How can people do more for their community?

Big Design Challenge

How often have you heard this from someone in your community:

"i'd really love to help, but i'm working that day" or "nice idea, but we don't have the money to do that"

The Big Design Challenge - Cornwall has enabled new ideas for community enterprise to grow and new working partnerships to flourish. It has created a positive buzz amongst communities in Cornwall, yet it has also highlighted some of the difficulties of community collaboration and potential pitfalls of the Big Society concept with issues such as lack of time, money and leadership cited as barriers to people staying involved in community action.

The good people of Cornwall already do a huge amount of volunteering and work for their communities, yet there is little support currently available through business, community and family networks to make it easier for people to get involved.

Through delivering this project and "Designing Communities" for Dott Cornwall, we have observed that if you want to create a Big Society you need to build capacity from within communities first, but how?

We believe that the Big Design Challenge could be developed further to remove many of the barriers to community action and empower people to make good ideas happen.

Heres some ideas for how this could happen:

Barriers to community action	Idea	How could it work?
Funding	Develop a community "crowdfunding" platform	The Big Design Challenge website could be adapted to incorporate a “crowdfunding” element whereby people offer money to support the development of a particular idea
Funding	Offer free social enterprise /fundraising and business advice	Lessons in how to set up and run a sustainable social business, how to apply for grants, how to manage budgets etc
Time	Create a "Good for community, Good for business" volunteer scheme.	A scheme where local businesses / employers receive incentives such as tax benefits or Big Society funding if they allow their staff to volunteer for their community 2-3 hrs per week.
Leadership	Provide local community organisers	Sponsored community organisers for each local area. Perhaps this could be a sponsorship opportunity for large private business as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility programme?
Communication	Provide community support & communication toolkits	A toolkit that enables community groups / associations to work together, form an organisation and keep in touch. It could include a local / personalised website with links to all relevant community support services in the area, a forum and a list of jobs that need doing for people to voluteer against.