My Clore social leadership presentation today..

Clore social leadership interview with NESTA on Prezi

Community Lovers Guide to the Universe in Leeds..?

I've teamed up with @mikechitty and @charlottebritto in order to try and pull together great examples into a Leeds version of an international book called “Community lovers Guide to the Universe”.
Help is needed from editors, curators, or photographers - but mostly it’s a book of people starting interested, small, good things for the love of it..

Some examples from Tessy Briton’s Hand-Made have been:

1. ×          Men’s Sheds – a stress free home from home for better social interactions
2. ×          School of everything – want to learning anything? Someone already knows the answer, you just need to know where they are
3. ×          Ourgoods.org – an etsy.com marketplace for matching skills
4. ×          Learned dreams – where did you want to get to as a child, and what do you need to do to get there..?
5. ×          And more formal examples of People’s supermarket, urban farming schemes, community organisations using ebay etc

If you want to know more about HandMade you can download the pdf’s here (or even better part with £30 for a copy) http://www.blurb.com/books/1541053

So get your thinking caps on and let us know any leads, however small, of people doing good things around you. Leave a comment, tweet us, help us set up a facebook or just have a good long think.

We need to crowdsource ways to turn ideas into social innovation. We need to storyboard what the future can look like, and we need small examples of people leading the way. Come on board..!

Are Big Lottery going to change their operating system..? #ppchange

I have a confession to make, I am an ex employee. Which puts me in that came of loving the organisation, but leaving out of frustration with it.. But i remember conversations years ago about how to genuinely have an impact on social problems, they have some very bright people around, Peter Wanless is progressive and open to ideas - I always assumed it was the board that was risk averse and defensive..?

(one example was a radio interview about not funding war memorials: the public concerned about the legacy of Yorkshire war heroes, BIG defensive about "the strategic alignment with existing programmes"..)

1. Their funds will be genuinely more important than ever to focus on entrenched social problems in a difficult economic climate.
2. The board has just changed.
3. They seem a bit out of kilter with the three #big society white papers which came out last year (localism, public services white paper & giving green paper).
4. There has been a gradual swing towards newer type organisations; NESTA, Young Foundation, Your Square Mile.
5. The hard choice of top-down or bottom-up seems a bit irrelevant now - surely we can get strategic programmes fro the bottom up..?
6. They have just change their policy direction - (the criticism focused on percentage allocation)

I'm wondering if bigger changes are on their way...?
Are Big Lottery going to get all radical on us..?
Thoughts..?

A standing start.. or Hand made 2-0

I've had another good look through Hand Made by Tessy Britton. I'm trying to pull together interested people to do a Leeds and maybe York version of the new "Community Lovers Guide to the Universe" along the same lines. So the simple question is: from a standing start, without time or money what could you do..? Right here right now!

Under-utilised resources & by-products in social innovation..

Ok, so I have the possibility of being seconded to the City of York council Nesta creative councils bid, sit on the open innovation group and will lead on third sector innovation for the next 24 months, but what would it actually mean..?

Question 1 - under-utilised resources:

Could supermarket checkout staff be knowledgeable about community events? Could volunteer tourist guides know about locally produced produce? Could we use spare capacity in shops for libraries or virtual noticeboards? In short - how could we leverage in, and broker change in multiple sites across a city..?

• ×          Car parks
• ×          Lockers
• ×          Meeting rooms
• ×          Organisations
• ×          Open access toilets
• ×          Shops

Question 2 - by-products currently produced by the system:

• Could recycling be done by a voluntary organisation alongside their core work..?
• Could sellable goods be produced by co-ops of rehabilitation patients in hospitals..?
• Could service users be service experts – shaping the services they need, and changing those they don’t.

The list is short, for now, but given the dynamics, it’s a good test of collaborating and yet challenging - separate enough to bring something different to the table.. This is the beauty of open innovation, but a tricky thing to juggle being open with the politics of running a council. Luckily there are some very good examples of people doing that, and York has put a good team together so far.. 

What can Creative Councils learn from the RNLI..?

The RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Association) was originally a 'provided service' in the model of most statutory bodies. In most other countries where they exist, they are like the coastguard paid for out of taxpayers money - yet in the UK it is wholly run on public donations.

So the question is: how can councils and other public bodies brand themselves as a mixed income model? Can they increase their perceived value and their income at the same time..?
(The alternative model would be the post office, running commercially with a public subsidy..)

So what's special about the RNLI? Lifeboat crew members are unpaid volunteers, while lifeguards are paid by the appropriate town or city council and RNLI provides their equipment and training. Its is also ranked number 1 in a Third Sector list of charity reputations. They are a big organisation, operating 444 lifeboats across the UK. They rescue an average of 22 people every day. They run an annual budget of £147.7 million.

So the unanswered question is "why do people value this over ambulances, or bin men, or anything else" - and how can other services get a piece of the action..?

Stupid business ideas dreamed up in the Guggenheim..

First of all, go see the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao - its a great place for thinking. 

These are my 'business' ideas..

1.       Naturalair conditioning on trains (by creating a removable air vent flow system between front and back windows..)

2.       Socialenterprise driving school

3.       Fashion boutique by those with unconventional ideas (eg on the autism spectrum etc)

4.       Counciltax rebates for Mingas (Mingas are public works undertaken by communities in South America - normally annually to sort out roads or drainage etc.)

5.       A modern Guild for community enterprise - what better place than York with its history of Guilds.. 

6.       Taxifirm as social enterprise (they pretty much run as Co-Ops already, so maybe not much point)

7.        Peerto peer volunteer (we're working on this, but no-one has come up with a decent model yet - even timebanking..)

9.       £10canteen for 1 hr lunches. 3 starters, 3 mains & a drink.

10.  Something around Small is Beautiful .

That's it..! But i made me realise strange places produce strange thoughts so i always take a pen and paper to museums now..

Why the general direction of travel that should really worry those who like things as they are..

It sudenly occured to me that there were a lot of implicit policy changes since 2010 that have not been written down together. So here's a list of things that show the direction of travel..

1. community over voluntary
2. self organising over organised
3. loans over grants
4. informal over risk assessed
5. delivery over 'voice'
6. problem solving over fairness
7. competition over collaboration
8. any willing provider over VCS
9. individual responsibility over government responsibility
10. peer to peer over hierarchy
11. social enterprise over voluntary
12. communities of place over communities of interest
13. economies of scale over local protectionism
14. social impact bonds over grants
15. chaotic working groups over formal partnerships
16. the specific over the generic
17. change over consistent

And this is the backdrop that the voluntary sector will be expected to have an increased role in:

1. double dip 
2. higher inequality 
3. more disadvantage (as the population get poorer)

I'm pretty optimistic despite all this, but i think firstly we need to recognise what is happening.. ;-)
It not the specific, but the general direction of travel that should really worry those who like things as they are..

Shared access to beach huts - a small example of collaborative consumption #collcons

Yesterday I was on the north Norfolk coast, on a beautiful sunny day with the beach full of happy families. Yet the beautiful beach huts by the side of the sand were all locked up and unused. What a missed opportunity. How nice would it be for the families to be able to use the beach huts for the day - lock them up again therefore not subject to vandalism..? So we need a very small system of accountability and trust, and some sort of feedback system. It shouldn't be very difficult.

1. How about a database you could log into (maybe with facebook) that would give you the 4 number code for the combination lock on a beach hut. 
2. To lock it up after use you would sign back out (maybe using foursquare) to say you had left. 
3. And you could leave feedback on the exchange like couchsurfing.

You could apply this method to more vulnerable thing longer term; holiday lets, caravans, bicycles etc..
Let's get more use from the things we have. Collaborative consumption has a long way to go. So if you could increase the sum of human happiness on a North Norfolk beach really easily, think about putting that into health and social care..

What's the phone number for Europe..?

The UK has the best civil society in the world and is something I think we should be looking to export. But it is messy. And many people would prefer it to be easier to understand, work with and buy in. A colleague of mine summed this up nicely by saying:

"What's the phone number for Europe?
Asking me how something is done in the voluntary and community sector is like asking for the phone number to Europe.."

So I know thing need to simply and merge, but we need to be careful not to lose the diversity, independence and ownership of the third sector that has makes it the best in the world - something that you could never plan or build..

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech