Memorandum from Community Links
INTRODUCTION
"Knowledge is in the local people."
Newham resident, May 2005
Community Links is an innovative inner city
charity running community-based projects in east London, which
began almost thirty years ago with two objectives:
1. To find new solutions to our local problems.
2. To involve the whole community in the
process.
Today we work with around 50,000 people a year,
in more than one hundred projects, but all underpinned by those
two basic principles. 80% of our frontline services are delivered
by people who first became involved as users. We don't believe
that you can take a Community Links and "plonk it down"
in another city. Genuine local ownership is fundamental to our
approach. At the same time we think it is stupid for people to
reinvent the wheel. We have therefore developed a national dimension
to our work called LinksUK, which produces publications, runs
training and delivers consultancy services, all aimed at sharing
and developing our experience with other practitioners and policy
makers.
In 1998 we established our Everyday Innovators
programme, previously known as Community Links' Social Enterprise
Zone (SEZ), which aimed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness
of local public services, by putting local people at the heart
of innovation and change, by using their knowledge and experience.
The success of these local improvements could then used as evidence
to effect changes to national public policy.
Since then "Everyday Innovators" has
worked with over 5,000 local people, piloted 11 practical projects,
secured 12 national policy changes, and significantly influenced
the government about the informal economy and deprived neighbourhoods.
BACKGROUND
The London borough of Newham has undergone every
single government regeneration initiative since 1950's, and yet
we still remain one of the poorest, most deprived boroughs in
the country. Regeneration budgets only account for 2% of the overall
spend of public budgets in Newham. The mainstream budgets of education,
housing, health, welfare benefits, are the important budgets in
truly regenerating and transforming our borough.
"Unless and until we can find new ways of
using mainstream budgets to tackle multiple deprivation, we will
always be tinkering at the edges" (Robinson D et al, 1998).
VALUES LED
When developing Everyday Innovators we drew
inspiration from part of Community Links founding statement, which
says that "we appreciate that those who experience a problem
understand it best". We believe that we must work with local
residents, service users and frontline staff to develop relevant
solutions—and not do things to them. To ensure we address
effectively their issues we need to focus on the individual and
their needs, and have individuals rather than institutions inform
policy initiatives and delivery targets and processes.
EVERYONE HAS
A GOOD
IDEA
In our experience everyone has a good idea and
given the right environment, with the right tools to develop the
idea, this knowledge can be harnessed for effective and relevant
service and policy improvements.
"Everyday Innovators has had a big impact
on me returning to work because it helped me think about the independence
I used to have."
Newham Resident and Everyday Innovator, 2000
"...it's good to think that people will
listen to my ideas."
Everyday Innovator Citizens' Jury participant
2001
The Everyday Innovators approach, as well as
generating ideas, also helps the people who take part to feel
more included and engaged in society, because they give their
opinion, make their voice heard, and help to put their ideas into
action by getting involved with the pilot projects. One of our
development workers recalled how a woman she conducted an initial
Everyday Innovators conversation with had been despondent about
crime and prostitution on her estate. Bumping into her a week
later, the woman's first words were "what if we...".
"If I feel negative now, it is only because
I am NOW on full drive to do things but have to wait for others
to respond—I'm now impatient."
Newham Resident and Everyday Innovator, 2001
HOW EVERYDAY
INNOVATORS WORKS
Over the last eight years through pioneering
our Everyday Innovators process we have worked with over 5,000
local people to:
— identify the problems and generate
bright sparks of innovative solutions;
— test these new ideas in the real
world though practical projects; and
— share the learning and experience
with other practioners and policy makers across the country.
Everyday Innovators helps us to develop evidence
based, practical innovations which involve local people in the
process. We remain focused on taking action and making a difference;
inspiring others to do things for themselves; and sharing experience
from the ground up.
AN EXAMPLE
One of the first things you have to do when
you walk into your local GP's, Jobcentre or Hospital is to fill
in a form. In Newham with over 100 different languages spoken
and only 48% of schools achieving five GCSE's A-C's, it's not
a surprise that many people find these forms a challenge. In 2001,
Following some Everyday Innovators conversations with local residents,
service users and frontline staff we recruited and trained 40
local volunteers, who spoke 30 different languages, to provide
a form filling and interpreting service in Newham's Jobcentres
and Social Security Offices. Between 2002-04 they supported over
2,000 people, saved Jobcentre staff over 239 working days, and
increased efficiency by reducing from 70% to virtually nil the
number of forms returned by the processing team due to errors
(principally due to English literacy difficulties).
As a consequence customers only had to wait
three to five days to receive a benefits payment, instead of the
six to eight weeks wait before the service started. 33% of our
volunteers (60 people) gained paid employment whilst volunteering.
We were also able to test other ideas which included an Adviser's
Discretionary Fund and providing on-site careers advice. Five
separate form filling services have since been started in Newham,
replicating this model.
In February 2004, Newham had the highest job-entry
rate in the country. This was a simple idea suggested by local
people, put into practice, which had significant impact on improving
a genuinely needed service, considering that Newham has the second
highest unemployment rate in London. However the good news stops
there. The service is now closed. We were not able secure "mainstream"
funding from Jobcentre Plus. Due to a number of factors including
the impact of the Gershon review cutting local budgets; the transition
to Jobcentre Plus telephone helpline (think about who will and
who won't use the telephone); short term thinking, planning and
budgeting (it's an annual process); and most significant the lack
of authority of the east London Jobcentre District director to
continue this (cost) effective service, as she could not get the
consent from head office.
So what do local people do now? They are not
claiming (all) the benefits they are entitled to, thus pushing
them to live in poverty; not using Jobcentre's other service:
finding work, so remaining unemployed; turning to informal paid
work; and turning to voluntary organisations for support such
as Community Links, even though the statutory Jobcentres are being
paid to do a job they are clearly not doing. We find ourselves
in the same situation we were five years ago.
A short sighted, missed opportunity or worse?
The potential to expand the service across east London and replicate
the model to other similar areas in the country remains strong.
One of Newham's Jobcentre Liaison Officers told us, "It's
an excellent service, which has worked really well for us. It
has been invaluable because volunteers have the time to spend
with clients (they're not restricted by time like staff are) and
they help customers understand the benefits system, the Jobcentre
and give really good help with filling in forms. We (staff) really
appreciate it because our jobs are made easier. It would be terrible
if we lost this invaluable service".
ISSUES FACING
LOCAL PUBLIC
SERVICES
It's not for want of trying, hard work or ambition
from many of the frontline staff of our local services. However,
local services have not been designed and are not delivered with
local Newham people specifically in mind. Many government agencies
are tightly stretched and feel at times that they run "services
under siege". They are focused on meeting strict targets
with limited budgets, resources and timescales, many of which
have been set from the centre, not necessarily reflecting local
needs. Research through our Everyday Innovators programme demonstrates
that government agencies such as local Jobcentres, hospitals and
schools currently do not have the:
— Resources and capacity (staff or
budgets) for innovation
— Time to think beyond the immediate:
they see themselves on a "treadmill" to meet financially
incentivised targets, which regularly change depending on the
direction of the political wind.
— Incentive, authority or accountability
"to do things differently" or approach meeting targets
(or local needs) "from a different perspective"
— Mechanisms to involve and use the
experience of users and frontline staff to develop their own services
to meet local demands.
The challenge that we all face is to ensure
that we have good quality public sector services, which are designed
and delivered to meet people's needs; and national public policy
which can be shaped to respond to local circumstances.
THE PROCESS
OF EVERYDAY
INNOVATORS
Stage 1: Aspirations, barriers & solutions
Everyday innovation is a positive and energetic
process with a focus on solutions.
— Exploring experience reaches people
that statutory services often find hard to hear, and asks them
to share their aspirations. This develops an understanding of
the nature of a problem, exploring important details and nuances
from the ground up.
— Generating sparks creates ideas for
service innovation from the ground up. There is a wealth of experience,
knowledge and creativity within service users, front line staff
and managers who deliver services. Given the right environment
and the right tools, this knowledge can be harnessed for effective
service improvement.
Stage 2: Testing Solutions
Government require a strong evidence base. Innovative
ideas need to be tested and a clear approach to research and evaluation
help to ensure that the most effective innovations are backed.
— Practical Piloting and Demonstrations
Projects are developed to test and monitor innovative ideas.
— Simple, rigorous, research enables
exploration of a particular issue (arising from Stage One) in
more depth for more accurate social policy recommendations.
Stage 3: Sharing learning
Sharing learning about the issues affecting
people's lives, sparks of ideas, and evidence of what works on
the ground, why it works, and if it is replicable or scalable,
is crucial for informing better policy, and developing more effective
and efficient public services.
USER INVOLVEMENT
Involving users is not a new idea. Any non-statutory
body which doesn't involve their user to shape their services
and products does so at their peril. Ideas for public services
around choice, co-production (see new economics foundation recent
report, Summer 2006), user involvement or collective involvement
(users, providers, funders, academics and other experts) have
been developing over the last few years. Current rhetoric from
government ministers and departments is positive, even some of
their actions from Big Conversations, "open space" and
"citizen jury" road shows about the health service,
GP postal surveys, to making compulsory the involvement of children
and young people in the design of new services, is all a step
in the right direction. User involvement is more readily accepted
in the rhetoric of the public services debate, but turning it
into reality is proving to be much more difficult, without it
being tokenistic, superficial, another tick box exercise or at
worse damaging, leading to people switching off and being deeply
cynicism about the process.
Sherry Arnstein's "Ladder of Participation"
gives a good starting point to understand different types of involvement/participation.
Advisory panels (consisting of service users) and consultations
(done with an open agenda rather than predetermined outcomes)
can be tools to use, in a basket of many, alongside other participative
methods, such as Everyday Innovators.
HOW TO
INVOLVE AND
INNOVATE?
The key question is "how". How do
you innovate public services? By involving the users, frontline
staff and local managers to determine, design and run their own
local services. How do you do this? Everyday Innovators provides
part of the answer through living and applying its values to a
simple way of working. "Innovation" is frequently used
and interpreted in many different ways. Through our work we have
found that "innovation" need not be cutting edge, rocket
science or cataclysmic type change. Innovative change could be
about that which makes a real difference in people's lives: small,
practical and incremental change which works for local people
and their local services.
SO WHY
DOES IT
WORK FOR
US?
Everyday Innovators is so effective because:
We reach out and work from the ground up—we
go to where people are rather than expecting them to come to us.
For example, an Everyday Innovators idea was to provide Community
Links advice work in a range of settings including GP surgeries
and we now also support a number of small BME community organisations
to deliver advice themselves. Our work with local Jobcentres illustrated
above shows the need to reach out.
We build relationships—Everyday Innovators
can be local residents, service users, frontline staff and managers
who come from local grass roots Voluntary and Communuty organisations,
second tier umbrella organisations and local public sector providers
and agencies, for example Jobcentre Plus, schools and hospitals.
They have to be adaptable and work within the context of their
own localities and communities. It is vital that they build relationships
based on trust to reach people and issues that are often closed
to statutory services or are considered traditionally "hard
to reach" or simply marginalised and forgotten. These relationships
enable Everyday Innovators to get to the heart of an issue, so
that policy and practices can be based on real understanding,
rather than assumption.
We involve people in our work—Everyday
Innovators offers opportunities to volunteer and to train, and
then to find paid employment. So our work with young people who
are excluded from school is now delivered by staff who have themselves
turned their lives around. Local knowledge is the key.
We make things happen—we build on the
premise that everyone has a good idea. We create the space and
time needed to invest in innovating services. We bear the risk
and provide the capacity and resources to test new innovative
approaches, by setting up practical services that address people's
immediate needs, and then we share the learning from this practical
work with other practitioners and with policy makers through LinksUK,
our national arm. So those who come to us for advice can expect
immediate help, and their issues inform our research and policy
programme, for example, our groundbreaking work on the informal
economy (http://www.community-links.org/ourwork/IEpage—page159.aspx).
PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Public services should consider using "Everyday
Innovators"
— Make large-scale use of methods,
such as Everyday Innovators, to gather evidence about the needs
and aspirations of people locally and practical ideas for making
existing services more effective.
— Use methods such as Everyday Innovators
to generate and gather ideas for enhancing existing policy or
developing new policy. Crucially, this is not about token consultation.
Public policy should be designed at the centre
but in true collaboration with and based on evidence generated
by those with direct experience of the issue policy is aiming
to tackle
— Make much greater use of secondments
and short-term attachments from central government to public sector
agencies and community organisations. These should be undertaken
with the objective of developing new policy, refining specific
policies or to participate in delivering pilot projects. It means
that policy questions are relevant and ideas for new policies
are highly practical with a particular contribution to make to
addressing the challenges of local implementation.
— Make greater use of "back to
the floor" techniques, even incorporating a requirement to
spend a certain proportion of time based in front-line offices
into job descriptions. This would be aimed at increasing policy
makers' practical experience of the issues faced by users of public
services and front-line staff.
— Use research methods to capture in
a systematic way how staff currently use their discretion but
do so quietly and with a concern that it is against the rules.
— Give evidence generated at the local
level equal status with research generated within departments,
by university departments or research agencies.
— Policy design must be receptive to
lessons from pilots based on a firm commitment to incorporate
the principles of research and development into the practice of
government.
National minimum standards should be set out to
reflect the expectation for a policy and monitored from the centre
— Embrace the opportunity presented
by the Public Service Agreements to establish a conversation with
central government on the best ways of meeting these objectives.
The principle behind Public Service Agreements is sound, although
the practice is only worthwhile if government is open to dialogue.
— The standards that are identified
should be measurable, broad and few in number. Emphasis should
be given to objectives that are shared across departmental boundaries
in order to encourage joint working and allow objectives to be
met in a variety of ways.
— Community organisations have a role
to play in monitoring the delivery of policy, and identify where
expectations are not being met as demonstrated by the volume of
work Community Links has done on supporting people to take up
opportunities already made possible by policy.
Policy budgets should contain an element which
is designated for local managers with responsibility for policy
delivery to allocate on the basis of local needs
This creates the mechanism, resources and capacity
for:
Policy to take account of local distinctiveness
and be able to respond to changing local conditions and demands
— Make greater use of pilots to test
ideas and generate evaluation data. Locally controlled budgets
will increase the capacity to run pilots without the need to seek
permission from the centre so that ideas can be tested quickly.
By working with external agencies such as Community Links, much
of the burden of planning and delivering pilots can be delegated.
— Furthermore, by making Everyday Innovators
the vehicle for testing new ways of working, pilots can take place
at one step removed from a public sector culture anxious about
risk. Practical successes from pilots will reinforce the message
that local experience will deliver the goods.
— Use the funds designated for local
use to ensure that piloting new services does not add to the existing
workloads of public sector staff.
— Use channels created by greater collaboration
between central government and local areas to share results of
pilots and incorporate successes into future design of core policy.
This helps to create an environment where:
Public sector workers are motivated by achieving
policy objectives rather than paralysed by the minutiae of the
policy delivery process
— Staff must be encouraged to use their
discretion where this will help to improve performance against
agreed objectives and to share the results of this with colleagues.
Staff should be given time to participate in exercises
such as Everyday Innovators in order to contribute their proposals
for policy and delivery improvements
What next for Everyday Innovators?
Over the next three years Community Links' Everyday
Innovators programme will offer training across the UK and to
develop regional and national seminars and networks to share the
learning, including an on-line policy network (www.everydayinnovators.org.uk—to
be launched in spring 2007). This will spread practical processes,
tools and support for innovation between practitioners locally,
and would then link them via these networks to policy makers at
national level. Everyday Innovators is not about bringing experts
into an area but about uncovering the expertise that already exists
locally and empowering people to take action and responsibility
for changing their local services. Our vision is for one in four
boroughs in the country to have an Everyday Innovators team by
2012.
February 2007
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