- How can we create a community benefits system?
- What are the prospects for young people in Cornwall?
- How can we design a better service for people living with dementia?
- Who wants to be a young entrepreneur?
- Could a community work exchange help people find employment & skills?
- How can we present GB expenditure & benefit data to show opportunities for innovation?
- How can people do more for their community?
- Where there are difficulties, there are opportunities.
- Imagine if Cornwall was a Worldwide Superbrand...
- Can Big Society be delivered with small change?
- Challenging Big Cornwall to Design in The Time
- Is there such a thing as 'Hard to Reach' people?
March 2011
Can Big Society be delivered with small change?
Excerpt from Intersections 2011 conference at the Eden Project,
by Robert Woolf
A few weeks ago, I met Lord Nat Wei - the government's top advisor for Big Society - to discuss Designing Communities. This was our first Dott project for CPR Regeneration, where we were tasked with finding out how a new community centre might bring about lasting benefits to the residents of Pengegon. Pengegon is amongst the most deprived wards in the UK.
He thought our work, and the work in Pengegon that had preceded us, was a compelling example of Big Society in action. Where ideas and improvements were best achieved in partnership with residents and agencies already active in the community.
Lord Wei was interested in how we had started to think more deeply about the social challenges faced in Pengegon; such as the disproportionate cost of Jobseekers Allowance and Incapacity Benefits within a community like Pengegon.
He also liked the way we had considered the economic impact of social deprivation in England, not just in terms of the benefits system, but in other areas of spending too - like the national health and family support services.
In getting to know the people and protagonists in Pengegon, we've achieved two things. Firstly, we've co-designed a new community building, which has been led by the residents. Along the way, Designing Communities has enabled the community to feel better about themselves.
Secondly, we've presented new ideas to Lord Wei and the Department for Communities and Local Government for reducing the number of people on long-term benefits. One idea - the Peoples Benefits System - focuses on nurturing community activism as a way of topping up benefit payments, and this idea is about people accepting change for themselves and their community. From small things do big things come.
Another example of how Big Society might be delivered with small change comes from our second Dott project New Work Cornwall - a skills development project for the Skills Funding Agency.
We spent three months mapping the employment opportunities in Cornwall arising from public investments. In total, we added up 22,715 new jobs forecast for Cornwall. Let's compare that number against the number of unemployed people in Cornwall (17,700) and the number of people currently claiming Jobseekers in Cornwall (8,298).
You don't need to be a maths whizz to see that the cost would double if all unemployed people claimed jobseekers (adding around £16m to the taxpayers bill by my calculations). Then again, in theory anyway, for every unemployed person in Cornwall there is a job with which they can aspire to.
The current system for supporting unemployed people is to provide lots and lots of support. Yet, with unemployment still rising, one must reflect at some point about whether this represents value for money.
By contrast, New Work through co-design has outlined a number of unique ideas, such as Freedundancy, where services and support are exchanged or bartered by individuals and businesses without any funds being passed. This idea among many others would be a very Big Society approach. The future of service delivery?
And so to our last project for Dott, the Big Design Challenge sponsored by the Technology Strategy Board. Epic budget cuts sounds like a bad deal for people and, when presented as an alternative to budget cuts, it's understandable that many people and the media dismiss Big Society as vague. But without budget cuts, without an economic crisis, would we be thinking differently? Would we be thinking about achieving more for less?
This project asked the people of Cornwall what issues matter most to them, and they responded in their numbers. The Community Innovation Awards at the Eden Project demonstrated what can be achieved by providing the right information and the right environment for successful collaboration.
So, can Big Society be delivered with small change?
In my view, yes it can be, it's simply a question of how you look at problems and how we all look at society. There will always be better and more sustainable answers out there. As Albert Einstein said: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
