Fair Wealth: Popup Talent's new ways to work

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

The real Secret Millions

Weekend television has a new star in C4’s fascinating series, Secret Millions.

The title and format for the series follows in the footsteps of Secret Millionaire; only the source for the cash investments this time is the Big Lottery, and its beneficiaries are a group of charities working to solve complex social issues through some genuinely innovative ideas. The Foyer Federation is one of them, so I have a vested interest, but my reason for writing is to reflect on the more general message behind the series.

Watching the first stories about London Youth and the Papworth Trust, it is clear that the title Secret Millions has another, more profound meaning. It would be a mistake to believe that the potential ‘millions’ revealed to us by the celebrity presenters is just the funding (or not) from the Big Lottery to replicate a charity idea. The secret millions has a human side too.  I think the real millions are the amazing individuals the public is being introduced to each week, people trying to get on with their lives in the background of challenges that would defeat many of us.  The first two episodes alone are a reminder of the million or so young people struggling to find work at the same time as dealing with complex situations, whilst an equal number of young adults experience disabilities that challenge the independence of their lives and those of their families.   

These are the secret millions to celebrate. People in our communities, living right next to and alongside us, that many of us don’t speak to or care about. People who are normally made invisible under the weight of negative stereotypes used by politicians, the media, and – let’s not forget – the charity sector itself, whose communication departments are too often involved in ‘selling’ deficits to the public for cash. In each case, the so-called ‘disadvantaged’ are neatly packaged into problems for 'pennies in a bucket' or discriminative policy sanctions that keep the individuals involved distanced from our hearts and minds.  

Not so in the C4 series. The Secret Millions is re-introducing us to the people behind the headlines.  In each case, what we find is a mirror back to ourselves.  The episodes seem to have at least one moment where you are genuinely touched and personally involved by a word, a look, a conflict, a failure or success; where we feel and share the humanity that is no secret to our real sense of values and beliefs.  It is the TV version of what Participle call 'Relational Welfare' - where the focus is on forming and being part of positive relationships geared around people building the assets and networks required to thrive in life. Which is why, in these first episodes, the adult mentors, parents and helpers, the connected cohorts of young people, and the links forged between the celebrity, the viewer and Big Lottery, are all important to suggest a different type of relationship is possible to create social change.

There are millions of people who have talents and potential that is being lost to us all. The crime is that it has been kept a secret for far too long. Government after Government, we have been prepared to pay huge amounts of money as a society to keep these secret millions hidden from view, lost in state systems of welfare, care and punishment that simply do not work.  C4’s series, and the funding of the Big Lottery, offers something of a revolution.  Each week, the public can see how positive, flexible, personalised approaches, that are prepared to take risks and develop new relationships, bring about real changes in perception and possibility. We see people beginning to flourish through environments and opportunities where they can explore their real selves in meaningful ways. We see charities doing what they are meant to do best - being radical, shaking up the status quo.

Many of us in the sector have been saying this for years. Well, now the secret is out. It’s time to get back from inside the positive-thinking closet, crawl out from behind the aspirational sofa, and stand up with confidence for what we truly believe in. The days of ‘disadvantaged thinking’ about supporting problems and coping with deficits is numbered. The days of acting in isolation, of charities being secret about their solutions to go it alone with funders, must be drawn to an end. There are millions of people with assets we just need to find the right way to invest in, so we can all benefit as a society.  C4’s series with the Big Lottery is showing us how we can do it together. 

For more information about Secret Millions, and to watch the episodes, see http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-secret-millions

Sending a message: Huhne, Grayling, and the rehabilitation revolution

One of many promises the coalition Government hasn’t delivered on is the so-called ‘rehabilitation revolution’: the long overdue systemic reform of our outdated, overcrowded, expensive, ever failing penal justice system.  It was always going to be a hard ask. Particularly given the Conservatives have ‘previous history’. Just remember Michael Howard and Anne Widdecombe.  But events over the last few days have taken an even more comical and depressing turn.

For starters, we have Chris Huhne. The Lib Dems, clearly learning from their coalition partners, have produced the next high profile politician ready to be imprisoned for perverting the course of justice. Huhne follows in the careful footsteps of hubris laid down by Jonathan Aitken and Geoffrey Archer. Though it’s unlikely Huhne is going to be in prison for long, the costs of his imprisonment are significant.  By the time of his sentencing, it will have cost around £65,000 to imprison him, taking into account the police, court and other expenses. Then there is at least a further £40,000 for each year of incarceration.  Huhne is a millionaire. A final sum of around 100k would be fairly small fry. But of course, it won’t be Huhne who is paying. We are. The taxpayer will cough up around £100,000 for a politician from a Government that based its standards on deficit reduction.  That isn’t just ironic, it is bitterly symbolic. For it is the Government’s behaviour – both as individuals, and through their policies – that is responsible for what we are all paying for now.

Before Chris Huhne packs his overnight bag for sentencing, he would do well to digest Chris Grayling’s comments from the Mail on Sunday’s ‘I smacked my children when they were badly behaved’.  It’s a headline that might interest David Cameron too, given recent grumblings inside the Conservative party. Grayling, though, is the Minister for Justice.  He is tasked with overseeing the institution Huhne is about to incarnated in, and – one hopes - for the ‘rehabilitation revolution’ that promises to reform the way it (doesn’t) work.  If Huhne’s past behaviour reflects badly for a former minister of climate change (I imagine most people who care about climate change don’t speed, let along lie about it), then Grayling’s behaviour as a child smacker doesn’t exactly suggest that ‘rehabilitation’ is anywhere near the top of the Government’s agenda for justice.  

In the Mail on Sunday article, Grayling suggests that he ‘smacked’ his children to ‘send a message’.  As @bberrybeth365 responded on twitter, ‘That message is the parent has lost control, their temper, and the plot!’ For Grayling and many others in the Conservative party, it is a message of deterrent that they believe is equally applied to the importance of prison.  Smacking a child might make a parent feel they are sending a message about discipline and boundaries, but the experience of being smacked is altogether more complex and sometimes deeply damaging.  Given high re-offending rates in prison, one has to wonder if ‘the message’ is of less significance than the actual impact of ‘the experience’ on a person.   If you look at criminal justice statistics from 2012, they  show that nearly a third of defendants convicted of serious offences had 15 or more previous convictions or cautions.  

Grayling goes on to clarify, in typical Daily Mail language, his belief that prisons should be ‘spartan but humane, a place people don’t particularly want to come back to’. Tellingly, there is no reference to rehabilitation here. Prison is a place lacking meaningful support for individuals to develop what they need to live healthy, sustainable, crime-free lives in society. This is not just a question of being humane; it’s an imperative part of prison as a process that is meant to rehabilitate as well as punish.  Most people who ‘go back’ to prison don’t do so because they didn’t get the message; they do so because they didn’t get any help to change.  For £40,000 a year, we should expect a lot more.

Dostoevsky wrote that ‘the degree of civilisation in society can be judged by entering its prisons’. Looking at the Minister for Justice smacking his children, and an ex minister about to be imprisoned for perverting the course of justice, one is left with the sickening feeling that our society lacks proper leadership.  Maybe that is the real ‘message’ that Grayling and Huhne are sending out to us. It’s time we listened, learned, and rehabilitated ourselves.

Escaping the straight-jacket: thoughts on the progression whole

Today I went to an ‘expert seminar’ run by The Progression Trust, The Young Foundation, and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, called ‘Progression Whole’. We live in a world where too many young people are left to struggle through key transition points in their lives.  Policy and practice is often over focused on narrow, limited interventions and outcomes rather than the ‘whole person, whole journey’ of an individual. That, in my limited nutshell, is the mantra and message of The Progression Whole. So how do we go about changing things at a system level?

The day kicked off with the suggestion from the always insightful and provocative chair Matthew Taylor that we didn’t need to discuss what progression meant, but needed to get stuck into the nitty gritty of the associated practice, research and policy issues.  The rest of the morning was spent with a mix of presentations and facilitated groups sessions to begin to scratch the surface in those areas. What came through – which Matthew Taylor suggested was a long way from being granular enough - made me think back to the opening comment: maybe the issue we are all dealing with is that progression is not as well defined and understood as we’d like to think it is.

I believe we are in a policy and practice environment where there is a tussle going on between a full monty aspirational person-centred progression vision, and a series of false markers that appear to promise that but are in fact delivering something entirely different. Thus, one can find organisations commissioned to offer move on and resettlement services, under the banner of progressing independent lives, but within a framework and timescale which entirely limits what an individual can achieve.  Resettlement, move on, independent living, are all phrases which might form part of a whole progression but on their own often package up an individual into an outcome rather like one puts on a straight-jacket.  Sometimes, we get lost in the proxy rather than the reality of where someone is.  If we ask the question, what do we need to be able to do and be to make the transition at this point and what/where next, the answer is unlikely to be measured in an exit interview for a resettlement plan.   It is entirely possible at present to be responsible for services that deliver excellent outcomes in delivering very little at all that really helps an individual make a significant transition or transformation in their life journey. That is the bad faith that is the blindspot or hole in our current progression whole.  The difference between coping and thriving is an entirely different type of provision, not that young people are incapable of making the journey between the two stages.

There are a series of complex issues at play here.  One of them is certainly that, in some places, there is a poverty of aspiration for specific groups of young people.  As the recent Joseph Rowntree report on ‘Attitudes, aspirations and behaviours’ indicates, we are awash with language on the  lack of or achievement of aspiration. But little of that is directed at the poverty of aspiration inside the policy and decision making frameworks behind the shoddy deals offered to some young people at the local level.  Linked to this, is the behaviour by which even the sector itself fuels the poverty of aspiration in others by endlessly stereotyping young people in terms of the language that marks their challenges – disadvantaged, at risk, NEETS, vulnerable, etc.  It is yet another straight-jacket which, once we buckle young people into, entirely limits the way their progression is discussed, measured and invested in.  The other issue is the whole nature of complexity itself. Progression must be about embracing the concept of complexity theory; the need for very tailored, co-produced, personalised solutions that ensure the journey is real  and alive for someone.  Within the rigid silos of age-based policies, departmental budgets, specific funding programmes, and a host of other Kafkaesque hurdles, you need dynamite to keep the road of that vision open .

I left the building with a memorable quote from the day in mind: ‘let’s measure what we value and value what we measure’.   If you think about that for a moment, and go back to think about how progression is valued and measured in one’s own organisation, it’s a good starting point to escape the straight-jacket.

People Powered Change: A game of shadows

Last night I attended an event by the Institute for Government (IfG) and the Big Lottery Fund (BIG), called ‘Connecting Policy with Practice: People Powered Change’.

It is a partnership designed to engage policy makers and commissioners with the insights of VCS leaders involved in the latest round of strategic investments from BIG expressing their new People Powered sision.  As the IfG website says, ‘It is increasingly clear that traditional delivery models, and silo working, will not be effective in addressing the most intractable social policy problems especially against a background of reducing resources.’

Of course we’ve heard the concepts of cross sector partnerships, new deals, learning from what works, etc etc, before.  But at the heart of this endeavour is something with potential: a desire to solve the intractable issues repeated through the poverty and exclusion engrained in our social order.  In Sherlock Holmes terms, it’s a return to the elementary business of hunting down the Moriarty behind the ‘Game of Shadows’ in our rather murky world of policy, funding and civil society delivery.

I want to pause for a moment to be mindful about what the BIG vision of People Powered Change means. The event at the Institute for Government included excellent insightful presentations from Peter Wanless, Chief Executive of BIG, and Dharmendra Kanani, BIG England Director. It is quite clear that BIG are beginning to occupy the territory of a thoughtful funder, trying to push the focus of investments away from just ‘random acts of kindness’ towards something more strategic, evidenced, and transformational. It is refreshing to hear BIG beginning to talk the same language of what we call at the Foyer Federation 'Open Talent': the theory of co-production, how the experiences of people can provide solutions to the problems they seem to pose, the importance of working with people based on what they can do rather than just supporting what they can’t.  The challenge for this progressive dialogue is whether it can deliver on the promise in People Powered Change. Can BIG help lead a change in the ‘power’ dynamics by which the VCS, policy makers, commissioners and funders perceive and act on ‘people’?

This question here is not just one of co-production, or representation. It is also about the language we use to identify and understand the people who are meant to be powering the change. Because one of the changes urgently required in the shadows is the way policy, funders, and the VCS perceive and diagnose people through a lexicon of needs, deficits, problems and vulnerabilities which often negatively directs what and how services get designed and funded.

There is a paradigm moment here: we are collectively stuck in a way of thinking – a form of ‘disadvantaged thinking’ -which labels people in ways that influences how society works with and misunderstands those people.  It is a vicious cycle that promotes the disadvantage we seek to address.   Moriarty is in our minds.

People Powered Change must be about people as they really are, not people as a set of entrenched stereotypes. Part of the power we must learn is the power of language itself.  What we choose to call people is key to what reality we create with and for people.  Whilst the Institute for Government and Big Lottery Fund partnership is refreshingly important, it is still in part thinking from and connecting within the shadows of language it must find the power to change. That is its starting point.  There are people who are experiencing the challenges of not being in education, but none of them exist as NEET, and not one of them deserves the type of services and policies we continue to clumsily shape to address the stereotype that they are not.  People Powered Change – really - yes please. 

Be-cause

Nagasaki. In the ruins of Japan’s oldest Christian cathedral, they found one remain: the burnt out face from a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her features ashen, eyes tortured into black pits, a medusa stare of horror within her peaceful transcendent gaze. Our death-mask of humanity.

One sinks into onsen, hidden in a forest watched by wild deer, listening to the wind rustle morning mist into glistening leaves.

 ‘Open to the talent of ancestors

Open to the talent of our selves

Open to the talents of others

Open to the talents of our world’

To replenish.

To see, refreshed, the focus  and purpose of charity.  The saving, the stabilising, the preventing;  where is the cause? We are an athlete becoming faster, no longer aware of what is the race. Lost in a net of our own keeping, origin is a distant mountain.  Fuji’s mysterious peek-a-boo.

Cogs of the universe turn at the Temple in perfected ritual. Sutra and incense to ease a soul sickened from the West’s gorging reason.  You impact by being the transformation you seek for others. Yet the systems we work within persist in such conflict. What structures has reason shaped in our hearts, to shift the paradigm of thinking we cherish but are not?

Disadvantage is our product. An ugly show-room car of the way we think, the values we feel.  Mass produced.  Branded.  Promoted.  Sold in an industry like a range of breakfast cereals offering both the sugary policies of poverty and the healthy options of charity. Eaten blindly.  Another New Year sale, another diet of good intentions failed.

Staring back into Yokohama sky, a cargo boat snails silver across the horizon, shifting heavy ripples of purpose to the shore.  The sands on the beach below me cannot contain all our suffering.  Opportunity lies, but not in the grains – it is the problems within us. We stand so shy in the mirror to ourselves.

Military helicopters hum overhead, spinning angrily towards an imaginary war of clouds. Breaking nature. And now I fly, over Murmansk, arms stretched to home. What is inside: what is outside.  We are the measure and impact; the story to sweep the beach and reveal our mountain; the catalyst of experience to collaborate us together again.

The airport luggage belt laden with shapes from many travels turns in an infinite Escher puzzle. Which one will you choose?  How? Who? To where? There are three cases to each item of luggage: our today is both what we solve from yesterday and create for tomorrow.  

I watch people push past with nothing to declare. They become invisible in the sterile glare of arrivals. Then I too follow, a different Humpty Dumpty.

 

 

In a Crisis

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a V event to raise awareness about youth homelessness. It was an open mic style evening at Westminster University, to which myself and two other charities had been invited to provide some speeches in between the open mic musical performances. 

My contribution was based around a bucket, representing the big change in thinking and behaviour we all need to lead on, instead of the small change of coins by which we dispose of the issues and our responsibility in solving them.  The bucket was my performance prop, and I hoped at the end of the evening to give the audience that image to carry with them for some time to come. What talent do you have to put in the bucket, to bring about real change?  Every time they saw a coin bucket, I wanted them to think of the bigger bucket inside their minds and hearts.

At the start of the evening, something fascinating happened. The event was actually being used to promote the work of Crisis, whose leaflets and small change bucket were plastered across the room. There are lots of charities working in this field, and in the run up to Christmas, Crisis is one that many people rightly think of. Like a dog, though, a charity is not just for Christmas – but nevertheless, that’s how our social thinking works.  When the representative from Crisis arrived, and we were introduced, I was looking forward to an interesting conversation about how our respective work contributed to the issues the event was exploring.  Instead, the representative just smiled politely. ‘ Foyer who?’.  I tried to explain. ‘Should I know you?’ the person said, half apologetically.  Behind us, the big projection screen would show that there were around 80,000 young people experiencing the stereotype homeless. My organisation worked with 10,000 – should they know us?

This was and is the real crisis. Not the charity name, but a crisis in charity itself. We spend most of our time promoting the problems and asking for money to solve them, but take minimal responsibility for the way we act ourselves. We don’t really know each other. We don’t really love each other. Rather than finding new ways to collaborate, we mostly compete against one another in endless funding and marketing duals.  We think more of our own survival and wouldn’t think twice about taking the cake for ourselves without any sense of responsibility for fair distribution between us. We often spend our time gossiping about each other’s weaknesses. We don’t really share our resources to create the biggest impact. We hardly ever go looking at how we can support each other. We care for the cause in equal measure but don’t have time to care about each other. 

And yet here we all are, at the same event, oblivious to the real crisis: that the values by which we work directly equate to and reflect the problems we are working with.  We are homeless charities, who have no home for each other.

‘Should I know you?’ she said. 

Yes, 80,000 times over.

We are in a Crisis, we are seeking Shelter, we want some Prince’s Trust, we care to take Action for Children, we believe in Kids Company, we are making a Centrepoint, we are Foyer Federation...and so many more. 

In the Home for Advantaged Thinking, no one is at home unless everyone is.  Making a home for people must begin with how we work with ourselves. It starts here, inside us. How can I know you?