Monthly Archives: October 2014

0 My Origin Story

Two Fridays ago I shared a simple story from my past and last week I wrote about digital storytelling.  Today I’m going to share my origin story; the story that explains why I have set up my community web consultancy.  This story is a work in progress and I shall re-write it many times.  Stories are fluid, there is no final version.  This one still needs more work!

At the time of publishing there is an earlier version on the About page on this site.  I expect to take it down once I’ve re-written my origin story to my satisfaction.

One late afternoon in 1996 Attercliffe in Sheffield UK, my friends took me to Pizza Hut, and not leave me in the office on my own. We had a meeting coming up that evening and I was shaking. I’ve never felt that way before or since. My hands were visibly involuntarily moving.

It was stress and it led to my first diagnosis of high blood pressure, for which I still take medication. Looking back I wonder whether anything is worth that sort of stress.  But what brought it on?

Well, we had over 3 – 4 years set up a Trust, Attercliffe and Darnall Community Enterprises, and the idea was that it would be the successor to the Lower Don Valley Forum. The Forum covered several neighbourhoods but it was a small group of dedicated activists with little local support but with the support of the Local Authority.

With my support (I worked for Industrial Mission in South Yorkshire, a church-linked ecumenical organisation) the Forum had developed several community enterprises and businesses. The Trust was an essential step towards providing support for these projects into the future.  The meeting should have been a simple transfer of assets from the Forum to the Trust.

However, the closing of the Forum was a step too far for the activists and in the weeks leading to its AGM their opposition came into the open. I had made a lot of mistakes. I’m not always sensitive to peoples’ feelings and had underestimated their strength of feeling.

My friends did what they could to calm me with pizza and then we went to the meeting. What was at stake? Everything legally belonged to the Forum but it was not a company and lacked the democratic structures for it ever to be properly accountable. They had recently won significant grants but they were for the Trust and depended  upon the transfer of assets.

There were a lot of problems with several projects in the area; all of them were struggling with accountability. I wanted to show it was possible for local people to run an organisation to professional standards. The reality though was this meant the old Forum members would lose power. There were others who wanted to be involved and were delighted the Forum had been successful in its grant applications. They supported the change but were there enough of them?

It wasn’t fair because the Forum’s rules allowed anyone living in the Valley to vote at AGMs. This was one reason it wasn’t suitable to go forward. It is the reason why the old members lost the vote when the doors opened and about 60 people marched in.  I hadn’t expected these numbers and they were all members of the Forum under its rules even though they had never been to a meeting.

The Forum’s activists split off and instead of closing kept it going with council support. I lost friends and colleagues I had made over the years. It was a professional victory and a personal defeat for me. Even though the Trust had support from local people it took several years for the Council to concede it was well run and accountable to the community.

This experience set me on a new path. I had seen community economic development as simply about setting up projects. I realised there was more to it and relationships were just as important, maybe more important than funding. Good relationships without funding can achieve a great deal. Funding with poor relationships achieves nothing of lasting value.

Over the years I have seen the same story repeated time and again. Large sums of money thrown at communities that lack the relationship capacity they need to make anything of it.

Why? Because we base so much of our practice on the assumption altruism motivates people to volunteer or become an activist. Self-interest motivates successful groups and is effective in transformational change, not altruism.

Self-interest is honest. I benefit when the people around me benefit. I understand that working for the benefit of others benefits me too. In working for my benefit I benefit others.

In the UK we separate self-interest from community; compare with the nineteenth century, people understood self-interest and achieved an astonishing amount through mutuals. The retail co-operative movement was the most important example of this but mutual principles motivated or influenced almost every institution we use in modern society.

It was a way of harnessing entrepreneurial spirit to local solidarity. People who owned their own businesses believed they were working for their communities. Not only did they create jobs they also endowed the local authority with gifts of buildings and parks.

Today community work happens in community centres. Most people see small businesses as part of the private sector, where people do unspeakable things with money. What I’ve seen is the opposite. Time and again I’ve seen large amounts of public money go to projects that lack accountability and business acumen. They flame and burn out.

Meanwhile small businesses quietly support the local economy. The thing is when you know you can generate income, then the value of money changes. You can be generous because you know how to find more. Grants are time limited and bring instability to our communities.

The future of our communities is with the entrepreneurial spirit and not community groups. This means the future is with entrepreneurs, whether they are small business owners or running social enterprises. These people need to work together both in their local areas and online.

They need to work together locally because together they can get some purchase on the flow of money around the local economy. Wrestling control from the multinationals will never be easy but it is has to be through the local economy.

Online because partnership can happen between areas, sharing stories and ideas, learning how to market online as well as locally. Together we need to face up to the ideas that marginalise community work in the third sector.

Work in Progress

Perhaps the story is too complex to fully grasp.  Explaining the back-story can possibly lose the reader.  Also the end becomes rather theoretical and I need to find perhaps another story to bridge from this one to the present.

Currently an earlier version of this story appears on my site’s About page.  I could move it to a more prominent place on the website.  It could be told in text or by video, which is certainly something I want to explore.  Many people have several versions of their origin story suitable for different situations.  They tell the story at meetings, during training events, in videos …  This story as it stands doesn’t quite trip off the tongue but I’ll keep working on it!

Any feedback about how I might improve would be welcome.

2 Using Categories

The first priority when organising blog posts as you write, is assigning them to categories.  It pays to be systematic from the start. Categories help you keep track of your posts.

If you assign categories before you start, assuming you know what your blog will be about, this will help you keep track of things.  You can assign as many categories as you like to any one post.  You need to be careful if you assign multiple categories.  This is your primary way of organising posts and so you want a system that is easy to grasp, for your readers and for you when you return to it after a period.  Some people allow only one category per post.  I assign one subcategory per post and whilst this includes the parent category, I assign the parent too so that I am reminded about the parent child relationship.

Later, you may find you need to adjust your categories.  You can:

The thing to remember is if you delete a category you do not delete its posts. You will lose a record of which posts were in the deleted category.

So if you open the WordPress dashboard and click on Posts in the left hand column, you will see Categories among the submenu items. So open the Categories page.

To the right you will see a record of your existing categories and their relationships.  To create a new category, work down the left hand side of the page and start by naming your category.

It is best to keep names as short as possible but they should convey what the category is about. One disadvantage of a long name is it will lengthen you post urls and so the next box, Slug, allows you to assign a shorter category name for your urls.

If you click on the arrow beside the word Parent, you can select one of the existing categories to be Parent to your new category. So categories can be nested within other categories, these are sometimes called subcategories. If you want a standalone category, leave this blank.  Posts entered into a subcategory will also appear in the parent category.

You can enter a category description if you wish. This may help if you have a number of blog authors, so they have some idea which categories to use.

To add your new category to the list on the right, click the blue button at the bottom. This table should be self-explanatory. The Parent-Child relationships are shown by blue dashes to the left of the category name. If you hover over the name you will see several options appear.

Quick edit enables you to change the name and the slug. Edit takes you to a new page which enables you to change just about anything.

Your new category name will appear in your post editor so that you can assign new posts to it. Once you have one or more posts in the category it will also feature in lists of categories in the sidebar or footer of your website.

If you want it to appear in your navigation, you will need to set that up; the topic for next time.

2 Knowing Your Purpose

So, now to the main theme of this thread, where I shall look at the issues third sector organisations face. We need to face up to it, not knowing your purpose is likely to be a problem your organisations faces from time to time.  The reasons for this are complex.

Third sector organisations share some issues with businesses and government bodies whilst some are peculiar to third sector organisations.  Many small organisations find their resources restricted and time limited. Without paid staff organisations are dependent upon volunteers. Paid staff means volunteers need to track down finance or manage staff; it can be tough for unemployed people who manage paid staff.

Some people enjoy it because their small organisation becomes their personal purpose. Organisations can take on a life of their own; they take on a reality in the minds of their members, beyond the mundane reality of their resources . To create a website that works for their organisation, they will need to understand how others perceive their practice, as they strive to express it to the outside world.

Why Websites Need a Purpose

Let’s face it sick organisations produce sick websites. No-one can rescue a poor website if the client organisation is sick. A healthy organisation will not want to put up with a poor website for long. Many designers and developers find their clients frustrating. You can see why if you understand the problem may be with the client and not the machine. Woe betide the designer who has no people skills and does not understand organisations.

Here are five issues that lead to organisations losing their sense of purpose.  They don’t:

This is a work in progress for me and I shall expand on each in turn over the coming weeks. If you think I’ve missed something do let me know.