Burngreave New Deal: Community Based Partnerships
Since last Monday’s post “Are grants bad news for community projects?“, I’ve reviewed the evaluation of Burngreave New Deal for Communities (BNDC) and it seems more relevant than the national evaluation. As a local resident, involved in BNDC, I write about what I know.
Grants can do good and I do not deny the good done with the £50 million spent in Burngreave over the New Deal decade. However, with all that money to invest, the programme systematically failed to engage with the local economy. We need to think about communities in economic terms and build models based on economic activity that puts grants in their place. What is their place? I’m still working it out!
If there is potential to support local economies online, those who develop online services need to understand local economies. So, in this and the next five emails I shall comment on the six lessons learned according to the Burngreave New Deal for Communities: End of Programme Evaluation, January 2012. Here’s the first lesson learned:
“there is a need for community based partnerships to establish processes and mechanisms for collaboration before embarking on delivery; a year zero in which BNDfC has been able to establish a robust partnership might have helped overcome some of the difficulties experienced at the outset of the programme”
Burngreave NDC did not build local community based partnerships in year zero or at any other times over the 10 year programme. Why was that?
What Went Wrong?
Let’s go back to the beginning. NDC was an imposed programme. The government informed the city of Sheffield one community could receive ND funding. The local strategic partnership, which I think at the time was called Sheffield First (the charmed circle that makes up these partnerships recycle themselves so many times it’s impossible to remember what they called themselves in any given year) met behind closed doors and announced a shortlist of communities.
At this stage you would think they might have talked to people in these areas. We asked them and they refused to do so.
Way back in 1997, after a 2 or 3 years of hard work we launched Burngreave Community Action Forum (BCAF). It had support from active residents and met quarterly with over 60 people attending each meeting. A year or two before NDC, BCAF founded a charitable company called Burngreave Community Action Trust (BCAT). BCAT employed four staff who delivered BCAF’s community plan. What would BCAF/T had said had Sheffield First invited them to a conversation before making their decision?
Maybe the forums in the other shortlisted areas would have provided evidence that swayed them to a different community. Or a conversation at that stage would have established commitment to BCAT as a community based partnership.
The Real Issue
One or two years later, BCAT might have been able to play this role (with support it might have been sooner). On the day NDC announced Burngreave as the lucky recipient of its largess, a vocal group of residents turned up at a BCAF meeting and told us BCAF/T was not going to get its hands on the money.
Sheffield First did hint that BCAF/T was the reason they chose Burngreave but it was clear that first evening, BCAF/T had a lot of work to do to show people BCAF/T was their organisation. In fact, many other organisations had designs on the money and feared a community united behind a single representative body. This was never about one local group getting the money at the expense of others, it was about control of the money by local people or the local authority.
BCAF/T knew about the divisions in the community. They were the reason we founded BCAF. Council policy caused many of the divisions over the previous 10 or 20 years. They used grants to divide the neighbourhood and £50 million simply widened the gaps.
I don’t know whether these are the difficulties referred to in the first lesson. It is interesting, with all those resources NDC was unable to resolve these differences.
Have you experienced relationships undermined by funding? Share your comments below.