Good Local Economics
Claire Dove picked up a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion this week. Chief executive of social enterprise Blackburne House and chair of the Social Enterprise Coalition, she spoke to New Start about standing up to injustice and driving social enterprise to the next level.
How did you start out?
Most people go into the social enterprise or charity sector because of an experience they had. For me it was because of the racism I experienced when I was young. There was very overt racism back in the 70s in Liverpool. I couldn’t get a job. You either shrink and go away or decide it’s not acceptable. It’s part of my personality that I wouldn’t allow people to put me down and my working life has been spent on social justice. I set up an employment agency to work with employers. We said we’ll work with the best candidate with the best skillset rather than judge people on their gender or race. I’d worked with the women’s movement in the early 60s/70s and wanted to do something specifically around women and was asked to work with a group looking at setting up training provision for women. At that time there wasn’t a lot of supportive training for women, especially for those that had been failed by the traditional education sector and for black women. Our organisation – the Women’s Training and Technology Scheme – was about getting women into careers not jobs, training them to a high level. We thought technology might be a growth industry and started a very bold course thirty years ago training women in new technology – microelectronics, computing and electronics – and we were very successful. What we looked at doing was not just putting a course on but basing it around the needs of women. We got more women than we had space for, grew exponentially and didn’t have enough space.
Ed Miliband recently announced plans to devolve more resources to cities and local areas including support for the 39 local enterprise partnerships (Leps) – the key vehicle tasked with local economic growth. However, recent work by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), highlights how Leps have some work to do before short term economic growth priorities translate into longer term social improvements.
