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Big Society on a local scale 5

Governance | Gordon Hunter | 21 Jul 2010

Big Society offers communities the chance to change their ways, notes Gordon Hunter as he offers some big ideas devised for a local action plan.

Greening up

Some advice for Regional Development Agencies before they're abolished. The best way to apply underspend (redefined as "future spend" by our creative civil servants) would be to set up a Green Energy enterprise, buy some mobile rigs and start drilling (80 per cent of the capital cost of ground source heating is drill hire).

Eco burials

How to make money out of green spaces. Set up a natural burials operation. The planning's a pain but you're contributing to the freelance economy (all those surveys of trees and endangered species) and you can post surplus (typically 60 per cent of the plot fee; the rest goes on maintenance) to your own "community pot".  Sustains your operation and you get to help save the planet.

Traditional burial - municipal maintenance, headstones, caskets (try the "Persephone" at £28,000 a pop) - is many times more carbon negative than "green" burials; even cremation is more eco friendly.

Payroll Giving – making every penny count

The working populaton of Lincolnshire is about 400,000.  If everyone donated their spare pennies to charity (50p a month, £6 a year) we'd raise £2,400,000 every year to spend on our local communities.  There'd be no need for grant aid from local authorities.

A culture of customary giving is stable and self reliant.  It should replace our dependency on grant aid, artificial targets and handouts.

Consultation: does it make any difference?

Certainly not in the case of dormant accounts. Last year’s exercise was a classic skew-up.  The opening gambit was to use the label “social investment wholesale bank”, a bit of a clue to answering the question “what should we do with unclaimed assets?”. The next trick is to baffle your audience with terms like angel equity, mezzanine loans and venture equity bonds. Result: nearly all of the 80 responses were from consultants, venture capitalists and retail bankers.  Naturally they want dormant accounts transferred to them so that they can offer complicated loans to a market desperate for grants!      
 

Community buildings

What should we do with all those churches and church halls (700 in Lincolnshire) and all those village halls (built because the Victorians installed their beautiful pews) and all those village pubs with uncertain futures? Churches with catering (get wed then stay for the feast)? Pubs with prayer and post offices and libraries and community transport? Or should we knock them all down and build something green and self sustaining?

Volunteering

Lord Wei is promoting volunteering as though it was something new. His “active citizens’ union” aims to increase the number of volunteers tenfold by 2016. But does he know the facts? Already 14 per cent of the adult population are sports volunteers (difficult to increase tenfold). And what about First Responders, volunteers who (amongst other things) kick start heart attack victims? There’s nearly a thousand of them in Lincolnshire staffing 140 local groups.  If you’ve got one nearby (their average response time is 4 minutes 32 seconds), your chances of surviving cardiac arrest improve from 1 in 20 to 1 in 3.

Maybe we should concentrate on sustaining the thousands of volunteers we already have.

BIG Society/LOCAL action.

Dave’s flagship projects are, indeed, commendable:  out-of-hours volunteers for museums, taking over a community centre (isn’t that what the Social Investment Business’ “Community Builders” programme was all about?), doing some recycling.  And there are and have been for decades thousands of low-cost, local activities that bring people together in community service. Some are truly innovative:  inner city orchards (find all the fruit in Manchester and share it out), paint schemes (combine all those half pots under the stairs and you could paint every community building in the land – khaki mind!).

What those projects need isn’t a crack team of civil servants to navigate them through the bureaucratic landscape. What they need is funding, ideally from BIG Society LOCAL community banks.

Gordon Hunter is the founder and director of the Lincolnshire Community Foundation 

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Who's Who: Gordon Hunter