Scarman and Hinton lectures

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There was much coverage towards the end of last week of Cameron’s Scarman Lecture which featured Conservatives accepting the concept of relative poverty, and the propounding of the ‘social responsibility agenda’. The emphasis was on attacking the "causes of poverty" and, following families, drugs & alcohol and debt, comes a fount of solutions: social enterprise:

"Well I want local authorities – and large voluntary organisations – to be more permissive themselves.To take more risks. To put more emphasis on funding organisations themselves, and less on funding specific measurable outcomes.To sustain the continuity of care, so that social enterprises can
develop proper relationships with the people they’re trying to help. And in the most deprived areas I want us to be especially proactive.

Just as economic growth in the inner cities was kick-started in the 1980s by Enterprise Zones with low taxes and regulations…..so I believe we need Social Enterprise Zones today. Our Policy Review is developing proposals for areas where the planning
rules are relaxed, so communities can use buildings and space more
flexibly where there is a level playing field for the voluntary sector to compete with the public and commercial sectors…where the funding streams for social enterprise are simplified and longer contracts awarded and where voluntary work is rewarded in the tax and benefits system."

Difficult to argue with much of this, and many small/medium charities/enterprises would endorse the sentiments and the words. Cameron even responded directly to the main criticism of this focus on social enterprise + the voluntary sector ("Some people may be nervous that our faith in social enterprise and the
voluntary sector is a cloak for an agenda of spending cuts to finance
tax cuts….") and there is evidence of a good understanding of the issues of state funding and its relationship to independence/innovation/effectiveness. His answer: trust/be open.

Can’t help but be made nervous by stuff like this though: "But I am supremely confident that as we allow communities to take over responsibilities for their own neighbourhoods as we change the funding system to reward creativity and innovation we will witness a fantastic flowering of social enterprise, the like of which we cannot even imagine today."  Well, I’d like to think so, but I think a bit of underpromise and overdeliver is probably called for…. (though I guess not many politicians underpromise….)

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Also last week was the Hinton Lecture (pdf), delivered by Ed Miliband. Provides quite an interesting foil to Cameron’s lecture with some similarities (user-driven solutions, third sector as haven of innovation etc) but also a strong emphasis on the sector as voice/campaigner, engaging and representing in a way that government/politicians cannot. Obviously the major difference is that the tenor of Cameron’s speech is about getting out of the way of the sector or the "letting them get on with it" approach, whereas Miliband’s is much more on government and third sector as complementary partners.

Public services is always a hot topic but I think Miliband is right to say that

"For those that do deliver services, it is important this doesn’t become simply a battle for territory with the state or private sector and focuses on the quality of the service. And the third sector needs to do better, working with government, at showing through evidence its impact and difference in the quality of service".

Absolutely. Michael Lyons was saying something similar recently…

Aside from public services, the two areas focused on were voice and building communities. There are some interesting points made here about whether it is better to be a unified voice (a la Make Poverty History / Stop Climate Chaos) or not, and about the networks of support that third sector organisations can build and maintain more effectively than government. I would only add that it is key that policy is rooted in practice (a point made by Nicholas Hinton himself, quoted by the minister), and that networks are key in this context…as support mechanisms, as routes of opportunity, as steps on a ladder, and to create strength through diversity.

Miliband/Labour are also getting a little clearer (braver?) about differentiating themselves from Cameron, which is to be welcomed, if only to be able to slide the proverbial cigarette paper between… Witness this paragraph near the end:

"You might call it social responsibility. And social responsibility therefore is the foundation of both voluntary action and a modern welfare state – not, as some would suggest, voluntary action versus a modern welfare state.

So my message tonight is this: progressive change can’t happen without you. But I also don’t think it can happen without an engaged government, working as a good partner at all levels."

Now I wonder who that "some" might be referring to? ;0)

CSR and responsible business

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Great article on WorldChanging by Joel Makower, entitled Milton Friedman and the Social Responsibility of Business which repeats Friedman’s view that the sole purpose of business is to generate profit for shareholders…and that responsible business is therefore uncompetitive, costly and a distraction from their core obligation.

As Makower points out, we now know this to be nonsense: that ignoring environmental and social issues can be bad for business, and that this trend is only increasing. Want to recruit new graduates? Want to not poison/pollute your customers? Want to have raw materials to use in ten years time? Want to retain employees? And so on. If a company isn’t thinking in these kind of ways in this day and age, it will soon be left behind….better to be ahead of the curve than trying to claw your way up it over the next decade.

And that goes for big and small business: I enjoyed judging the CAF CCI awards recently, an enjoyment tempered only by how few SMEs enter the awards, a topic we discussed afterwards. So much discussion of CSR revolves (understandably) around the big boys that there is probably need for a corrective of some sort. I was interested to run across Small Business Journey the other day, which is an interesting way for “small businesses to realise more value by behaving responsibly”. Value of all types…

A few more corporate social responsibility pieces to end with:

– a corporate social responsibilty course in Barcelona (download the modules online) [via Audeamus]

– Fast Company have dished out their 2007 Social Capitalist Awards to, slightly bizarrely, 43 organisations (why 43? a secret homage to 43 Things and 43 Folders?)….mainly US-focused as ever, but worth reading some of their gumph as well, including their take on why this is all important: “A More Powerful Path“

– A post linking to some debates about Product Red (iPod, AmEx etc. raising money for HIV); interestingly, there was someone on the radio this morning discussing how we should be giving African countries an army rather than aid…will try and find the link….. 

Video posting: the Camel

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Have a replicas relojes china few bits of video I want to post up occasionally, so thought I would give this a test run (using VideoEgg.com). Here is a video of our local pub (the Camel) detailing its history during the war as an early social enterprise!

Third Sector media darlings

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As I waited for my meeting with Matthew Thomson, formerly of SSE and now Chief Executive of the London Community Recycling Network, I opened up Third Sector magazine and was delighted to find:

– on the front page, SSE Fellow Dave Pitchford is kicking up a storm with his web-based organisation Intelligent Giving and their take on Children in Need (Four Things Wrong with Pudsey)

– then on the first inside page, above the article about the new Social Enterprise Action Plan (see previous post ), there is a photo of Ed Miliband, SSE Chief Exec Alastair Wilson and two of our current students, Darren and Tania….who won £1000 for their project at a Dragon’s Den event on Social Enterprise Day

– then (!), on the letters page, they printed my response to Nick Cater which I blogged about here (where you can also read the letter) almost in full and only with one mistake (the School for Social Enterprise rather than Entrepreneurs)…and it won letter of the week, no less, so I get to dispense £25 to a charity of my choice….an SSE student or Fellow, methinks

All good – next week, on I’m a Social Entrepreneur, Get Me In There……

MySociety or WhySociety?

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Great coverage of the E-Democracy 06 conference by David Wilcox over on his Designing for Civil Society blog. Of most interest to me was the following “Not just e-democracy, new democracy says MySociety founder” post. This includes:

“Once you have managed to achieve the funding for tools, fix the bugs,
get people interested it’s time, says Tom [Steinberg, founder of MySociety], to reflect on what changes
we might want to see in the system, as well as in policies. What should
we be pushing for, and what are the dangers in doing that? After the
rush to practical solutions, it’s time for some theory.

Put around the other way “what could be the wrong philosophy of
representative democracy that would lead to us all building and
spending time on tools that were actually unhelpful”.

Tom wants people who are building sites in the e-democracy field
to start talking about what sort of democracy they are building those
tools for.”

Interesting this, and it obviously follows on from something that Matthew Taylor said earlier in the conference, namely:

“The Internet, said Matthew, had helped people to mobilise. It offers
new methods of search and exposure. But does it yet really help people
engage with dilemmas and challenges, and work their way through to
conclusions? He presented that challenge to developers and advocates of
e-democracy tools.”

It is very similar to what I said to Francis Irving (one of the MySociety crowd, who did PublicWhip.org.uk and then has had significant involvement in their other projects) when we were speaking together at an event in Wales. I basically said that the use of technology had to be driven by social need, that it was a ‘failure’ if it was driven by the desires/interests of the designers, rather than the needs of the users, that the use of new tech must be grounded in the organisation’s values, and that people shouldn’t overestimate (or underestimate) what technology can achieve.

Nothing very groundbreaking or controversial there….though I did then go on to say that I felt the challenge was not developing new tools but translating internet activity to real-world action; I then added that it was perhaps instructive to note that one of the primary successes of Pledgebank was the establishment of a digital rights organisation….so was that really reaching new people, extending democracy etc, or are these sites mostly being used by internet-savvy, Guardian-reading middle-class types? [NB – I should say that I would put myself squarely in that bracket, and think all of the sites are exceptionally well-built and useful….for me].

Now this may be unfair, and I have been a champion of all their sites in the past (particularly via the Global Ideas Bank and Blog + our Social Innovation Awards) and recommend and use them regularly, but certainly what Tom and Matthew say above would tend to support that view: they are great tools, but are they really changing anything? To our students at the replicas bolsas, they are just another useful resource to take advantage of, but it is their action, commitment and focus to change things in the real world that will make a long-lasting difference.

Now I don’t think Tom has ever overclaimed what these sites they can do, but their “sexiness” to the media and to the political establishment (which is Tom’s background as a policy wonk) has perhaps led to this situation. There seems to be a stepping back in that statement above (i.e. we don’t need more tools without really thinking about whether they are needed, and what changes they will make; and what, ultimately, this is all aiming towards). Indeed, surely the subtext of what Tom says above is that they rushed to develop stuff without thinking about why they were doing it. Even the most action-prone social entrepreneurs usually know their objectives and goals before they rush headlong into delivery….

These are amazing and incredibly useful tools for information, for campaigning, for communication, for accountability and so on. But it’s important we have them in context, which is why the statements above are welcome.