alison.baxter's blog

Lord Wei, the founder of Teach First and a new peer, is said to be the brains behind the Big Society. He made his maiden speech in the Lords yesterday and apparently wants to nurture a eco-system. He calls this his ‘coral reef’ theory. The seabed consists of public services, the coral is civil society and the fish are charities. I used to have a coral reef at the bottom of my garden and very lovely it was too, so I now have a mental picture of blue and yellow striped charities swimming in around in a beautiful multi-coloured civil society.

So welcome to the brave new world of the Big Society. I haven’t written anything since before the election and I’m still assimilating some of the impact. It’s time to learn a new language again. We’re now ‘civil society’ rather than the ‘third sector’. (Does this make the rest of them uncivil, by the way?) That’s 900,000 organisations, so potentially a stronger voice than just 180,000 charities – but not if we don’t have a single viewpoint. And we don’t.

I spent the last ten days of March on the Nile. It was an amazing holiday for all sorts of reasons. I saw beautiful sights, learned a lot about the past, met some great people and soaked up the sun. But I realise that one of the most relaxing things was simply relinquishing all responsibility. Some of you may find this hard to believe but I enjoyed being told what to do.

I’ve been thinking again recently about why it matters when a local voluntary organisation loses a contract to an agency from outside the area. The service will continue and may well be delivered to a high standard – one would certainly hope that any agency winning a tender or competitive bid has been able to demonstrate a commitment to quality. Many of the same staff will probably remain in post having transferred across to the new provider. So what is lost?

I’ve noticed that as people get more and more anxious about impending cuts to government and therefore voluntary sector funding they tend to focus on the impact on staff. This is absolutely right in the sense that you can’t deliver services without staff, and demoralised and demotivated workers won’t do a good job. But in the end organisations, whether statutory or voluntary, don’t exist to keep people in jobs, they exist to deliver services.

As I was getting ready for work this morning I was listening to the news on the radio. Today’s lead headline is that the recession is over. But is it? At last week’s Oxford Strategic Partnership I was given a copy of the Centre for Cities report Cities Outlook 2010 http://www.centreforcities.org/assets/files/10-01-15%20Cities%20Outlook%202010.pdf

Our Volunteer Centre receives many enquiries from people wanting to volunteer on Christmas Day. It’s not always easy to place them and although we appreciate the offers, we try to encourage them to give time at other periods of the year as well. But Christmas triggers the impulse to help others - I just wish we knew how to make that sustainable. It’s partly that people don’t necessarily know enough about volunteering and they think it’s more demanding or less interesting than it really is.

I was burgled the other week and it started me thinking about material possessions and identity. It was quite a professional job – they forced open a window, picked up my computer, my ipod and my gold jewellery and let themselves out through the back door. There was very little mess and no damage other than to the window. I can get another computer and another ipod but the jewellery was irreplaceable. Almost all of it was inherited from different family members and had stories attached to it. But in the end it’s only stuff.

Democracy is valuable and although I sometimes talk as if I’d like to be a benevolent (naturally!) dictator, I do believe in the underlying meaning behind all those jargon words like participation, consultation and empowerment. In the context of staff management, decisions can’t necessarily be delegated or even put to the vote but collecting opinions can help you make better decisions.

I’ve been thinking recently about delegation, not just by individuals but also by organisations. I come from a long line of teachers. My mother, my grandmothers, and way back in the early nineteenth century even my great-great aunts were running little schools in their homes. So I’m very familiar with the ‘command and control’ attitude that people adopt to stop situations from getting out of hand. The trouble is, it can become a habit even when there is no real need to keep control. And the result can be an atmosphere of mistrust.