Citizens UK, the organisation that felt it was unjustly passed over for the £15m contract to provide the community organisers programme, has applied to trademark the name ‘Institute for Community Organising’ in a move likely to annoy Locality, the group that won the contract.

Locality's Jess Steele, the manager in charge of the community organisers programme, announced last week that Locality would be setting up an Institute for Community Organising as part of the programme.  The Institute would not be owned by Locality or hosted by an academic institution, but would be a mutual owned by organisers themselves.  

She said it would provide solidarity and ongoing CPD for members, who would be drawn not just from the government-funded Locality programme but from the many organisers that already exist and those that will be trained and developed by other organisations.

An institute for community organising was part of the government’s brief for the community organisers programme.  The intention was that the institute should take over the role of programme lead when Locality's contract ends in April 2015.

But Citizens UK, which also bid for the contract and voiced its disappointment when it lost, applied to trademark the name ‘Institute for Community Organising’ on 2 March, two weeks after the contract was announced as being awarded to Locality. The status of the trademark application is currently 'Advertised'.

Neil Jameson, director, said the Institute has been up and running since late 2009 as part of Citizens UK’s trading arm, the Centre for Civil Society.  However, until recently it was called the College of Community Organising. "It was our idea first," he said.

The Institute provides training and accreditation in broad-based community organising and already has contracts with the Conservative Party and with the Labour-affiliated Movement for Change, he said.  It is staffed by one full-time administrator and the training is provided by the 25 community organisers employed by Citizens UK.

Jameson said Citizens UK’s Institute was quite different to the membership body proposed by Locality: “They just have the same name but totally different purpose and track record.”

Jameson said he didn’t understand how Locality’s institute proposal would work anyway. “There are already 300,000 other people calling themselves community organisers so it will be a big mishmash of people fighting over titles. I can’t see how it would work. Inevitably we will have to get into conditions and criteria and accreditation, and I don’t know how people can accredit themselves.

“We find it useful to have [an Institute] in that it provides a focus for community organising, but obviously the stuff we do is broad-based community organising which is arms-length from what the other folk are doing, which is really community development work by another name.”

Locality: 'Our plans remain unchanged'

Locality said it would consider the implications of the trademark application.  Jess Steele said: “We don’t have any comment at this time apart from to say that setting up the ICO was part of the government’s specification for this programme.

"As the national partner, we will consider the implications of Citizens UK’s trademark application – but our plans remain unchanged. The programme will create an independent institute which will carry forward its work in supporting effective community organising.”