Creating ‘ready for anything’ communities

Geraldine Blake is chief executive of Community Links, a charity that has worked in one of the most deprived areas of the country – Newham in east London – for over thirty years. She talks to Clare Goff about responding to change.

HOW HAVE AUSTERITY AND WELFARE REFORM AFFECTED THE COMMUNITIES YOU WORK WITH?
The picture is just so awful. It’s like a tidal wave of need and people have little understanding of what will happen. We’re seeing unemployment shooting up, people have much more complex problems, and are much more distressed. They’ve been thrown off benefits or are getting further into debt and there are more working people experiencing problems. People are increasingly concerned for their future and this is happening at the same time as there are cuts to legal aid and to other services as councils make huge savings. We are struggling to meet the increased demand for our advice services and we can see that things will get worse with the welfare reform that will hit in April. When new systems are introduced assumptions are made. They say for example that ‘people will be able to look online’, but this is one of the most diverse places in world. There are high levels of illiteracy and lots of different languages. And when the chancellor talks about taking another £10bn out of the system you think, ‘from where?’. Community Links is now, for the first time in its history, giving out food vouchers and sending people to the local food bank. That’s the level of desperation.

WHAT ARE THE PARTICULAR SOCIAL ISSUES OF THE AREA?
This community has been very deprived for a long time. The deprivation indicators are off the scale. It’s the third most deprived in the country and has quite an insular attitude, being geographically separated, on the wrong side of River Lea, and not in inner London. When I first came to Canning Town [where Community Links is based] the thing that struck me was you could see the poverty in peoples’ bodies. It’s a different level of poverty. There’s also a lot of churn – between 20 and 25% of people are new each year – so you have real serious challenges. You have a really young population and hyper-diversity. But it’s an entrepreneurial community and has amazing opportunities. The challenge is to make this community confident enough and with the knowledge and resources to believe that this is a remarkable place to be. If you’re going to be anywhere in austerity Britain you might as well be here. There’s an assumption among young people that they won’t get jobs, which comes from decades of living in poverty and being told not they aren’t worth much. Regeneration has the potential to crack that one because it’s becoming a really special place to be, with the Olympic Park and Westfield as the centre of gravity and a new university campus at Stratford.

HOW HAS COMMUNITY LINKS REACTED TO THE CUTS?
We’ve always been innovative. This organisation is full of restless people with too many ideas. We lost a third of our funding – £3.5m – and a quarter of our staff – 70 people. We’ve reduced the number of Neighbourhood Centres drastically and they are now based only in the most deprived areas. We previously had a youth team, a children’s team and an adults’ team but now these have been merged into one early action team who’s brief is to go to the communities and say ‘Here’s a Neighbourhood Centre and a little bit of support. What do you want to do?’ It’s been a difficult transition. In some areas they quickly adapted but in others it’s been a more traumatic transition. We put in professional support but it was driven by parents and each has ended up with a different programme of activities, designed and delivered by the community. I don’t want to say that there’s been a silver lining to cuts but the challenge to think in new ways has had some real benefits. Community Links takes a very practical approach. We think about the issues and really engage with them. Our first value is to tackle causes not consequences. If you have that approach you think not about ‘how do we deliver differently?’ but ‘how do you change the environment so that service is not needed in first place?’

ARE WE AT A TURNING POINT IN TERMS OF PUBLIC SERVICES?
If we’re trying to make a shift about how we think about society we have all conditions you need. It’s times like this when big shifts happen. In five years time our society will be completely unrecognisable. People get fixated on libraries closing down but there will be so few public services and what services there are left will be delivered by a complex patchwork of private sector, charities and other delivery bodies. The changes require all of us to have a different mindset. We measure our Neighbourhood Centres very carefully and can see that in those areas with a centre crime is much lower, and it impacts positively on health and unemployment. On the Rokeby estate (pictured) there used to be very high crime and fear of crime. We built a very small centre – one room – and said ‘this is your space’. They’ve set up a programme that includes play schemes and family support and someone teaching guitar. All of it sounds simple but crime dropped by 58% in one year because people know each other and challenge and support each other. It’s not soft at all – it’s really powerful and effective. The services being cut at the moment are the things like this that aren’t always easily measurable. There will continue to be funding for measurable work but what will disappear is the soft early action work. Its really important we don’t say ‘here’s a community that’s about to go off the rails so let’s prevent bad stuff’, but to say ‘here’s a community with potential’. We need to make communities ready to tackle whatever happens.

HOW IS YOUR OWN MODEL OF PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY CHANGING?
In 1997 when Labour first talked about involving the third sector in public service delivery our model changed. We had 75% public money and grew dramatically – with employment and work programmes and our school for excluded children. Now we are heading back to a model which still has some public money but that’s more likely to be payment by results (PBR). We’ve been calling for PBR for years and now a quarter of our income comes from PBR. But it requires education on all sides. The principle of being paid when you deliver results and focusing on outcomes is sound but managing all those programmes and cash flow is challenging. The government is keen to do more but it needs to recognise the challenges for the people delivering them. There’s also the issue of attribution. If crime falls 58% there is a cashable saving but how can attribution be determined? And what about the things – like early action – that are more difficult to monetise? Focusing on monetising will take us down the wrong route if that’s all we do.

Focusing on monetising
will take us down the wrong route
if that’s all we do.

YOU RECENTLY LAUNCHED THE ‘DECIDING TIME’ REPORT BY THE EARLY ACTION TASK FORCE. HOW EMBEDDED IS THE IDEA OF EARLY ACTION IN GOVERNMENT? 
We set up the national early action task force to make the case to government, business, and funders for a complete shift in approach. It brings together a range of people but it’s drawn from our experience on the ground and the challenges we see every day. We need to move from becoming a society that deals with problems to a society that is ready for anything. There’s been huge progress in a short space of time and some interesting work is being done in the Welsh Assembly and the Lancashire Constabulary in particular. It’s a very compelling case and the economic and social and evidence is huge. One of things I’ve learnt is that politicians don’t always make decisions based on evidence but rather on politics. The key to the next phase is political leadership. We need to ask what kind of society we want to live in and how can we create it.

YOU WORK CLOSELY WITH BUSINESS. HOW HAVE YOU MANAGED TO BRING THEM ON BOARD?
Our location, close to Canary Wharf, makes it slightly easier to engage with business. We have solid remarkable partnerships, some of whom we’ve been working with for many years. They do employee volunteering and specialist pro bono work – I don’t want a bunch of solicitors painting a community building – and they work with us to jointly try to effect policy change around issues that affect their customers and business. A number of them are involved in early action task force and others host policy events or connect us to their network. Some support a 10-week programme for Neets. The best partnerships operate on many levels and for us it’s increased during the recession because we’ve worked hard at those relationships. It’s all about the relationship. Our offer to business is not ‘please give us some money it will make you feel good’. It’s, ‘here is a problem and what can we do about it’. It’s not about being a supplicant but being equal.

HAVE THE OLYMPICS AND OTHER BIG REGENERATION SCHEMES TRICKLED DOWN?
The Olympics is one of the smaller regeneration programmes in east London. There’s been billions of pounds of building and infrastructure. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity; no future government will spend money in the way it has done on these areas. The key thing about the Olympics was the sense of aspirations being raised, of people feeling confident and part of it. We were worried that young people would feel excluded and that things would kick off, but it was amazing. The Games will always be a blip. It’s more about the twenty year story about what’s happened in east London and making sure everyone benefits. But it was huge and so exciting that everyone got caught up in it.

• For more information about Community Links click here.