Here is an update from the NCIA planning group meeting on 6 September 2011. Let us know if you are interested in joining the planning group or if you want to comment or contribute to anything mentioned below. Email: info@independentaction.net
Or you might like to come to an assembly meeting – more information here.
Present: Ruth Cohen (Chair), Bernard Davies, Rachael McGill, Melaina Barnes, Andy Benson, Penny Waterhouse, Maxine Moar, Joe Taylor, Dorothy Newton, Nazreen Subhan, Adrian Barritt, Sandra van der Feen, Steve Lancashire, Frances Sullivan (notes)
Aplogies: Colin Rochester, Chris Walsh
Updates
As we went round the table, several people said that they haven’t much to contribute since the last meeting, as not a lot has changed during the summer months.
Bernard has mainly been involved with youth work issues, but some of the matters he is trying to put together at present may have some relevance to NCIA’s interests. He will be taking part in a round table discussion at a Manchester University-hosted event on 20 September, about academics who are also activists. He also commented that the main national youth work umbrella group, National Council for Voluntary Youth Services, is completely sold out to the govt’s privatisation and cuts agendas, and is taking a highly divisive line re its member orgs – e.g. trying to get youth projects to take public ‘anti-riot’ positions/ pushing “Not in My Name” T-shirt slogans etc.
Dorothy told us that public services in the Finsbury Park area are fast disappearing with the result that the pressures on local people are becoming unbearable, with huge increases in unemployment and widespread fear of this even among those who are in work at the moment. The general attitude coming from politicians and the bureaucracies seems to be ‘Promise the earth; take the money, and let down the community!’ The outlook is very dark.
This led to some general discussion on the collapse of public services, and the lack of any challenge from the large nationals and 2nd tiers on, for instance, equality issues, and other serious knock-on effects including raised barriers to access of both services and financial benefits…
Nazreen commented that the LSE have done recent research on out-sourcing, showing that it doesn’t even work for the private sector, where many companies are now taking previously out-sourced work back into direct management!
Joe and Maxine have both been very involved with the development of NatCAN and its website http://nationalcan.ning.com/. Joe commented that he had hoped that the Community Organiser programme would be useful in assisting local people to come together to resist the climate of cuts and privatisation, but on discovering who is involved, has realised it is simply a waste of time. He is still interested in community organising (lower case!), but is investigating alternative approaches. He mentioned someone called John Lordwho has apparently been very involved in helping communities to organise themselves in the USA. He suggested that if 10 or 12 people were interested, it might be useful to get this man to come over and offer a one-day training event to test out his approach. This suggestion provoked a level of disquiet, and it was generally felt that more information would be needed about what this person understands community organisation to mean before deciding whether it would be useful to meet with him.
Sandra told us about the work LCVS has been doing on the update to the Big Squeeze report, a survey of the effects of recession (and now cuts) on the London voluntary sector: www.lvsc.org.uk/campaigns/big-squeeze.aspx Pretty depressing picture: e.g. 51% of respondents had closed services in 2010-11, 54% expected more services to close in 2011-12, 81% said demand on their services had increased, and 77% were not confident they could meet this increased demand. The most deprived boroughs had the highest cuts. Independence was not specifically discussed in the survey, but it featured indirectly, with many mentioning the negative effects of reliance on commissioned money rather than grants.
Rachael has been working with Aston Mansfield’s Community Involvement Unit around the event, ‘Surviving Hard Times with Integrity’ that NCIA are doing jointly with them on 20 September, and also looking for further opportunities to develop joint events that can fulfil a role similar to Assembly meetings. She has continued to work on the Independence Audit, and together with Melaina, Andy and Penny, she has been working on the office work programme for the rest of the period we are funded for. In addition:
Melaina has been doing a piece of work with Penny on resourcing voluntary action. Penny has been putting some ideas together, and written a short document that can encourage a conversation in the sector. This is an important issue, and a hard one to get to grips with. Resourcing is a much wider matter than money – it’s quite a complex issue and it’s difficult to get a handle on it that can fire people up, and make them enthusiastic to take action. They want to ‘capture the mood music’ and set out some ideas that people/groups can relate to their own situation and make some practical use of. Melaina commented on the frustration of NCIA’s having a clear position, but somehow even those who should definitely be our natural allies are not all ‘getting it’. This expanded into a short conversation about consciousness – people have been so bombarded with the notion of market values being the only values that count, that they have often internalised this attitude and don’t even realise what it’s doing to their freedom of thought! That’s precisely what this project is about…. It’s at a fairly early stage just now, but Penny and Melaina will try to get something on paper and send it round to P.G. attendees for comments etc.
Penny has also been helping to steer the Supporting Activism project in Hackney, which is now drawing to a conclusion. Marie Venet, Rebecca Sharkey, and Jo Newberry have written up the 11 interviews they have undertaken, and had a feedback session, attended by Penny, Andy, Frances and Rachael. The info is fascinating in the way it brings out the diversity of attitudes within the vol sector in the borough. We saw them as Insiders/ Outsiders/ and Inside/Outsiders, with very different types of contact/sources of support. After years of talking about this, at last it’s all coming out! The next step is to have a meeting with all the participants, present a summary of our findings, and have a general discussion with them all, both about what we have found, and how to move forward.
Andy is in the middle of writing the next newsletter, and both he and Penny are in the throes of fundraising.
Fundraising
Andy explained the nature of Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, and his thinking in designing the bid in the way he had done. It was agreed that this was a good way of going about it, and he should finish off any details that he still wanted to put in, and send the bid off in time to make the deadline.
We went on to talk about other possibilities. Penny has been doing some research, thinking about looking for fairly small amounts of money, either to do a specific piece of work, or, especially, that might help us in the task of keeping on keeping on. The Andrew Wainwright Trust could be in the running here. The Trust is about political action – Hilary Wainwright of Red Pepper is a member of the family, and their average grant is around the £10,000 mark. Penny is working on a bid for around £8,500, concentrating on activities that we are doing already. We also need to explore before July whether there is any possibility of Tudor continuing support. Whatever happens, we need to have some ideas about whether we can keep going without any paid help, or whether we will need to wind up.
The general consensus is that we want to keep going if poss – but can’t expect any one or two people to flog themselves into an early grave, so we need to develop our strategies for survival.
The Baring Foundation Independence Panel
Everyone felt that NCIA’s response expressed all the concerns we had about this at the last meeting and incorporating as many of the emailed comments as reasonably possible. (Since the planning group, there have been news articles about it in Civil Society magazine and Third Sector).
Although Andy’s comments were seen to be an alternative response to the paper which we might have adopted, they were not what the last planning group agreed. Some of Adrian’s views on the so-called Big Society really warrant a whole NCIA publication, and it wouldn’t be possible to squeeze them all into this, though making the point about the establishment reaction to the recent rioting is highly pertinent.
It was decided to expand the final section slightly, to reiterate the points about the terms of reference and the methodology, and to offer NCIA’s assistance if these issues are to be addressed (!).
The meeting then considered what we should do with the paper, in addition to sending it to Barings. Apart from sending it to their office, we should cc it to members of their Board who we might specially want to see it. We should also put it up on our website and encourage our wider constituency to respond in similar vein.
Other issues
This venue: the room where we started out today was free, and we all appreciated that – but it was really suffocating, making it hard to concentrate. We were very lucky to be offered the larger conference room for part of the meeting, but this normally costs £60. Rachael will continue her heroic efforts to find a room that is free, comfortable, and reasonably central!! If that is impossible, we may have to settle for cheap, comfortable etc. LVSC may let us have this room for £30 if we have a joint meeting with them and find an area of policy overlap to discuss.
Next meeting, Monday 21 November 2011
2pm-5pm at the TUC, Congress House. Frances to chair, Adrian to take notes. We are trying to stick to the system that the notetaker for one meeting chairs the following one.
Meeting after next, Tuesday 17 January 2012.
(Time’s wotsit wings again…) Next meeting
The next meeting will take place in London on Tuesday 6 September at 2pm. Papers will be circulated before the meeting. Chair and note taker to be agreed.