Meeting as equals

My new report, Meeting as equals: Creating asset-based charities which have real impact, will be published by the RSA and NCVO and launched online at an RSA seminar on Thurs 28th January 2021: here

2020 was a year of extremes for voluntary organisations and volunteering. Hundreds of thousands of people have stepped forward to offer to help during the pandemic, including three quarters of a million wishing to help the NHS, people volunteering to help with the vaccination programme, and uncounted thousands setting up mutual aid groups for their street or neighbourhood. Meanwhile hundreds of much-loved charities are providing more support than ever while teetering on the edge of financial collapse as fundraising and earned income has plummeted.

Many charities, like many households and communities, are in survival mode. But for those charities which are able to survive, what then? The future that we might have predicted a year ago has disappeared. Even as many of us live day-to-day, a new future is beginning to emerge. Charities can wait for it to become clear before reacting to it, or we can do what we have always done at times of societal upheaval and be part of shaping it.  

To do that, we don’t just need to overcome our immediate financial challenges, but to recognise and engage with the reputational, public trust and financial crises we were facing as a sector before the pandemic hit. Those issues haven’t gone anywhere. Some were rooted in the difficulties of running organisations which can be complex, large and under financial pressure, while demonstrating the close relationships with community and the very human ethos which all of us expect from charities. Many rose to that challenge and won large public service contracts through responding to the pressure on charities to professionalise and become more commercial and competitive. But after ten years of government funding shrinking far below the level needed for consistently exceptional quality, and some private sector organisations co-opting the language of community to talk about their customers, the challenge now is for charities to demonstrate that we are different. That we can draw on community action just as much as service expertise and that we work in ways which drive the social changes we call for.

During the pandemic, the charity I work for, Shared Lives Plus, has been changing rapidly like many others. We support a national network of Shared Lives carers and Homesharers who share their homes and family lives with people seeking supportive householders. The 170+ local organisations who are part of our network coordinate supportive shared living for over 15,000 people. We’ve seen how more human, personal and deeply community-embedded forms of support can not only be safer and more effective but can be part of creating more inclusive and active communities at a time of burgeoning isolation and loneliness.

The services in our network are based around people who seek support and those who offer it ‘meeting as equals’ and our members are not alone in taking an approach which seeks to find and build on the strengths and potential of people and communities. In writing Meeting as equals: Creating asset-based charities which have real impact, published by the RSA and NCVO on January the 28^th, I have talked with charities which have done just that, often in the most challenging circumstances.

Slung Low Arts is a theatre company which was already sharing its space with a working man’s club, and which has now become a food bank for 7,500 households, because, in the words of co-founder Alan Lane, “My desire to make a big piece of outdoor theatre is irrelevant if people are too hungry to come to a play.” This change came about because when COVID hit, and the team thought ‘what do we do now?’, rather than decide that amongst themselves, they posted a letter through the nearest 200 doors to say “we are here, we have transport, what do you need?” and were willing to be led by the responses.

Recovery Connections believes the key to providing a more personalised substance misuse recovery service is that people with lived experience make up the majority of the team at every level. Dot Smith describes working with the ‘messiness’ in her words, which can come with high levels of trauma. But it’s embracing and valuing that humanity which has enabled Recovery Connections to be one of the few services of its kind to be rated as outstanding by CQC.

These organisations are not just willing to talk about new approaches, but also to talk with a new group of co-decision makers. Sharing decision making through ‘co-production’ is the first step in allowing everyone involved with an organisation to start looking for people’s strengths, assets and potential, not just their needs and problems.

The report sets out what it takes for a charity to embed asset-based thinking throughout every aspect of an organisation. It recognises that how we work is as important as what we do. And that how we work is fundamentally about who ‘we’ are. Who is allowed in the room when we make decisions? Who do we employ? Who shares in the resources, but also in the responsibilities and the risks?  We like to say that we ‘speak truth to power’, but we must also recognise the power we have amassed ourselves, even at a time when our resources, capacity and influence can feel diminished. The ‘asset-based’ charity will share its platforms, access, research expertise and resources with communities in support of the issues which feel most important to them, demanding less control in return.

Can a charity deliver government-contracted services and run genuinely independent campaigns? Can a financially-struggling organisation become more commercial as well as more community-rooted? I believe that they can. A concept underpinning asset-based thinking is the idea that some things we see as scarce are in fact abundant when we change our approach. Power and resources are not zero-sum: when we set out to combine the resources and expertise of charities with the resourcefulness and care of communities, we can create organisations which build community capacity and which make a compelling cost-benefit case to those commissioners willing and able to listen. When we look for ways of sharing our own power with those we purport to represent, our combined voices can be louder and the message more urgent.

They want us to become like them so that they can understand us

‘The majority of procurement practice is stifled by process and bureaucracy, what appears to be text book practice in reality translates into overly complex, process focused exercises.  Such exercises demand a huge input from providers and commissioners and often miss the point of the intended outcome. Tenders now typically require 30,000 word submissions, and the majority of tendering organisations now support sizable bid teams.’

‘When I’m applying for £500 it’s like I’m applying for £500 million.’

‘Providers if presented with a problem will often identify system wide solutions for commissioners; however this approach is limited, and commissioners often commission small silo services in isolation without asking the provider sector to develop and deliver a whole system change.’

‘They say the VCSE sector is good at reaching ‘hard to reach’ groups, but then they want us to do it in exactly the way they think it should be done.’

Two of those comments came from the four largest not for profit housing and care organisations in the country, and two came from very small, grassroots organisations in the North of England, all of which were contributing to the Joint Review of the VCSE sector (http://www.voluntarysectorhealthcare.org.uk/vcse-review/) which I’m currently chairing. It’s been striking that organisations very different kinds and sizes have all been telling us some of the same things about the challenges they face.

The story of the birth, growth – and sometimes death – of a not for profit organisation is too often one which starts with a need identified by a community, and then becomes increasingly a struggle to stay true to that community and purpose, whilst having to chase funding targets set by people remote from that community. As one grassroots organisation put it, ‘They want us to become like them so that they can understand us.’ The more I’ve listened to people in the not for profit sector during this review, the more I’ve felt that the case we need to make is not for the statutory sector funding the voluntary sector, it’s for the two sectors to work together with their communities to define what is needed and what the total resource of that community – state money alongside people’s time, creativity, passion – can do to meet those needs. One participant cited the example of Bradford council doing just that with their Adult and Community Learning Budget, where the outcomes were set with the VCSE sector, who are now bidding for money in an open and fair process which feels more like an opportunity to demonstrate they are good at what they claim to be good at, rather than jumping through hoops.

There is no simple, risk-free way of spending public money on achieving complex health and care outcomes. Risk is a little like the air in a balloon: squeeze it in one place and it threatens to pop in another. Managing risk is too often confused with making a particular part of the system feel better about risk, with the least imaginative commissioners acting like the anxious manager who reduces the efficiency of their team by micro-managing them. To achieve the optimum balance of risk and efficiency will require a much closer and more respectful relationship between sectors, in which state money like the rest of the community’s resources, is seen as owned by us all, not owned by one part of the system to be given – or not – to another. As one BME charity put it:

‘Each time I meet the commissioners it’s like they’re meeting me for the first time. They haven’t taken the time to understand and respect us.’

The alternative to developing a trusting relationship in which risks can be taken and shared, is often presented as efficiency, rigour, transparency, but can actually result in waste:

• ‘The commissioners hand us over to procurement who don’t know anything about the work.’
• ‘As a small organisation we spend the majority of our time fundraising.’
• ‘Hand to mouth funding wastes so much money: our staff are constantly leaving as their contracts near their end.’

Partnership working has become one of the mantras of the VCSE sector, so it’s interesting to hear organisations – especially small ones who lack the back office to develop complex contractual relationships – challenging even that idea:

• ‘The funders changed their mind about whether the work we were doing with the lead partner (who had received their grant) was a grant or a contract. As a contract it would attract VAT which would have bankrupted us. Luckily we persuaded them to change their minds.’
• ‘The state sector always wants us to work in partnership, regardless of whether that approach is the best one.’
• ‘We work well with private sector organisations without the formal contracting required by state agencies.’
• ‘We are talking less about forming partnerships now and more about solidarity between organisations and causes.’

We are still digesting the views, reports and experiences which many colleagues from the sector are generously sharing with us, and we will do so until the end of the first phase of engagement on March 2^nd, but I think we are all agreed that there are some fundamental changes needed in the relationship between the statutory and not for profit sectors. Those changes are hard and they are not being made anything like consistently, but I am yet to hear anyone suggest any change which wouldn’t be achievable, if both sectors agreed it was important enough.

Shared Lives: a Big Grant & time to become a movement

We are feeling extra-festive at the moment, because we are lucky enough to be announcing that Shared Lives Plus has been awarded £1.4m by the Big Lottery Fund, alongside £350k by the Cabinet Office and Nesta, to help us achieve our ambition to see the number of people offered family-based Shared Lives double in England over five years. Shared Lives carers share their own home and family life with an older or disabled person, as an alternative to traditional care services.

A great example of what this feels like can be found here, in the account of Leeds-based Mary Crawford’s 23 years as a Shared Lives carer with council’s Short Breaks scheme: “Family was so important to Mary that she wanted others to experience the same love and support that she did. It wasn’t only Mary who got involved, the rest of the family did too! Her children Bridget, David, and Joan remember vividly those who stayed with them.  To them the experience added to what being a family meant.  Their family included each other, whoever was stopping with them at the time and even the chickens and a goat!  They had regular weekend visitors and some who stayed for months and even years and many of them are still in touch to this day. Bridget said: “Mum has plenty of love in her heart to go round – there was no limit; there was enough for us and anyone staying with us.””

10,000 people in England currently benefit from Shared Lives arrangements, many of whom say they feel less isolated, make real friendships and participate more in community life as a result. If we succeed with plans to double the number of people living in Shared Lives households, this will also result in real savings of over £50m per year to councils and the NHS, because Shared Lives has been demonstrated to cost much less than equivalent care for key groups.

Almost every area already has a small Shared Lives scheme, but few people know they exist, so many are under-used. The majority of people using Shared Lives arrangements are people with learning disabilities – however Shared Lives is often also used to support older people with dementia, people with mental health problems, young people and others. The plans to expand are to grow demand for Shared Lives through awareness-raising and to grow the supply of Shared Lives through building learning, resources and peer support and through a programme of social investment in local schemes. We will be protecting and strengthening the values and ethos of Shared Lives throughout this period, including through helping Shared Lives carers and people who use Shared Lives and their families to have their voices heard by local planners. And we will be building an outcome measuring approach and exploring a Quality Mark.

We hope you will join us in working with the 152 local schemes and c8,0000 Shared Lives carers to build the emerging Shared Lives movement into something which fundamentally changes people’s views on what is possible in care and support.

http://sharedlivesplus.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/592-shared-lives-plus-wins-big-lottery-fund-and-nesta-grants-to-double-number-of-people-in-shared-lives/