Discovering Shoreditch past and present

Boundary Community Launderette

A few months ago I moved into the Shoreditch area from neighbouring Bow having lived in East London for nearly ten years. I’m attracted to it for many reasons: it’s an artistic, entrepreneurial, and technological hub, has a lot of social problems alongside tremendous wealth, and is a place where a lot is going on that feels quite big society in many ways, even though politically it is heavily dominated by Labour (which as I have argued before has roots in social action which are well worth reviving by its new leader).

In the past Shoreditch was also a hotbed of citizen-led social reform. Shaftesbury worked with others here to establish education for those on low incomes such as the Ragged Schools here. This was also close to the birthplace of the settlement movement in which those connected to universities settled students in slum areas to live and work alongside local people through whose efforts according to Wikipedia “settlement houses were established for education, savings, sports, and arts”. Octavia Hill was also active in and around the area, pioneering reforms that lead to the establishment of Royal Parks and social housing all over the country. Shaftesbury also started social franchises for ex-chimney sweeps and beggars called the Shoe Black Brigade in and around the area to help them make an alternative living.

Today there are tremendous challenges as well as opportunities. Hackney and parts of Shoreditch are known for their high levels of poverty, there are problems with gang violence and shootings, and high levels of turnover in the population and over-crowding among both the immigrant and white population relating to housing shortages, and while the council has clearly improved services over the years since it had to be taken over, there is still a huge amount to do. But once again there are examples of social reform from the Mayor’s Fund backed City Year initiative, to the Headway head injury charity’s centre whose Timebank I have recently joined (see this Guardianarticle on the potential of time credits to transform public services), to the work of Citizen’s UK who have recently hired a community organiser to work in the area funded by the Mayor’s fund which also supports the Playing to Win initiative led by Greenhouse schools with Street Lead, London Youth, working with schools and youth clubs to tackle social problems using sports and games;  to faith-based initiatives led by local churches with the support and interest of organisations such as Street Pastors.

Shoreditch is undoubtedly very different from many parts of the UK, particularly compared to rural Cumbria which I visited a few months ago hosted by MP Rory Stewart. In Penrith, the concerns were more about access to broadband, and more control over planning to create homes for young people who would otherwise leave for the cities, and community transport since public transport could often be quite limited. In Shoreditch, the issues are more to do with people not knowing each other, crime, and unemployment particularly for young people and men. But there are similarities as well: from a desire in both places for more multi-use community spaces through which local services can be delivered by a mix of the people themselves, the state, and voluntary and community enterprises; to an interest in sustainability whether it be in anaerobic digesters in the one, or city farms and guerilla gardening in the other. Above all there are paradoxical similarities to how poverty may need to be approached in both places, which is surprising given how one is extremely low density and the other extremely high density compared to other parts of the country. I was shown in Cumbria the farmhouse of a lady who was a widow on state benefits and one of a million people who are classed as in rural poverty. Recently, my church leader told me about a man he helped in Shoreditch who had racked up thousands of pounds in debts having been repeatedly sent warnings and notices because a) he had been misdiagnosed when getting his benefits such that his dyslexia was not picked up and support not provided to help him cope with it, and b) because the energy company had mistakenly read the wrong meter and charged him instead of his neighbour for the energy used. In both cases, a local neighbourhood group is able to do far more and at a more human, granular level, than the state ever could, no matter how much non-existent money we pump into it. In the case of the rural widow, she would not have been picked up by the state’s statisticians since super-output level data in her area does not identify her (the farmland and property around her tend to be inhabited by wealthy farmers or second-homers). In the latter case, the managerialist approach taken by the state using databases and call centres and tick-boxes failed to ensure enough time was spent observing the man’s life and the difficulties he faced, which would have been easier and possibly lower cost had he been part of a group of citizens, encouraged to get out and about rather than isolated at home. This is why I am passionate about groups, particularly those with a range of people from different backgrounds in them, supported by the voluntary, government, and business sectors, but not dominated or bypassed by them unless a high level of professional skill and interaction is genuinely needed. This is why I am working with others to establish the Shoreditch Group, a bunch of local citizens, philanthropists, and neighbours who want to help to bring change and improvement to the area, meeting in the pub once a month (if you think you are one of them, get in touch via #NatWei and let’s meet up!).

Unlike in moderately dense areas, where aspects of Big Society have often been in existence through local assocations, neighbourliness, and public services funded through taxation as well as local fundraising*, our most dense urban areas or peripheral estates and most rural areas are having to create new forms of Big Society which are interesting and often novel and present potential glimpses into the future as we seek to reinvent the welfare state and re-empower the citizen and citizen group in the face of technological, demographic, and economic transition. It does not seem an accident that Hackney and Shoreditch is seeing and has seen for many years a bewildering amount of lifestyle transformation, with the rise of the organic and sustainable urban farming movement and services (see Hackney City Farm), the harnessing of web-enabled community arts to bring people together to regenerate run down areas (see I AM HERE run on the Kingland and Haggerston estate), and multi-use community facilities such as the Boundary Community Launderette (a not-for-profit community business run by volunteer directors that washes clothes, lends books, acts as a gallery and raises money for charity). Groups like these are showing us how to draw communities together and unlock the potential that exists in them. There is furthermore a curious obsession with bikes (I have to admit I tend to walk more than cycle since the drivers round here terrify me!), and a profusion of the kind of fascinating slightly anarchic social media driven citizen-led movements and hyperlocal activity that Tessy Britton writes about, as well as the kind of more “old-fashioned” neighbouring which often faith groups in the area are starting to rediscover which John McKnight calls us to live out in Abundant Community.

This is an environment which has fostered the rise of social movements for centuries, and seems increasingly a difficult place for Big Charity and Big Government to penetrate or transform for the better. But I agree with Bubb that there are opportunities here for partnership between larger and smaller charities, the state, and citizens and citizen groups to help widows and the isolated, and everyone else alike and empower them in turn to help themselves and others around them. There are ways that Big Government, Charity, and Business can harness models to do this more effectively such as social franchising (see Foodbank and the People’s Supermarket), the “freemium” model (give your IP away for free and provide value added support, a model which Alcoholics Anonymous kind of follows), and classic joint ventures to reach the unreached and connect them with supportive local groups and services.

So to conclude, I’m excited to be here, excited to get to know my neighbours, and definitely up for learning and listening. There is going to be, given its political and social make-up, huge debate about Big Society or other participatory approaches to the relationship between the citizen, state, and voluntary and business worlds here as much as there will be all over the country and around the world in the coming decades. Julian Dobson’s point that there is still much to be done to build a consensus on the way forward is as true here in Shoreditch as around the country: how will we harness what can be fickle voluntary action, alongside what can sometimes be clunky monolithic state provision, together with markets that are not always moral? I think part of the answer is around understanding citizens, giving a voice to those who don’t shout the loudest, and empowering them to redefine a new settlement that fits best their individual and our collective circumstances. So here’s to the Big Citizen, to big citizens everywhere, and to Shoreditch – my new home.

Next post: Dealing with the Great Transition using big society participatory approaches in local government

* There are still many exceptions in moderately dense areas: I have been told wealthy commuter belts can be particularly alienating, where affluenza and social isolation, and the ability to purchase most of your services seems to coincide at times with high levels of family and community breakdown

Reform versus Revolution

In case you hadn’t noticed, I love social reform. I’m just not so sure about social (or political) revolution. The amazing thing about this country is that despite having gone through two dramatic technological and economic shifts over the past few centuries  (agricultural and industrial) and now as we experience a third (information) – all of which invariably tend to widen the gap between those that have and those that do not – we have a track record of finding ways to reform our society and politics, rather than resorting to physical and bloody revolutions. In other countries around the world, and still today, this was not always possible. Somehow the anger and sense of injustice here was channelled into solutions that more people could benefit from: electoral reform in the past, the rise of the free press, of steam power, education for all and the welfare state.

Great reformers, whether Wilberforce, Shaftesbury (my favourite), Gladstone and more recently Beveridge, knew that to effect long term change and achieve social justice, they needed to widen the net of support beyond their base of activists, and include among them the general public and those with the skills and resources to not only win the argument, but also to implement a different future.  So anger about slavery was directed towards enlisting public support through reasoning and ultimately legal and economic measures to move the country away from dependence on slaving as a source of growth, which paved the way for its eventual abolishment. So anger about about illiteracy was turned into a desire to establish the first non-governmental schools for the poor. So anger about the crippling poverty from unemployment and depression led via the war to the welfare state in its original, enabling form. All without the scale of unrest and bloodshed that dogged countries overseas.

So the real question, Julian, in response to your thoughtful and eloquent letter, is not whether I or others are prepared to engage with and accept anger at the coming cuts and the speed of them, but how we deal with the situation together. How we deal with it not just in government, but also at the level of affected and unaffected institutions working in partnership with those that have alternative resources to government whether from philanthropy, business, or direct from citizens. And how we ultimately figure out how to channel our anger into real local (and sometimes national) solutions.

I’m angry as well. I’m angry that the previous government led so many social organisations down the garden path which meant that when the inevitable reductions in public expenditure arrive, they have been left exposed and vulnerable – a result of Big Government style funding. I’m angry that the process has to be done so quickly because to not act now would mean things would be worse later when the country is forced overnight to act as it did in the past – but that it suits those who no longer have to make these painful decisions to cast blame rather than to share responsibility. I’m angry because what is happening affects my family too, with a number of local services we use being potentially affected here in Shoreditch.

But I choose to harness that anger and direct it to finding solutions. To looking in government at how we can smooth the transition where possible, encouraging philanthropy to support organisations at risk and bring in new skills so they can diversify their income away from government, and to finding ways longer term to join up budgets and make them more locally-led by citizens, reducing the waste and overheads that comes from overcentralisation and allowing funds to flow to social enterprises and other providers so long as they can convince people rather than Ministers that they can genuinely help them achieve their aspirations for their neighbourhood. That’s why I and others are working to build a long-term social investment sector that harnesses the tremendous wealth we create as a country and directs some of it towards helping to scale what works, so that sustainable funding is no longer totally subject to the vagaries of politics or elections or the IMF. And that’s why I’m engaged in thinking through with other citizens how we can save our local services innovatively, such as by co-locating services and raising local funds to run them more autonomously, and by going back to local government funders and landlords with alternative business plans and proposals that make sense and which allow more to be done for less.

To do all of this requires more than just anger and angry people. It requires a joined up movement at all levels first to get the angry and the “not particularly angry” to work together by showing the latter what life is like for those on the margins; second to team up those with resources with those that do not have any and harness not just their money but also their skills and networks; and third to recognise that we can aim higher and not just tackle the economic and financial challenges that this once-in-a-lifetime generational shift poses, but also build real prosperity which is not just about money but also about social connection and the poverty of isolation – which affects people of all classes and backgrounds. To just be angry (at government) and have no solutions is divisive and can alienate those in the mainstream who might otherwise get involved and help. To turn that anger to constructive reform is to follow a noble tradition which will invariably help lead us out of the crisis which we all face – a crisis which otherwise threatens to turn into a bitter, unforgiving, bloody revolution that will once again set community against community – the opposite of what Big Society is all about.

Navigating the Big Society (part 2)

Thankfully, while politics and the Big Society are intertwined because it represents a vision and a debate about the kind of country we want to build together, I’m also increasingly clear that it is here to stay. This is because the Big Society (or whatever you want to call it) builds on thinking from the internet – it is about a change in the way we operate, about releasing information, power, and people in their streets and institutions, and supporting people to take as much or as little control over their lives from whomsoever currently hoards it – mainly government, but also other large vested interests. Once you have had a taste of the freedom offered by the internet, can you imagine going back to life without it? Yes of course there will be challenges, just as there were with the creation of the internet, with those who would seek to disrupt it, and enterprises that harnessed it that have come and gone – and it had its critics too. But it is here to stay, for better or worse, and generally for the better.

So how does one get one’s head around it? Well it very much depends on what you want to do with it – again like the internet.

If you are interested in it as a political idea, its origins in history, and as a governing philosophy, then I recommend searching and tracking what leading politicians, thinktanks, and commentators have to say about it as well as historical writers such as Burke, De Tocqueville, Oakeshott, Hobson and Hobhouse or modern ones such as Seldon. If you want to follow it in terms of policy – as in how the government is seeking to support the building of it – then I recommend tracking what government departments are saying and announcements at the Cabinet Office which lists and reports on progress in a number of key areas. A lot of umbrella groups and communications specialists organisations have created guides and are running conferences on the Big Society to help contextualize the policies as they are being developed for different sectors and stakeholders. A useful recent guide on the policies being developed can be found here.

If you want to get involved and respond in some way to it either as an individual citizen or a group of citizens, as an enthusiast, or as an institution, there are a myriad of routes to finding out more. As a citizen or group of citizens, look out for the work of the Big Society Network, which aims to be a background organisation, whose campaigns will have mass appeal and will seek to remove barriers to your getting involved where you live in Big Society, led by one of the founders of Comic Relief and the Big Lunch, Paul Twivy. Their flagship project at the moment is the development of a citizen’s mutual called Your Square Mile with tools, signposting, and peer support to help you get started to change those things where you live you feel strongly about and to make it easier to go from having no understanding or desire to make a difference to becoming more engaged. There is also nothing to stop citizens from getting involved either through local charitable activity, in local democracy, and by literally setting up their own initiatives, if that suits them. For activists, there are a number of informal spokespeople working on different elements of it such as Phillip Blond at ResPublica who is concerned about how it can change the relationship between citizens and business/the market and other non-governmental organisations, Paul Twivy at the Big Society Network for those interested in making it easier for the less engaged to become engaged, Richard Reeves – formerly head of Demos – for those interested in its relationship with left-leaning thinking whether through the Liberal or Labour movements, Gavin Poole at the Centre for Social Justice exploring its relationship with a more humane and nuanced understanding of poverty, and Will Perrin who looks at how Big Society relates to practical social media technologies and how these can be harnessed to transform deprived areas and in turn bureaucracy itself.

For those particularly interested in the impact Big Society will have on how institutions operate, I recommend following Matthew Taylor at the RSA who is looking at how businesses, voluntary organisations, or local government agencies may need to change their modus operandi to respond to the challenges and opportunities it offers to their engagement with citizens. He has done a lot of work with local authorities, large membership organisations such as the National Trust, and through social media to explore how to create more open citizen-led institutions.

How do all the pieces fit together? Well the different levels are all being developed at the same time, rather like internet servers, browsers, and websites or apps being created all at the same time, or like an ecosystem coming into existence with minerals, and large and small organisms evolving in real time. The governing philosophy is really about creating culture change to move away from the almost literally bankrupt(ing) ideas of the late 20th century about the relationship between citizens as passive recipients of state and non-state welfare and services, to their being more in the driving seat and to change the assumptions about how we should and can live our lives. The policy agenda is about creating specific legislative and non-legislative powers for citizens to take up in every department (“public sector reform”), creating financial, organising, and enduring capacity to enable citizens and citizen groups either directly or with the help of social enterprises to take up those powers (“social action”), and strengthening really local groups with formal and informal powers (“neighbourhood empowerment”). The citizen led approach is about together tackling all the barriers to mass citizen participation at a local level, recognising that these are formidable and finding solutions so that everyone can have good reasons for getting involved, demand and use local powers, and can have repeated experiences of citizen engagement that better fit their lifestyles and expectations and which lead to active involvement in local groups.

Phew! There is enough here to fill a book. In fact, a group of us are starting to put together a guide, mainly for activists, for those interested in building the Big Society, which will be a collaborative online project. Watch this space for more to follow!

No doubt I will have missed out loads of detail and other organisations. Do comment with your thoughts and plugs for other activity underway and organisations involved in any of the above areas, though I cannot claim to endorse everything that is posted as a comment, and comments will be moderated. It goes without saying, despite many commentators and twitterati’s best attempts, that not everything these days that goes by the name “Big Society” is in fact bona fide. Sometimes, the name is evoked to try to protect an organisation that is having its funding reduced (“So much for Big Society”), or to describe an action someone intends to take or is about to take like running a public service (“I’m taking out the trash and doing my bit for Big Society”), or as a synonym with the fight against poverty. Such comments show how many though not all understand the once in a lifetime shift taking place and how wedded many are to the idea that government and large organisations must do and be everything, so much so that you could in fact replace “Big Society” in such comments with the word “government” without changing the meaning. The key test of whether something is Big Society or not is about whether it represents a genuine shift in power, whether the power of information, decision-making, and/or people to us as citizens without compromising on the quality of a given service affected, and without the vulnerable and poor being adversely impacted overall when the measure is taken together with other social justice actions happening at the same time.

Next post: social reform versus revolution

Navigating the Big Society (part 1)

Well a lot has happened since the Big Society first appeared as a political concept, a Coalition policy approach, and an independent citizen-led movement! established to help remove barriers to mass participation. As I have said before, it can be hard to get your head around at first, largely because it is organic and evolutionary in its nature, and because it maps in my view more closely to real life – infinitely varied and often surprising. It is more substantial than the tedious ‘do a press launch, announce a target, bring out the champagne’ approach of the previous government – which too often did not ultimately seem to really affect people’s lives on the ground.

But despite this, and the critiques from the some on the left and right, I’ve been struck by how the Big Society has struck a chord with ordinary people whether in the country or in town who feel government, and indeed many institutions such as some business or even some voluntary organisations have become too “big” if not in a literal sense then in terms of their attitude. Such organisations have often become overly bureaucratic, bloated, and distant from us, and leave little room for us as citizens to have a say, or to take matters into our own hands to improve our lives together where we live and where it is appropriate – in short they do not make ourselves as citizens, as a society, feel and be “big” but “small” and insignificant. Such a situation is a far cry from the vision of the welfare state which Beveridge had in mind to which we need through Big Society to return, and even of the early pre-Fabian Labour movement. Here is an excerpt from wikipedia quoting one of the principles of the Beveridge report which lay the foundations of today’s welfare state from pensions, to the NHS, social housing, and national insurance:

“Policies of social security ‘must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual’, with the state securing the service and contributions. The state ‘should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family’.

Compare this to David Cameron’s vision for the state in last year’s Hugo Young Memorial Lecture:

“I want to extend and deepen the argument I made in my party conference speech this year, that the size, scope and role of government in Britain has reached a point where it is now inhibiting, not advancing the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general well-being. Indeed there is a worrying paradox that because of its effect on personal and social responsibility, the recent growth of the state has promoted not social solidarity, but selfishness and individualism.

But I also want to argue that just because big government has helped atomise our society, it doesn’t follow that smaller government would automatically bring us together again.

Yes, there are specific instances where the very act of rolling back the state will serve to roll forward society, for example when organisations that have been dependent on the state are asked to go outside government for funding, and thereby improve their record of engaging with the public and society. But I believe that in general, a simplistic retrenchment of the state which assumes that better alternatives to state action will just spring to life unbidden is wrong. Instead we need a thoughtful re-imagination of the role, as well as the size, of the state.

The first step must be a new focus on empowering and enabling individuals, families and communities to take control of their lives so we create the avenues through which responsibility and opportunity can develop. This is especially vital in what is today the front line of the fight against poverty and inequality: education.

But I also want to argue that the re-imagined state should not stop at creating opportunities for people to take control of their lives. It must actively help people take advantage of this new freedom. This means a new role for the state: actively helping to create the big society; directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal.

So yes, in the fight against poverty, inequality, social breakdown and injustice I do want to move from state action to social action. But I see a powerful role for government in helping to engineer that shift. Let me put it more plainly: we must use the state to remake society.”

I think this is why opposition politicians before and during the election and today – while keen at times to criticize it as a “veil for cuts” (despite the fact that it was created before the last government created the deficit that now requires such large savings to be made) or as lacking substance (despite it being much more substantial than much of the last government’s programme – remember the Big Conversation?) – are privately and sometimes publicly envious of it. Both Paddy Ashdown during the election, and the Miliband brothers have alluded to it in speeches either claiming to improve on it, or coming up with their own more watered down versions, such as the Good Society. The Left need to listen to the voters who switched at the election, who according to Demos/YouGov research were fed up with Big Government and Big Debt. My big fear from the rhetoric we have heard from the leadership candidates so far is that they still believe in Big Government/Debt but are trying to dress it up unconvincingly in bigsocietyish language, and are risking being seen to be behind the times and out of touch (see another Demos/YouGov survey highlighting how this has started to happen already).

Getting started

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” – Margaret Mead

While I don’t agree with everything that Margaret Mead stands for and said, her phrase which I quote often sums up pretty much everything I’d like this blog to be about: how we as citizens can come together to make a difference through the Big Society, social reform in general, and – to give it some local flavour – in Shoreditch where I and my family live.

It has to be said at the start that what I write here is in a personal capacity, and these words should not be taken as either government policy in the light of my role as a Government Advisor for Big Society, nor as the definitive textbook on 21st (or 19th) century social reform in which I have had an interest that extends to before Big Society emerged as a concept and policy approach. And I’m definitely not an authority on Shoreditch which is itself a pretty unique place and an exciting and fast changing one.

But I am going to try to help make sense of what is going on in and around this phenomenon called Big Society, building on previous posts I have published on the Big Society Network’s blog. I’m also going to reflect on previous eras of reform led by such historical figures as the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, who inspired me to launch several years ago an organisation called the Shaftesbury Partnership to incubate new approaches to social change. As for Shoreditch, well I and a bunch of thoughtful, committed citizens are in the process of setting up an informal network called the Shoreditch Group, with a passion around improving our neighbourhoods and tackling poverty in all its various forms locally, about which I hope to blog more later. While I am not formally or legally linked to any of these organisations anymore to ensure they maintain their independence from government and politics, I do wish them well and commend them for their work. Maybe together and through this blog and others like it we can change the world we live in.

I’m going to try and alternate between blogging about Big Society, social reform, and Shoreditch between each post. We’ll see how it goes. Next up, Navigating the Big Society.