Paul Twivy, the CEO of Your Square Mile Ltd, has said he set up the organisation after realising that Big Society Network, which he founded in 2010 and briefly ran, could not be independent from government.
Speaking to civilsociety.co.uk, Twivy said he has always championed his independence from government. “I certainly started Big Society Network to be independent from government,” he said. “When I found that it couldn’t be I left and did Your Square Mile.”
He would not elaborate further on this when pressed.
At the launch of Big Society Network in March 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron proclaimed: “This is a network of organisations being set up irrespective of what happens at the next election. It’s non-political and it will never become political.”
But, in recent months, there have been suggestions that Big Society Network has been unfairly favoured for funding by public bodies. It has received more than £3m from the government and Big Lottery Fund since its launch, yet none has been declared in any published accounts.
Shadow minister for civil society Gareth Thomas has accused the government of wasting money on “Big Society vanity projects” and described Big Society Network as "the government's favourite charity".
But the chair of Big Society Network, Martyn Rose, has already rejected suggestions that the organisation has been unfairly favoured.
‘We must be Tory boys’
Twivy said that he felt that Your Square Mile had been “tarred” by its association with Big Society Network. “There is an assumption with Big Society Network, which I ran for a short period of time, that we must be Tory boys. I spent much more time working with New Labour than any other by far. I spent 15 years working with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair on social action issues.”
On Your square Mile, Twivy said that while some aspects of the project had failed, as civilsociety.co.uk revealed last week, there were also some notable successes.
“We had six months of pilots with 16 communities,” he said. “They were chosen by BIG and other charitable foundations – the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Barrow Cadbury Trust.”
The communities chosen were places of high deprivation or other social problems, such as an ex-mining community and a Cumbrian coastal town which had the first youth curfew in Britain.
Though none of the pilots continued, Twivy said they were only ever intended to last for six months: “We had failures and big successes. There were some pretty dramatic changes in those communities.”
The brewer Heineken had also agreed to sponsor three more neighbourhood projects for three years in areas where it is a big local employer, all of which are still under way.
Your Square Mile Mutual
Twivy said that most of the £830,000 from the Big Lottery Fund paid for the activity in the 16 communities and for the Your Square Mile website – not for the work on setting up the Your Square Mile Mutual, which got nowhere near its target of three million members.
“It may look as if £830,000 of public money is going into something and only 140 people have joined when it was supposed to be three million. That part has not succeeded and we have been completely straightforward about that but the vast majority of the money wasn’t for doing that.”
Your Square Mile website
The website was constructed, he said, to cater for a variety of people, from active community leaders through to people who are completely disengaged from their community.
“The website has a huge wealth of material,” he said. “It’s very carefully designed and has a lot of work put into it.
“Active leaders can come on to the site and find something to help them. And for people who are emotionally predisposed but not yet active or totally disengaged we’ve provided as much information as we can - for example, giving them great ideas for community cinemas.”
The website also has a section for the ‘savvy citizen’ to let them know how they can get involved in their community, for instance by becoming a school governor.
Community Infopoints
Twivy said as well as the website, £100,000 of the £830,000 grant was used to trial Community Infopoints – community information screens in public places. However, BT wanted more evidence of their success before agreeing to install them in thousands of adapted phone boxes.
He said that going forward he would be working with Martha Lane Fox, the government’s adviser on digital inclusion and founder of Lastminute.com, on how mobiles can support communities. “The results will be shared by network operators,” he said.
No government support
Twivy also reiterated his frustration with government: “They put money into community organisers but they haven’t given us a single pound,” he complained.
He said YSM was now in active talks with corporations about potential future funding partnerships, as “without government funding, BIG or grant funding our future lies with business partnerships.”
He also said it was working on making closer links with the BBC to raise awareness. “We need a media partner,” he said.
He added that Your Square Mile has been the only “bottom-up, top-down systematic social enterprise trying to find a way of helping as many UK communities possible”.
“We have failed in many ways,” he said. “But the most important thing is that in the 19 communities we have done very specific things. We haven’t been a vague organisation. We’ve gone in and developed practical projects on the ground.”
