The opportunity to hand power back to local community networks is too valuable to discount – here’s Manchester native Cath Dillon on her hopes for the devolution agenda.
As I write this, the UK Devolution Summit is in full swing in Glasgow, with leaders from Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Liverpool and Scotland taking part. Devolution has been on the agenda for some time now, with support across the political spectrum. At Participle, we’ve seen first hand that when you put power in the hands of local people, good things happen. It’s an opportunity, an open space to do things differently across public services, in a way that makes sense for the people and communities they serve. As with any opportunity, there are risks involved. But if we can find away around the pitfalls, we might see something really exciting.
For me the political is now very much personal. As a Mancunian who studied in Sheffield and lived in Leeds for over 10 years, I have been following the debates around greater devolution for the North and Scotland with growing interest. I love the idea of Devo Manc. To me, devolution suggests taking action on the issues that matter to us, and having hope for a positive future. I was in Edinburgh at the end of last week, and I heard similar thoughts from the people I spoke with. We talked about how we can ‘light small fires’ in relation to sparking actions, and taking small steps on the way to a flourishing Scotland.
The feeling is that the time is now – people have shown that they want participation, and we’ve got to deliver on that promise.
I’m also excited about how it links directly to the work we are doing at Participle, creating future public services with and for people.We strongly believe that relationships and community networks should be at the heart of UK public services, so that’s the way we run our projects too. It’s given us a great respect for local knowledge.
We work by directly linking policy with practice in a boots-on-the-ground kind of way. When we start thinking about a social problem, the first thing we do is get out in the community and meet the people affected by the problem, whether that be at market stalls, the local pub, or on the high street. How could you possibly understand the relationships, the real-life social networks and the dynamics of power within a community without being there and experiencing it for yourself? You can’t have a relationship with someone you’ve never met. These things matter.
When we’re spending time with people at the start of a project, we stick around for weeks or months, but of course this can’t compare to the understanding of people who’ve lived their lives there. That’s why we hand on the baton to local people who run with things and make it their own.
It seems obvious, but time and again we see how powerful and transformative it can be, for example with Circle in Nottingham and the borough of Rochdale and the Life programme in Wigan. We’ve shared with them our framework and and our principles, and they’ve run with them in a way that makes sense for their local communities. These people have knowledge of and a commitment to the places they live that is essential to the success of the services they run. We’d love to see more of this type of collaboration, and the devolution agenda holds promise here.
We know it’s not always easy. One commonly expressed concern is that devolution will exacerbate local infighting, or as the IoD puts it “that rival bodies would clash and nothing would be achieved as they compete to improve their own patch.” This has to be about leadership: national and local political leadership as well as the public, private and third sector thinking genuinely about how to do things differently.
Taking Participle’s mission statement Beveridge 4.0 as a guide, we need to focus on motivating deep participation from our communities and encouraging social connections – starting with the lives people want to lead and the things people want to contribute and share. There’s a long way to go before the proposed reforms can achieve this, but let’s not miss out on the opportunity.
Cath Dillon is Partnerships Director at Participle. She is a native Mancunian with over 20 years of experience in the non-profit sector. You can find her online here.
Photo of Scottish Parliament by Shabazz Majeed, via the Flickr Creative Commons.
Relational Welfare Blog Archive 