-The greater potential for our well-being of political, economic & spiritual community drives Paul Crosland to stand in general elections & to write the “Relearning PCECSC trilogy“(or #PeskyTrilogy for short):Volume 1 - The Myth Of The Heartless Tory; Vol 2 - The Pioneering 108 Vagabond Custodians preparing for The Festival Of The New Society 2066; Vol 3 - Politics As A Spiritual Practice. These books will form the shares in “Refuge Tree Woods” where we gather to refine our organic plot…
Here now is my Community Development Portfolio (which helped secure me a close second place out of 5 candidates for the Neighbourhood Enablers Team co-ordinator post (for which I didn't even apply, until I was asked to by those due to do the interviewing).
If you are keener to see a diverse group of people explaining how they got involved with the Community Development work led by Paul Crosland, this film
shows the amazing synergy that began with the launch of "Hastings & St Leonards Action for Happiness". Mark Williamson, the national CEO of Action for Happiness visited us as "a leading local group" in September 2011; the circle process being facilitated by Paul Crosland in what has been hailed as "an exemplary style":
And here's the Hastings Trust Mission, Vision and Strategy that I love and constructively question how it is being put into place:
Our Vision Our vision is for Hastings to be a place of connected, creative and sustainable communities that people are proud to be a part of. Our Mission
Our mission is to identify and create opportunities for people to work together, improving the quality of local lives now and for the future.
We aim to deliver this through the following areas of activity:
A Asset acquisition, protection and development
• To provide a more secure financial future for [our] communities.
• To provide affordable, accessible and appropriate accommodation to enable more socially focussed organisations to operate for the good of the future regeneration of our communities.
• To contribute to the urban regeneration of the area through the improvement and redevelopment of underutilised properties.
B Routes out of poverty and worklessness
• To enable the community economic development of the area through provision of appropriate support and assistance which enables local people to become economically active and less reliant on state assistance, thereby improving quality of community and individual life.
C Community development and quality of life – arts, culture, heritage and environment
• To enable local people to have greater control over the fortunes of their communities, to work together for the common good, and to improve quality of community and individual life.
• To provide the right environment for environmental, cultural, heritage and arts development thereby enhancing the regeneration of the area, improving the local economy and improving quality of individual and community life.
All of which are underpinned by:
D Secure financial position, management team and governance
• To ensure that [we have the structures to] provide long term support to enable the social, economic and environmental regeneration of Hastings, St Leonards.
E Campaigning, lobbying and partnership working
• To ensure that [we] and the wider third sector, locally, regionally and nationally, is better equipped to provide all of the above for the common good, to enhance social, economic, cultural and environmental regeneration and thereby improve quality of individual and community life.
If you can see that your concerns might benefit from some tweaking of the social media you generate, then come to a workshop at the Southwater Area Community Centre or at your place on request. No money payable; I will value your skills equally to mine and trade an hour for an hour through "St Leonards Sharing" timebank.
1) The "Non-exploitation card" scheme -making purchases in Hastings & St Leonards 20% cheaper for those who make a non-property-profiteering agreement:
& Paul has (allegedly) improved on Damian Hirst's Art:
The video on YouTube has a link to the website where Paul would be grateful, warm & fuzzy if you engaged in voting for the St Leonards Love Statue of your choice on http://love-statues.blogspot.co.uk
NB 8 themes (for the vote on the drama you want written about what's going on here -& elsewhere):
Local community (re)generation themes:
The ongoing loss of justice in relation to those known to have been on the pier on the night of the fire & the consequences of not resolving this to the satisfaction of the community?
What difference the Jerwood Gallery is making, or will -in time- make to Hastings, and whether there is harm to be addressed here too?
What "St Leonards Love Statues" could do for "St Leonards" in the way that Anthony Gormley statues eg "The Angel of the North" have done for their local areas?
How to stop developments squeezing out much that we value here?
How we can best address social exclusion and the roots of social unrest?
“Sustainable Local Futures” - in the new world economic order, undertaking the transition to a local economy that is more independent of world shocks?
“The amazing wealth of original, talented young people ,numerous local, high profile events and projects” promoted by The Respond Academy, amongst others?
"Ethical Outings in Hastings & St Leonards" (in relation to Arson etc) & what role we play across all generations in "character building" and taking responsibility, rather than letting things get worse.
There are three activities that I'm most keen to develop further as a contribution towards Community Development:
1) Sharing what we own
2) Developing Mutual Support Systems through Timebank Brokerage (Focussed Networks of Time Exchanges that build Social Justice).
3) Building a comprehensive Community Justice System (so that no grievance is left over; everyone knowing how to get support to process any dispute or conflict.)
A brief film from me on Sharing:
A brief film from someone in America I've never met about Timebanking:
Summary of the 6 types of Vision I've put out for St Leonards (& Hastings):
At the close of this video (from 7 minutes and 53 seconds in), Dominic asks the key questions that promote engagement in vital dialogues as a pro-active considered choice rather than a reaction to what's going on that is taken on the hoof:
How can we create communities which are resilient enough, robust enough, to deal with this [period] of intense transition that we are in on almost every front:
transition in relationships
transition in parenting
transition in education
But also huge coming social transitions
with the way we distribute resources
with the way that we deal with the consequences of massive climate transformation
with the way in which we deal with the increasingly volatile economic situations
WE WILL BE MAKING DECISIONS
WE WILL BE RETURNING TO TOWN SQUARES
WE WILL BE RE-OPENING PUBLIC DIALOGUE ; if not because of the exciting potential that that gives us for democracy, then simply because the kinds of situation that we are increasingly confronting demand that of us.
So I would like us to learn to get more and more skilful about:
How do we create social dialogue?
How do we create procedures which support social dialogue?
How do we create outcomes from that process which (actually) effectively meet fundamental human needs?
Does anyone want to join me in filming more in this series about (Hastings &) St Leonards being the place we know with the highest quality of life at the lowest cost of living & CAMPAIGNING TO PROTECT THAT FROM INITIATIVES WHICH RAISE THE COST OF LIVING AND FALSELY RAISE THE VALUE OF OUR PROPERTIES. ('Funny Money' is unsustainable and taints us with the 'greed' of which we accuse others).
Sadly, there are Council led initiatives which threaten the low cost of living here. This is part of a questionable regeneration strategy risking generating only another Brightonesque "London by the Sea"?
This film is the first in the new CAMPAIGNING series: "The Cost of Living in St Leonards):
To complete this background information by providing the two pages about freelender.org, Edmund Johnson & I in "The Moneyless Man" by Mark Boyle (being published in 16 languages, I'm told:
Here's "The Moneyless Man"; demonstrating that humans don't need money to meet their needs; money is a strategy (not a universal need) & MONEY OFTEN HAS A HIGHER COST THAN FORMS OF TRADING THAT BUILD MORE TRUST, COMMUNITY & GENEROSITY:
And from April 2010, here's Maria talking about the relative importance of my various Community Development projects -crucially www.freelender.org - and how the Centre for Peaceful Solutions is working innovatively in also generating the skills for the well-being of communities, skills to be held by all, rather than put in the hands only of professionals:
I do much of my work on facebook; the stages of my best work being
Dreaming and Visioning
Planning
Networking & Doing,
Reviewing
(Then round this cycle again and again. I even taught the dream-cycle to a year group of students in the central city of India -Nagpur- in 2010: http://nagaloka-dream-cycle.blogspot.com)
One organisation that supports me in doing much of my work is the company I set up after being "Head of Restorative Justice" for 5 years at Mediation UK -the national charity which used to exist to represent and support community mediation services. The company is called Mediation Support Ltd. If you are interested in developing any of the above areas of work, please drop me an email via the Mediation Support contact form which clearly states what you'd like to happen next to further your interests.
Another structure that (alongside co-director Edmund Johnson) is being offered to communities in East Sussex and beyond is the Community Interest Company (a bit like a charity but easier to run) that we set up in 2008 and whose work has been hailed both by the leading UK Sustainability Think Tank, Forum for the Future, and within one of the seminal "transition books" of our era: "The Moneyless Man" by (out-there) Mark Boyle. The Community Interest Company that you are invited to apply to co-direct is currently called Freelending CIC. One of the fun spin-off of this work in developing how communities can share more (eg tools, clothes, cars, beachhuts, DVDs, conversations) and build-trust is the creation of the "Lend-It-All Man" persona:
For “Creative Timebank Brokerage”, example websites are www.timebanking.org www.stleonardssharing.infowww.east-sussex-veg-people.blogspot.comwww.ethicaloutings.blogspot.com
& Here's part of an interview I made with Sarah Bird from Timebanking UK which shows, amongst other things, that Timebank volunteering has been recognised as taking the pressure off the council Home Repair Service:
For “Door-knocking as a Team-Building Occupation”, my inspiration comes from work which I did whilst employed by www.karuna.org The “two-step” fundraising model they use has great potential as I see it to be applied to increasing our connections with our neighbours. (More background on the skills, ethics and integrity required in the kind of door-knocking that opens hearts available on request; this is what in my opinion Community Development Work could benefit from greatly …..)
And now for the Walking Buddhas of Hastings, St Leonards & making this the place of grand sculpture in SE England?
(http://www.youtube.com/v/ZoAURxQK9dw)
And here's the Walking Buddha Statue being replicated as part of the re-positioning of Hastings & St Leonards in the new cultural and economic world order:
There are three activities that I'm most keen to develop further as a contribution towards Community Development:
Though I haven't yet inspired a St Leonards team to knock-on doors for the sake of the development of our community, I sense that this possibility is getting nearer after the 2012 St Leonards Community Planning meetings began. Below I'm with Erica Smith of the Hastings Network and with Jeremy Birch, the leader of Hastings Borough Council:
AGAIN:
If you are interested in developing any (or all) of the above areas of work, please drop me an email via the Mediation Support contact form Please reflect first on what you'd like to happen next to further your interests & your care for the well-being of your local community.
+++++++++++++++++++++
And...,
To say a little more, as a Community Development worker, four things that I'm particularly troubled by in the UK are:
1) "An English man's home is his castle" property protection mentality
2) Mass (individualised) Consumption rather than collective ownership eg How much easier it is for people to purchase stuff than to use the Internet to find the same stuff being shared.
3) That nonviolence is not deeply understood as a life-course.
4) That the vision of community is often so limited by all of the above -AND MORE
THESE ARE SOME OF THE REASONS WHY I WISH TO DRAW ON MY DEEPEST EXPERIENCES OF COMMUNITY which I have found in Indian Ambedkarite Buddhists. The Normans coming out of the sea may be more relevant to Hastings' past. I'm not the person to advance that project. Rather I'm wanting to work on agendas such as the "cities of sanctuary" project to build a healthier approach to immigration. We have so much to learn from my friends in India, particularly "how to live better for less". "how to live better for less" is also St Leonards' unique selling point. This is partly the basis on which I'm inviting Amber Rudd (MP), Jeremy Birch (leader of the council) and Kim Forward (Mayor) to a meeting to discuss how government, local and national, can best support sharing of cars, houses etc and what social policies, cultural links and arts will best position Hastings & St Leonards as a resilient, well-connected place in the face of the coming new world order?
The process said to be necessary to build any community with any depth:
The Stakeholder Analysis in relation to Hastings Pier:
LINKS THAT CAN BE FOLLOWED UP ACCORDING TO WHAT AREA OF COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN DEVELOPING OR MAINTAINING:
Hastings Observer pieces:
June 2011 -"We need to act if we want justice"
June 2011 -"Group aims to get Hastings smiling again"
September 30th 2011 -"Talks to mark the anniversary
AGAIN:
If you are interested in developing any (or all) of the above areas of work, please drop me an email via the Mediation Support contact form Please reflect first on what you'd like to happen next to further your interests & your care for the well-being of your local community.
At the close of this video (from 7 minutes and 53 seconds in), Dominic asks the key questions that promote engagement in vital dialogues as a pro-active considered choice rather than a reaction to what's going on that is taken on the hoof:
How can we create communities which are resilient enough, robust enough, to deal with this [period] of intense transition that we are in on almost every front:
transition in relationships
transition in parenting
transition in education
But also huge coming social transitions
with the way we distribute resources
with the way that we deal with the consequences of massive climate transformation
with the way in which we deal with the increasingly volatile economic situations
WE WILL BE MAKING DECISIONS
WE WILL BE RETURNING TO TOWN SQUARES
WE WILL BE RE-OPENING PUBLIC DIALOGUE ; if not because of the exciting potential that that gives us for democracy, then simply because the kinds of situation that we are increasingly confronting demand that of us.
So I would like us to learn to get more and more skilful about:
How do we create social dialogue?
How do we create procedures which support social dialogue?
How do we create outcomes from that process which (actually) effectively meet fundamental human needs?
“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, 9th 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 19th 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,
You do (more of) what you like to do & bank the hours with "St Leonards Sharing" Timebank. (NB The timebank may require these hours to be of clear service to someone else before they allow them to be counted; and please note that some time spent on your allotment -if you have one- can be banked as hours owed to you)
Your credits at the Timebank can be exchanged for veg or for help with errands/chores/cleaning as well as for all the usual therapies or help from Mediation Support Ltd to transform some issue with someone that is giving you grief.
You even earn time credits/veg for coming to the October AGM for the Timebank, and deciding with the rest of us what projects the timebank should most support.
Timebanking is much more than an alternative way to buy/sell food, pay the rent and build community.
It is not just an alternative currency, but opens up a whole new way of working.
Crucial are the skills and creativity of the Timebank Broker & the Timebank Community Development Worker.
Here's me interviewing Sarah Bird from Timebanking UK about an example of the synergy that timebanking can create when money stops working for us (& seems to be working more for bankers elsewhere!)
Paul Crosland: Mediation Support Ltd & Community Development in Hastings etc
5th 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:
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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.
Whilst applying for jobs in community development (eg those being established by the Hastings Trust), my longer-term main project is to co-write a TV film (set in St Leonards on Sea) entitled "The Walking Buddha (of South East England)".
At the appropriate stage I intend to meet up with an old school friend who is a script-writer for Eastenders, Casualty etc in order to propose that we join forces in co-writing.
One key influence in the gestation of the script so far has been the 3 part "Public Enemies" on BBC iPlayer; staring Daniel Mays and Anna Friel.
In "The Walking Buddha (of South East England)" the cast is as follows:
- Yvonne (who arrives home with daughter Cosette) to find her house burnt down.
- Howard from Hastings (her new partner) who gives Yvonne & Cosette shelter, but little solace.
- Dr Ambedkar, who, although he died in 1956, appears as a guide to the "more enlightened" characters.
- A blog or two eg:http://nagaloka-dream-cycle.blogspot.com
- Josh, Joey, Shane & Will (Youth involved in the house fire who take different degrees of responsibility with what they know; Josh is the one who gave Joey's mobile number to Paul Crosland, having read the appeal in the Hastings Observer by Paul Crosland's company, Mediation Support Ltd for further information about the circumstances surrounding the CCTV footage of two people at the time of the fire.
-Paul Crosland, an agent provocateur who attracts the attention of the police from time to time for his wide range of "edgy" activities, including winning the 2010 Social Innovation Camp award for coming up with the idea for "the app with most potential to reduce youth offending & imprisonment" Here's the winning presentation, with the founding ideas of Restorative Technology Ltd:
Much of the source material for the TV-film is also being put into a play format for performance at Triratna Buddhist Centres across the UK and can be found on http://ethicaloutings.blogspot.com
-Yes, you can't hear me on this film; the music is better than the spoken word at times, eh?
This film (from the Maybrick44 channel) helped me reconnect with my past in playwriting, performance and being an Entertainments Officer.
The result of all the current gestation:
