Resources of Public, Private and Non-Profit Institutions
I’m drawing on my experience of community development to consider six categories of community assets, and the third is public, private and non-profit institutions. You can find the full list towards the end of my post, What Are Community Assets?
Last time I suggested local associations can be assets or liabilities and so can other organisations active in a neighbourhood.
- Public bodies can include members or officers from the local authority, health and social services, schools, the police and various government schemes. Some employ officers they call community workers who are often workers in the community and not always development workers. The resources these organisations bring into a neighbourhood can be significant although they often raise accountability issues.
- Professional voluntary organisations, including not-for-profits, can make significant contributions of resources and expertise to a neighbourhood. Sometimes these grow out of local activity, committed to a particular neighbourhood. They may have local roots but perhaps do not count as community associations because they may be run by employees from outside the neighbourhood who bring in valuable expertise. There are a range of these third sector organisations and they contribute to communities in various ways. The link is to a page that offers more details.
- Private Bodies are often committed to a neighbourhood but they are rarely recognised for the contribution they make. Occasionally a business owner might join a local association and sometimes local traders form a traders’ group. It is not unknown for local businesses to support community activity in creative ways but it is rare. Partly this is to do with the expectations of local organisations who naturally turn to the public sector as allies.
If a neighbourhood has a social enterprise based there, committed to working for the benefit of the area, the chances are it will have extensive networks into all three of these types of organisation. Local partnerships can marshal resources and enable all interested parties to contribute to a single plan for the area. Find My Three Function Model for more details.
Community Plans
The Local Government Act 2000 in the UK required local authorities to publish a community plan. As far as I can tell no later Local Government Acts rescinded this legislation, although there is variation in the extent to which local authorities carry them out.
These community plans theoretically bring together all sectors, including community associations, to plan for their local area. What forms a local area, seems to vary from council to council. Some produce a single plan for the local authority area. Others base this plan on plans for neighbourhoods within the Local Authority.
These local plans are an opportunity to get all the sectors around the table to work out the best ways to deploy public sector resources. This may work if the local authority puts resources into making it happen; perhaps less likely to happen in this era of austerity.
It is harder to start this type of planning at neighbourhood level, because community associations and social enterprises do not usually command the resources local authorities can bring to the table.
However, creative community organisations and social enterprises can bring together partners to work on specific projects.
One of the dilemmas facing many community organisations is mission creep. If an external organisation brings assets into a neighbourhood, how can the priorities of local residents be honoured under these circumstances? Can you share stories of creative cross-sectoral work that affirms local priorities? How did you get back on course after the inevitable drift away from local priorities?