Survival of the fittest???

Apologies for the lack of blog for two weeks. The first was for a holiday – very important time devoted to my own kids (and husband!), rather than the young people of Surrey in general. I then came back to a very busy but interesting week and had little time to catch up on email or write the blog… I’m sure you know the problem!

Last week was a good example of the range of things I get involved within in this job….the most exciting was our beta test of Communilab carried out by our very supportive partner Barclays. We had nine very engaged Barclays employees aiming both to break the system and make suggestions for improvements. We have come away with lots of ideas and will be asking our developer to make some changes. We will be sharing Communilab with more and more of our partners…charities, Surrey County Council, Penningtons Manches solicitors, Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, Surrey Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner, etc… over the coming weeks and months.

A flavour of my other activities…

·        The launch of the Surrey Nature PartnershipBoard’s business plan (I see protecting the natural environment as important for our young people)

·        A presentation on European funding from the Enterprise M3LEP and Surrey Community Action

·        The Youth Commission (investigating the role of Surrey CC in youth work in the future)

·        The Surrey Charity Chief Execs forum

·        Internal monthly Management and Finance meeting with my trustees.

With respect to funding, a theme which keeps reoccurring is the old localism versus efficiency debate. Understandably funders often balk at the idea of breaking their funding pots down into small amounts because it is expensive to administer.  They therefore give out larger pots. However, they are often keen to get smaller organisations, particularly charities, involved in delivery. They therefore want charities to form partnerships to bid for these funds. This does not, in my opinion, reduce the costs, it merely shifts them away from the commissioner into the delivery organisations. It costs to build and maintain high quality partnerships. And sometimes they go wrong, leaving one or more partners who have delivered admirably out of pocket or with a contractual or reputational problem on their hands. This emphasises the second issue with this model – the transfer of risk away from the funder to the delivery organisations. This is why the cost efficient approach of the large business suppliers (e.g. Serco) is often attractive to funders.

I realise that this might be unpopular in some quarters (after all most of us charity CEOs and trustees enjoy our roles, don’t we?), but I believe that in the tough funding regimes going forward, larger charities would flourish better and that some mergers are needed. My belief is not just based on theory, I have seen the huge difference that scaling up can make as a trustee of Groundwork in London over the last ten years.  I first went onto the board of Groundwork Merton, which had a turnover of approximately £1m, but whose future was very uncertain. Over the period of five years, 7 Groundwork trusts merged to become Groundwork London with a turnover  of over £10M. This required 7 boards to fall on their swords and a variety of suitable arrangements found for Executive Directors to manage the transition appropriately.  Groundwork Merton might not have survived, Groundwork London is now flourishing and accessing a range of funding that would not have been open to it before. The great work is going on. There was a big debate (about three years long!) about how to maintain the local connections beyond merger. The proof has been in the pudding.

I think we need to wake up and smell the coffee in Surrey…. mergers may be the best route to get our great work to flourish….

Giving young people a voice...do they want it?

We are increasingly getting requests from various local councils and other organisations to help to find out what young people want from their services and in their community. Some organisations want to consult with young people in depth whilst others are looking to us to speak on behalf of young people. We strongly believe that young people should have a say in public services and want to make this happen;  many youth leaders that we meet feel the same.

There are, however, several challenges with this. Like many situations in society, we need to find a way to get the voices of a variety of young people with different backgrounds not just the most articulate. We have amongst our 75 member organisations a very wide variety of young people, so working with our members, in theory we have access to a wide variety of voices. However, I keep hearing that young people don't want to be consulted, which has often puzzled me because the teenagers that I know are usually happy to express opinions. However, maybe it is because the organisations and their young people are all busy with their activities and don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to sit down and answer a survey, especially if they cannot see that anything is going to happen as a result of giving their time and opinion.

I was heartened last week, therefore, when meeting with the Police Sergeant Adam Luck, who leads the Surrey police team with responsibility for working with young people in Surrey. He has a very different opinion - he hasn't found any difficulty in getting young people to talk. He ran a successful conference at Sandown Park a couple of years ago called SHOUT (Surrey Hear our Thoughts) where young people came and did a series of workshops giving young people a chance to air their views and concerns. The difference was that the young people voiced their thoughts through a variety of means including interactive drama. The message that I took away from this meeting was to rid my brain of thoughts like “focus groups” and to start to think more creatively about active ways in which to work with our members to engage young people to give their voices. The other challenge that we have with this is, of course, finding ways to cover costs for our member organisations and ourselves to do this work.

If you have any thoughts on giving young people a voice, do let me know. 

Young people with disabilities

This week the subject of young people and disabilities came up a number of times. On Tuesday I visited one of our members, the Queen Elizabeth Foundation in Leatherhead where they run an employment programme to help people with disabilities - mental health or physical - back into work. They also have a residential home for people in wheelchairs where they can have a variety of accommodation to support people on the steps to independent living if appropriate. I was particularly struck by the frustration of one young resident whose communication device had been sent off for repair and who was therefore very limited in the way that she could communicate until it comes back. Imagine suddenly losing your ability to communicate for a week or so…

One of the challenges that we as a society need to face is that as we save more very sick young children such as those born very prematurely and as more people who have very bad accidents survive with major disabilities, we need to find a way to for them to have happy, fulfilling lives, in dignity and comfort, whilst at the same time working through and coming up with solutions to the financial implications.

I had a good chat with Richard at Surrey Independent Living Council (one of our fellow tenants at Astolat). SILC is run by and for disabled people, helping them to live independently and to arrange the support and services that they require.   

On Thursday I went to visit the inspirational Dan Eley who has been in a wheelchair since an accident in 2010. Since then he has set up the Dan Ely Foundation which runs employment programmes for young people from poor backgrounds in Columbia - he is out in Columbia as I type overseeing the latest programme. Dan believes that his life is more fulfilling now than before the accident. What a role model!

On Saturday my children and I went to the Challengers special monthly swimming event at the waterslides at the Spectrum in Guildford. We went with close family friends who have a daughter with a disability. The session at the Spectrum is lovely because it gives young people with disabilities and their siblings an opportunity to be themselves and have fun in a safe space where, for example, it doesn't matter if a child blocks the way walking up or takes several minutes to decide whether they want to go down the waterslide. I feel a strong sense of community spirit with everyone looking out for each other's children.

I do believe that we have made progress in society for helping young people with disabilities to live with more dignity and fun, but I also think that there is so much more that we can do - and by "we" that means everyone - we all have a role to play in ensuring that people with disabilities are welcomed into shops, into the workforce and into all aspects of mainstream society.

Perfect storm?

I attended a briefing by the leader of Surrey County Council, David Hodge, last week on Surrey’s “Spending Power” for 2015 and beyond. It makes grim reading. Everybody I speak to seems to be in agreement that whatever flavour of political party or coalition is in Whitehall after the election there will be significant further cuts to local government budgets. Leaders in Surrey CC have further tough decisions to make on where the axe falls. Not a fun task methinks. So far, Surrey has maintained a much larger spend on youth provision than many other counties, but can it last?

Meanwhile I am increasingly hearing from my voluntary and charity sector colleagues that they are receiving increasingly complex referrals (i.e. clients with a wider range of problems in layman’s terms).

A third bit of news this week is some research reported by the BBC that suggests “Behaviour of boys from poor homes is worse when they grow up with wealthier neighbours”. I am not surprised to hear this, common sense says to me that if you are a teenager sitting in a class full of people with iphones going on skiing holidays it must be harder than sitting in a class full of other people with little money. So, Surrey's young people from poor backgrounds need our support. 

A perfect storm of problems? Maybe not, but certainly a pretty bad combination. I believe that a very strategic response is required with a range of players coming together to try to maintain and improve support for the most vulnerable in our society in the face of cuts. I will be working towards this over the coming months. But it won't be easy. Suggestions on a postcard please…

Impact is the new black

Outcomes are so last year. Impact is the new way of showing that your organisation or service is making a difference, so I learnt at a meeting of Local Authority representatives and Youth Infrastructure Chief Executives held at the Cabinet Office last week. Why? Because measuring outcomes alone doesn't tell about your impact.

Impact is the difference between a world with your organisation or service in it and one without it. To take a definition from the Big Lottery, impact is:

“Any effects arising from an intervention. This includes immediate short-term outcomes as well as broader and longer–term effects. These can be positive or negative, planned or unforeseen.”

WHY do we want to measure impact? Because it is evidence. Why do we want evidence? To support an assertion. What should we be using it for? To build confidence over time. What is evidence….experience, pictures, words, statistics. 

Here are a few key points that I took away from the discussion:

• ·         You need to think about how you want to use the data. Have a think about other ways that you could use the data, to influence new potential funders that you haven’t influenced in the past e.g. lottery, businesses.
• ·         To measure your impact, it is recommended that you consider bringing a group of key stakeholders together to reflect on the questions. It gives you a major opportunity for dialogue.
• ·         Measuring impact is only really going to work when you have people all across the organisation bought in – including the CEO and the youth worker at the coal face. Often, youth workers are supremely unconvinced by measurement initiatives, yet can be the most evangelical if won over to the cause.
• ·         When a young person’s life is changed, it will often be down to several organisations, perhaps a school and a youth group, rather than just one. We therefore need to talk about contribution rather than attribution - collective impact and collective responsibility.

And if you want to start on this work, here is a list of questions to get your brain going…What is need? What is demand? Who is asking? What are your big aims? What are you trying to improve? What are you trying to reduce? What assumptions do you have about ways that you work? Do young people stick with you? What do they particularly stay about for?  If you are looking to change, where is the line between adapting and wholesale metamorphosis to being a new organisation? When are you no longer you? 

For more information go to: youth-impact.uk/

Anger and solutions

The sad events in France over the last week remind us of how complex some problems are and how they cannot be solved by one organisation. We (globally) need to try to understand why some people feel so angry and disenfranchised that they make life choices which are unimaginable to the rest of us. I deliberately haven’t used the word Islam because religion here has been misappropriated by people wanting to use it as an excuse to vent their issues with society, just as many atrocities have been committed in the name of religion related to the Northern Ireland conflict. These types of issues can only be solved when many parties get together to solve them. Governments cannot do them alone.

Similarly, it is important in Surrey that we work to encourage our most disenfranchised young people back into mainstream society. Surrey County Council and the local boroughs cannot and should not be expected to deal with them alone.

There are complex problems facing us in Surrey which can benefit from multiple organisations working together to solve. Going forward I very much see part of Surrey Youth Focus’s role as being too help people identify problems being experienced by our member organisations’ young people which are not getting solved. Our intention is to bring together a new set of players to help to solve them. The strong focus many corporates have on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) these days provides us with a new opportunity to help get long-standing problems solved.

For example, take the issue of getting young people with learning difficulties into meaningful occupation. These young people often have a tolerance for repetition that others do not have, which could be valuable to employers. I would like, at some point, to get together a group of HR managers from employers together with disability organisations to work together on an employment initiative to provide new types of roles suitable for people with learning difficulties. (If this has been done before… do let me know how it went…)

Do you have any problems facing young people in Surrey that you have been trying to solve for some time that could benefit from working with other organisations? Would you like help moving things forward? If so please do drop us a line, we would love to hear from you. 

All Change?

Listening to the radio this morning about the drive to get parents to give their children less sugar, I reflected on a change in our habits that has helped on one level, but has potentially caused other problems. (Click here for more information on the campaign).

Until recently, I was a full-time mum and used to frequently shop at supermarkets, often with one or both kids in tow. This meant that I was often subject to the typical requests for the sweeter cereals, for biscuits, etc. Now we are doing most of our shopping online, I am no longer subject to so many requests and it is easier to purchase more wisely without pester power. 

On the downside, however, the kids have less opportunities to learn about the shopping process and food ingredients now that they don’t observe it happening. True, they still sometimes see me cook, but it will take longer for the younger one to learn all the names of, for example,  fruits and vegetables. As so often with technology, the challenge will be going forward to make the most of technology whilst overcoming any downsides. Often, however, the downsides are not easy to spot.

With respect to reducing sugar consumption, I believe that it cannot be done by the strength of character of parents alone. I believe that a widespread change in society is needed, including regulation of food manufacturing and sale. If I could wave a magic wand over legislation, my first action would be to disallow sweets and sugary treats at low levels by checkouts. That would be one less pester inducing situation for a parent to negotiate.

It is tradition to say “happy new year”, but this sometimes feels to general for me, so instead I will say that I hope that you have the new year that you want, whether that be happy, peaceful, spiritual, loving, relaxing, carefree, reflective, calming, fun, exciting, connecting, healing, comforting, joyful or maybe something else….

Cate