This post covers the final lesson learned from the January 2012 evaluation of Burngreave New Deal for Communities. Previous posts covered these lessons learned:
- community based partnerships,
- the accountable body,
- project management,
- place related outcomes, and
- community engagement and community development
The next lesson learned was
‘the contribution of agencies was vital to the change observed in the NDC area over the lifetime of the programme. However, changes in leadership, funding and priorities have meant that interventions have not been maintained in the longer term. Although reductions in public spending have impacted on all statutory agencies it is important that a strategic overview is maintained to ensure that the benefits associated with the NDC programme are not lost, and that problems which prompted the allocation of NDC resources to Burngreave in the first place do not re-emerge in future.’
As far as I can see, no-one has learned this lesson. (Has anyone really learned any of these lessons? We’ve experienced these lessons for many decades and still carry on in the same way.) The second sentence says it all. Changes in leadership, funding and priorities should not mean the partnership collapses! Ultimately, NDC failed to engage commitment from any of its partners. The partnership collapsed as soon as the money ran out; and so the community Forum collapsed a few months later. (Note the Forum existed before New Deal and apparently was the reason why the city chose the area for New Deal!)
Lessons Learned (or Not)
Let’s be clear because the writer of this lesson did not have the perspective of the last two years:
- there is no longer a strategic overview – the local authority has its own agenda and engages with the community through tedious meetings with pointless aims and objectives, offering derisory funding for things nobody wants
- the long-term benefits of the NDC revenue programme are unknown; we have no means of knowing one way or the other as there will be no future evaluations
- the assets belong to the local authority and do not produce a surplus, so much for “legacy, not history”
- the problems are re-emerging and there is no community Forum; the activists who set it up have no heart to reconstruct what they have lost.
What went wrong?
Everyone misconceived the programme from the outset. Grant money always creates an artificial market. The delivery organisations, who received grants from New Deal, were not rooted in any market. They were not trading and so when the grants ran out they had no customers and so had to wind up. This happens time and again with much smaller funding programmes. Grants (and sometimes loans) are readily available and this undermines community businesses because the grant-aid short cut is so seductive.
Furthermore the people administering New Deal had no interest in its success. An entrepreneur must succeed because the business is their livelihood. The project officer when a project runs out of money simply moves onto the next project. They’re rewarded for the grants they raise and their outputs and not for the survival of their initiatives.
I don’t think there ever was a strategic overview. The professionals who manage grants took over and did what they do. An entrepreneur with £50K would do more than the teams of professionals who ran this £50 million programme.
Governments do not build communities. Governments regulate market behaviour (or they should do) but they can easily wreck neighbourhoods through poor policies. They do not bring the economic skills to the table needed to regenerate our communities.
The business people I’ve worked with in community contexts usually stay on the periphery and then walk away because neither government officers nor local people know how to conduct business. Thus we act to marginalise the very people who can regenerate our communities.
Can you name any project that started with grant aid and has become sustainable through mainstream funding or trading? There must be some, it would be brilliant to know how they did it.
