2½ Cheers: A response to Transforming Place: Proposals for a Neighbourhood Strategy for Birmingham

The Green Paper, Transforming Place: Proposals for a Neighbourhood Strategy for Birmingham, clearly represents a great deal of hard work, and hard thinking – and the decision to submit something that, even in its own words, has already ‘been developed and agreed’ by a number of major stakeholders, to a wider public conversation is courageous, albeit utterly necessary. What emerges from this process of, hopefully rigorous, conversation should, ideally, contain some tried and tested wisdom that will help shape the future of Birmingham City Council.

I start from two key premises. Firstly, that this Green Paper is not just about practical outworkings. It is about a vision, an approach, a culture. As such, I am treating this Green Paper (I come at this as a messy mix of community practitioner, community development research student, and practical theologian) as a ‘theological’ text: its grandest aim is to describe a vision, a worldview, which should shape the way we think, and talk, and act, into the future. My second premise flows from this: that Birmingham City Council’s approach to, or better with, its neighbourhoods is quite simply the most important thing that BCC could possibly be about at this unprecedented point in its history and development. If it gets this bit right, everything else that BCC is about will fall into some kind of place. If it gets it wrong, it is setting itself up to fail in massive ways, all over the place, in the coming years.

So no pressure then!

2½ cheers!

There is a lot to affirm and celebrate in the Green Paper. Among them:

• The centrality of the ‘Social Inclusion process’ goals, particularly around the language of ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’, ‘connection’, ‘equality’, and ‘social cohesion’
• Seeking to offer an ‘enabling framework’, which places the importance of neighbourhoods at its heart
• Learning lessons from past neighbourhood working, but understanding that we’re in a radically new context
• Leaning towards the language of ‘asset-based’ approaches, and expressing a central aim of building social capital within neighbourhoods

At the same time, the Green Paper is full of tensions, some acknowledged explicitly and some not. I suggest that it is in the naming, and working through, of those tensions, that the most important insights may well be gleaned. Among the most significant, I would identify the following:

• Between ‘shaping our neighbourhood’ and ‘shaping our public services’
• Between ‘needs’ which result in ‘priorities’, and ‘assets’ which point towards ‘opportunities’ – with an implied (but untrue) ‘either/or’ between ‘needy/deprived’ neighbourhoods & ‘asset-rich’ neighbourhoods – and a lack of clarity about which is prioritised and invested in (with money, time and/or attention)
• Between ‘building social capital’ and ‘service / programme delivery’
• Between (active) local ‘initiative’ and (passive) ‘engagement’ (normally by the Council)
• Between ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ – with the assumption that BCC can only really do the latter
• Between BCC’s role as ‘responding to greatest need’ (a kind of ‘filling the holes’) and a ‘brokering / connecting’ role (within & between neighbourhoods)
• Between seeking what is ‘effective, efficient and economical’ and seeking ‘resilient communities’
• Between a vision of ‘a city of united neighbourhoods’ cf. a city of connected neighbourhoods
• Between singing the praises of the ‘proven value’ of ‘neighbourhood managers’, and ruling out any future possibility of funding a similar role

Key questions

Where the Green Paper falls short, I would suggest, is where these tensions collapse, as they so often do, in the direction of the structural, the procedural, and the centralised, rather than in the direction of the vital, messy, detailed life of neighbourhoods themselves. The following reflections are offered (and could, if necessary, be backed up by some pretty solid evidence, both contextual and academic) both to highlight and fill in some of the gaps in the Green Paper’s understanding, and to seek to redress the balance towards the neighbourhoods which are the Green Paper’s intended focus.

1. Understanding social capital

While I am delighted that the Green Paper seeks to bring to the fore the concept of ‘social capital’ and how it can be built and strengthened, its brief analysis betrays at least two critical issues. Firstly, its description of ‘bonding’ social capital misses the vast difference between ‘residents of a [potentially superdiverse] neighbourhood’ and members of ‘an ethnically specific organisation’. The kind of work needed to ‘bond’ in these two instances are almost incomparable. Community-building in a neighbourhood, and growing a Nigerian Community Association, for example, demand very different resources and capacities. Taking this point alongside, secondly, the understanding of ‘bridging’ social capital as being primarily between ‘groups’, leaves no space for a ‘local network’ approach to neighbourhoods, where diverse individuals are connected together through a wide array of distinct but overlapping activities. The ‘working principle’ (p.8) which seeks to promote both ‘networking’ and ‘a unified neighbourhood conversation’ is an example of this tension in action: there will always be multiple, overlapping, and inevitably contradictory, ‘neighbourhood conversations’ going on in any one neighbourhood. Finding a single ‘neighbourhood organisation’ with which to ‘engage’, for example, is not going to somehow resolve that complexity. A more patient, subtle approach to local ‘networking’ would be much more beneficial. Thirdly, the descriptions of social capital here also seem to leave little room for ‘bridging’ between neighbourhoods, what we might call a ‘connected city’ approach – implicit in places in the Green Paper, but with much more potential to be developed than is given here.

2. Understanding ‘community assets’

A second area where positive language is used, but the full implications are not grasped is when referring to ‘community assets’. The Green Paper wants to base its ‘new approach’ on the ‘many community assets built over the past years [that] are still in place’. These include, it suggests, ‘buildings and other facilities owned or controlled by community organisations’, but also ‘“softer” assets’ such as ‘active community organisations and development trusts’ which ‘provide quality services’ and ‘attract investments’, ‘community engagement mechanisms such as neighbourhood forums’, and ‘the staff of many public services, community organisations and local businesses’ (p.3).

While these are all undoubted potential assets within neighbourhoods, the Green Paper’s structural emphasis on ‘service provision’ and ‘community engagement’ means it misses – or at best seriously mislabels – some of the community assets that are in fact the most vital. No attention is paid to community organisations and forms of associational life which don’t focus on ‘delivering services / programmes’ or function as ‘engagement mechanisms’ but do, in all kinds of ways, build local social capital and resilience within neighbourhoods. And again, the informal networks of neighbours – which are proven to be the most significant factors in co-producing health and wellbeing, a sense of safety and security, and the relationships in which people are included and cared for – are not explicitly acknowledged at all, when it is surely nurturing these that should be at the heart of any neighbourhood-focused strategy for social inclusion.

3. Understanding a genuinely ‘asset-based’ approach to community building

‘While it will be important to continue analysing needs, focusing on the most deprived areas, with residents prioritising which of these needs should be acted on and how, it is important that there is a shift to a community asset based approach.’ (p.9) As I have already suggested, this is one of the key tensions running through the Green Paper, almost acknowledged as such, but never addressed thoroughly. In relation to the Social Inclusion process itself, it has been clear in previous papers and summits that the full implications of a genuinely asset-based approach are still a long way from being widely grasped. The problem is not just that the traditional ‘deficit approach’ involves neighbourhoods competing against each other to ‘“prove” that their neighbourhoods is more deprived’ – it is that the culture of ‘service delivery’ itself can so often disempower local communities from doing things for themselves, a vicious cycle that is only intensified when a community is identified as particularly ‘deprived’, and so in need of ‘priority’ attention and more intensive programmes.

It is telling that, throughout the Green Paper, what is described as ‘independent action by local communities’ always seems to come last on the list of forms of agency, which tend to start with the delivery of ‘public services’, ‘programmes’ and ‘city-wide initiatives’. Neighbourhoods are valued because they are often the site of ‘community organisation and volunteering’, but even there, the tendency is to lean towards the value of passive ‘community engagement’ rather than active, local initiative. There is an important acknowledgment (p.4), that ‘communities will need to be less reliant on public services and do more for themselves... They will need to be even more enterprising... they will need to be resilient with citizens supporting each other to overcome challenges, hardship and divisions.’ But this is presented in parallel with, and secondary to, the need for ‘public services ... to be more targeted on identified priorities of local communities’ and ‘to work more effectively together’. It is almost as if self-reliance and resilience are presented as the particular (moral?) responsibility of local neighbourhoods – as ‘their side of the deal’ – with very little detail as to how this might be achieved, and supported.

What is outlined in more detail are the ‘neighbourhood working principles’ (p.8). They are tantalising close to articulating a genuinely asset-based approach – but not quite:

• ‘start where a neighbourhood is at...’ they suggest, but only ‘for neighbourhood planning’;
• ‘recognise the points of community...’ they say, but so BCC can conduct ‘engagement’;
• ‘local leadership is needed...’ but primarily ‘for a neighbourhood delivery plan to succeed’;
• and ‘provide opportunities for neighbourhood capacity building and enable independent activity to improve the quality of life in a neighbourhood’ – but as something of a low priority on the list, towards the end.

I want to suggest that maybe one of the key stumbling blocks to properly seeing through an asset-based approach is the repeated, unquestioned, assumption that the Council operates in a ‘top down’ mode, in contrast to local ‘bottom up’ approaches. It may well be true that one of the great successes of Neighbourhood Management was that it enabled ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ to meet – making its discontinuation even more of a loss – but what this Green Paper is missing more than anything is the courage to imagine the possibility of a Council that discovers ways of ‘bottom up’ working. Rather than beginning, as the Green Paper does (p.4) with the question ‘What can the Council still do...?’, with a nod, late in the day, to the ‘independent’ activity going on within local neighbourhoods, a genuinely asset-based neighbourhood strategy would start instead with something like these questions, and crucially in this order:

1. What are the things that this neighbourhood can do for itself?
2. What are the things that this neighbourhood can do, with help from other agencies (e.g. BCC)?
3. What are the (remaining) things that BCC needs to do itself?

I would suggest that these questions can only be asked at a neighbourhood level, in the neighbourhood, with a broad cross-section of residents of the neighbourhood – rather than at the at-least-once-removed District level, in a forum dominated by councillors and council officers – and probably, given what I suggested earlier, in not one ‘unified’ conversation, but in a number of local, overlapping conversations.

4. The role of the Council

I welcome the Green Paper’s acknowledgment that the Council can offer different kinds of local investment – that time and attention in some places might be more valuable than money, for example. But the Green Paper is unclear, to my reading, as to how that might be discerned. It outlines ‘four broad categories’ of neighbourhood, from ‘neighbourhoods with little or no joint working and with weak or non-existent community engagement structures’ to ‘beacon neighbourhoods’ with ‘established neighbourhood budgets’ and ‘delivering a range of projects to empower local people and address social inclusion issues’. Such ‘beacon neighbourhoods’, the Green Paper suggests, ‘know how to use local assets, resources and talent to make deep seated sustainable change’ and so can therefore act as ‘mentors’ or ‘role models’ for other neighbourhoods. I would suggest that it might be much more difficult to categorise neighbourhoods – and certainly place them into a clear hierarchy – than is imagined here, for several reasons:

• The focus on structures (for ‘joint working’ or ‘community engagement’) does not necessarily ask the questions of functional effectiveness or broad, inclusive participation. A neighbourhood with a vocal neighbourhood forum does not necessarily have a high level of local social capital.
• The suggestion that a neighbourhood might ‘know how to ... make deep seated sustainable change’ is a red herring. There are neighbourhoods where there are ‘hub organisations’, or individuals, or networks, who know something about these things, and do them well.
• At the same time, neighbourhoods where there is ‘good stuff happening’, and networks that work, might also have a lot of fragility to them – and by no means necessarily have achieved a ‘united neighbourhood conversation’. The places to learn from are not necessarily the most robust or resilient – even if they may be heading in that direction.

My final observation, then, is that the implication that learning between neighbourhoods is going to be primarily ‘1-to-1’, and passed ‘one way’, ‘top down’, from ‘beacon’ neighbourhoods to ‘fragile’ neighbourhoods, is distinctly questionable. The connectedness between neighbourhoods needs to be seen much more as horizontal, mutual, and widespread. We all have valuable learning to do from each other – and it might just be that working towards a more ‘connected’ city is just as important a goal as working towards a more ‘equal’ city.

So perhaps the most important role of the Council might be to invest – and yes, both time and attention, and carefully-focused money – in asset-based community-builders (see fig. below), who can ask the questions suggested earlier, in, of and with local communities, who can support the building of local social capital – as much in the form of networks as organisations – and who can enable neighbourhoods across the city to connect with each other in ways that can make mutually supportive, transformative learning to happen. I realise that one of the basic premises of the Green Paper is that ‘there’s no money’ for this – but that premise itself is based on neighbourhood work being a compartmentalised section of the wider Council’s work and budget. My argument here is that neighbourhood-focused, asset-based community-building needs to be absolutely central to Birmingham City Council’s agenda, or all its efforts and expenditures in ‘service provision’ will ultimately be futile and counterproductive.

Concluding comments

So, 2½ cheers for this first attempt at a Neighbourhood Strategy for Birmingham – and mostly for the vital central aim of ‘building social capital’ within and between the neighbourhoods of the city. But that central aim – put most simply, of building community – is clouded, perhaps even fatally obstructed, by an old-fashioned ‘service delivery’ perspective. Despite the frequent use of the language, Birmingham City Council still needs nothing short of a ‘conversion’, a dramatic culture shift, from the ‘deficit-focused, service-provision model, to an asset-based, community-building approach. It is, as I have suggested elsewhere before, an addiction that needs therapy. There are good therapists to hand – many of them live and work in Birmingham’s neighbourhoods – but the patient seems to be, as yet, far from cured.

Revd Al Barrett (Vicar, Hodge Hill Church; Firs & Bromford Neighbours Together; etc.)

References:

All quotes come from Transforming Place: Proposals for a Neighbourhood Strategy for Birmingham (Green Paper, July 2013).

Some of the key sources that have informed these reflections include:

• Chamberlain Forum’s Communities Managing Change report (June 2013)
• CarnegieUK’s Appreciating Assets (February 2011) (http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/getattachment/aedb15fb-a64a-4d71-a2d6-e8e6e865319b/Appreciating-Assets.aspx), esp. p.21 on ‘the anatomy of an Appreciating Assets worker’ (fig. reproduced above)
• the asset-based community development work of Cormac Russell (nurturedevelopment.org)

My own previous reflections informing this response include:

• ‘On “Social Inclusion” and professional addicts' (http://thisestate.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/on-social-inclusion-and-professional.html)

• ‘Towards an incarnate Council: reflections on “Communities Managing Change”’ (http://thisestate.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/towards-incarnate-council-reflections.html)

Towards an incarnate Council? Reflections on 'Communities Managing Change'

The fabulous Chamberlain Forum launched 'Communities Managing Change' this afternoon. It's an excellent report and well-worth reading and translating into action and change. You can find it at www.chamberlainforum.org

I was asked to respond briefly. It went something like this...

I want to say a big Yes... But it's a 'Yes, and...' It's a big Yes to 'connected places'... but also to bodies, and stories...

So, a story:

About a year ago, I got wind, via a phone call, that a team from Birmingham's Social Inclusion inquiry were visiting the Firs and Bromford, my neighbourhood, in the very near future. Hardly anyone knew about us, and it was to happen in a Council venue that was not even on the estate.

With a phone call or two, we managed to get it moved, to our shop front on the estate, a very 'hubby' place (in the words of the report) - so much so, we call it The Hub! We also managed to get more local people and practitioners there.

On the day, the team arrived late, they had less than 45 mins with us, and they mostly asked us what was wrong with our estate.

A number of us were, to put it mildly, rather cross! Another phone call or two, and the next day I had a call on my mobile from a senior Council officer. He wanted to offer an apology, changes would be made to ongoing visits elsewhere, and he offered to come out and see us again.

He did. For 3 hours. A group of us chatted together, ate together, and we then went for a long walkabout round the area. We talked about the demise of the local 'walk in' Neighbourhood Office, whose doors are now closed to the public, and where you have to phone a call centre to arrange an appointment for a week, or 6 weeks, time. As we walked, our visitor spotted Fort Dunlop, just across the M6. "That's where the phone calls to the call centre go," he said.

We talked about The Hub - run as a partnership between ourselves and Worth Unlimited, a space for youth work, which now also hosts children & families provision, community lunches, meetings of local Practitioners Network, and more. At The Hub, we'd recently started 'Open Door ': run by gifted volunteers, the idea began as a possible 'job club', but turned into a place of welcome and hospitality, a place where people might come with 'needs', but who are invited to rediscover what's in their heart (passions), head (knowledge), and hands (skills) that they might be able to share. This small beginning is just starting to develop into the idea of Time Banking, a way of enabling those gifts to be shared with those who want and need them, of unlocking those gifts to make new neighbourly relationships and build community. And now, Open Door's beginnings of Time Banking have been taken right to the heart of the area's 'Big Local' neighbourhood plan - it's not the £1 million financial investment, but the simple idea of Time Banking, that will be at the 'organising core' of the regeneration work we're beginning on Firs & Bromford. None of it was rocket science for us, but the reaction of that senior Council officer was interesting - his eyes were suddenly wide with newly-discovered possibility!

So that was the story. Now just a few brief reflections.

Co-production between neighbourhoods and Council has barely begun, but the sky's the limit - from environment & green spaces to health & wellbeing, from youth work to adult social care, you name it, and more.

In nature, the most resilient systems have what are called 'tight feedback loops' - they're responsive quickly and flexibly to the smallest, but often significant, changes at the most local level.

The key technical word from my own faith tradition is 'incarnate'. It means discovering a power that's not invested in top-down hierarchy but is connected, fleshy, earthed. It's about where you spend your time, who you come face to face with, who you listen to and where you put your feet.

A Co-operative Council would be good. But I want an 'incarnate' Council... I want a Council Officer in every neighbourhood, literally a body with their feet on the ground, their eyes open and their ears receptive to the stories of their neighbours, and asking 3 key questions, in the right order:
1) what can this neighbourhood do for itself?
2) what can it do, with the right help from the Council?
3) what can only the Council do for this neighbourhood?
[the questions come from my friend Cormac Russell; anything 'lost in translation' in the paraphrase I take full responsibility for!]

And finally two of my favourite quotes:
1. "Inside every Council officer is a citizen waiting to get out" (Cormac Russell again)
2. (originally attributes to Australian Aboriginal feminist activists in the 1970s, but perhaps could be said at this point in time to BCC from those of us in Birmingham's local neighbourhoods) "if you have come to help us, you are wasting our time - but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with ours, then let us work together"

On 'Social Inclusion' and professional addicts

"We don't need more joined-up thinking - we need therapy." That was the core of my contribution to the launch of Birmingham's White Paper on Social Inclusion on Tuesday. It got a laugh. Which was nice. I envy the ability of professional comedians and know that I can never be one. But I was actually quite serious.

I've written here quite recently about the big questions we need to ask of the language of 'social inclusion' - even if we may genuinely believe our hearts are in the right places, even if we may be passionately working to tackle financial and social inequalities in our city and our country.

But Birmingham's White Paper has a bigger language problem. At its heart is a call 'to work together and take a different approach'. To explain that 'different approach', it uses the fine language of moving from a 'deficit-based' to an 'asset-based' approach, of 'evidence-based' and 'targeted' work, 'early intervention', 'outward facing services', 'utilising co-production in the design and delivery of services', 'collaboration and partnership working', 'public procurement' and a 'social inclusion champion's network'.

The trouble is, when the group of 40 people I was co-facilitating (about a quarter of those present) got together, to start turning these fine words into concrete actions, it became clear quite quickly that very few of them had much of a sense of what the words actually meant. My co-facilitator and I began with what we thought might be quite a quick exercise to 'translate' the jargon into more meaningful language, and were met with significant numbers of blank and quizzical faces. So... if the 'great and the good' of the statutory and voluntary sectors in Birmingham don't understand the 'different approach', how on earth is it going to filter out to the colleagues they work with every day, let alone what I hesitate to call the 'ordinary citizens' of Birmingham?

The problem emerged with even sharper clarity when we set to tackle the 'case studies'. There's a bit of a story behind the case studies themselves - they were themselves on their fourth draft, having begun as pretty desperate stories of desperately needy (dare I say 'troubled') individuals, depicted in isolation from any conceivable 'assets' (internal or external), networks of support, or resourceful neighbourhoods. As they were though, our groups were able to identify some of the 'assets' that were mentioned explicitly, and imagine (with my slightly subversive encouragement) a few that weren't, but could have been. But when we moved to the question of 'what needs to happen?', the dominant reaction was fascinating, if predictable. 'We need to get a CAF in place.' The Common Assessment Framework: a paradigm of 'joined-up thinking'; a multi-agency meeting of professionals with different areas of concern and expertise, getting together (perhaps with the mother of the child in question), to formulate an action plan. Of course. We would be neglecting our duties if we didn't.

Thank heavens for one lone voice (I was trying to be a good facilitator and keep relatively quiet). 'Don't you think, maybe, for the mum, a room full of professionals deciding what they were going to do for her, might actually be quite the opposite of enabling co-production to happen...?' The shock. The immediate, gut-rooted resistance. The sudden sense of threat and defensiveness. 'What do you mean? This is what we have to do!' The lone voice describes an alternative approach. Identify who the key people are in the person's life: gran, friends, neighbours, maybe. Bring them together. Allow them - including the mum, crucially - to come up with a plan that draws on their own strengths and resourcefulness - but also calls on professionals for specific support where that is needed. Again, defensiveness. 'But you can't do that! You never know what they might come up with!' Yes. Quite.

There was a sense, in our group, of just scratching the surface of an alternative possibility that was about as far away from immediate grasp as learning a whole different language. But there was, at the very least, a desire there to do just that - and that gave me just a little hope. Our session finished with one group member voicing a want and need to get together and 'learn more about this "asset-based" thing, and try and work out how we put it into practice' - with nods of agreement from many others.

The other small sign of hope was the contribution from a relatively young man from a theatre group. He'd been listening intently, and spoke relatively late in the conversation. What the boy in the case study needed, he suggested, was something to spark his imagination: to glimpse the possibility that family, and life, didn't have to be like this, could be different, more... He was dead right, of course. But I think he spoke for us - and of us - as a group of 'professionals' too. What we needed was some imagination: to glimpse the possibility that the people we 'do to', or 'work with', are more than our default definitions of them, more than a bundle of issues and needs and problems.

We also needed, as I think was clear as the conversation unfolded, the gift of patience. So often we are governed by a sense of urgency, and urgency pushes us into default responses. Our group work itself was testimony to the time and effort needed for the more creative, the more imaginative, the more 'asset-based', 'co-productive' response to emerge. But our systems and professional processes are not geared to giving that time and effort and patience. And as money gets tighter, as 'efficiency' becomes even more dominant, that time and effort and patience will be in even shorter supply.

Finally, our conversations highlighted the need for humility. It's not, I suspect, a word much used by, or associated with, many of the professions of my colleagues in that room. To be honest, us clergy aren't particularly good at it either - although it should at least be in our vocabulary. But the kind of humility emerging as a need within our conversations was that of letting go of our identities as 'providers', to encounter our 'clients' not as 'clients', but as fellow citizens, as fellow human beings. Realising that the answers, ultimately, come from them rather than us. Acknowledging that we have needs too, and limitations, and anxieties - that too often we dare not admit to anyone, least of all those people we work with.

I think (and I'm probably speaking as a priest first and a community development practitioner second) that to discover those things in our conversation is probably the greatest thing we could have achieved with an hour and a half of group work. It doesn't really resemble the 'action plan' which was the objective we were given as facilitators. But it does, I'd suggest, invite a moment of profound pausing within a process which, however well-intentioned, has the danger of careering like a juggernaut towards its stated end-point, but missing its actual goals completely.

The language of 'asset-based', 'co-production' approaches is good language - even if rather technical. I've lived and breathed it for much of the past year and written about it here and here. We need to recognise, however, that it stands in tension with some of the other aspects of the 'different approach' that Birmingham's White Paper advocates: 'targeting' particularly - which so easily allows us to slip back into defining people by their needs and problems and focusing on the worst, in isolation from their wholeness as human beings, their support networks, and their communities. The trouble is, particularly when money is tight, money controls everything - even how we look at and approach people. We have to ruthlessly prioritise, so we 'target' those who have least money - and we approach them as if they have least of everything.

We also need to recognise that we can get every professional in the city signed up to 'asset-based', 'co-production' language, and it can make not a scrap of difference on the ground. We are addicted to our need to 'provide services' - our very identity depends on it. We have convinced ourselves (because the evidence seems to suggest it) that if we do not 'provide services' then we will be failing the most vulnerable in our society. And that is, of course, true. But what we struggle to even contemplate is the possibility that, weaned off our professional addiction, we might be liberated to approach those we genuinely care about most, not just as 'vulnerable' but as 'gifted' human beings, not just as 'isolated' and 'excluded' but as already embedded in networks of care and support, however fragile and fractious they might often be.

This is anything but neoliberal 'Big Society'. It's not abandoning people and communities to 'sort themselves out' and letting market forces have their way. This 'different approach' needs real investment of real money. But it needs more: it needs investment of imagination, patience and humility by the professionals and the decision-makers who, let's be honest, have the biggest stake in it.

The alternative - clinging on to our professional learnt behaviour and problematising and pathologising those people and communities in the grip of poverty as 'needy' and 'troubled' - is just a stone's throw from the demonising, the scapegoating, the excluding, and the ruthless abandonment of the most vulnerable, in which our current government is so deeply engaged.

As a manifesto, the Birmingham White Paper has much to commend it. My fear is that it is dangerously close to being an Emperor, parading around to general acclaim, but with barely a shred of actual, tangible, clothing. The vital first steps for an addict include not just wanting to change, but admitting you have an addiction. What we need is not more 'joined-up thinking'. We need addiction therapy. And urgently.

Birmingham: from 'apocalypse now' to compassionate city?

I've blogged here before about the devastating budget cuts that have been forced on Birmingham City Council, and the beginnings of a response. There is a growing body of comment and opinion (including this piece from Left Foot Forward) that also highlights the injustice of the situation cities like Birmingham find themselves in. But I want to dig just a little deeper into that 'how do we respond?' question - in a way that dangerously mixes politics and theology so as to quite possibly alienate and/or bemuse many readers who would rather swing one way or the other...

Apocalyptic predictions and Advent: the 'big picture' and the 'little stories'

So 'the end of local government as we know it' is beginning. The 'jaws of doom' are beginning to bite. But there is much more to come. The imaginations of Birmingham citizens are beginning to be filled with 'Les Miserables'-like images of closed-down libraries and leisure centres, rubbish piling up on the streets, isolated older people abandoned by the 'social care' system, and a 'youth service' that is merely a distant memory - not to mention thousands pushed below the poverty line and cut loose from financial support by brutal changes in the system that was, once upon a time, called 'social security'.

All of this stuff, as I've also pointed out here before, is what we might call 'apocalyptic'. It's the kind of dark and threatening future, the 'doom and gloom' in a quite literal sense, that we Christians sometimes encounter in our Scriptures, particularly in the Advent season leading up to Christmas. But as Sir Albert Bore, Birmingham City Council's lucky leader, and others know all too well, there's no need to be a religious nut to take this stuff seriously. It feels like an all-too-real possibility in the not-too-distant future, for many of us.

When Jesus in the gospels does 'apocalyptic', however - and this goes for the early Christian writers who were at the very beginning of trying to make sense of his 'good news' too - there is a clear, consistent theme: be realistic about this stuff, don't be in denial... but don't get seduced by it, sucked into its glare with morbid fascination. Instead, shift the scale and focus of your attention. Look from the threatening 'big picture' to the smallest human scale possible: to the relationships and care and attention and compassion and friendship between individual human people. Look to those for a different way of seeing 'reality' - for a 'counter-story' that challenges the dominant narrative, for the cracks in the 'big picture', for a different future opening up in the almost-invisible.

Anything but 'Big Society': some 'C' words for the Council...

This, I find myself repeating often, is anything but 'Big Society'. This is no top-down narrative of impossible ideals conveniently imposed as a cover for systematic, unjust, dehumanising cuts. The doom and gloom of the big picture needs to be seen with heart-breaking clarity, and lamented with passion. Birmingham's future is looking pretty bleak at this point in time, and there are non-inevitable decisions and systems of the powerful that are responsible for that. Our leaders in Birmingham City Council - and any of us that find ourselves with some kind of leadership at a local level - need to be utterly honest and realistic about this.

But the counter-story can - must - nevertheless be told, and lived. And alongside the micro, hyper-local, Birmingham City Council have it within their power to tell and live such a counter-story too...

At this point in Birmingham's story, we have gone well beyond needing a 'competent' city council, as if somehow, so long as 'they' do it well, we can sit back and let it happen. We certainly don't need a 'consultative' city council, if that means 'them' deciding what to do and then asking 'us' if that's OK. Or even asking 'us' what to do and thereby drawing 'us' into responsibility for decisions that will never, given the big picture, be 'OK'.

I've found myself in conversations within and around BCC, exploring what it might mean for Birmingham to become a 'co-operative' council, 'working with' other organisations and local residents to make things happen more effectively than if the council tried doing stuff on their own. But I fear that is too timid a position to be exploring at this point in time.

Co-production: a challenge and a cry

I've also been in a number of conversations around the city where the term 'co-production' has been used. It has normally, in those conversations, meant some kind of significant involvement of 'service users' in designing, and - more ambitiously - 'delivering' the services that they use. In a more radical sense, the good people in the Chamberlain Forum have used the term with more depth and clarity to remind us that co-production is always already going on in local communities: we - individually and together - take at least some responsibility for our health, for example, through the decisions we make, the activities we participate in, the support we give each other. It is not for 'service providers' to come into neighbourhoods and 'introduce co-production'. At best, 'service providers' can try to strengthen what is there already - and not obstruct it or co-opt it for the ends of their own organisations and systems.

Edgar Cahn, who developed the idea of 'Time Banking' in the USA, and must take a lot of the credit for developing the idea of 'co-production' too, found himself in the late '90s shifting his tone from 'promoting' the values of co-production (seeing people as assets; redefining work to include anything human beings do to make human beings, families and neighbourhoods flourish; replacing one-way 'services' with two-way reciprocity; and investing in the 'social capital' of communities) to a passionate lament that the way things are is not the way things should be:

Assets became: No more throw-away people.

Redefining work became: No more taking the contribution of women, children, families, immigrants for granted. No more free rides for the market economy extracted by subordination, discrimination, and exploitation.

Reciprocity became: Stop creating dependencies; stop devaluing those whom you help while you profit from their troubles.

Social capital became: No more disinvesting in families, neighbourhoods and communities. No more economic and social strip-mining.[1]

So 'co-production' gets us as far as the cry of 'no more...'. It would be interesting to hear Council officers and elected Councillors beginning to inhabit such language from day to day.

But language urgently needs to turn into action, and good language is the kind of language that readily makes that shift to 'doing things'. I'm not sure the language of 'co-production' can cut it in these demanding times. But I wonder if 'compassion' just might.

Birmingham: the 'compassionate city'?

What might happen, if Birmingham as a city was disarmingly honest about how tough life is going to be in the next few years, how many taken-for-granted 'services' will no longer be provided - but at the same time, began to tell and live out a powerful counter-story (to the ConDem government's 'there is no alternative') of a compassionate city?

How about if Birmingham as a city took over control of its Job Centres and refused to allow the merciless 'benefit penalties' to be imposed for those who haven't met the demands of the Work Programme due to sickness or disability, caring for family or neighbours, or doing valuable voluntary work in their neighbourhoods and communities?

How about if Birmingham kicked out the farcical Atos assessments, and introduced a new, more compassionate process which deals face-to-face with people as human beings rather than boxes to be ticked?

How about if Birmingham commits to becoming a genuine 'city of sanctuary' for those seeking asylum, welcoming them as gifts to the city, whatever the UK Border Agency might be told to think?

How about if Brummies from our multitude of backgrounds, in our multitude of languages, cultures and faiths, could speak proudly of a city where neighbours young and old care compassionately for each other, even - or especially - when the systems that we used to rely on for 'care' are crumbling around us?

We could be, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have suggested just today, a 'policy laboratory' - experimenting at the cutting edge of our rapidly-changing society. But more than that, we could be a place which tells and lives a different story to the heartless, divisive, scapegoating stories that are churned out daily from this government and its comfortable friends in the media.

I've talked quite a bit about the city council in this - we do, after all, still look to them and their 'leader' for some kind of leadership.

But of course it isn't about them. It's about us. It starts and ends with us. Birmingham, the compassionate city? What can you or I do tomorrow to start making it so...?

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[1]Cahn 2000:29

'Regime change' at the 'centre', or experimenting at the 'edges'?

With most of those inside the Church of England, and a remarkably large number outside, this week I have spent a lot of waking hours somewhere in 'the valley of the shadow of death', repeatedly finding myself surprised by intense feelings of shock, disbelief, anger, sadness, disappointment, disgust, embarrassment, frustration... the reel of emotions could go on and on.

Coincidentally, the decision of General Synod almost to agree to proceed with bishops of both genders, but not quite - thanks to 6 members of the House of Laity - comes in the week that I've sent off a hefty chunk of ramblings to my PhD supervisors, around the themes of 'asset-based' community development and 'co-production', and the Christian practices of gratitude and lament. I finish the piece, with inevitably unsatisfying loose ends, by suggesting that the 21st Century version of Saul Alinsky's community organising tradition, seen in the Occupy and UK Uncut movements, contains more than a little promise and possibility for bringing the laments of the local to the centres of power. I dare to suggest that these movements might be valuable partners to the local church.

The trouble is, of course, this week has made the church look ridiculous, irrelevant, lacking in any credible voice, especially on issues of community and justice. The very fact that, the day after the Synod vote on women bishops, the same Synod voted for the Living Wage throughout the institution - this should have been headline news, a challenge to central government, but instead was utterly eclipsed, consigned to irrelevance by the day before's 'long, boring suicide note', as one astute journalist described it.

But we in the parishes, at the front line of community-building in our neighbourhoods, had to get up on Wednesday morning and get on with our jobs. To be sure, we had plenty of explaining to do to our incredulous neighbours, to our children, to our partner organisations in local quests for justice, wholeness and integrity. God knows our jobs have been made more difficult by Synod's failure to live up to its latest kairos moment. But a crucial part of our 'getting on with things' locally has been the sense that, whichever way Synod had voted, how we live out church 'in the local' is not greatly changed. This is a point, I think, about bishops in general, about decisions in London, about the institution - in relation to the local Christian community that happens to call itself Anglican (in our case, even that is only partly the case).

We are a long way from the centres of power. Bishops do not (sshh, don't tell anyone) actually make a vast difference to our daily life and ministry and mission. Neither does much else that the institution does or decides or instructs - other than the 'taint by association' (unfortunate phrase in the context, but hey) that such crashing stupidity, amplified by media interest, inevitably fosters.

I am reminded of two things. One is a recent comment by a well-respected Council officer that 'the further you are from the centre, the more you can get away with'. Other institutions have their human edges, as well as their inhuman systems, too. The other is the wisdom of Australian 'Christi-anarchist' and radical community development thinker and activist, Dave Andrews. Dave reminds us that, in systems and institutions, 'regime change' (i.e. changing those at 'the top') never changes the system itself. Jesus was not interested in regime change. Instead, says Dave, 'Jesus’ stratagem was simply to persistently deny hierarchy, advocate mutuality, and reframe all his relationships, over time, in terms of equality'. Instead of seeking to 'move up' in the institution, Jesus and his followers deliberately sought to move to the institution's 'edges', locating themselves 'on the sidelines' rather than 'in the main game'. This presented Jesus (as it does his disciples) with a number of advantages:

'One, it gave him perspective. From the sidelines he was able to see the whole field, and see what needed to be done to improve the game. Two, it gave him opportunity. On the sidelines he was far enough away from the game to be beyond its immediate control, yet close enough to affect the way it played out. Three, it gave him time. On the sidelines he was able to develop his short-term alternatives to the system while he worked on his long-term transform-ation of the system. Four, it gave him space. On the sidelines he was able to demonstrate the alternatives he developed in the eyes of everyone, so they could assess for themselves whether they wanted to adopt them - or not. Five, it gave him a position from which he could advocate change, without being in a position to impose the change he advocated on anyone. So people knew they were truly free to adopt the change—or not to—as they so desired. And - because that made the change process much less threatening to the people in the synagogue - it gave Jesus greater freedom to experiment more!'

As the apostle Paul took on and developed Jesus' strategy of experimenting at the edges, 'Paul’s prayer,' says Dave, 'was that his experiments would not stay ‘on the margins’. But, that his ecclesia, would become ‘the centre of attention’. And not only be admired, but also be adopted as the modus operandi of society.'

Dave continues:

'Now many people think there is no point working for change on the margins. But I think there is probably often no other place we can work - except on the margins. Until there is a kairos moment of some kind or other, which can open up a closed system, and can give us a chance to take the changes we have accomplished on the margins, and place them—for serious consideration - right at the heart of the congregation. It doesn’t matter whether the kairos moment comes sooner or later. What matters is: we recognise it when the moment comes, and use it to manoeuvre our movement for change, from out on the edge, into the middle of the turmoil. We should always use a crisis in an institution to advocate the kind of change that can facilitate the development of a healthy community. Whether the crisis be conflict in the group, criticism of the organisation, or a succession in the leadership - we can use it - to encourage people to consider serious change.'

Now I don't want to claim anything special for Hodge Hill (although I do happen to think Hodge Hill is a very special place, for all sorts of reasons!). But I do want to suggest that this week, more than ever, Anglican churches around the country that are slogging away, often at great cost, at the edges of society and the edges of the church institution, undertaking risky, daring experiments in mutuality and community - these are the gift to the church that could, if the kairos moment is grasped, change everything. And guess what? Women are equal partners with men in leading such work. Why wouldn't they be?