Channel Four’s Secret Millions ‘Popup Talent Shop’ episode
offers some welcome respite from political debate on benefit payments. After
a week that has seen the stakes raised following the Daily Mail’s provocative association
of the Philpott tragedy with the Government’s claims against so-called ‘benefit
scroungers’, Secret Millions has thankfully uncovered a more positive human story
against the grain of stereotypes.
Parties on both sides will continue to argue about controlling benefits
through ever more crude and complex systems of conditionality, particularly for
those unemployed young people aged 16-25 from challenging homeless backgrounds who
end up living in Foyers. But the answers to the issues in theri lives are unlikely to
come from Westminster. Beveridge aside, Government attempts to bring about
solutions have actually created more social problems over the past decades than
they have ever fixed. Universal Credit
and ‘welfare reform’ are just another shaking of the precarious policy jelly. To
steal a quote from Bill Ford, the CEO of General Electric, a growth equity
company investing in enterprise in emerging global markets, ‘I hope the role of
Government remains benign neglect’. (See
Chrystia’s Freeland’s ‘How to get rich from the eastward tilt’, International
Herald Tribune, April 5, 2013). Benign neglect for Ford has meant that ‘poorer’
countries such as Pakistan, Turkey and Nigeria are now producing the latest
Steve Jobs as entrepreneurs begin to thrive in the gaps left to tackle unmet social
challenges. These are the same gaps
where charities once flourished as a source for innovation in the UK. But in
more recent times, the role of charity has often been diminished through closer
ties to state funding and the deficit-based thinking that has characterised
much of its commissioning of services and subsequent cuts. With current high rates of youth
unemployment, there has never been a more urgent time to find ‘new ways to
work’. Thankfully, Secret Millions suggests charities can still lead social
change - using the power of young people’s talents, a little help from some
friends, and a healthy dash of pioneering spirit.
The Foyer Federation is a case in point. It has long argued
that the right investment in ‘something’ for a young person can lead to
‘something else’ that reaps huge personal and social gains. In 2009, the Federation began to articulate
this as an ‘Open Talent’ strategy, introducing a range of inspirational initiatives
aimed at involving young people in finding, nurturing and promoting their
talents – the majority of which have been funded by forward thinking
organisations such as Virgin Unite, the Society for Motor Manufacturers and
Traders, Monument Trust and Esmee Fairbairn. The focus on assets, not deficits,
is where the Federation is breaking important ground. Open Talent suggests that ‘support’ should
not be about how to help someone cope with deficits; its sole purpose should be
how to enable someone to build the assets required to thrive in life, to find
and use their talents. This is the
approach of the entrepreneur: looking for, developing and investing in the
advantages that will create sustainable solutions. Not surprisingly, the Federation’s partners
for Popup Talent include a social enterprise (GoodPeople), a youth leadership
charity (Changemakers), and local community services like Braintree Foyer who
are prepared to take a lead in doing things differently. Together with the freedom of two years
Lottery funding, this is a rich mix for transforming lives.
In the Popup Talent episode, we see young people freed to
express their enterprising nature to find and make work; to be part of their own solution. Secret Millions shows us that it is not
‘hand outs’ that young people need to do this, but ‘hand ups’ – opportunities,
guidance and encouragement to build and exploit the personal assets that we
take for granted in our lives. The Big
Lottery funding awarded in Secret Millions will enable the Federation to do
just that, by filling a gap in the benefit debate in which young people still fail
to receive the emotional and social capital to invest in their future.
Arguments about the size of the hand out needed for someone
to live on are of course vitally important; but without any focus on the hand
up that will build someone’s asset base, the arguments are lost in an endless
‘something-for-nothing’ debate of their own making. The real missing
‘something’ is not the commitment of young people, but whether or not they have
the opportunity to develop and promote their assets to offer something back. That ‘something’ must come from ‘somewhere’
if we are to help young people move on in their lives for the benefit of
society, and it is sadly not coming from the majority of Government funded job
centres and work programmes where the neglect in developing young people’s
talents is not so much benign as wastefully ignorant. If payment by results for job centres and
work programmes was properly linked to nurturing talent, then the current
system would be seen for what it is: hopelessly out of touch, no longer fit for
purpose, in need of real innovation.
Secret Millions reminds us of The Big Lottery’s crucial role
as an intelligent funder: to free up charities and the young people they work
with to ‘thrive in the gaps’; to reveal and empower the hidden millions of
people and ideas that are missed beneath the headlines and policy statements. Why
not believe that young people from challenging backgrounds actually have talent
and potential? Why not provide a job centre model and a work programme approach
that tries to build those talents? Why not involve young people in devising and
developing the content of how these centres and programmes might work? Why not enable employers to develop more
upstream relationships with the young people who could become part of their future
talent pool? Why not save taxpayers’
money by investing more intelligently in positive, flexible, personalised
approaches, that are proven to work. Such questions won’t be found in the
current arguments about benefits, but they badly need to be asked.
Popup Talent introduces a very different perspective to traditional
concepts of welfare. I call it ‘fair wealth’, and it involves us all in how we
think about and work with young people in a
more ‘advantaged thinking’ way than the current obsession with
‘disadvantage and need’. It offers a
simple three dimensional solution: treat
young people not as problems in the system but as potential assets for society;
invest in what young people actually require to build their own thriving life,
including the space to take risks, fail and be enterprising; and collaborate
with young people to harness their experiences as part of a community of
relationships able to create its own solutions, including future employment
options.
‘Fair wealth’ is about being more measured, rational and
just in how we invest in the development of our shared future capital - young people. Ensuring each young person grows up as an
asset to society is an aspiration and a responsibility none of us can afford to
hide from too. It is our ‘something’,
our part of the deal. As Secret Millions shows, it’s also a much more exciting
and engaging story to be involved in than arguments about welfare that have long
since lost the plot.
If you want to be part
of the Popup Talent revolution, you can find out more at www.foyer.net and www.popuptalent.org
No comments:
Post a Comment