The Happiness Agenda relates to all - not just the political right!

Don't surrender happiness to the political right! -a response to Suzanne Moore's article in the February 9th 2012 Guardian

“For Happiness we need Collective Action” were the words of the Labour leader of our local council when he first heard of the local Action for Happiness group, which I co-ordinate. I applaud the identification by Suzanne Moore (Guardian, 9^th February) of the danger of the privatisation of happiness; seeing well-being in all its dimensions as being entirely a matter of individual responsibility. The politics of the individual pursuit of happiness in the politics of the U.S.A. -which leaves people without the equivalent of our NHS. The pre-cursor of the NHS, which academics (in Social Policy) see as a causal factor, was World War 2. (When a country is called to fight a mass war, the legitimacy of the war is affected by how the nation addresses it's own inequalities in health & political power).

A successful social movement has certain characteristics, and my efforts are directed at supporting “the happiness movement” to develop the necessary organisational and political awareness. The danger for “the Happiness Movement” at this time is rightly identified as our being used as pawns in David Cameron's game, or that of any other political leader.

With my background over 20 years being in “restorative justice” and related work, I recognise the importance of a cause that benefits all being forwarded in a way that is not party political. My monitoring of the progress of Restorative Justice in the UK ever since I became Head of Restorative Justice at Mediation UK (in 2001) and invited by Tony Blair to 10, Downing St to be thanked in 2004 for my work on behalf of victims of crime, is that all three main political parties, and the Greens, can take credit for their support for this communication between victims, offenders and communities that improves public safety.

In the favelas in Brazil, my friend Dominic Barter has been one of the world's top "radical innovators", as lauded by NESTA, the “National Endowment for Science, Technology & The Arts”) [http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features/radical_efficiency] . In Brazil, the challenge has been to unite more polarised state departments (from the left-wing Ministry of Education to the militarised and right-wing Ministry of Justice) behind the “restorative circles” social policy. The left have bought into these restorative processes on the basis that they place attention on the social causes of crimes; the language being that “some people have fewer choices on the menu” when they want money, influence etc & this contributes to violent crime. The right have bought into the development of these restorative processes as alternatives to court processes on the basis that “restorative circles” emphasise personal responsibility. Thus, though “the menu” in the favelas may be experienced by one who lives in a hut sliding down a muddy-hillside as limited, the individual who choses to pick up a gun to address their sense of inequity is still responsible for the choice made, and the wider community can hold that person to account more effectively than courts usually do.

I live & work as a Community Mediator [http://mediationsupport.info]/ Community Development Worker/ Action for Happiness Activist in the 19^th most deprived town in the UK; and St Leonards is even worse-off than it's neighbour, Hastings, with whom this figure is compiled. There is a major challenge that the St Leonards Sharing Consortium has taken on in embarking on “truth, reparation and reconciliation work” in the wake of the burning of the local pier. This work is part of restorative justice work that seeks to avert riots like those experienced in more major urban areas of social exclusion. The challenge is “How to build common ground between people across the range of geographic/socio-economic and interest-based communities in a town and it's hinterland?”

In constantly re-asking this question and finding many different ways to work on that agenda, I get much encouragement from Dominic Barter, in Brazil, heralding “Action for Happiness” work as a way for someone as politically reticent as some of his older relatives to actually become part of a mass social movement in these crucial transition times of failing economies. (If it's not failing economies across the globe the dominant alternative appears to be models of economic growth that short-change the chances of survival for much of human kind.)

Kindness, in all senses, matters now, more perhaps than it ever has, and we may have more power than ever before to enact it, and to challenge, as the OCCUPY movement has, the manifestation of it's opposite, Greed.

Kindness and Happiness are closely related in ways perhaps too obvious to spell out. One of the “Action for Happiness” slogans is “If you want to feel good, do good”, and my preference is for people to adopt Action 24 from the list of ways of acting for happiness ie Understand Each Others' Needs.

The OCCUPY movement is a response to a crisis that has opened up a large space for creative new thinking. The new economics required for the greatest happiness are (as evidenced by “The Spirit Level”) are economics of greater income equality, and, I would add, sharing of resources. I campaign also as “Lend-It-All Man”, with a personal strapline “Anything I own, you can borrow”. My hope is that humour and thinking creatively about the best way to use all the resources available (irrespective of who believes they own them) begins to engage people either in the light green “Collaborative Consumption”(Botsman) or the deeper green “Collaborative Conservation”, as I call it. Recycling was only stage one, followed by freecycling. Beyond this comes freelending (AKA streetbank.com etc) for releasing an inventory of our possessions to our neighbours and hence building social capital. (how would it be if every time you went to buy something on line, you had an option to check with one-click whether any of your friends, neighbours or others were willing to lend you that thing instead? Is it use of something we want, or ownership? And what are the costs of ownership compared to the costs of borrowing & lending? Alongside this economics of “either a borrower or a lender be” comes timebanking, which values one person's time equally to another and, with skilled brokerage & development, connects us through what we can do for each other.

Timebanking has a radical edge to it in many ways, generating “an informal an unregulated social work system” according to an academic from Bristol Social Policy unit. What I love most about time brokerage (as an alternative currency) is the power of the relationships that can be built up with commercial organisations to release some of their resources for free to the community, and the collective power of the timebank activists to re-allocate surplus value when many people trade a couple of time credits to come to a performance put on by a few, who only get time-credits for the hours they have put in. These excess time-credits can then go to developing a building that serves as a new community hub or some other collectively chosen activity. In Hastings, on the second anniversary of the pier fire, St Leonards Sharing Timebank is putting on the play “Ethical Outings in Hastings” and the the actors and playwright are being paid in time credits for each hour they put in to preparing to share this vision of “a more caring & sharing Hastings & St Leonards”.

If I now jump back 25 or more years, it was in the campaign for nuclear disarmament that I first began to learn the lesson perhaps most valuable to this age; that my well-being is dependent on my active concern for others well-being. My conscience has remained opposed to the holding over a civilian population, at risk to the survival of our species, the threat of nuclear annihilation. Sadly, in the years of my nonviolent direct action in the 1980s, CND became politically marginalised. Though I managed to recruit and retain members from sections of the population who had not previously been political activists, for all my best efforts within the Youth section of the campaign, CND allied itself to tangential left-wing causes (eg the Miners Strike) that lowered the prospects of recruitment from Tory voters.

Hopefully the local Action for Happiness group of which I'm co-ordinator will be more successful as one of many vanguards of a new local economics, sparked partly by the “localism” vs “globalism” of the film “The Economics of Happiness. I hope we succeed in developing the ethic that values peoples time equally (timebanking). I hope that we recognise the importance of of tuning into the needs of others, especially when triggered by behaviours we don't like, not least of whom are those who start the riots! And of course I hope that we act to produce a society that cares enough to maintain (& develop) the best of the Welfare State.

Can national political commentators please see that this is the scale of what is at stake when they attempt to marginalise campaigns for happiness that, if engaged with, can be broadened and deepened to benefit all through collective action. Don't surrender happiness to the political right!

We need to act if we want happiness just as, to cite writing in my local paper “We need to act if we want justice”; social justice. Social justice and happiness are not separate campaigns -they are deeply interlinked.

Paul Crosland

Co-ordinator, Hastings & St Leonards Action for Happiness,

& Co-Director, Freelending CIC

[The above article was sent as a response to Suzanne Moore's article in the February 9th 2012 Guardian

Community Engagement and Community Development in Hastings and St Leonards

Paul Crosland: Mediation Support Ltd & Community Development in Hastings etc

5^th Oct 2010 - Hastings Pier Fire - the catalyst for Mediation Support Ltd to move to St Leonards to “innovate in getting stuck communications unstuck & to model taking responsibility in communities”. The Hastings Observer published the mission as: “We need to act if we want justice”. As CEO, I'm passionate about “finding our power”, articulating our values/needs & getting amazing outcomes out of facing our difficulties. Together we'll generate a “more caring & sharing Hastings & St Leonards”.

I've chosen one film (of 200plus) films to put here as it has been praised for how it unfolds the Community Development Work in Hastings & St Leonards which has been partly shaped by the "Action for Happiness" agenda. Here's a September 2011 meeting with the director of Action for Happiness, Mark Williamson, showcasing & discussing how Hastings & St Leonards have set a lead in a wide-range of Action for Happiness related projects; including developing community understanding and healing in the aftermath of the pier fire:


Why not now try... - "St Leonard's Sharing"?

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Notes on Community Engagement and Community Development

This is an extract from a paper circulated on the October-December 2011 University of Sussex "Community Development & Community Engagement course" (10 weeks) which I completed.
(This study is perhaps the most successful UK Community Development work that we were shown)

Over the last 7 years, the Beacon Partnership has achieved a series of dramatic health, educational, law and order, and environmental outcomes. Today, a series of initiatives contribute to the ongoing maintenance of the regeneration process. A purpose built nursery in being constructed, alongside a new youth centre. There are plans for a sensory garden, money has been secured for landscaping the original Beacon site, from which the estate takes its name. A mosaic project for street names and signs aims to bring the young and elderly to work together with the long-term unemployed of the estate.

Case Study AnalysisOur first motivation for seeking to understand the process of regeneration that occurred on the Beacon and Old Hill Estate from the perspective of complexity theory, emerged during a complexity workshop held in 2002. During the workshop, a presentation by Eve Mittleton-Kelly provoked the following response from the author:Although the presentation was nothing to do with community development, I was mesmerized by it. What I heard being described was a process which, uncannily and exactly, mirrored my intuitive responses to ‘kick starting the Beacon Project’. It placed great value on widespread networking and the creation of relationships and dialogue based on trust. Conversations, humility and respect, I now realised, contributed hugely to the creation of that all important enabling environment, which released the resourcefulness of this community to become self- organising and achieve such significant and dramatic outcomes. Sitting through that presentation was one of those rare, life-changing moments of self- enlightenment.The most significant aspect of the regeneration process on the Beacon and Old Hill estate was that, from the outset, there was no initial funding, no hierarchy, no targets, no business plan, only a shared vision of what the community wanted to be, rather than an obsession with what it had to do. Thus, the regeneration process was not a result of a predetermined plan. Rather, the process emerged as a consequence of the interactions between the members of the community, and between the community and its environment, namely the statutory agencies, the police, the council, and so forth. As the community evolved, so also the agencies and professional bodies co-evolved with the community.Prior to these processes occurring, however, it is important to pay attention to how the receptive context for change was created. Not only was the community isolated from the statutory agencies, it was also isolated from and within itself. The common response, when others suffered the effects of crime and vandalism in the community, was one of relief that it had happened to someone else. There was little or no communication, either between the community and the authorities, or amongst the members of the community themselves. Rather, as Bob Mears, the Police Community Liaison and Crime Reduction Officer was later to reflect, ‘there was an attitude among us and other people that everybody who lived on the estate was a criminal. That’s obviously not true, but there was no exchange of information.’The success of the residents’ associations, and then the partnership, consisted first and foremost in enabling relations to be formed amongst the members of the community, for people to begin to talk to each other again. As a consequence, vandalism and crime were no longer seen as other people’s problems – rather, they were problems confronting the community as a whole. In turn, the formation of these relationships enabled relationships to begin to form with the authorities, such that chains of communication between the community and the statutory agencies started to emerge. As trust spread throughout the community, so the community began to be trusted by the authorities, and the community in turn began to trust the agencies. On the basis of the formation of such relations, therefore, we can talk of a co-evolution of trust between the community and its environment. An initial series of ‘listening forums’ ultimately led to the situation where the agencies began actively to glean the views of the people in the community. The change in attitude was captured by Grenville Chappell, the Chair of the Beacon Community Regeneration Partnership: ‘You’ve got to get out there and find out what people want, not sit around and think you know best what people want.’While these interrelations doubtless constitute a necessary condition for the regeneration process, the momentum for that process came from a different quarter, a quarter which bears all the hallmarks of non-linearity. In a linear relation, the cause is ‘commensurate’ with its effect. In non-linear relations, however, small causes can lead to disproportionately large effects. It is precisely this disproportion of effect that propels the regeneration process. In the case of the Beacon and Old Hill estate, perhaps the most striking example of this is the instance of dog-waste bins. The provision of dog-waste bins on an estate is calculated according to a ration based on the number of residents in the estate – not the number of dogs. If, as is the case on Beacon and Old Hill, the number of dogs per capita is higher than average, there is a consequent lack of dog-waste bin provision. On the Beacon and Old Hill estate, the environment was blighted by dog waste. The Partnership worked to deliver a dog-waste bin provision which reflected more accurately the number of dogs on the estate. Within a very short time, dog-waste became a problem of the past. In a subsequent survey of tenants and residents, which sought to determine the single factor that had the most impact on the estate, a large majority identified the provision of adequate numbers of dog-waste bins, and the resultant improvement to the living environment for the community. Here was clear evidence of a dramatic outcome following from a small intervention, and the momentum this gave to the change process was to lead, ultimately, to a community-wide commitment to the betterment of the environment.A key element of complexity theory is the insight that, within a community or organisation, knowledge is distributed, and behaviour is necessarily localised. Macroscopic changes in the behaviour of the community or organisation as a whole are then classified as emergent phenomena resulting from the interactions between the localised changes in behaviour. This necessitates a conceptual shift from the assumption that change must be ‘managed’ from the ‘centre’. A fascinating example of this notion of localisation occurred as a direct consequence of the award of the Capital Challenge funding. While this award provided further evidence to the community of its ability to achieve successful outcomes by working together, it also necessitated, as a stipulation upon which the funding was conditional, the formation of a formal Regeneration Partnership. The effect of the formation of this Partnership, not least in terms of the trust which it built up in the authorities, was a noteworthy break in the traditional working practices of local government. Rather than maintaining sole control of the budget and decision making processes, Carrick District Council agreed to delegate some of its powers, a process which empowered the Partnership, which remained a predominantly tenant-led body, rather than a council committee, to make recommendations to the full council concerning the estate’s progress. As Mike Owen, Senior Housing Officer for Carrick District Council at the time, said: ‘It was quite brave for the authority to extend responsibility to a body controlled by residents.’ While the decision may indeed have been brave, it had the effect of ensuring that it was the specific local needs of the community which were being responded to, with local, directed, changes being the result. Perhaps the most poignant expression of this localisation of the decision making progress is to be found in the way that the Partnership worked together with the tenants to determine the order of priority for the improvement work on the buildings enabled by the award of the Capital Challenge funding. Such localised self-organisation in turn ensured that, for the community as a whole, there was clear evidence of the fairness of the prioritisation of the recladding and heating improvement work to be undertaken.
ConclusionThe Old Hill and Falmouth Beacon estate are a living example of relevant order emerging out of what was in 1995 a chaotic system. The intricate web of interactions which have formed between the community and the agencies hold the Beacon Partnership at the edge of chaos and allow the exploration to involve different individuals in new projects. The self-organisation of new social structures which emerge are able to adapt and respond to changes. There is a sense of agencies ‘acting differently’ in non-traditional ways, forging links outside of their organisational remit which contributes to this emergent order. The visibility of the change is captured in the wonderful gardens on the estate- where once prams and mattresses flourished, there is now a riot of flowers and shrubs, rockeries and raised borders. Work is ongoing to determine whether exchange visits , where communities (beginning to regenerate) are brought to Falmouth to ‘see’ and share stories can act as a vehicle for the possible transference of successful change.

(The above is the second half of the report that can be downloaded directly from www.healthcomplexity.net/files/Community_Regeneration_and_complexity.doc)

Paul Crosland AKA Lend-It-All-Man is happier by living less with money & more in a "face to face" (time) exchange, sharing & gifteconomy

2nd December 2011, The Metro reports greater happiness amidst economic downturn.
The site I'd love you to record your interest in a healthier form of economics is:

brightontimebank.info

The times we are living in, or approaching, are transition times, when the choice is between giving up  unsustainable consumption or death of our species. Logically, there is no alternative, and by sharing we can save resources and learn co-operation with each other (and harmony with the earth that sustains us).

2011 Lend-It-All Man Films



2010 Lend-It-All Man Films






The skill-set of greatest value that I want to continue to work on is that of sharing as well as that of handling our conflicts:
http://freelenders.blogspot.com
http://imperfectidealist.blogspot.com
http://sussexcommunity.blogspot.com
http://restorativetechnology.blogspot.com