Our Town Centres Tomorrow

The core principle to Julian Dobson’s approach in “How to Save Our Town Centres” is perhaps summarised in this single sentence:

“The thriving high streets and town centres of the 21st century will be those that rediscover how to maximise returns to their communities.” (page 127)

The concept of community is notoriously slippery and perhaps mostly we must fall back on “I know community when I see it”. We can say community is present where there is growth of sustained relationships between people committed to a particular place. Whilst there is a degree of trust required in any financial transaction, in large commercial chains it is primarily through written contracts and familiar branding; not so much through personal contact.

City Centres are Complex

So far, so simple. Dobson shows how complex our cities are and the many factors we need to consider. So, in the second part of the book, he has written chapters about:

  • New approaches to the economy, many of which are well-known if neglected by the growth of multi-national corporations; we need to see a variety of business models and particularly models that allow money to circulate locally.
  • Libraries and information centres. The very first retail co-operative had a library and meeting room above its store front. The Rochdale Pioneers understood the need for education and shared information.
  • Consideration needs to be given to the spaces between the buildings in our town centres. Sheffield has seen many arguments over which shopping streets should be pedestrianised, the need for parking and control of traffic flow through the town centre. Some argue, restrictions on traffic have damaged footfall in the centre as much as out-of-town centres like Meadowhall. Dobson addresses these issues and the need for green spaces in town centres.
  • Housing is important because  people living there transform town centres. The type of accommodation is important but what many don’t realise is residents extend opening hours. A town centre where people live is less likely to close down at 5pm.
  • The ownership of land and buildings is crucial. We’re all familiar with buildings standing empty that belong to someone who bought them as an investment and take a dog in a manger attitude until they can make their profit.
  • And of course there is money and its administration through banks and other financial institutions. Debt is a real issue for many people and loan companies replace shops as they pull out-of-town centres. There are also alternative currencies and other incentives to shopping with local businesses to be explored.

Economic Development Equals Community Development

Dobson questions the approach to regeneration that brings together the great and the good. He writes:

“They fail to appreciate that economic development must encompass community development … this means considering not only what kind of places we want to create, but how they are to be run and in whose interests: who will control or influence what can happen in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years’ time and how to ensure our towns are no longer at the mercy of decisions taken hundreds or thousands of miles away – or even behind closed doors in the local town hall or chamber of commerce.” (page 262)

In my free e-book (see below) “Community Development is Dead! Long Live Community Development!”,  I argue practitioners have ignored the local economy. The corporations have taken advantage of the neglect many local activists have practiced towards their local economy. They have their power because activists have refused to dirty their hands in trade. As a result community activity has become grant dependent and so unable to build sustainable programmes in their communities.

An Objection

And this brings me to an objection to Dobson’s argument. We cannot get there by concentrating solely on town centres. Town centres are one part of larger towns and cities with many suburban centres. And they too need regeneration. The big supermarkets recognise local shopping centres are important and wealthier centres usually house at least one major chain in direct competition with local businesses.

Local businesses not only base their activities outside their town centre because they can afford the premises but also because they value where they are. They build networks of suppliers and customers where they are.

We need a model that provides a framework for trade across the city, allowing customers to find local businesses not only in the centre but across the city. I’ve written about Hunters Bar in Sheffield, a distinct centre that draws people for recreational purposes, perhaps on an afternoon off work. In the same post, Spital Hill is another example of a local centre, where there is in embryo an Islamic shopping centre. There are many other similar places in the city. We need to find ways of supporting all this economic activity and the city centre can support these satellite centres.

This apart, “How to Save Our City Centres” is an essential contribution to the debate about the future of our cities, local economies and communities.

Participative Methods 5: Using Citizens’ Organising

Citizens’ Organising is immensely powerful in the United States but is not established in the UK. However, I suspect many development workers pick and mix insights from citizens’ organising and so it has not been without influence.

You can find out more about the history and background to Citizens’ Organising, including some reference works in my post Citizens’ Organising.

I took Citizens’ Organising leaders’ training in 1992.  Whilst I had issues with their whole package, much of what I learned has been helpful in my community development practice.  The method is not written down anywhere because citizens’ organising is passed from practitioner to practitioner; by mentoring not study.  Be aware there are sound reasons for this.

Some Basic Citizens’ Organising Concepts

  1. Burngreave Cemetery Chapel

    Old church buildings can still contribute to the community. Friends of Burngreave Cemetery organise events for local residents from the old chapel.

    Organising starts with the churches.  Why?  Because churches are there for the long haul.  In disadvantaged communities they can be the only institutions that maintain a presence.  (While it is true that in the UK, churches are often the last institutions to leave some estates, the churches overall have less influence in the UK.  There are fewer of them, fewer people involved and therefore they are less financially robust.       Leaving aside any reservations churches may have about being involved in Citizens’ Organising, the reality is their presence is nowhere near as decisive as it is in the United States. It is hard to think of any other organisation that could take on the role in the UK.)

  2. Organising depends upon power analysis.  The statutory, private and professional voluntary sectors access power through organised money.  Community organisations cannot do this, as they have no money, so they access power through organised people. (In the UK, the grants industry usually drives community development. Citizens’ Organising in my city went down the road of applying for grants, presumably because it couldn’t generate the income it needed from its members’ dues. This had two effects: it subtly changed their approach. They made demands on community organisations that should have been their allies and failed to build a sustainable movement and so eventually closed.)
  3. Contributions from member organisations are the sole source of funding for Citizens’ organisations.  This guarantees independence, as grant aid means they become beholden to donor organisations.  Citizens’ organisations must unambiguously represent the interests of their members. (This is perhaps the fatal dilemma for Citizens’ Organising in the UK. With less potential for support from the churches, it cannot generate sufficient income from membership dues. This not only means they are prone to become beholden to grant making bodies but also they are unable to build a citizens’ movement. In grant dependent culture, organisations normally receive money to pay for community development and do not pay for it themselves.)
  4. Power tempered by love.  Power is collectively exercised and used in a disciplined way that marginalises no-one. (In the UK, power language is somehow extreme.)A
  5. Anger and self-interest motivate the people involved.  Anger energises leaders and ensures things get done.  Self-interest is where I understand I benefit when I work for the benefit of others and so it is the wellspring of mutuality. (Words like anger and self-interest are not commonly used of community activities in the UK. Community is about people working together and so conflict is frowned upon. In reality, community organisations (and churches) are often battlegrounds because people do not know how to resolve conflict. Citizen’s Organising offers the structures organisations need to resolve conflict and help organised citizens be more effective. Whilst it is possible to use some of these insights they are not generally understood.)
  6. Leaders never occupy any position in the organisation for more than one year. They develop their skills by moving between positions and not remaining in them.  This way they pick up new challenges and make space for others who pick up their old responsibilities. (Whilst UK groups do talk about succession, the most common reason is fear of losing the current leader. A lot of the conflict within organisations is because they become ‘self-perpetuating oligarchies’ and one reason for this is most organisations do not take seriously the training and education of their members for leadership. This is surprisingly common in the UK and indeed many churches face similar issues. Perhaps the best known failure to bring on the next generation of leaders is the current leadership election in the Labour Party. (They are enacting the consequences in the full glare of the media although all parties face similar difficulties.))
  7. They work by ensuring people with power, eg local politicians, business people, church leaders, etc are accountable through their own aims.  (And this is something not generally understood. The first recourse needs to be to the aims of the organisation that is using power to the disadvantage of our communities.  Malice does not motivate most institutions but they often act in self-defeating ways. This is often caused by failure of their own leaders who lose touch with their organisation’s purpose.)
  8. Citizens’ Organisations have no permanent friends or enemies, the aim is always to develop relationships. (This insight has become better known in the UK. Properly understood, it helps community organisations enter into genuine partnerships, helping powerful institutions meet their objectives locally. Where it is not understood, groups collude to make cosmetic changes and do not address deeper drivers of disadvantage.)

Conclusion

So, in Britain we have not yet developed an approach to organising that suits our own culture.  I’m not sure it is possible if the churches are unable to provide support equivalent to churches in the US.

How would you apply these principles in the UK?  Use comments to tell me what influence organising has had in your community. Perhaps you live somewhere where there is still a citizens’ organisation. If so, how do you fund it?

Compromise

Don’t compromise your business. Why not? Because it sends out mixed messages. If people struggle to understand your offer it can be because you are not clear about it or your market.

However, compromise is hard to avoid. You develop a package for your consultancy service and someone comes along and wants something different. They want to work with you and so it is hard to resist their requests for a specially tailored service.

Is this compromise or simply responding to your client’s reasonable requests? Surely you need to be flexible, if not why shouldn’t your client seek something more suitable?

This is the issue. Is there someone who could deliver what your client wants better than you? Maybe it would be better if you referred them on? Think of the advantages:

  1. the client gets a good service, will thank you for sending them there and may be inclined to recommend you to others;
  2. the other practitioner will be grateful for the support from you and may seek some way to return the favour, and
  3. you don’t dilute your message and have time to improve your packages and market to the right clients.

If you’re not sure about your package or market, try different types to find the best fit for you. I suspect whilst the best businesses don’t compromise, they needed to compromise to work out what they should not compromise! Once established some businesses find they can relax their rules a little.

What Works for Me

So, I compromise by underselling my business.  I charge less than my support is worth and as a result find my work undervalued.  This is a common issue for new businesses.

Clarity about what I offer, makes it easier for prospective clients to say “yes” and the reason they say yes is they understand the value of my offer.  If I don’t charge enough it means I undervalue my work!  Obviously there are several factors involved in what I charge.  Too much and people genuinely can’t afford it and too little they may not feel committed to working with me as a coach.

My Offer

I offer a Done With You (DWY) service to help clients sort out their organisation’s online presence, fully integrated with its in-person activities.  It would not make sense to charge more than Done For You (DFY) website designers, of course.  However, DWY has advantages over DFY for some organisations and so it is not just a way of saving money.  Ultimately, I do not offer a website; I help clients develop and carry out a marketing strategy for their organisation.  What they get is something the website (with other activities) delivers in terms of new supporters, partners and income.

And from my point of view I balance what I charge with capacity.  I can manage only a few clients at a time, so it is crucial I find clients who are right for me, perhaps passing on others who need a different service to the one I provide.

How have you compromised your business or community activities?  Did compromise work out for you or against your best interests?

This post is one of a series exploring questions in the circuit questionnaire and addresses the branding element of the questionnaire.

Our Town Centres Today

So, what are the problems facing town centres today? Last Friday I introduced Julian Dobson’s book, “How to Save Our Town Centres”. Today I shall summarise what he understands their problems to be.

What Are Town Centres?

We are making a massive mistake if we think town centres are solely about retail; fundamentally they are places where relationships develop between citizens. Retail depends on trust and so the nature of cities and their spaces, where relationships can grow, is important. At least, that is true for local retail businesses. The large corporations depend on their brand to develop trust and so have become independent of civic institutions.

Dobson writes:

“Not only the shops are going: many of the institutions that once anchored town centres, from churches to libraries to adult education centres, have disappeared or diminished. The activities that brought people into town in the 19th and early 20th centuries are often no longer there, and sometimes no longer anywhere.” (page 10)

Later, he writes:

“Go back to the ancient Greek idea of the agora and you will find a far richer mix than exists in even the most successful contemporary street markets. The agora was a civic space, not just a marketplace. In the agora of Athens there was the courtroom, places of religious worship, the gymnasium, the mint that produced the city’s coinage, and the bouleuterion, the council building where people assembled to legislate and to discuss public affairs. The agora was used for theatre and performance, meeting and holding court: it was far more than a shopping precinct.” (page 46)

The Marketplace

This vision will be familiar to readers of this blog although I’ve usually used the word marketplace to describe similar diversity. People generate all these activities and so we say they are people-centred. Of course, some institutions, for example civic authorities, manage activities such as courts or council meetings. But all these activities are essentially public activities. They take place behind closed doors only in totalitarian states.

But ideally local businesses and community organisations generate most activity. Each activity supports future activities because town centres have histories known by the people and are an inspiration to them. They take civic pride in their unique place.

Three Trends Undermine Town Centres

According to Dobson there are broadly three trends that have undermined our town centres in recent decades:

“The shopping centre, the supermarket and the internet giant: each in its way is stripping trade out-of-town centres and away from local businesses.” (page 78)

And when the trade goes it becomes more difficult to sustain the other activities.

  • So, in my home city, Sheffield in the UK, we have a shopping centre called Meadowhall. It is close to the M1 and said to be within 1 hour’s drive of 20 million people. Other centres in the region feel its effects. The city centre’s problem is shops’ rents fixed to rates affordable only to large national chains. Most have moved to Meadowhall. Local businesses cannot move in because they cannot afford these rates. So, shops stand empty, footfall declines and the remaining shops find it more difficult to continue.
  • With supermarkets the issue is direct competition with local businesses. Perhaps the threat these days is small branches in neighbourhoods in direct conflict with local traders. Whilst they make some contribution to the local economy, for example by paying wages to staff, their profit does not circulate locally. They usually have suppliers fixed nationally and so they undermine the local networks of small suppliers.
  • Internet giants such as Amazon, are well-known for the impact they have on the High Street.  It is very convenient to buy books online and even easier with e-readers.  It has made it incredibly difficult to run a bookshop in real life.  They cannot compete on stock or price.

The one thing that unites these three threats to town centres is branding. Meadowhall, Tesco and Amazon (for example) are all trusted brands. This means they are well-known, provide a massive range of goods and offer credible guarantees of quality.

What Can Be Done?

Whilst many local retail businesses can compete on quality they can rarely compete on their range of goods (addressed by having many businesses and not so much by increasing the range of goods held by a trader) or becoming well-known because they have limited marketing budgets and are often based in premises they can afford outside the town centre.

Somehow we have an economic system that makes no effort to protect the interests of local businesses and communities.  Local authorities plan to attract corporate businesses into their areas in the hope it will regenerate their towns.  Instead they take more finance out of the area, destroy local supply networks and then when they find a better offer, are likely to leave.  Where are the plans to grow, support and protect local businesses and communities?

No summary can do justice to Dobson’s book and especially the wealth of examples he offers based on good and bad practice.

Next week I shall explore some of the solutions Dobson offers and reveal the one point on which I do not agree with him.

Participative Methods 4: World Café

Whilst I want to encourage the use of participative methods, I don’t want to imply they are easy.  These posts about community development draw attention to a variety of participatory methods.  My message is experiment, acknowledge your limitations and you will improve over time.  Share leadership and work with others when you can.

People at table in a world cafe session.

A view of typical “paraphernalia” from a World Cafe session I helped facilitate a few years ago.

World Cafe can be more flexible and straightforward than open space technology.  Broadly people sit in small groups around tables, discuss a topic which might be the same for each table or vary from table to table.  From time to time people move around, leaving one person behind to introduce new people to what was discussed earlier  This mixes insights from several tables.

Some Issues to Consider

Furniture and Paraphernalia

The main difficulty (apart from actually being participative!) is resources.  You need to accommodate everyone in a single large room around small tables, 4 at each table is ideal.  You also need flipchart paper and various flowers, sweets, toys, information sheets to encourage the right sort of atmosphere (You don’t need all this stuff but it helps some people).  One advantage of working with churches is there is no shortage of large rooms.  The ubiquitous trestle tables can be a bit of a problem but the method can work quite well with them.  Round tables optimise distance and so help with hearing and of course look better.

Hearing

Hearing can be a problem.  If tables are close together and there are a lot of them, background noise can be a real problem for some people.  (Me included!)  The size of tables is relevant: groups of 12 around vast tables are impossible because everyone has to shout to be heard.  Use the loop or PA system to clearly set the task and ask people to make sure everyone has a say.  Large sheets of flipchart paper where participants can record the conversation, can help with hearing (and will help more people than you think).

Keeping Track

With large sheets of paper and plenty of pens, people can share ideas and they serve as an aide memoire when people move around.  They can be pinned to walls to share conclusions at the end.  If you can’t manage all the other paraphernalia, do make sure pens and large A1 sheets are available.

For more information, take a look at my previous post about World Cafe that includes some resources.

Some people relate to issues by thinking about them, others through emotions or design and others by playing with things.  Have you experience of ideas springing from these different approaches?

Strengths and Weaknesses

Most people are familiar with the SWOT analysis, even if familiarity causes us to run a mile from it! SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats and the idea is we brainstorm them in turn.  It is best to work through in that order, starting with the positives.

SWOT works just as well if you attempt it on your own although there are advantages to working in groups because more insights are likely to be shared and the outcomes are more likely to be owned by an organisation that has shared its analysis.

What tends not to happen is the analysis part of SWOT analysis. Having brainstormed each of the four lists, it’s easy to move onto the next thing without asking questions like, how do we:

  • build on our strengths?
  • address our weaknesses?
  • take advantage of the opportunities?
  • mitigate the threats?

Note the first two are internal questions and so it is usually possible to discuss them within the organisation. The second two may depend on things outside your organisation’s immediate control. Some action might help you take advantage of an opportunity but you don’t have control.

The circuit questionnaire asks for strengths and weaknesses. It’s worth adding opportunities and threats, to complete a SWOT analysis at this stage. You’ve made progress with an analysis of your brand in this element of the questionnaire and this is an opportunity to consider its implications.

PESTLE

Your situation will form your business and so it is worth considering things from outside your business. Thinking about opportunities and threats helps with that. PESTLE is a lesser known analysis sometimes used alongside SWOT. It is another set of six brainstorms. They don’t all apply to every business or organisation but it’s worth asking whether they do. PESTLE stands for

  • Political – implications of government policy for your business should include local government and European Union (if you live in a member state)
  • Economic – all aspects of economic trends including shares, austerity measures, money flow locally
  • Social – this can be immensely important when considering local markets
  • Technological (and/or Theological if you’re a faith group) – new technologies can have a major impact over a few short years. (Faith groups may need to be aware of new theological insights and trends in their traditions.)
  • Legal – changes in legislation that will impact on your business.
  • Environmental – particular issues in your area, eg flood plains as well as changes to environmental protection.

I find, as a lone worker, my strengths and weaknesses come out as about me. My personal strengths and weaknesses are the strengths and weaknesses of my business. This is one reason opportunities and threats are important because they encourage the sole trader to look beyond their own limitations. Mind mapping can be very helpful for the lone worker, using an online application such as Xmind.

I suppose larger businesses will tend to more impersonal results, although it may be helpful to record personal strengths and weaknesses somewhere. Appraisal systems can be one way of doing this.

Ultimately, it’s worth attempting a SWOT analysis at this stage but be aware of its limitations. It is a small part of the circuit questionnaire and the other questions can lead us to a deeper analysis.

How to Save Our Town Centres

They used to say the story of Sheffield was a tale of two cities. The old city centre was bombed during the Second World War. I can remember travelling by bus as a child into the centre and passing bomb sites. I didn’t know they were bomb sites at the time. A comedian once said the residents of Sheffield quite liked the bombed look and so modelled their city on it!

One day during the 1960s, my parents took me to the Central Library to see a model of the plans for the city centre. This was the famous “Hole in the Road”. I remember being particularly impressed by a ramp built into Cockaynes (which I thought had been there forever). It was to connect to subterranean passageways from the hole in the road (follow the link for archive photoes, scroll down for Castle Square with the hole and as it is now).

Using subways, bridges and pedestrianised streets you could walk from Moorfoot to the Castle Market without crossing a road. Sheffield was the cleanest industrial city in Europe and the greatest shopping centre outside London.

I moved away in the seventies and upon my return in 1989, the hole in the road was a shadow of its former grandeur. Sheffielders were once again enjoying empty spaces. They wrecked the centre by building Meadowhall, the biggest out-of-town shopping centre in the region, a couple of miles away.

A Tale of Three Cities!

Today it is a tale of three cities. The hole is long gone, the Supertram introduced in the early nineties and many sixties monuments replaced by millennium projects. The millennium projects have actually been quite successful and are more popular than many of the buildings they replaced.

However, as a retail centre Sheffield has not done so well. There have been several attempts to build a new shopping centre at Barkers Pool and a new proposal is under consideration at present. The Castle Market has moved to Moorfoot (so there’s no need to do the famous walk) and they’re building a new retail site nearby. But the Moor itself is a shadow of its former glory with most of the retail chains closing or moving to Meadowhall. Fargate, arguably, the main retail street, is a mess. It looks like someone emptied a back catalogue of street furniture onto one street and then paved it with Italianate cobbles that make walking along it an unpleasant experience.

How to Save Our Town Centres

I could write more about Sheffield’s centre (and possibly should) and it will be familiar to Julian Dobson who lives in the same city and is the author of “ How to Save Our Town Centres: A radical agenda for the future of high streets”.

The only thing I would take issue with is the book’s title that hardly does justice to its content. The implications of his argument would stretch far beyond town centres and are relevant to every neighbourhood.

I’ve covered ideas in this book previously in this blog. (He uses the term Agora and writes about the retail co-operative movement’s significance.) The writing is brilliant, a pleasure to read and I’m really jealous he has managed so much I’ve attempted to write about!

The book is not only a pleasure to read but also practical. There are many examples of projects all over the United Kingdom and indeed the world. Experiments are happening all over despite the lack of political support for change. Dobson includes practical suggestions for activists and legislators, should we ever manage to elect politicians who truly share our interests in a thriving national localised economy.

Of all the books I’ve reviewed so far (and I’ve reviewed some very good books) this is the one I most wholeheartedly recommend you read. I’ll write more about it over the next few Fridays.

Participative Methods 3: Open Space Technology

I first encountered Open Space Technology in the early 2000s through the Primary Care Trust in East Rotherham.  They introduced it as a method used for a couple of hours in a community setting.  I used it a few times, with various groups engaged with community planning.

Open Space Technology appealed to me because I knew about several other participative approaches.  Also, it worked well with local people.  As is often the case with participative methods, it is professionals who struggle with it!

Longer Conferences

Audience in rows with keynote speakers

Some conferences prefer keynote speakers!

Open Space Technology is effective for longer conferences: one day conferences work and apparently a 2 to 3 day residentials can be particularly effective.  I’ve found Open Space Technology more problematic over 24 hour sessions.  This may be accounted for by  audiences of professional people and maybe 24 hours is not long enough for the benefits to become clear.

With longer conferences, I learned a few hard truths.  Open Space Technology

 

  • is difficult to facilitate.  It can take up to 45 minutes to set up a session and this can be tedious,
  • really needs to be run with people who agree to take part in advance.  It is difficult to communicate the benefits and the spirit to an unprepared group.
  • is easily undermined by dominant people.  I remember one session where a senior person wouldn’t let me start a session after I’d set it up because he claimed everyone wanted to do a particular workshop.  He asked me to tell them all to do the workshop even though I was about to ask them to choose what they wanted to do!  I pointed out this contradiction to him afterwards and I think he saw it.
  • with short sessions it seems to work quite well but with a long session, it is perhaps best to go for 2 or 3 days.  One day produces useful and insightful information but does not allow time to move those taking part to action planning.  This has cost implications and some people find it hard to commit to 3 days without keynote speakers!
  • if you have resident experts, you should not use them as keynote speakers, they can offer workshops like everyone else!

Evaluation

I’ve found whilst people in neighbourhoods find Open Space Technology liberating, professional people with agendas find freedom to explore issues profoundly threatening.

Open Space Technology is a powerful method when people contract to use it in advance.  It is less effective with unprepared participants.  The challenge is to find contexts where it works well.

Perhaps my previous account of Open Space Technology is a little more optimistic about its use. The older post includes a link to a book about the method. For community organisations the practicalities of running very long sessions may be prohibitive. However, it can be used effectively in a couple of hours, particularly if participants are familiar with the approach.

Have you found participatory methods appeal more to local activists than they do to professionals?  Why do you think that is? Have you been able to use it for short sessions? For sessions covering a day or more?

Finding Followers

The next question on the circuit questionnaire is about finding followers.  Every business or cause seeks people who may become customers or active supporters. Many people, interested in your business or cause, do not commit to it as a customer or activist.

I’ve sat in many meetings where people complain they cannot get supporters to become active members. I spoke to someone the other day who offers a monthly free event for a local group and they have a mailing list of 600 from which about 15 turn up for meetings.

That is a conversion rate of 1 in 40! How can you improve this? It suggests the meetings will increase by 1 person for every 40 who join the mailing list. Are there ways to encourage more people on the list to attend the meetings? It will still be necessary to build the list because there is likely to be a turnover as new people become interested in the meetings and others lose interest.

So, if cake decorating is your thing, who do you want to follow your group? Are you looking for people interested in cake decorating technique or designs for cakes, or recipes for cake and icing? Or what about people who enjoy looking at beautiful cakes (or eating them!). Or a more specialist group around  a type of cake (eg cupcakes (formerly known as buns)) or particular techniques or types of icing.

So, your global proposition might be “All things cupcake!” if you specialise in cupcakes. But what if you’re actually more interested in the right cupcake for the job? The way you present cupcakes at a wedding will be very different to the display for a children’s party. Your global proposition might focus on the celebration and finding the right cupcakes for it. Alternatively, how many jobs in various business networks does a cupcake business support?

Promotion of ingredients and the tools of the trade on the one hand and enhancing formal celebrations on the other might suggest a business that values its impact on the local economy. A cake shop, for example, that specialises in special events might value its impact on the local economy. Everything from the supplies it uses, to the impact on local parties, the increased footfall in the area as people go there to get the cupcakes they need (if anyone ever actually needs a cupcake).

My followers

My aim is to build a list of followers through my website. I have an ebook (see below) as an incentive and my invitation is to join the conversation. People on my list receive a weekly blog update and I hope this will result in comments about experiences and insights about local economies and how they can be supported online.

This will be a place to share ideas and insights with like-minded people. If you commit to a project you will have many ideas and most of them are lost because there is no time to implement them. Shared, they may inspire others to action.

One thing I’ve noticed in reviewing these thoughts, is I have not promoted joining my email list to local contacts. This would be a means to keep in touch and build the local dimension. Maybe with more local groups, I can encourage more participation on my website.

The Heritage of Asset Based Community Development

I’m not familiar with Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). However, Cormac Russell’s book “Looking Back to Look Forward” has inspired me to find out more.

The book is primarily Cormac Russell “in conversation with John McKnight about the heritage of Asset Based Community Development and its place in the world today”. John McKnight is one of the founders of ABCD. The core of the book explores nine key thinkers, who were or are McKnight’s contemporaries and inspirations.

The book has a helpful bibliography about ABCD. ABCD will re-issue it in an expanded form in 2016, to include interviews with other founders of the movement.

Alinski and Illich

Of the nine key thinkers I was previously familiar with two, Saul Alinski and Ivan Illich. The other seven thinkers and activists cover a vast area of expertise in areas such as a health, education and the arts.

Ivan Illich observed that as institutions develop they move from their foundation principles through various phases. They culminate in self-defeat, meaning they reinforce the problems they were set up to solve.

They clearly illustrate this principle in the economy. Local businesses exist to enrich communities. Good business people leave a trail of new or improved businesses because their model is generosity. Obviously things don’t always pan out that way and many business owners do not excel as employers, for example.  We remember the pioneers of the industrial revolution who left a great civic legacy. They were also exploiters of their employees.

At some point in the growth of a business it slips its moorings and ceases to benefit the wider community, concentrating wealth in fewer hands and extracting it from circulation in the economy. So, big businesses no longer enrich and begin to impoverish local economies.

Communities from the Inside Out

The vision behind ABCD is residents can grow their communities from the inside out, using the assets naturally available to them. They throw “their lives into becoming the counterbalance to a non-sustaining consumer culture”. Their negative view of the marketplace perhaps marrs his positive approach in some part. I would like to see a more positive vision of the marketplace when it is a place for sharing of local assets.

There has to be some focal point where communities share their assets and why not call it the marketplace? It would certainly be a more historically accurate use of the word than the current neo-liberal version.

The assets available to communities appear to fall into six categories:

  • local residents’ skills;
  • local associations and the power they exercise;
  • resources of public, private and non-profit institutions;
  • physical resources and ecology;
  • economic resources of local places; and
  • the stories and heritage of local places.

It would be interesting to explore each of these in some depth and to find out how the longer book due out in 2016 develops them.

Whilst I am sure the ABCD approach is on the right lines, I am less sure it has sufficient leverage to effect the changes we so desperately need. I hope to see in the longer book a positive approach to reclaiming marketplaces in local neighbourhoods and an analysis of the political leverage required to effect real change.

1 … 42 43 44 45 46 … 75