A new network that claims to be the self-appointed watchdog of the Big Society held its first public event in London yesterday to examine how the Big Society concept has progressed, one year since David Cameron first announced it.
Our Society Network claims to be a “self-forming, self-running watchdog for the Big Society”, to ensure that the Prime Minister’s big idea truly connects with communities and empowers people on the ground as it develops. The network’s strapline is ‘Social action. Honest exchange. Grounded learning.’
Although the network launched last summer as an informal group connected online through forums and blogs, yesterday it held its first event which it dubbed ‘A reality check for the Big Society’. Marking the first anniversary of the launch of the Big Society, the Our Society team sought to examine whether it is really working for communities at local level, or whether resources and opportunities are passing them by.
The event was hosted in the community centre at Walterton & Elgin Community Homes (WECH) in west London, the site of England’s only statutory transfer of council housing into tenant ownership, in 1992.
Our Society has 467 members signed up to its forum on Ning, which hosts 25 discussion groups, a calendar listing 143 Big Society-related events and a national map of projects. It was created after its founders realised that the government-sponsored Big Society Network had no facility to interact with the public, and so decided to create a highly interactive network that could share ideas and critique the Big Society as it progresses.
The network has also been involved in the development of the Big Lottery Fund’s People Powered Change initiative.
Speakers at yesterday’s event comprised Julian Dobson, director of consultancy Urban Pollinators, who chaired; Tony Blume, director of Urban Forum; Jonathan Rosenberg of WECH; Will Horwitz, communications co-ordinator at Community Links; Paul Webster, regional ICT champion project coordinator at Navca – who lost his job yesterday as a result of the public spending cuts; Jess Steele, who is managing the community organisers programme at Locality, and Nick Denys from the Conservative group Platform 10.
Click here to see what they said about the Big Society one year in.
