been worth it for the lively Facebook page and a great email list creating forums for ideas to be launched and developed. In his closing remarks, Danny Flynn from North Staffs YMCA, instructed all the delegates to talk to one person they did not already know and then send the outcome of their conversation to local MP Tristram Hunt.
The second and third objectives are tougher to achieve: with the economy in the doldrums, unemployment rising, living standards falling and public service provision being cut, is it possible to generate either improvements in the quality of people’s lives or the health of the local economy? To understand whether and how this is possible requires the development of what I have called ‘a social economy of place’.
On the one hand, this means identifying, mobilising and organising key factors of social production to generate better outcomes for local citizens. Key amongst these factors are:
- Time
- Care and compassion
- Regard and esteem
- Creativity, innovation and hope
In relation to these factors, we know those in play could be applied more productively and also that every large community contains a deep reservoir of untapped time, compassion, esteem and creativity. The big question is: ‘how much social good could in practice be released by the better articulation of these factors?’ To take two obvious examples: could the spare time of those who are unemployed and under employed be better directed towards those whose main problem is loneliness and social isolation; or could better linkages between people make a variety of sporting and cultural activities more viable and affordable, think here of book clubs or kids’ football tournaments.
The economic challenge is even tougher. It is whether, on the one hand, money spent in a place can circulate for longer and more widely in that place (think here of various schemes to encourage people to purchase from locally owned shops) and, on the other, stronger social bonds can start to generate commercial opportunities based on cluster effects or economies of scale (for example, could local craftspeople combine to create a shared marketing and on-line trading capacity).
It is great that the RSA is involved in initiatives like those in Stoke and Leicester. But as a research and development organisation with links to the wider world of ideas, the RSA should be aiming to work with localities to do the tough work of exploring how civic enthusiasm can be applied to a civic strategy underpinned by a robust social economy of place.
As so often the problem is capacity. The RSA has a great deal of relevant insight and experience from projects like Connected Communities and Citizen Power. I would love to find the funding to enable a major action research project (which we would happily do in collaboration with partners) to explore one of the most important questions of our time: how do we tap the hidden wealth of every community so that society can flourish despite the continuing frailties of the market and state.
Maximum impact
Often an issue engages us because over a short period of time it has come up from different angles in different contexts. For me themost recent example concerns the way the RSA describes social impact. The issue cropped up at a recent Trustee meeting in relation to different views about how we should judge the success for RSA projects. For some Trustees the most important thing is impact on the ground, others would like to see evidence that we are influencing policy makers and breaking through more consistently into the national media.
Then, on Friday, we had an internal meeting involving senior managers where there was discussion of a paper proposing the development of single corporate framework for assessing impact. Finally, on Saturday in Todmorden I saw a great example of the RSA making an impact – in this case supporting a fantastic initiative which has built great social capital in town – but also one which it is quite hard to capture as a conventional output.
So I feel these questions need further thought and having such great readers – who are generally enthusiastic about the RSA – I thought that over the next few days I might share some of my thought processes with you.
Last year the RSA Trustees agreed to launch a new strapline: twenty first century enlightenment. The feeling was that this worked at several levels. It combines a reference to our eighteenth century enlightenment origins with a commitment to be relevant in the century ahead. It refers to our mission to open up new ideas to the world. But the strap line also referred to a more substantive conversation about the Society’s modern mission which had been taking place among Trustees and in other RSA forums.
Twenty first century enlightenment means different things to different people, but I gave my personal take on it in my 2010 annual lecture. In essence this was an argument of three parts:
1) For the world to meet major challenges and to flourish in the 21st century we need a step change in human capability, including significant changes in the ways we think and behave: in short we need citizens who are more engaged, more resourceful and more inclined to be pro-social.
2) If we seek to enhance human capability we need to understand what drives human behaviour. From disciplines as varied as neuroscience, behavioural economics, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology new, more complex and more nuanced accounts of human nature are emerging to challenge the formerly dominant myth of homo economicus.
3) Putting together the challenges generated by the modern world with new thinking about human behaviour provides an opportunity to reconsider the way we have come to interpret some of the founding ideas of the post enlightenment era; namely autonomy, universalism and humanism.
As I say, this is just my take but it helps to explain why measuring impact is a tricky problem. The relationship between our mission and what we do is reasonably clear, the difficulty comes when we move from what we do (output) to what we want to achieve (outcome).
The thirty five million on-line views of RSA events proves we are making ideas interesting and accessible to a mass audience. But apart from the many positive comments on YouTube and other places how do we know that those ideas are having an impact beyond entertainment? And should we more ambitious about using the events programme to surface new issues in ways which really have an impact on public discourse?
Our projects in areas ranging from design and education to social networks and behaviour change all relate to questions of human capability. We can point to good publications, rising media profile and concrete real world impacts such as our Whole Person Recovery work in Sussex or the achievements of our Academies, but if we wanted to aim for a more profound long-lasting influence and change what would it be and in what areas would we focus?
As my day in Todmorden vividly showed, our investment in supporting Fellows’ activities is starting to pay off in an ever growing level of Fellowship activity (as another example, last week saw over 150 people attend a Profit with Purpose network meeting here in London). But can we aspire to all these disparate initiatives coalescing into the RSA Fellowship making a substantial contribution to civil society?
In focussing on outcomes rather than more easily measured outputs there is a danger that the discussion becomes rather abstract and speculative. But I also think that part of the RSA being a truly innovative organisation could be that we try to judge ourselves by distinctive criteria, developing new metrics and making new kinds of arguments about impact. One possibility, for example, might be that we use the forthcoming Fellowship survey to ask some deeper questions about how being a Fellow changes people’s sense of social efficacy and responsibility. Social network analysis (an area in which the RSA is now seen to be a leading practitioner) might also enable us to see how our work ripples out beyond our immediate stakeholder groups.
I hope to return to these issues later in the week and – as always – I’ll be interested to see of readers have their own perspectives.
It’s incredible, it’s edible, it’s Todmorden
I am writing this on the way back from a fantastic day in Todmorden, the home of Incredible Edible Todmorden. I can’t say catching the last train back to London from the bleak badlands of Stockport is my idea of a good Saturday night but the journey was certainly worth it.
I’m sure many of my readers will know about IET. It is a fantastic project based on the simple idea of local people growing food. The driving force behind the project is Pamela Warhurst. She told me the idea occurred to her and her friends after she heard a lecture by Professor Tim Lang, so there was a nice symmetry when my trip ended with me introducing Tim at a packed meeting in Todmorden’s wonderfully preserved Hippodrome Theatre.
Before the event I had been shown round the IET green route which included Pam’s original private rose garden, which is now a tiny public garden full of vegetables and herbs. My guide Estelle then showed me the raised beds planted by the canal, the places where standard issue municipal prickly bushes had been replaced with edible plants, and the health centre which has a border of strawberry plants maintained by a GP who used to grow strawberries in Poland as well as a raised bed planted with medicinal plants. Most of this has been done without asking for permission (or only asking for it after the planting) and all of it by volunteers.
The project is now having impacts across the town. Small businesses are being created including a soap maker who uses IET herbs. All the town’s schools are involved, especially the high school where a BTEC in agriculture is proving very popular and where a local sustainable fish farming social business in being developed. And in case IET sounds like it is one of those worthy but achingly middle class green initiatives, its ideas are also being implemented by a local social housing provider.
It is hardly surprising that visitors from all over the world are flocking to Todmorden to learn more about IET. Today, people from twenty existing or putative schemes like IET gathered to share ideas, discuss experiences and develop collaboration.
For me the project packed extra impact for two reasons. The first is that RSA Fellows have played an important role in developing supporting and publicising IET. I met some fantastic Fellows during the day, the kind of people who give the Society a good name whenever they mention their association. The second is that the project fits so well with the idea that we need to close the social aspiration gap (the gap between the future people say they want and the one we are likely to build unless we are willing to change some of the ways we think and act). I have said that closing the gap means encouraging people to be ‘more engaged, more resourceful and more pro-social’. By getting people to think about food and the impact of our food choices, in encouraging people to grow and cook their own food, and in mobilising volunteers from all sectors of the community IET as well as demonstrable building civic capacity IET is a microcosm of the new ways of living we need.
So, it’s ten to ten and we’ve only just left Stoke on Trent but, for once, I’m not complaining.
RSA Fellows bring some cheer on a gloomy Monday
On such a grey Monday morning I opened the newspapers with a predisposition to gloom. They didn’t disappoint. Our politicians seem to have decided green politics was a fad (neither David Cameron nor George Osborne have delivered a speech on environmental issues since the General Election), but according to the latest sea ice maps, Arctic ice levels have fallen to their lowest ever recorded levels. If the trends suggested in the latest survey are borne out, the loss of ice is substantially faster than that predicted in the last IPCC report.
The famine in the Horn of Africa is worsening. Political choices made by the West have clearly contributed to the chaos in Somalia. The ceremonies yesterday to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 were moving and a vital part of the process of remembering and moving on. So perhaps it is unrealistic or churlish to wonder whether more could have been done to use the international focus on yesterday’s events to engage nations and citizens in tackling a humanitarian crisis which, it is estimated, will kill more people every day between now and the end of the year than died in the Twin Towers attack?
The famine puts our domestic problems in context. But there is little at home to lighten the mood. The trade unions are threatening civil disobedience in protest at public service cuts. The IFS says that a decade of falling living standards will hit the poor particularly hard, and most experts predict very grim unemployment statistics later this week.
I can’t pretend it’s a particularly coherent or commensurate response, but at times like this it feels desperately important that people who want to use their talents to make the world a better place combine their resources. States may be buffeted by global forces and economic vulnerabilities, the markets too, but in the face of growing needs and threats civil society needs to mobilise. The good news, I believe, is that there is huge untapped capacity in communities and organisations which could be released if only we could find smarter and more generous ways of working together.
Which is why I see a connection between global and national problems and an initiative taken by RSA Fellows in Leicester. Yesterday saw a hugely successful ‘Our Leicester Day’ taking over the city’s market. Over 100 local organisations set up stalls and the day was packed with people coming and going from morning to late afternoon. Apparently the day seemed to carry three big messages. First that Leicester is full of great people doing great things to make their city better. Second that the civic life of the city reflects and celebrates its diversity. And third, that even some of the most active local citizens had no idea there was so much going on and so many useful connections to be made.
The Leicester Fellows who organised the day were able to call on an RSA Catalyst grant to help with promotion and I very much hope the Society can continue to support their efforts. But the organisers are also pragmatic. They want to evaluate the day carefully and only then decide if and how to do it again. Such thoughtfulness is, in my experience, a vital but underestimated ingredient in successful civic action.
With our brilliant Fellows and a staff totally committed to enabling the RSA Fellowship to be a powerful source of civic innovation, we may not be able to solve the world’s ills but at least we can try to make a positive difference. So, ‘thank you’ Leicester Fellows for making Monday feel better and – I hope – for inspiring other Fellows to follow your lead.
The twin twin towers
I recall the morning of September 11th 2001. I was director of IPPR and we employed an intern from New York who was that day helping us organise a conference. I vividly remember her shock and distress when I took her to one side to describe – as best I could – what was unfolding in her home town. (As an aside, it is interesting to recall that just ten years ago – before mobile phones and laptops were routinely connected to the internet – it was possible for people to go some hours before being aware that a major world event had occurred. Now, everyone would know within minutes.)
There was also a broader personal context. The attack occurred a week before the showing of a film I had made earlier in the summer for Channel Four, provocatively entitled ‘I’m not racist, but’. The programme involved me touring the country talking to various people who had misgivings about the growing diversity of modern Britain and trying to get to the bottom of whether these concerns were more than simple prejudice. What excited Channel 4 about the programme and – I have to admit – made me nervous, was that I had reached the conclusion that, alongside what was clearly good old fashioned racism, there were genuine issue about people in Muslim communities who apparently rejected integration in British society. This was then a very controversial thing for a leftie like me to say.
TV stations are always looking to make material as topical and controversial as possible so it is also poignant to recall that the producers had already cut out a scene in which I confronted a group of young men who had set up a stall in Brick Lane and were hawking various extremist literature including material promoting Al Qaeda. Presumably they didn’t think this kind of extremism was particularly significant.
There has already been so much comment on the consequences of 9/11 i am wary of adding more but it seems to me that since the Twin Towers were brought down, two new towers – of misunderstanding and fear – have grown. They stand apart but it is as if they are in a race to be the highest. The first of these towers is the belief among many Muslims that they are subject to a deliberate and co-ordinated attempt by the West to attack their communities and their religion. From this perspective wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are portrayed as Western assaults on Muslims when they are in fact wars between an alliance of external (national) powers and local groups on one side, and a different alliance of external (terrorist or fundamentalist) forces and local interests on the other. Equally from this perspective it is somehow forgotten that the overwhelming target and victim of ‘Islamic’ terrorism is other Muslims. This sense of victimhood and paranoia is vividly illustrated by the number of people in predominantly Muslim countries who apparently believe the September 11th attack was undertaken by some combination of the CIA and the Israeli secret service; the number ranges from 30% to up to 70%.
The other rising tower is the idea that the West and its values are under genuine threat from Islam. This is not to say there aren’t Muslims who would like to create a global caliphate nor that the West doesn’t genuinely need to defend itself from terrorism and its apologists. But the idea that terror incidents (which are still very rare in non-Muslim countries), the views of extremists or even the hypothetical answers given to opinion poll questions by the minority Muslim community can be put together to represent a credible threat to our way of life is surely nonsense. It may be true that some young Muslims will be radicalised but over time a much more significant trend will be the gradual integration of third and fourth generation Muslim migrants into the diverse mainstream of British life. Whilst the murders of Anders Breivik were the acts of madman, those who encourage paranoia about a Muslim take-over must answer the question: ‘if we are – as you say – genuinely threatened by a Muslim conspiracy to destroy our way of life then presumably violence is among the legitimate responses?’
And so the towers of victimhood and paranoia keep climbing. How might they be dismantled? Of course, those who reject such thinking must say so loudly and clearly at every opportunity. We can also hope that the emerging Arab democracies represent a chance for a new narrative for the development of Muslim nations. Although, of course, those who live in tower two will point to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and argue the West was crazy to help topple friendly dictators and open the door to the threat of democratically-sanctioned extremism.
I am not in any way complacent (how could anyone be when looking once again at the images of the 9/11 attack?), but my sense is that history will take its course and eventually the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim will diminish and fade in significance. The question is how much needless suffering must take place before then; how high will the towers grow?
This is very much a matter of leadership. But for those of us who engage on a smaller scale there is still work to be done. Indeed it may be in towns and cities, where people can, more easily than at the national level, have ‘hyphenated identities’ (sikh-Brummie, Muslim-Glaswegian, East End Jew) that it is most possible to disrupt sectarian narratives. It may take a long time, but while we wait for change at the global and national level, we should chip away in our own communities at the foundations of the new twin towers.
This is one reason why I am so delighted that RSA Fellows have been at the forefront or organising a major civic day in Leicester this Sunday. Leicester is the first majority non-white English city. Some people will see this as a problem, for me it is an opportunity. Leicester could become a global symbol of how diversity can work. Even when the nighmare of the bigot comes true and the indigenous population becomes a minority (although, of course, white English continues by a long margin to be the biggest single ethnic group) the people of the city respond by becoming more proud, more dynamic and more united. That those hard at work building towers of fear will see such an event as misguided and futile should give the organisers even more determination to make it succeed.
PS As you would expect, we have some fascinating events here at the RSA to mark the anniversary of 9/11.
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