RDC(3) P&D4
Response to the Assembly’s Rural Development Sub Committee Scrutiny Inquiry into Poverty and Deprivation in Rural areas of Wales.
Community
It is important the Assembly do not overlook a focus on the social, and especially community dimension, to poverty and deprivation in rural Wales in ensuring the development of effective responses that work.
Clearly, enhanced benefits, lifting some individuals out of benefits, establishing a living wage policy and a more flexible benefits support system addressing in work poverty is vital to the alleviation of individual poverty which, assuming such measures could be introduced, should also carry a deep impact on child and family poverty.
However, the importance of community is also fundamental in our view to tackling poverty and deprivation. The market model places emphasis on people as lone individuals seeking to enhance their economic circumstances. The social model on the other hand, emphasizes people as members of social structures and communities with a range of valuable resources and support mechanisms available through a range of social networks such as family, friends and neighbours.
For many people experiencing poverty and deprivation, the potentially most powerful factor in enhancing their quality of life is not the accessing of a job, but the strengthening of such social networks which then afford the opportunity for greater support, comradeship, friendship, and access to social activities and services.
Having something to do, and somewhere to go, is not something very valuable and meaningful to young people alone, but very importantly provide a sense of belonging, meaning, purpose, and sometimes structure, to the lives of many people of all ages experiencing poverty and deprivation.
It is the community that offers a structure and focus for work which may change cultural factors such as attitude and aspiration. Peer pressure exerts a tremendous influence on people’s behaviour.
It is the community itself which must be supported in taking an active role to become stronger.
Community Involvement
Under community involvement we would emphasize the importance of fostering community action, and community self help.
Community involvement is not just simply informing the community about planned policy, programme or project developments, neither is it about simply consulting the community and seeking input into such matters.
Community involvement needs to embrace developing community infrastructure enabling community members to take direct action themselves in tackling the problems they face. This involves the training and development of people with direct experience of poverty and assisting them to organize into groups which can move forward and grow, over time, into organizations.
Such community organizations not only provide a very practical and effective learning environment for community members to grow, develop, and become more effective partners to statutory sector organizations, but they can also practically tackle local poverty and deprivation in a range of ways.
Independent community organizations can attract resources from a wide range of organizations to develop and deliver local projects, services and activities that meet real need, and further engage community members as service users, volunteers, trainees, employees, and trustee / directors. Several of our members have followed such a route very effectively.
Such organizations that our members are a part of, or leading, provide a wide range of community activities and services vital to the alleviation of deprivation. Some examples include childcare, play, homework clubs, luncheon clubs, hairdressing service, credit unions, youth clubs, detached youth work on the streets, youth café, sports activities, food co-ops, education, training, housing advice and tenant support work.
We believe that the above points are not simply an organizational perspective from ourselves, or an emphasis on the needs of a particular section of the community that we engage with, but reflect very fundamental values from within Welsh culture.
It is no accident that the Assemblies flagship social inclusion programme was named Communities 1st. Neither was it an accident that there was such a strong emphasis in C1st guidance on a bottom up approach and community development principles. Programme development followed a highly extensive information gathering exercise. The resultant programme contained a much stronger emphasis on community than comparable programmes in England. Within Wales, community has a much stronger cultural resonance than in other countries. This needs to be acknowledged and made a fundamental element in the development of a rural anti poverty and deprivation strategy for Wales.
Communities 1st
We have heard it said it is this type of programme that is needed for rural areas. Several of our members have very direct experience of this programme, and we carried out our own research on the implementation of the programme. Based on this, we would offer some comments briefly that we believe are relevant to the development of Government responses designed to reduce poverty and deprivation in rural areas.
The original vision of C1st was one that very powerfully engaged and motivated community members in areas of disadvantage. On paper it appeared what active community members had been saying was needed for many years. In practise however, it is not what community members expected. The emphasis on Partnership structures with strong Local Authority engagement, with their additional engagement in many areas as the accountable body, given sometimes long local histories of communities feeling let down by them, acted against the empowerment of the community. Such arrangements acted against effective community engagement, empowerment, and the development of community leadership.
Corporate capacity building within the statutory sector was grossly under emphasized and needed a much stronger focus, while community capacity building became a by word for much of the activity in some C1st areas.
We see the need for a stronger emphasis on delivery to specified targets, impacts and outcomes reflected in the development of Communities Next.
A way of targeting funding to much smaller sub ward areas is needed.
There was a great emphasis on locally focused work, while we feel there needs to be attention on building a form of partnership process between the Assembly and community more directly. For instance, this could include an annual large scale event involving the most relevant Assembly Minister, a very sizeable involvement of cross departmental civil servants and AM’s, twice annual meetings with relevant AM’s and relevant civil servants, and meetings quarterly with civil servants. Such a grouping would provide direct access for community members to people engaged in national government decision making processes, and a channel for ongoing communication, focus and impetus.
This, broadly speaking, is similar to the model employed by the Department of Work and Pensions in England and would merit closer study.
Rob Walsh
Development Worker
Anti Poverty Network Cymru
March 2008
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