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final report

Inside out

Rethinking inclusive communities

A Demos report supported by Barrow Cadbury Trust

February 2003

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Contents

Foreword 4

Executive summary 5

1. Introduction 9

2. Community capacity-building: why does it matter? 13

3. The goals of inclusion 14

4. Building capacity for inclusion 18

5. Conclusion and recommendations 24

Notes 28

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Barrow Cadbury Trust has a reputation forfunding cutting-edge projects on social inclusionthat make a real difference in their local commu-nities. The trust has an ethos of working inpartnership with funded projects to promote theircontribution and speed up the pace of socialchange. We are now seeking to engage otherpartners to get better leverage for the practicalwork of our projects and enable them to achieveimpact with a range of audiences. We thought itfitting to join forces on this report with Demos, athink tank that places an emphasis on ideas thatgrow out of practice.

Through this project, the trust aims tohighlight the enormous potential of community-based organisations to provide local leadership,reach people who are often marginalised andchampion change. The report also reveals thechallenge facing government, charitable founda-

tions and voluntary-sector organisations to learnfrom one another in order truly to advanceinclusion and build capacity in our local commu-nities.

Our thanks are due to our partner projects –WAITS in Edgbaston, Birmingham, TELCO inEast London and the St James Advice Centre inAston, Birmingham – for their participation in thefieldwork, and to all our funded projects in thisfield for responding to the questionnaire survey.

Finally, we would like to thank Jeremy Crook(Black Training and Enterprise Group), CaroleHarte (Birmingham Women’s Advice &Information Centre), Neil Jameson (CitizensOrganising Foundation) and Marcia Lewinson(WAITS) for their contribution to the project.

Sukhvinder StubbsDirector, Barrow Cadbury Trust

Foreword


This report was undertaken for the BarrowCadbury Trust to help review the context in whichit undertakes its grant-making programme. Thereport focuses on the challenge of buildinginclusive communities, and addresses both thepublic policy and the organisational challenges ofinvesting in community capacity to encourageinclusion in diverse communities across the UK.

The research has involved a review of nationalpolicies relevant to social inclusion andcommunity development. In addition, there hasbeen qualitative fieldwork with organisations thathave been funded by the Barrow Cadbury Trust(BCT) to ascertain their experiences of workingwith local communities, with government and thepublic sector and with other voluntary andcommunity-based organisations (CBOs).

Rethinking inclusive communities

The role of communities in tackling social exclusionis high on the political agenda of Western govern-ments, international institutions, civil societyorganisations and grant-making bodies. Thechallenge of developing ‘community capacity’ is onethat has long applied to governments of all politicalpersuasions, and the discourse of ‘community’ is animportant strand both in current public debate andin the UK government’s social policy agenda. It isparticularly prominent in the NationalNeighbourhood Renewal Strategy, but is alsoobvious in a host of other policies – from educationand health reform to local government, and ininitiatives such as local strategic partnerships.

The government’s current approach to thisissue involves several strands of policy and manydifferent types of investment and intervention.Alongside income redistribution through the taxand benefits system, several major programmesare designed overtly to tackle the problems of

multiple deprivation, or social exclusion, in disad-vantaged neighbourhoods. Reducing exclusionand improving outcomes for those who are worstoff is also an explicit objective in several main-stream areas, including health, education andemployment policy.

In several of these areas, ‘buildingcommunity capacity’ is a priority, either implic-itly or explicitly, and government has introduceda number of smaller funds and programmes toboost the capacity of locally based communityorganisations.

However, relatively little is known about thecomplex processes by which policies based oninclusive values such as participation and partner-ship achieve in practice the full engagement oflocal communities and the diverse groups andindividuals within them. The experience of BCT-funded community projects is instructive inhelping us to understand these processes better.Using in-depth case studies and qualitative surveyfindings, this report assesses the role played byindependent grassroots-based organisations infacilitating capacity-building and leadership in thecommunities they serve.

The goals of inclusion

Demos identified three key dimensions of‘inclusion’ relevant to the work of community-based organisations.

The first of these is access to social goods.This involves ensuring that all individuals andgroups, including those in the most marginalisedcommunities, have equal access to collectivegoods that represent the citizen’s basic socialentitlement, such as welfare, housing, legaladvice, social services, public transport, trainingand employment. Many BCT projects provideservices and support to hard-to-reach groups,

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Executive summary


therefore identifying and filling service gapswhere statutory agencies struggle to achieveeffective impact.

The second dimension is empowerment.Many BCT projects aim to transform relationshipsof dependency into individual and collective capa-bilities for autonomous action. These CBOs gobeyond service provision by developing leadershipskills in individuals and within groups, thusbuilding the capacities required to demand realchange in the balance of power between citizens,government and employers.

The third dimension is institutional trust.The findings of this research suggest that thecurrent government’s emphasis on participationand user engagement has not yet achieved theconditions for effective institutional collaborationto solve common problems. In the experience ofmany CBOs, the new local governance arrange-ments – built primarily around multi-agencypartnerships – do not give central place to the realexperiences and concerns of communities. Thesurvey and interviews found that BCT projectleaders are often dissatisfied with formal struc-tures for participation at local or regional level,such as local strategic partnerships, domesticviolence forums and consultation processes,finding them time-consuming and often unre-sponsive. The general culture and level ofprofessional jargon surrounding these formalstructures can make them inaccessible to thesocially excluded individuals and groups served byBCT community projects.

Capacity-building for inclusionThese three goals – access to social goods, empow-erment, and institutional trust – can best beachieved by taking a ‘capacity-building’ approachto developing communities. This concept hasgathered growing recognition from policy-makers, grant-making bodies and internationaldevelopment agencies in recent years. It rests onthe principle that investing in the human andsocial capital of marginalised individuals andgroups enables them to develop the capacitiesneeded to thrive, and to play an autonomous rolein developing and renewing their communities.The case-study projects achieved this through:

! acting collectively to demand change fromothers, such as local officials or employers

! generating change internally to strengthensocial cohesion and empower marginalisedsub-groups, such as women or youth.

This approach contributes a valuable perspectiveto the mainstream public services reformagenda, which has tended to frame citizens asconsumers of services, albeit from an increas-ingly diverse and responsive state. Thecapacity-building work of CBOs offersimportant lessons for the government in itsplans to enlarge the role of the voluntary sectorin service delivery and to develop its thinking onbuilding public value through user engagementand ‘co-production’.

However, it also suggests that, for sustainablesocial inclusion to be achieved, a layer of inde-pendent civil society organisation must benurtured and supported to generate trust andmutual understanding between different socialgroups across particular local communities.Government cannot achieve this directly, and veryoften large public-sector providers have difficultyin developing ongoing, responsive and high-trustrelationships with citizens, particularly amongsome client groups.

In light of this, Demos identified three keyconditions that need to be fostered if CBOs are tocarry out successful capacity-building work:

Longevity – the importance of staying power forcommunity organisations hoping to gain and keepthe trust of the communities they serve. This isfacilitated by sustained commitment from staffover a period of years and by a stable relationshipwith funding bodies that cover core running costsas well as project work.

Leadership – the quality of leadership that existsacross the full range of stakeholders. BCT projectsflourish under strong internal leadership, as wellas by drawing on the resources of both formal andinformal leaders in the communities they serve.Commitment to the values of inclusion from localgovernment leaders and independent trusts canalso enhance the environment in which CBOsoperate.

Leverage – leverage on financial resources andlearning opportunities. This is generated byCBOs through trust-building relationships

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within and beyond the community sector. Mostorganisations are involved in formal or informalnetworking activities at some level, and seek toenhance the impact of their work by buildingstrategic alliances with others, sometimesincluding larger voluntary sector organisationsor statutory agencies.

TensionsClearly there are limits on how far these threeconditions can be achieved in the current environ-ment. The nature of grassroots-based projectsthemselves creates challenges for the capacity-building agenda:

Funding – BCT projects argue that they are undercontinual pressure to secure funds for corerunning costs. As well as being time-consuming,this reduces their ability to plan ahead and tosustain the trust of user groups. In addition, manyorganisations value their independence fromgovernment and other large organisations, andsome will avoid applying for government fundingwherever possible. This contributes to their fragilefinancial position.

Campaigning role – many organisations partici-pate or aspire to participate in political debateand to influence policy at a national level. Thiscan put pressure on their role as service providersrooted in the experiences and needs of localcommunities.

Internal differences – the potential for successfulnetworking and alliance-building is limited byfragmentation within the community sector.Often organisations are competing for the samescarce resources, or avoid joint working due toanxiety about losing their independence andidentity.

Practical challengesThe experience of BCT projects proves that thereare examples of good practice and effectivecapacity-building work going on in many commu-nities across Britain. The current government’sinvestment in a range of area-based initiatives hasprovided opportunities for pockets of innovationand good practice to emerge.

The challenge, therefore, is no longer to makethe case for the value created by CBOs, but rather

to gather and spread the lessons of capacity-building at a system-wide level.

Areas of priority

The report identifies three key areas of prioritythat must be addressed before such an agenda canbe moved forward.

Mainstreaming across all areas of social policyFirst, there must be better understanding andrecognition across government of the conditions –identified through research and experience – thatenable CBOs to contribute to the inclusionagenda. Second, this must be accompanied by astrong commitment to identify the lessons learntfrom capacity-building work across departmentalboundaries.

RecommendationsThe Active Community Unit and Regional Co-ordination Unit should take a lead inmainstreaming community capacity-buildingactivity in the implementation of three key policyagendas in particular:

! the Futurebuilders Fund for modernisationof the voluntary sector

! the Private Action, Public Benefit agendafor legal and regulatory reform of the char-itable and wider not-for-profit sector

! the Review of Area-Based Initiatives,designed to improve the coordination andintegration of area-based initiatives,including support for community groups.

GovernanceThis commitment at central government levelmust also inform local government reformprocesses, especially those relating to regulation ofthe community sector. As this report shows, aheavy audit culture often breeds an atmosphere ofdistrust and risk aversion, which encouragesuniformity in programme design and inhibits thedistinctive contribution that CBOs make.

Government policy thus must do more toencourage experimentation with new methodsand structures for partnership that balances thedemands of upwards accountability with theneeds of communities. This might includeextending and developing ‘people-based’ systems

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that emphasise ongoing, face-to-face contactbetween partners and rest on horizontal or mutualforms of accountability, or reducing the number ofexternally determined indicators and promotinglocally determined priorities and outcomes.

There is a further role for various types oforganisational ‘intermediaries’ in building theenabling middle ground through which this sort ofcollaboration can be successfully achieved. A keypart of this challenge is to reconcile the profession-alised culture of formal partnership structures withthe ‘bottom-up’ orientation of grassroots-basedcapacity-building activity. Formal structures, suchas local partnership boards and regional forums,might be better placed to address this challenge ifsupported by informal networks and relationshipsof learning and trust that provide more flexibleaccess points for participation.

RecommendationsThe principles of two-way accountability andpeople-based relationships should be promotedthroughout all multi-agency schemes, all centraland local government funding programmes, andin the implementation of the Area-BasedInitiatives Review Action Plan for Support forCommunity Groups.

Within the National Neighbourhood RenewalStrategy, community empowerment networks(CENs) are an area of great potential for buildingcapacity across the community sector.However, theirprogress to date is unclear, and there is a danger thatthe opportunity for strengthening the long-termdevelopment of capacity in this sector will be lostamid the continuing pressure to deliver year-on-yearoutcome and service improvement objectives.

We therefore recommend that governmentshould initiate a review of the progress of CENs,with the aim of connecting them more strongly toother efforts, across government and beyond, to

build up the strategic capacity and longevity ofeffective community-based organisations.

Strategic role of independent trustsWhile CBOs hold the potential to play a key rolein improved service delivery, the distinctive valuethey contribute is inextricably linked to theirstatus as a constitutive part of a rich, multi-facetedcivil society. Given this, there is an important rolefor non-state actors in providing leadership andleverage for social change and fostering a sharedcommitment among CBOs for increasing thecapacity of the sector as a whole.

Independent trusts are ideally placed tooccupy this space if they can meet the organisa-tional, learning and advocacy challenges ofcapacity-building in this sector. These challengesinclude:

! developing coherence and a distinctiveidentity for specific grant-makingprogrammes

! fostering productive networking, learningand knowledge transfer across theirfamilies of partner organisations

! supporting the dual role of CBOs as localservice providers and independent voiceswith a wider advocacy role.

There is real scope for a community capacity-building movement in the UK today, which couldtake the debate to a new level and establishorganisations and social outcomes that createlong-lasting value. If independent trusts are totake up this challenge, they will require the activeengagement and support of policy-makers, highlevels of trust between all community stake-holders and a readiness to challengeconventional wisdom and established practice inmany different arenas.

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Context and challenge

The role of communities in tackling socialexclusion is high on the political agenda ofWestern governments, international institutions,civil society organisations and independent grant-making bodies. In Britain, the current governmenthas taken up the community discourse in its socialpolicy agenda, developing a cross-cutting strategythat integrates the task of building strongercommunities with a range of broader objectives,from reducing child poverty and health inequali-ties to boosting economic regeneration and publicservices reform

The role of community-based organisations(CBOs) and civil society is equally importantacross the political spectrum. The role of non-state actors in strengthening social cohesion andcitizenship has a central place in the liberaltradition, and these themes have surfaced recentlyin thinking on the centre-right around civicconservatism and the impact of market reformson the fabric of communities.

This direction represents a response to thegrowing phenomenon of economic polarisationand social inequality in the UK and other indus-trialised societies. Several interconnected driversof change have, over the last two decades,contributed to the emerging phenomenon of‘social exclusion’. These range from decliningconfidence in national governments to deliver andthe perceived breakdown of shared moral andsocial norms, to environmental disintegration andthe increasing pressures of risk in the spheres ofwork, family and retirement.Combating and reversing these trends is a centralobjective for the current government, andprovides a focus across its major public spendingprogrammes. This objective appears most promi-nently in the National Neighbourhood RenewalStrategy (NNRS), but also shapes strategic

thinking for education, health, crime, socialsecurity, equalities and many other key areas ofpolicy.

Within this picture, investing in the capacitiesof communities is presented as a key pathwaytowards public policy and interventions that canunderstand and combat social division andexclusion more effectively. Current policies andspending programmes therefore shape much ofthe short-term context in which the role ofcommunities and community-based organisationsneeds to be considered.

The key policy narratives that give shape to thegovernment’s social exclusion strategy can beorganised around five core messages:

1. Participation – the engaging of individ-uals and groups in the renewal andstrengthening of their own communities –is, at least rhetorically, at the heart of thestrategy. The NNRS, launched in 2001,places ‘giving local residents andcommunity groups a central role inturning their neighbourhoods around’high among its objectives.1

2. Inclusion is recognised as a key principlefor facilitating participation. The ActiveCommunity Unit (ACU) was createdwithin the Home Office in May 2002, withthe aim of making real the government’saspiration ‘to support strong and activecommunities in which people of all racesand backgrounds are valued and partici-pate on equal terms, by developing socialpolicy to build a fair, prosperous andcohesive society in which everyone has astake’.2 The ACU complements the work ofthe Community Cohesion Unit, estab-lished after riots in Burnley, Oldham andBradford in the summer of 2001 to

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1. Introduction


integrate diversity and cultural pluralismwith regeneration and race equality strate-gies at local level.

3. Enhancing the role of the voluntary andcommunity sectors is a crucial element inthe government’s strategy for facilitatingboth participation and inclusion. Lastyear’s cross-cutting Treasury review andthe Strategy Unit report Private Action,Public Benefit3 both highlighted the impor-tance of building the capacity of voluntaryand community organisations andincreasing public confidence in the sectorto deliver public services.

4. Partnership is another element in thegovernment’s community agenda. This isframed as the new mode of governancecapable of engaging stakeholders acrossthe community in tackling cross-cuttingproblems. Most new area-based initiativessince 1997 are grouped around theframework of multi-agency partnerships,from local strategic partnerships (LSPs)and ‘Excellence in Cities’ clusters to theNew Deal for Communities and Sure Start.

5. Local leadership is the final elementdriving this agenda. One objective of localgovernment reform is to enhance the roleof councils and councillors on the basis oftheir status as locally elected representa-tives. The Department of Transport, LocalGovernment and the Regions’ (DTLR)white paper of 2001 asserted that ‘thrivingcommunities and strong democratic lead-ership go hand in hand.’4

However, there is also some recognition of theimportance of informal leadership via theDepartment for Education and Skills’ CommunityChampions Fund. This scheme looks for energeticindividuals within the community who take ‘anentrepreneurial approach’ and can inspire othersto make change happen on the ground.5

Community and the policy-maker

There is nothing especially new about the Labourgovernment’s interest in communities as aresource for tackling poverty and exclusion.Community development and ‘empowerment’were fashionable terms among Western policy-

makers in the 1960s and early 1970s, informed bythe flowering of new grassroots-based socialmovements and the civil and human rightsagendas they espoused.

Marilyn Taylor sees similarities between thecurrent NNRS, which prioritises the coordinationof services and community participation initia-tives in the most deprived areas, and key policyinitiatives of more than three decades ago, such asthe US government’s ‘War on Poverty’ or theNational Community Development Project andthe Urban Programme in the UK.6 Capacity-building and community-development work hashad a strong presence in the not-for-profit sectorin the US ever since, represented by leading organ-isations such as the Coalition for Low IncomeCommunity Development and the Center forCommunity Change.

The 1990s arguably marked the end of aperiod in which individualism and economicrationalism dominated mainstream policydiscourse, and witnessed the renewal of interest inideas about community as a force for socialcohesion. This was driven in part by the rise of‘civil society’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and inpart by a flurry of new thinking around theconcept of ‘social capital’ and an emerging‘communitarian’ agenda.7 These new ideas haveparticularly informed the development work ofinternational institutions such as the World Bank,the IMF and the UN over the last ten years, buthave also gained purchase with national govern-ments increasingly occupied with rising inequalityat home and the emergence of a ‘south within thenorth’.

In Britain, the debate has centred around thecapacity of the central state to provide welfare inthe context of growing societal complexity, andthe implications of a larger role for the private andvoluntary sectors in service provision.Constitutional reform and the prospect of greaterdevolution of decision-making powers to theregions is also shaping the terms of this debate.

In meeting this challenge, New Labour haschampioned a vision of ‘governance’, framing therenewal of political engagement and communitycohesion in terms of a reinvention of govern-ment’s traditional policy instruments. In this newapproach, government institutions are to berelocated as one player among many, charged withan enabling role involving the devolution of

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decision-making powers to frontline providersand users and the fostering of participatory formsof policy planning, implementation, evaluationand review.8 One of the most recent contributionsto this debate relates to the concept of ‘publicvalue’. This discourse attempts to develop moresophisticated tools for assessing performance thatreflect all aspects of the costs and benefits ofgovernment policy, including trust, legitimacy andperceptions of distributional equity.9

The challenge: making inclusive communities a reality

Despite this commitment to rethinking the rela-tionships between government and citizens, thereremains considerable uncertainty about howsuccessfully the current framework for tacklingsocial exclusion is effecting real change on theground. The goals of community development andcapacity-building are now widely recognised aslegitimate; however, the mechanisms required torealise them and spread best practice at a system-wide level have not yet been fully developed.

The challenge of coping with increasingcomplexity is widely recognised among policy-makers today. Reflecting on the achievement ofthe Attlee government after the Second WorldWar, David Blunkett argued recently that

fifty years on, we need to recognise how muchmore complex and sophisticated most people’sexpectations have become. A welfare society,and the institutions and norms whichunderpin it, must meet a greater diversity ofneed. It must also serve higher aspirations byrecognising forms of well-being and fulfilmentwhich were not available to most people formost of the twentieth century.10

A similar view was expressed by Ed Balls, ChiefEconomic Adviser to the Treasury, in the forewordto a recent pamphlet on localism:

in today’s complex world, it is simply notpossible to run economic policy or deliverstrong public services using the old, top-down,one-size-fits-all solutions.11

This shift in thinking is promising. Nonetheless,forging a coherent role for government in tackling

the multi-causal nature of exclusion and in under-standing the multi-dimensional nature of‘community’ remains a daunting task. Thechanging configurations of local governance –through ongoing devolution, growing diversityand partnership with stakeholders from theprivate and voluntary sectors – only adds to thischallenge. As a recent Demos pamphletsummarised: ‘Government and public agencies arestill struggling to find a coherent and credibleapproach to the engagement of communities insolving public problems or generating legitimacyfor leaders and public institutions.’12

The fourth sector? Community-based organisations

Of particular salience here are the distortions anddependencies as well as the capabilities andenhanced outcomes that can be generated byfunding regimes (both state and independent) andthe CBOs that are their beneficiaries. Governmentpolicy shows some signs of seeking to enhance therole of smaller members of the voluntary sectorwho work directly with communities, throughmoves to simplify funding regimes and unleashcentral government funds via grant programmeswith a dedicated community theme, such as theCommunity Empowerment Fund, CommunityChest and the Active Community FundingPackage.

However, the importance of the sector’s role inproviding an independent voice for civil societypresents a dilemma for policy-makers who hopeto harness the resources of CBOs in pursuit oftheir social policy objectives. The current govern-ment produced a key document early in its firstterm setting out the framework for relationsbetween government and the voluntary sector,which recognised that ‘an independent and diversevoluntary and community sector is fundamentalto the well-being of society.’13 In practice, asgovernment makes more demands on voluntaryand community organisations as agents ofdelivery, the independence and ability of thesector to scrutinise and challenge policy decisionshas come under strain.14 This is particularly thecase for small community-based organisationswith limited capacity operating in the context ofan increasingly demanding infrastructure of localgovernance. In this light, the role of independent

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trusts in offering an alternative source of leverageand support for community capacity-buildingwork is crucially important. However, the organi-sational challenge for trusts wishing to take on thisrole is significant. Independent grant-makingbodies must develop a coherence and distinctiveidentity for their work that adds value to govern-ment’s social inclusion objectives, but whichavoids duplication or becoming absorbed tooheavily into any specific public policy agenda(such as neighbourhood renewal).

Nonetheless, identifying exactly what isdistinctive about this diverse and little docu-mented CBO sector and what forms of investmentbest enhance its impact is far from straightfor-ward. The multiple roles its members play asservice providers, practitioner networks andpolitical pressure groups present a challenge forpolicy-makers and trusts looking to maximise theresources of this stakeholder group in combatingexclusion. One of the objectives of this report,therefore, is to examine the place of community-based organisations in wider ecologies of trust,norms and social ties, and to assess their potentialfor creating a new kind of social value.

In this endeavour, we make three hypothesesabout the types of contribution this sector mightmake to the inclusion agenda, all focusing arounda central concept of ‘capacity-building’:

Service innovation – unlike public-sectoragencies or larger voluntary-sector providers,community-based organisations are uniquely

placed to provide responsive services to a varietyof hard-to-reach user groups, and to offervaluable lessons about how relationships of trustand legitimacy are forged between provider anduser.

Empowerment – the social location ofcommunity-based organisations and the usergroups they serve creates the conditions andcapacities for empowering the most excluded bytransforming relationships of dependency –commonly associated with the state – into indi-vidual and collective capabilities to actpurposefully and autonomously for change.

Institutional trust – community-based organisa-tions increase the legitimacy of decision-makingprocesses and public debate by giving voice to andmaking visible the hidden needs of marginalisedand informally disfranchised groups.

These hypotheses provide the themes for theanalysis that follows in this report.

The case for community capacity-buildingand development in combating social exclusion iswell established in policy circles, and as this reportwill show, pockets of best practice exist in margin-alised communities across Britain. The challengenow is to understand better the sorts of capacities,cultures and relationships needed to generate andspread this best practice at a system-wide level,and to identify the forms of governance and part-nership that enhance learning.

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Given the growing recognition in policy debatesaround exclusion of the importance of developingcommunities’ capacities for change, this piece ofresearch sets out to explore the question of howthis is achieved in practice through the focus ofcommunity-based organisations funded by theBarrow Cadbury Trust (BCT).

The objectives of the research were to examinethe role of community-based organisations(CBOs) in facilitating capacity-building and lead-ership in the communities they serve, and toproduce a set of recommendations that willinform a new working agenda on buildinginclusive communities.

Crucially, the research aimed to uncover thefrontline experiences of CBOs within the infra-structure of local governance, and identify thetypes of organisational qualities, relationships andwider cultural norms that produce and sustaingood practice.

The first method employed was the develop-ment, collation and analysis of a qualitativequestionnaire directed at service managers incommunity projects funded by the BCT. This wasdesigned to generate a broad, impressionisticaccount of their experience of developing specificservices, their relationships with statutory organi-sations, and how they and their clients are able torelate to wider community resources and institu-tions in seeking to tackle exclusion.

The second method involved qualitativefieldwork involving three key projects supportedby the trust:

! Women Acting In Today’s Society(WAITS) This is a grassroots organisationthat works to develop and support socially

excluded women in the Birmingham area.Services include community organising,training, counselling, and support andadvocacy for sufferers and survivors ofdomestic violence. WAITS was establishedin 1992, and currently has a team of twofull-time members of staff, and two part-time support and development workers.

! The East London Citizens Organisation(TELCO) A broad-based citizens’ organi-sation affiliated to the Citizens OrganisingFoundation Institute, this is composed ofcivil society institutions in the East End ofLondon. TELCO’s members engage in aseries of campaigns at local, regional and,occasionally, national level on issues thatimpact on their communities. The ‘LivingWage for London’ campaign was launchedby TELCO in spring 2001.

! St James Advice Centre Based in Aston,Birmingham, St James Advice Centreprovides free expert legal advice to thelocal, largely Bangladeshi and Pakistani,communities. The centre is located withinSt James Church (Church of England), andis managed by a sub-committee of thechurch’s board.

The fieldwork on these case-study projects wasprimarily carried out via on-site visits and in-depth individual interviews with staff membersand representatives from partner organisations.The purpose of these interviews was to build up afine-grained picture of how relations betweenprojects, the public policy framework andstatutory agencies work in practice, as well as toidentify and evaluate examples of good practice.

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2. Community capacity-building: why does it matter?


The twin concepts of ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ arefreely deployed in political debate, despite beinghighly contested and opaque in nature. Both termsare typically used to refer to a cluster of relatedideas, such as ‘poverty’, ‘disadvantage’, ‘deprivation’or ‘inequality’, with different emphases dependingon the context and stakeholder in question.

Despite this variability of usage, theexclusion/inclusion discourse is useful for policythinking in that it implies the multiple dimensionsof deprivation and locates these in the complexrelationships between individuals, groups and thewider society.

On the basis of Demos research, it is possibleto identify three key dimensions of ‘inclusion’ withdirect relevance for policy-makers, public institu-tions and independent trusts with an interest inadvancing this agenda.

Access to social goods

At a very basic level, inclusion involves ensuringthat all individuals and groups, including those inthe most marginalised communities, have equalaccess to the collective goods that are the citizen’sbasic social entitlement. A recurring theme

throughout the research was the extent to whichmany individuals and groups do not enjoy equalaccess to benefits, housing, legal advice, publictransport, education and training or otherservices. In the overwhelming majority of cases,this lack of access is due to the informal barriers oflanguage, culture, disability or gender plus manyothers or, more often, a mixture of two or more. Incontrast to the familiar narrative of rising publicexpectations and increased consumer literacy, themajority of these excluded individuals are not in aposition to articulate their needs, make demandson the system or ‘opt out’ altogether.

For example, a support worker at WAITS high-lighted the service gaps that exist for the Chinesecommunity in Birmingham, whose status as one ofthe smallest minorities in the city in terms ofpopulation means that their culturally specificneeds are often overlooked in council planningprocesses.

One of the major problems in this regard is theabsence of ‘joined-up’ thinking at local level.Another support worker at WAITS described thefragmented nature of local government’s approachto domestic violence, pointing to its failure to ‘joinup’ in any systematic way its work with sufferers

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3. The goals of inclusion

Of the organisations selected by the Barrow

Cadbury Trust (BCT) to participate in this research,

41 responded to the Demos questionnaire. All are

independent organisations, the majority with char-

itable or charitable company status, and with staff

numbers ranging from 1 to 26 full-time members,

and annual turnovers ranging between £14,000

and £1m.

Annual numbers of frontline users vary between

under 50 to over 10,000. The major user groups

served include: women, black and minority ethnic

groups, asylum seekers/refugees, disabled people

and young people. A few organisations serve trade

unionists, single-parent families and the elderly.

Practitioner and policy communities are also repre-

sented among the surveyed sample.

Most of the organisations have a local focus for their

frontline work. However, around half also provide

information or training services at the national level,

and one fifth have an international reach.

The surveyed organisations


and survivors to closely related policy on childprotection and family services.

In this context, many of the Barrow CadburyTrust (BCT) projects surveyed see their role asfilling the gaps where statutory agencies haveproved ineffective – for example, by providingtraining opportunities for unemployed blackcommunities, childcare for single mothers or legaladvice and translation services for non-Englishspeakers. One of the most frequently cited benefitsof partnership working was its usefulness in iden-tifying these gaps and publicising them to the statethrough the partnership itself, through informalcontact with officials from statutory agencies orthrough lobbying campaigns for legislative changeat national level.

Empowerment

This critique of exclusion was developed furtherby most BCT questionnaire respondents, many ofwhom frequently referred to the idea of ‘empower-ment’ as a way of pushing the goals of inclusionbeyond service provision. Inclusion in an‘empowered’ sense means more than consideringindividuals as passive recipients of services, albeitincreasingly diverse and responsive. Rather itimplies a transformative experience for the indi-vidual, who transcends the relationship ofdependency with a paternal and controlling stateby discovering his or her own capabilities andcapacity for autonomous action.

This vision of empowerment involves ananalysis of power relations that leads to politicalaction of various kinds. These ideas are importantin the work of both WAITS and TELCO, whodraw on models of ‘community organising’ firstpopularised in the US in the 1930s by Saul Alinskyin his pioneering work around citizen-led politicalaction.

A technique used by both organisations is the‘One to One’ interview. This is an intensive sessionin which the organiser attempts to uncover theissues that drive and agitate each individual, andwhich have the potential to motivate him or herinto action. TELCO regards every person as a‘project’, and the purpose of the ‘One to One’sessions are to uncover and foster the qualities andstrengths within individuals that create thecapacity for leadership and action. WAITS organ-isers employ a similar process with the grassroots

women they work with; they use the ‘One to One’to help their clients articulate the issues they careabout, and to encourage them to form supportgroups for further exploration of these issues in asafe, supportive environment.

WAITS organisers were careful to emphasisethat they do not go into community groups ormeetings with individual women with a predeter-mined agenda regarding which issues to raise ororganise around. Instead, they help the women toidentify the issues that are important to them andlet this evolve in a flexible way, led by the womenthemselves. As such, the issue that initially bringsa group of women together may not be the onethat sustains longer-term action. The value ofhaving an open and flexible agenda was contrastedby WAITS staff to government-led initiatives thatoften appeared predetermined and unresponsiveto what women perceived as their needs and theneeds of their communities.

Driving these activities is the principle thatempowering individuals also empowers thecommunities to which they belong. TELCOparticularly targets individuals who act as ‘gate-keepers’ to larger communities – perhaps a priestor a schoolteacher or a shop steward – and whohave the potential to engage a ‘following’. One suchgatekeeper, a Roman Catholic priest fromStratford, got involved with TELCO because hewas concerned about the declining social cohesionof his congregation and the number of individualslocated ‘on the edge of things’ for whom thechurch was not a source of friendship andsupport. Active participation in TELCO’s LivingWage for London campaign has, in his view,generated a stronger sense within the congrega-tion of ‘what we’re about’, and has given thosemarginalised individuals the self-esteem andconfidence to play a fuller role in decision-makingwithin the church.

In this sense, the inclusive force of TELCO’swork hinges on the relationship between the ‘root-edness’ of the civil society institutions it workswith and their capacities for pooling their socialcapital resources for positive change. AnotherTELCO gatekeeper, a chaplain in a RomanCatholic secondary school with responsibility forthe citizenship curriculum, believes that member-ship has provided her students with an enablingspace in which disparate communities can engagein dialogue and mobilise around a shared

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Inside out 15


objective. Their participation in the Living Wagedemonstrations not only brought the Catholicsocial teaching tradition to life for her students,but offered them an unprecedented experience ofcommunity, through collective action with a rangeof diverse groups. To borrow Putnam’s termi-nology of social capital, the ‘bridging’ relationshipsacross the community operate here in symbiosiswith the ‘bonding’ processes that aid internalcohesion – the one reinforces the other.15

WAITS’ model operates along the sametheme. Its work often indirectly strengthens itsclients’ family relationships, and the localcommunity might also benefit from the women’scollective actions – for example, if a WAITSgroup decides to lobby for better street lightingor a children’s playground. However, WAITS’work also creates new communities throughbringing women together to form support groupsaround issues that affect them, such as a sharedmedical condition or a shared concern abouttheir treatment as single mothers. Some of thiswork is aimed at challenging and turning aroundexisting dominant views held by a localcommunity. For instance, WAITS is currentlyworking with a group of under-16 single mothersliving in a hostel for homeless people who areexperiencing a high level of hostility from thesurrounding community. With WAITS’ help, theyare holding open days and beginning to raisetheir profile in positive ways.

Central to this vision of inclusion is a funda-mental change in the established balance-of-powerrelationships within which individuals or groupsare located. TELCO, in particular, sees power as akey social dynamic, and much of its work involveshelping members to understand relations of powerbetween their partners, employers and thestatutory bodies with which they interact and,through understanding, to learn how to use powerfor themselves.

Few other organisations were as explicit intheir analysis of power as TELCO, but an anxietythat recurred frequently among the groupsinvolved the preservation of their independenceand the integrity of their work.

Many expressed this in terms of maintaininga distance from the agendas of government orother powerful institutions. For example, a signif-icant number of the sample surveyed will nottake government funding because they value

their independence; a few asserted that they willnot apply for funding from organisations whosepast activities have conflicted with their objec-tives; and a number of the community-basedorganisations (CBOs) whose work is under-pinned by a strong Christian ethos will not takeNational Lottery money because they disapproveof gambling.

Others described more general fears ofbecoming co-opted by multi-agency partnershipswithout having a genuine stake in the decision-making process. These anxieties and fearsillustrate CBOs’ perceptions of their fragile andtenuous position in wider structures of power.

Institutional trust

From the perspective of CBOs supported by theBCT, it is clear that government commitment toinclusion through ‘participation’ must extendbeyond the creation of formal partnership struc-tures and embrace instead a relationship of genuinepower-sharing with community groups. Makingvisible and giving voice to the hidden needs ofmarginalised groups and the work of CBOs impliesa governance agenda that looks far beyondensuring a nominal role for a small number ofCBOs in consultations or local partnerships.

Demos’ research suggests that the communityparticipation agenda is under pressure from whathas been labelled ‘initiativitis’. A recent studyestimates that, in its first term, the governmentintroduced over a dozen different multi-agencyschemes, each carrying annual spending commit-ments from between £50m and £600m, andleading to the creation of thousands of individualpartnerships.16

Other commentators see signs of governmentwillingness to rethink this ‘chaotic centralism’ andmove instead towards a ‘steering centralism’ inwhich the centre facilitates and enables ratherthan commands and controls. This new directionis reflected in the thinking behind local strategicpartnerships (LSPs) – designed to help make senseof a mixed range of schemes in any one area andto help them cohere – and in attempts to ratio-nalise and lighten inspection regimes forhigh-performing councils.17 The recent Area-Based Initiatives Review also highlights the needto coordinate and mainstream new initiatives andtargeted schemes.18

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However, there is little indication from Demos’research that these policy moves have made ‘partici-pation’ any more of a reality for communities on theground. Furthermore, WAITS pointed out that oneof the unintended consequences of ‘initiativitis’ isthat people in areas where a high level of governmenteffort is concentrated often become either fatiguedor develop a dependency on others to take action forthem. One WAITS organiser said that they find itvery difficult to engage people in such areas, and thiswas particularly worrying because they oftenremained the areas of greatest need.

Staff at WAITS adopt a largely pragmaticapproach to local partnerships, selecting carefullythe forums or boards they will join throughmatching their objectives to WAITS’ mission goalsand calculating the time commitment that partic-ipation will entail. They encourage users to engagewith formal structures of power as part of theirgroup action plans – for example, one WAITSgroup produced a report in response to a StrategicHealth Authority consultation, and a memberfrom another group now sits on a low pay forum.

However, while WAITS believes that the voicesof grassroots women should be heard whereverpossible, the jargon and culture surrounding theprofessionalised structures of local governmentare such that full and equal participation is notreally a meaningful possibility for most of theirusers. This view was echoed by one questionnairerespondent, who suggested that the organisationalvalues of CBOs were not always promoted by thecurrent local partnership model: ‘Principles of

equality and participation “for all” are verydifficult to practise in a framework that demandshigh levels of communications skills and veryspecific styles of working and learning.’

This problem has not gone unrecognised bythe government, which in response has created‘Community Empowerment Networks’ (CENs) in88 deprived areas of the UK as part of theNeighbourhood Renewal Strategy. These aredesigned to serve as a communication mechanismbetween local government and the communitysector to help local authorities meet the require-ment for community representation within LSPs.Given that most are still in the process of beingmade operational, it is probably too early to judgehow well CENs are working; their presence wasnot significantly felt by the organisations surveyedin this report.

TELCO organisers were more insistent thatpartnerships with government rarely lead to anychange in the balance of power between state andcitizens, and while generous financial resourcesmight be on offer, as the weaker partner CBOs willalways be in danger of becoming co-opted on to agovernment-determined agenda. TELCO prefersto engage with local government and public-sector agencies through building relationshipsthat facilitate dialogue, rather than participating asan unequal voice in the formal structures of part-nership. This ‘relationship model’ could offer afruitful alternative, or addition, to the currentfocus on the ‘partnership model’ as the way toprogress community engagement.

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Views expressed by BCT projects relating to govern-

ment partnerships and consultations tended to fall

into one of two categories. First, that partnerships

drain time away from organisational objectives

without adding any clear value: ‘The local authority

we work with . . . has no real concept, commitment or

experience of collaboration or partnership work.’

And second, that partnerships attempt to turn

CBOs into agents of delivery, which compromises

their independence and autonomy: ‘[The local

authority] doesn’t help community partnerships. It

tries to determine/direct them.’

There were some instances in which dialogue had

resulted in positive outcomes, such as the creation of

a local area forum for voluntary-sector organisations,

or a local authority presence at events organised by

BCT projects. Participation in policy consultations

was also mentioned by several questionnaire

respondents – one BCT project believes that its input

into a government consultation on immigration

helped shape the final guidelines that were issued.

This handful of success stories demonstrates that

effective collaboration is possible, but that the

conditions and capacities that facilitate good

practice are not yet present at a more system-wide

level.


Much of the work of the case-study organisationscan be usefully described as ‘capacity-building’activities, involving investment in the human andsocial capital and the individual and organisa-tional capacities of communities.

As a part of the terminology of communitydevelopment, ‘capacity-building’ has a growingpresence in the grant-making programmes oflarge independent trusts. As a concept, however, itencompasses a range of activities that focus ontransforming relationships of dependency intoindividual and collective capabilities to actpurposefully for change in their communities.Thus much of the work of stakeholders, fromcentral government to community-based organi-sations (CBOs), involves some capacity-buildingelement. At the same time, it is important toacknowledge that the term has been criticised inthe past for being ‘top-down’ in usage andimplying deficit on the part of the communities.This report argues that the concept of capacity-building remains a useful one when understood interms of drawing out unrecognised or dormantpotential by enhancing opportunities and accessto resources.19

It is this formulation of capacity-building thatthis report believes government and grant-makingbodies should promote. The challenge now forthese parties is to make the goals of communitycapacity-building explicit, to communicate themeffectively and to identify the sorts of cultures,conditions and relationships that most enhancetheir impact.

The short answer to this challenge is repre-sented in one word: trust. This precious asset wascited repeatedly by staff at TELCO, WAITS and StJames and by the organisations surveyed as beingthe most valuable resource they could possess, butalso the hardest to develop and sustain. As such,trust represents the vital membrane of inclusive

communities. But what does it mean? And howcan it be fostered by policy-makers, serviceproviders and grant-making institutions?

Longevity

A key theme recurring throughout the researchwas the importance of staying power forcommunity organisations hoping to gain and keepthe trust of the communities they serve. For many,this is quite simply the bottom line. If CBOs fail toprovide the support and services they have beencreated to provide over a sustained period of time,the trust needed to reach the most marginaliseduser groups rapidly dissipates.

St James is a strong example of where longevityhas produced a high level of trust, despite consider-ably challenging conditions. As a Church ofEngland-run service, the advice centre has workedhard to gain the trust of the mainly Muslim localcommunity, and has, over its 27-year history, main-tained a strong commitment to reflecting thediversity of its user groups in its management struc-tures and staff. This trust, built through the advicecentre’s demonstrated staying power, has facilitatedthe widening out of the user group to reach themost marginalised – namely, women. The recruit-ment of two women’s support workers ten years agosaw the proportion of female clients rise rapidlyfrom 5 to 50 per cent. A mark of St James’ success isthat the local men are comfortable with their wivesattending the centre – in contrast, newly arrivedwomen’s support workers at a neighbouring advicecentre experienced hostility and threats from thehusbands of their clients.

A related element to longevity is reputation.Both the priest and the chaplain whom Demosinterviewed had heard of TELCO several yearsbefore they actually made contact and wereimpressed by the extent to which it was held in

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4. Building capacity for inclusion


high regard. St James relies primarily on word-of-mouth publicity within the immediate locality toraise awareness of its services, rather thanpursuing any formal outreach initiatives.However, these information chains can reach quitefar: the centre sees a small number of clients whotravel from other parts of Birmingham or fromeven further afield.

Leadership

The second related element crucial to building trustis the quality of leadership across the full range ofstakeholders. Certainly leadership capacity iscrucial within CBOs and the communities theyserve, but of importance, too, are the capacities forleadership around social inclusion within the localgovernment infrastructure and other funding insti-tutions, which are key players in shaping theenvironment in which CBOs operate.

Community organisations and their usersThe case-study organisations encompass a rangeof leadership styles, but their success in buildingtrust rests on the authority conferred on them bythe community. Leadership mandated by internalor external structures of governance and seniority

is less significant in this case than the enablingcultures it achieves or fails to achieve.

For example, the community organiser at StJames has, for many years, been a well-known andrespected local figure with an influential familyname. As such, his social location in thecommunity gives him strong leverage to interveneeffectively in local issues, and his relationship withsenior local government officials gives him awider public role in the city. The women’s supportworker at WAITS who works with Chinesesurvivors and sufferers of domestic violence (DV)displays a very different but equally effective sortof leadership. Given the taboo status of DV in theChinese community, her role involves great sensi-tivity and discretion, which a more conventionally‘charismatic’ or public leadership style wouldstruggle to achieve.

One important ingredient in successful leader-ship, for both individuals and organisations, ispolitical impartiality. The community organiser atSt James argues that much of his success inmediating between Bangladeshi and Pakistanicommunities over issues such as youth crime orbetween husbands and wives over marital disputesrests on his being known as an impartial figure,distanced from the sort of local ‘politics’ found inother spheres of community life – for example,governance structures within the mosques.Individuals perceived to be motivated by personalor political gain are unlikely to facilitate thebuilding of trust.

An interesting commonality between all threecase studies is the extent to which individualsmove freely from user status to assuming leader-ship roles within the CBO. Many members of staffat WAITS and St James had been users and volun-teers before they took on salaried positions. Onestaff member at WAITS suggested that this gavecredibility to the central message of their workthat grassroots women can empower themselves:‘Many look on us as role models.’

This was also a theme among the surveyedCBOs, many of whom described users going on tobecome volunteers, to sit on forums or to carry outfurther community work elsewhere.

To enhance these opportunities, many CBOsrun formal leadership-training programmes,workshops and mentoring schemes, often drawingon the skills and expertise of trustees. One BCTproject has developed, through reflective practice,

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Clearly there are obvious barriers for CBOs

hoping to achieve staying power.

! Long-term funding was cited by nearly all

the surveyed organisations as a facilitator

of sustained, high-quality service

provision and strategic planning. This sort

of funding is, however, hard to secure.

! Short-term funds for specific projects can

sometimes push organisational agendas

forward. However, all too often they

create incentives for starting work that is

unsustainable in the longer run, resulting

in, as one CBO described it, ‘a roller-

coaster existence’.

! Reputation can also be damaged by

competitive in-fighting between

community groups over resources. This

was cited as a common reason why part-

nerships failed or CBOs avoided them

altogether.


a model for developing leadership in the individ-uals they work with. Informal leadership-buildingactivities were also widely cited, such as organisedsports, picnics, trips and outings to the theatre.

Local governmentThe role of formal political leadership is less clear-cut. Certainly a total lack of official commitmentto partnerships with community organisationsinhibits the building of inclusive communities.However, a more likely scenario is that some levelof official interest from council leaders will exist,but success in translating that commitmentdownwards throughout all levels of the localgovernment infrastructure is highly variable.

Despite the government’s commitment torenewing local democracy through the constitu-tional reforms for councils contained in the LocalGovernment Act 2000, there is little sense amongthe case-study organisations that local govern-ment has become significantly more accountableto communities. TELCO organisers suggested thatthe creation of directly elected mayors in Newhamand Hackney in London has provided some focusfor public accountability around a persona,although the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone,remains a more important focus for TELCO’scampaigning work. Certainly all the case-studyorganisations encourage their users to vote inelections. St James, for example, invited the

prospective parliamentary candidates for the 2001election to a question-and-answer session for localresidents in the church hall.

However, what most concerns CBOs is theirrelationship with the executive arm of localgovernment and the statutory agencies with whichthey and their user groups have most day-to-daycontact.

Attitudes towards local authorities weremixed. Some organisations found them generallysupportive, and a few respondents were verypositive about their relationships with particularagencies or local government departments. Thestaff at St James, for instance, have a good rela-tionship with the Neighbourhood and Benefitsteam at the local council. Other respondents werefiercely critical, while still others were ambivalent.

On balance, the two factors most stronglydetermining the level of support available fromlocal authorities are:

! the quality of local political leadership, andhow far commitment to the communityand voluntary sectors extends down theinfrastructure of local government tofrontline managers and officials

! the extent to which the local authorityunderstands the challenges facing thesector and supports its ways of working.

Achieving this commitment throughout all levelsof local government will require more than tighterstrategic management from senior council execu-tives or other public-sector managers. A recentstudy of communities in Coventry found thattrust between public officials and residents tendedto be particularly low where those officials had nosocial ties to the local area, leading residents to feelthat ‘the professionals and managers they dealtwith had no real understanding of their needs orexperiences.’20 This is where CBOs, with theirdistinctive rootedness in the communities theyserve, have potentially more leverage in providingresponsive services and in building trust and legit-imacy among the most socially excluded.

Where local authorities directly fundcommunity groups, the research revealed thepotential limitations of statutory funding giventhe divergent priorities and approaches ofstatutory and community groups. BirminghamCity Council has recently introduced productivity

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Inside out 20

The questionnaire asked BCT project leaders to

select the qualities they believe are necessary

for effective leadership. Listed in order of impor-

tance, they were:

1. Strategic thinking

2. Honesty

3. Forward-looking

4. Inspiration

5. Approachability

6. Determination

7. Fair-mindedness

8. Courage

9. Ambition

Other words and phrases used to describe good

leaders included ‘openness’, ‘listening’, ‘trans-

parency’ and ‘no self-interest’.


targets for the 250 community advice centres thatit funds, one of which is St James. The targets arebased on the number of enquiries the councilbelieves each advice centre should deal with eachyear. While the council has been careful tonegotiate the targets with individual communityadvice centres, it is acutely aware of how itsprimary responsibility to maximise the number ofpeople receiving the statutory minimum (in termsof, for example, housing or benefit advice)contrasts sharply with the approach of manycommunity groups who emphasise the impor-tance of longer-term development programmesfor individuals who come to them for help.

Other funding bodiesAll the case-study organisations acknowledged thepositive impact of their long-term funding rela-tionships with the Barrow Cadbury Trust (BCT).Equally, many organisations highlighted the valueof the ‘people-based’ relationship and face-to-facecontact they had with the trust, and contrastedthis to the ‘paper-based’ accountability structuresthat tend to characterise their relationship withstatutory agencies.

TELCO believes that it is important that inde-pendent, forward-looking trusts lead the way incommunity development by funding organisa-tions whose work would be compromised bydependency on government financial support.Bold leadership by these grant-making bodies inchampioning capacity-building activities thusrepresents an important force for both challengingand reconfiguring the context currently set bymainstream government social exclusionprogrammes.

Leverage

The third element in building capacity forinclusion is the leverage generated through trust-building relationships within and beyond thecommunity sector.

It has been argued by thinkers in the field ofcommunity development that networks representa particularly appropriate method of organisingfor CBOs. Given that much of the sector’s strengthlies within its diversity, networks can mobilise abroad range of constituencies around a set ofcommon values, and spread information andlearning across a highly distributed system.21

Using the example of the Festival Against Racismin Bristol in 1994, Alison Gilchrist and MarilynTaylor argue that networks build capacity acrossthe community as a whole by drawing on theleverage of informal relationships and personalcontacts within the community sector, and usingthis leverage to connect into key local powerstructures, such as larger voluntary-sector organi-sations, trade unions and statutory agencies.

However, as is the case with partnerships,CBOs are often ambivalent about networks if theyappear too formalised. There can be fears thatformally structured networks will attempt toimpose uniformity of practice, or will becomehijacked by statutory agencies wishing to use themas instruments of government policy. For example,WAITS is a member of the West MidlandsDomestic Violence Network, created two years agoto open up communication and learning amongthe multiple providers in the area. Although therewas wide recognition of the need for some sort ofcoordination, many members voiced concernsabout autonomy when the network securedfunding from the West Midlands GovernmentOffice in mid-2001, and was asked to produce a‘regional strategy’ for domestic violence supportservices in the area. This case study illustrates thechallenge of building trust between the state andthe community sector, and of developing a cultureof governance which enables effective collabora-tion. The network has seen some success infacilitating the sharing of best practice, but there isa sense that some members are less willing toengage, particularly those who have struggled withunder-resourcing for many years and who conse-quently take a somewhat protectionist attitude totheir knowledge and experience.

This clearly relates to the dynamics of powerdiscussed in Chapter 2, and raises an importantquestion about how the value created bycommunity-based organisations can be enhancedby investment in networking activity. The fortunesof CENs in the Neighbourhood Renewal Zones willserve as something of a test bed for policy interven-tion in this area. The organiser of the BirminghamCommunity Empowerment Network describes hisrole as a facilitator of new, value-adding relation-ships rather than as the convener of a new structureof governance for grassroots organisations. Thethinking behind CENs emphasises the importanceof tapping into pre-existing community networks,

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Inside out 21


so as to create a type of ‘network of networks’ thatwill provide easier access for CBOs to the structuresand procedures of local strategic partnerships.22

The resilience and capacity of a CEN, however, willrest on how well supported it is by the cross-cutting,horizontal links that already exist in thecommunity, and how well it can generate more ofthese strong and weak ties. There is a danger that, ifthe CEN is seen as the only or primary access pointto participation in LSPs, the challenge of building awider range of more flexible routes into the formalpower structures of local governance will be pushedto one side.

Related to this is the function of communitynetworks to support not only learning orknowledge sharing, but also action and advocacy.Many CBOs funded by BCT view networking interms of building capacity to influence nationalpolicy or public attitudes and discourse aroundthe broader issues surrounding social exclusion.WAITS, for example, while emphasising thepersonalised nature of their work with individualwomen, expressed an aspiration to communicateat a national policy level their message aboutgrassroots empowerment. This illustration pointsto the dual role of CBOs: they might, individually,help to alleviate the symptoms of exclusion, butsome also see a role for themselves in contributingto the diagnosis of the problem at the level ofpublic policy and debate.

CBOs thus occupy an ambiguous space,needing to face in several directions to achievetheir full potential. Their ability to deliver andsustain positive social outcomes rests on their‘rootedness’ in the communities they serve, and onthe levels of trust they can build with user groups.However, this social location can make it moredifficult to deal with the routines, languages andformal systems of large-scale governance andpublic service management. Nonetheless, someCBOs have found themselves ‘in demand’ amonglocal authorities and other statutory organisationscharged with the task of ensuring ‘communityrepresentation’ on partnership boards and forums,and their participation and other advocacy workdraw them into national policy debates as theinformed and independent voice of ‘grassroots’experience.

At the beginning of this report, we suggestedthree hypotheses about the distinctive contributionthat CBOs might make to an overarching agenda for

creating inclusive communities. Given the examplesof good practice found among BCT projects and inother studies of community development, ourresearch suggests that there may be specific culturaland organisational characteristics that enable suchorganisations to operate effectively amid the chal-lenges and contradictions of the wider environment.The scope of our research is not sufficient toestablish these characteristics authoritatively, butthere do seem to be common characteristics thatmight act as a focus for further development.

These recognisable qualities, common tomany of the CBOs that took part in this research,include:

! strong commitment to the value of socialand organisational diversity, following auser-centred model that sets organisa-tional priorities in line with individualneeds

! strong commitment to building an organi-sational culture and identity around thevalues of integrity, openness and trans-parency

! sustained effort to develop the skills andcapacities of client groups themselves, toenable autonomous action that improvesquality of life within their communities

! continuity in relationships, respect, mutualunderstanding and social identity betweenuser groups, volunteers and staff, andstrong links to informal leaders in thecommunity

! the development of wider organisationalrelationships, leadership roles andpersonal networks that help small organi-sations to gain leverage on the use of widerresources

! strong, people-based systems of mutualaccountability based on trust and sharedexpectations, which often work alongsidemore formal structures and systems ofaccountability

! the ability to form networks and alliancesaround broadly shared values, and to usethem pragmatically.

These characteristics may be important forgovernment in understanding how to deliver andsustain improved social outcomes. But in thelong run, they may be even more important to

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Inside out 22


the overall health and vitality of civil society andthe chances of generating trust and self-organ-ising capacity, particularly in those communitiesmost affected by social and economic disadvan-tage. This latter agenda is one that should

arguably be taken forward by organisations thathave a long-term presence, political and financialindependence and the ability to shape theirinvestments and activities according to goodevidence.

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Inside out 23

Networking and alliance-building between CBOs

engaged in similar or related work is a standard

activity within the sector.

The most common forms of contact are:

! information exchange – for example,

regarding new funding streams or policy

changes

! joint activities, such as special events, trips or

workshops

! joint bidding for projects

! joint campaigns

! client referral

! shared resources, such as training materials

or legal expertise.

CBOs use these strategies to widen their geograph-

ical reach – for instance, by coordinating meetings

between activists from different localities, or to

replicate what has worked in one community in

communities elsewhere.

They also help CBOs to understand better the

values underpinning the work of others and,

through coalitions and networks, to avoid fragmen-

tation under funding regimes that force them to

compete against each other for resources.

Some organisations are linked at regional or

national level to larger voluntary-sector networks,

such as NCVO or NACVS, or to practitioner networks

for specific areas of work – for example, education or

working with disabled people.


This report has reviewed the potential role of non-governmental community-based organisations(CBOs) in tackling social exclusion and set out aforward-looking analysis of the challengesinvolved in making inclusion a positive reality. Ithas used qualitative research to gauge the experi-ences of some of these organisations, in order toassess their potential role in creating widersocietal change.

Our conclusion is that, in the short to mediumterm, a public policy agenda committed tocombating exclusion needs to find even moreeffective ways of supporting and partnering thesekinds of organisations. In the long term, however,such organisations play a crucial role in creatingand sustaining ecologies of social and institutionaltrust, and in enhancing the capacity of differentcommunities for self-organisation, adaptation tosocial and economic change, empowerment ofvulnerable or marginalised citizens and collectiveproblem-solving.

The research has illuminated some of the limi-tations of the present policy instruments andgovernance arrangements, and has shown thatefforts to create more flexible institutions andfunding streams still face significant challenges.

As the experience of the Barrow CadburyTrust (BCT) projects shows, there are examples ofgood practice and effective capacity-buildingwork going on in many communities acrossBritain. The challenge is no longer to make thecase for the value created by CBOs, but rather tounderstand it better and develop the conditionsthat enhance its impact.

In conclusion, this report identifies three areasof priority that need to be addressed if, first, theobstacles preventing CBOs from taking a fullerrole in building inclusive communities are to beremoved, and second, a better understandingamong all stakeholders can be achieved of how, in

the long run, diverse communities can becomeboth inclusive and sustainable.

Mainstreaming community capacity-building as a principle for social inclusion

If government is to maximise the potential ofCBOs in combating social exclusion, it shouldthink more clearly about the forms of directinvestment and strategic thinking across main-stream spending programmes that it can use toinvolve such organisations in service delivery in asustainable way.

This may mean developing further theguidance and incentives for large public-sectordelivery organisations and other statutory agenciesto work effectively with distributed groups ofsmaller, community-based organisations.

For this effort to be effective, central govern-ment needs to draw together existing lessonsabout community capacity-building and partner-ship from the many different sources of directexperience embedded in its current programmes,including Sure Start, Welfare to Work, the NewDeal for Communities and local strategic partner-ships (LSPs). The government’s investment in arange of area-based initiatives has created oppor-tunities for pockets of innovation and goodpractice to emerge. But to have a systematicimpact, the urgent task is to identify and learnfrom pioneering practice, share lessons acrossdepartmental and agency boundaries and fostercapacity-building work at multiple levels of gover-nance.

RecommendationsThe Active Community Unit (ACU) in the HomeOffice and the Regional Co-ordination Unit(RCU) in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister

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5. Conclusion and recommendations


should lead this process. It will involve taking across-cutting approach to gathering the lessons ofcapacity-building across all major social policyareas and facilitating collaborative enquiry andreflection among departments and agencies. TheOffice of the Deputy Prime Minister should alsobe fully involved in identifying the ways in whichlocal authority structures and practices canencourage the identification of similar lessons.

To ensure that these lessons have a full impacton the short- to medium-term agenda forcommunities, the ACU and the RCU shouldemphasise the importance of mainstreamingcommunity capacity-building activity, particularlyin the implementation of the following three keypolicy agendas:

! Futurebuilders Fund: created to meet theneed of long-term investment formodernisation in the voluntary sector andinformed by the Treasury’s cross-cuttingreview of 2002.

! Private Action, Public Benefit: the StrategyUnit’s agenda for reform of the charitableand wider not-for-profit sector, focusinglargely on law and regulation.

! Review of Area-Based Initiatives: carriedout by the RCU to improve the coordina-tion and integration of area-basedinitiatives, including support forcommunity groups.

Governance

If these new learning processes at central govern-ment level are to impact at local level, they mustinform the local government reform agenda, with aparticular emphasis on regulatory structures andaccountability systems governing the communitysector.

As this report has shown, a heavy audit cultureoften breeds an atmosphere of distrust and riskaversion, which encourages uniformity inprogramme design and inhibits the distinctivecontribution that CBOs can make. Too strong anemphasis on quantitative outputs, advance specifi-cation of priorities and performance criteriadetermined by external administrators andfunders can sap morale and undermine theknowledge and expertise of community leaders onthe ground.

Government policy must thus encourageexperimentation with new methods and struc-tures for achieving accountability in partnershipand funding relationships to foster collaborative,jointly owned projects and a culture based ontrust. This will involve balancing the demands ofupwards accountability with the needs of commu-nities – through, for example, extending anddeveloping ‘people-based’ systems that emphasiseongoing, face-to-face contact between partnersthroughout all stages of funded projects.Monitoring should be understood on both sides asa learning experience, not punishment for failure.

Accountability should flow downwards, too,with local communities having a greater say in thecriteria against which performance is measured.Reducing the number of externally determinedindicators and shifting the emphasis on tooutcomes defined by local communities andagencies together is more likely to build legitimacyand trust around partnership working, as well asdeliver enhanced inclusion outcomes.

Identifying the intermediary organisations –which are often to be found in and around localgovernment, and which can help to establish theshared spaces in which productive collaborationcan flourish – is another important task. A host ofnew methods and techniques of civic engagementand public participation in decision-making havegrown up over the last decade. The task in thiscontext is to ensure that they become effectivelyintegrated into mainstream decision-making,particularly where community-based organisationsare involved in partnership with statutory bodies.

A key part of this challenge is to reconcile theprofessionalised culture of formal partnershipstructures with the ‘bottom-up’ orientation of grass-roots-based capacity-building activity. Formalstructures, such as local partnership boards andregional forums, might be better placed to addressthis challenge if supported by informal networksand relationships of learning and trust (amongCBOs, community leaders, larger voluntary-sectororganisations, independent social entrepreneursand consultants) that provide more flexible accesspoints for participation.

RecommendationsThese principles of two-way and mutualaccountability should be promoted anddeveloped across all multi-agency schemes (Sure

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Start, LSPs, EYCDPs, Regeneration Partnerships,New Deal for Communities, etc.) and all centraland local government funding programmes(Active Community Funding Package, Children’sFund, Community Empowerment Fund,Community Fund, Single Regeneration Budget,Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, etc.), and in theimplementation of the Area-Based InitiativesReview Action Plan for Support for CommunityGroups. They are also highly relevant to thegrant-making programmes of independenttrusts.

Given its local status and level of resources, theCommunity Empowerment Network (CEN) is anarea of great potential for developing capacityacross communities via the intermediary role.However, the various directions in which CENshave progressed are not yet clear, and neither arethe levels of community engagement they mayhave achieved across the 88 NeighbourhoodRenewal Zones. This report, therefore, recom-mends that the NRU should initiate a review ofthe progress being made by CENs, the lessonslearned so far and the potential for making clearerconnections between the establishment of CENsand the development of a further-reaching agendafor increasing understanding of how to supportand work with community-based organisationsacross the whole of social policy.

Strategic role of independent trusts

While CBOs might play a key role in improvedservice delivery, the distinctive value theycontribute is inextricably linked to their status as aconstitutive and independent part of a rich, multi-faceted civil society. Strong partnerships withgovernment are crucial if the multiple dimensionsof social exclusion are to be tackled.

However, in a diverse and complex society,the longer-term value of these organisations maybe as part of an independent tier of organisa-tional life, enlarging and enriching the publicsphere and enhancing opportunities for civicparticipation, without ever becoming fullydependent on the mandate or the resources ofgovernment. There is a vital role, extending farbeyond the life of any one government, for non-state actors in providing leadership and leveragefor social change, and in building communitycapacity, the independent voice of citizens, and

the ability to participate equally in public debateand conflict.

It is increasingly recognised that independentgrant-making bodies are ideally placed to occupythis space, and collectively to act as stewards ofindependent, community-based capacity forsocial problem-solving and adaptation.

As has been noted in a recent report on thefuture of philanthropic foundations:

In a society in which government, business andmainstream voluntary sector increasinglyresemble each other and are driven by short-term, often spurious, performance measures,foundations have a unique role to play in ques-tioning conventional wisdoms, making newconnections, thinking and working ‘outside thebox’ . . . They can become the intellectuallyactive, independent and informed institutionsthat push innovation and social justice inmodern societies.23

Developing coherent long-term support forcommunity-based organisations dedicated toempowerment and social inclusion is one area offocus for foundations seeking to play this kind ofrole. Several major trusts and foundations in theUK treat this area as a priority, but the ways inwhich they can have the greatest collective impacton the capacity of the sector and the problems it isaddressing are still unclear.

Issues of best practice and knowledge-sharingamong grant-giving bodies are important here,and the potential role of umbrella initiatives suchas Philanthropy UK, established by theAssociation of Charitable Foundations, deservesmore concerted attention. Several trusts and foun-dations – including the Barrow Cadbury Trust, theJoseph Rowntree Foundation, the BaringFoundation, the Esmée Fairbairn Trust, theSainsbury Family Charitable Trusts and theCalouste Gulbenkian Foundation – all prioritisesupport for community-based voluntary organisa-tions. In 2000, the Baring Foundation’s SpeakingTruth to Power report explicitly made the case forsustaining the credibility and independence ofvoluntary organisations whose concerns ormethods might not fit neatly within governmentalpriorities at a given time. All such organisations, intheir different ways, are committed to creatingboth knowledge and capacity in this area. But the

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UK still does not have the philanthropic culture orthe strategic influence exerted by such organisa-tions in other countries.

While the specific focus of different institu-tions will rightly vary, there is enormous potentialfor drawing together relevant knowledge aboutwhat practices and strategies are effective inseeking to build up independent organisationalcapacity at community level. Inevitably, thisagenda is not one that can or should be takenforward by any institution other than thecommunity of trusts and foundations itself. Butour analysis and the growing salience ofcommunity capacity in a wider social and politicalcontext suggest that there is an important oppor-tunity to establish momentum behind thisoverarching goal that could have a powerful long-term impact.

RecommendationsIndependent grant-making bodies with a long-termpresence are ideally placed to lead this agenda, bothby providing focused support for particular kinds oforganisation and by designing programmes andknowledge-spreading networks that can influencethe behaviour of other institutions.

Given this opportunity, an exploratoryaccount of the organisational challenges facingtrusts is as follows:

1. Determining organisational priorities interms of grant-making programme designand selection of partners. How is the goalof social inclusion to be reflected in thetypes of projects trusts decide to support?What sorts of themes are most appropriateor most helpful in providing focus forCBOs’ capacity-building activities?

2. Managing this commitment over the longerterm. How are trusts’ social inclusionprogrammes to develop an identity andadded value that represent more than thesum of the CBOs they support? How canthese programmes enhance shared policyobjectives in tackling exclusion whileremaining independent of any specificpublic policy agenda?

3. Strategic investment in partners to

encourage networking and learning. Howcan trusts enhance knowledge-sharingrelationships across their families ofpartner organisations? What strategicalliances and methods of knowledgecreation and diffusion are needed toensure that lessons are genuinely learnedand spread? How can a shared responsi-bility for building the capacity of the sectorbe nurtured?

4. Balancing the roles of local provision andnational advocacy across their partnerorganisations. Many CBOs provideessential services to marginalised groups atlocal level, but their leaders are alsomotivated by a desire to influence policydecisions at national level and beyond.How can trusts support both these roles?How far should trusts and foundations,individually and collectively, committhemselves to supporting and amplifyingthe experience of locally based organisa-tions through advocacy? What are theethical or political dilemmas for trusts indoing this?

The potential role of civil society organisations inhelping to create social value and sustain trust acrossincreasingly diverse communities is becomingwidely recognised across political parties, sectorsand regions in the UK. There is real scope for thedevelopment of a movement dedicated tocommunity capacity-building that could have acumulative, long-term impact on the UK’s socialfabric. Developing such a movement will challengegovernment to take more risks in its approach togovernance and social inclusion, grant-makers tolead in championing innovative practice and findingeffective ways to share it, and community-basedorganisations and their leaders to engage in muchwider sets of learning relationships.

If these kinds of commitments combine in theright ways, the ideas and practice of socialinclusion could become embedded in communitylife in the twenty-first century in ways that reduceour dependence on short-term events and on theshifting priorities of public policy for securing thewell-being of all our communities.

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1 Social Exclusion Unit, A New Commitment toNeighbourhood Renewal: national strategy action plan(London: Cabinet Office, 2001).

2 Home Office, Getting It Right Together: compact onrelations between government and the voluntary andcommunity sector in England (London: Home Office,1998), Aim 7.

3 Strategy Unit, Private Action, Public Benefit: a review ofcharities and the wider not-for-profit sector (London:Cabinet Office, 2002).

4 DTLR, Strong Local Leadership: quality public services(London: Department of Transport, Local Governmentand the Regions, 2001).

5 Department for Education and Skills,www.dfes.gov.uk/communitychampions/about/index.cfm(accessed February 2003).

6 M Taylor, Public Policy in the Community (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

7 RD Putnam, ‘Bowling Alone: America’s declining socialcapital’, Journal of Democracy 6, no 1 (January 1995):65–78; A Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: rights,responsibilities and the communitarian agenda (London:Fontana, 1993).

8 M Taylor, Public Policy in the Community.9 G Kelly and S Muers, Creating Public Value (London:

Strategy Unit, 2002).10 D Blunkett, Politics and Progress: renewing democracy and

civil society (London: Politico’s Publishing/Demos, 2001).11 D Corry and G Stoker, New Localism: refashioning the

centre-local relationship (London: New LocalGovernment Network, 2002).

12 D Chesterman with M Horne, Local Authority? How todevelop leadership for better public services (London:Demos, 2002).

13 Home Office, Getting It Right Together.14 Baring Foundation, Speaking Truth to Power: a discussion

paper on the voluntary sector’s relationship with govern-ment (London: Baring Foundation, 2000).

15 RD Putnam, Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival ofAmerican community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

16 H Sullivan and C Skelcher, Working across Boundaries(Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2002).

17 D Corry and G Stoker, New Localism.18 Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Review of Area-

Based Initiatives: action plans (London, ODPM, 2002).19 M Taylor, Public Policy in the Community.20 V Nash with I Christie, Making Sense of Community

(London: IPPR, 2003).21 A Gilchrist and M Taylor, ‘Community networking:

developing strength through diversity’ in P Hoggett (ed),Contested Communities: experience, struggles and policies(Bristol: Policy Press, 1997).

22 Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, CommunityEmpowerment Fund: preliminary guidelines (London:NRU, 2001).

23 H Anheier and D Leat, From Charity to Creativity: phil-anthropic foundations in the 21st century – perspectivesfrom Britain and beyond (Stroud: Comedia, 2002).

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Notes


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