Changing stuff: Reclaim the Streets, Desmond Tutu & the DWP

How do we make things change? Beyond the work of community-building in our neighbourhoods - nurturing places of encounter, building relationships of trust and friendship, connecting people together through their passions, gifts and skills - how do we engage in movements, networks, flows that stand any chance of changing the bigger stuff - systems, governments, widespread prejudices and attitudes, 'the powers that be'...?

I realise it's a big question. But it's one that a lot of people seem to be asking, reflecting on, writing about, talking about at the moment - and it feels urgent, exciting, and more than a little heady to try and enter that conversation.

I've recently been re-reading a quite brilliant book on 'Christianity and Contemporary Politics' by Luke Bretherton, in which he describes politics, within a 'Christian cosmopolitan vision', as involving:

"the formation of a common world of meaning and action within particular places. The formation of such a world entails, on the one hand, the breaking down of those structures and patterns of relationship that exclude vulnerable strangers from this common world and, on the other, the upholding of those structures and patterns of relationship that maintain this world as a common one."

We grow up, says Bretherton, within "concentric circles of relationship", with neighbours near and distant, and, from a Christian perspective, as we seek to love those neighbours we are orienting our relationships towards an "eschatological horizon of fulfillment" - the image is of "the gathering of all peoples to the messianic banquet that has already begun amid the fallen structures of the earthly city". And this "horizon of fulfillment", Bretherton suggests, "both draws in and constantly interrupts all attempts" to make a particular place either "idolatrously self-sufficient" or "totally encompassing" in terms of our "economic, political, and social relationships". So on the one hand, "various forms of nationalism and identity politics overvalue the particularity of a place (be it cultural or geographic)", while on the other hand, "liberal cosmopolitan, global conceptions of citizenship, and the reductive universalism of capitalism" undervalue the particularity of place. [Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, p.211]

I find Bretherton's reflections really helpful here, for a number of reasons: he refuses any simplistic polarities like 'now, bad; future, good'; he values and focuses on the importance of place; he embraces difference and seeks not sameness or unity but places where we can 'be-in-common'; and he holds on to an ultimate hope that isn't deferred indefinitely, but is already breaking into the here and now.

Into this 'frame', I find a lot of things beginning to 'fit'. I've blogged here and here at length on my suspicion of 'community resilience' language, as disabling our imagination, desire and agency to change things beyond the local. I'm also more and more persuaded that while 'resistance' language is helpful, to a point, the fact that it is inescapably defined by - even dependent on - the thing it is 'resisting', very quickly becomes problematic, again limiting the possibilities of our imagination, our desire, and our agency.

From an eschatological perspective, instead, we can turn things around and see what currently seems like the 'status quo' (e.g. global capitalism) as in fact 'resisting' that which is coming (i.e. in Christian terms, the peaceful and just kingdom of God). This is what I'm finding all over the place, in non-Christian language, in the writings around 'post-capitalist politics' (see e.g. J-K Gibson-Graham) and the Occupy movement, to name but two. And the resonances between these streams of thought and action, and those of the Christian tradition, intrigue and excite me.

Take, for example, Gibson-Graham's reflection on the 'Reclaim the Streets' (RTS) movement - 'short-lived', 'embodying the political value of interruption (as distinct from endurance)', but 'producing an affective shock wave that reverberates through the brittle architecture of established forms' of political agency and spatial governance. Quoting Rebecca Solnit, they cite RTS's 'incendiary carnival spirit, global Internet communications, and tactics of temporary victory [my italics]' as creating 'part of the vocabulary of what came next'.

I like the idea of RTS's 'tactics of temporary victory'. It reminds me of one of the most profound stories (for me) from the anti-apartheid movement, as told by Jim Wallis, veteran American Christian campaigner for social justice, about the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

"A political rally had just been canceled by the white government, so Bishop Tutu called for a worship service instead, inside the beautiful cathedral [of St George's, Cape Town]. The  power of apartheid was frighteningly evident in the numbers of riot police and armed soldiers massing outside the church. Inside, all along the cathedral walls, stood more police openly taping and writing down every comment made from the pulpit. When Tutu rose to speak, the atmosphere was tense indeed. He confidently proclaimed that the 'evil' and 'oppression' of the system of apartheid 'cannot prevail.' At that moment, the South African archbishop was probably one of the few people on the planet who actually believed that. 

"Archbishop Tutu point[ed] his finger right at the police who were recording his words. 'You may be powerful, indeed very powerful, but you are not God!' And the God whom we serve, said Tutu, 'cannot be mocked!' 'You have already lost!' the diminutive preacher thundered. Then he came out from behind the pulpit and seemed to soften, flashing that signature Desmond Tutu smile. So - since they had already lost, as had just been made clear - South African's spiritual leader shouted with glee, 'We are inviting you to come and join the winning side!' The whole place erupted, the police seemed to scurry out, and the congregation rose up in triumphal dancing..." (Jim Wallis God's Politics)

What Bretherton calls the 'eschatological horizon' puts Reclaim the Streets' 'tactics of temporary victory' into hopeful, transformative perspective. Even 'short-lived interruptions' can be glimpses of the triumphal celebrations of Desmond Tutu's 'winning side', especially when the place of those 'interruptions' is hospitable enough to invite oppressors to 'cross the floor' and join those they have been oppressing, glimpses of the 'common world' which Bretherton describes as both real possibility and ongoing task.

Our work locally in Hodge Hill is rather more mundane than the confrontation in Cape Town cathedral, or the 'incendiary carnival spirit' of Reclaim the Streets. But if change doesn't begin where we are, then it doesn't happen, full stop. One of our dilemmas in the last little while has been how closely we associate our twice-weekly Open Door drop-in with the local JobCentrePlus, and the whole oppressively punitive DWP system within which JCP staff have to operate. We have, since we opened Open Door, welcomed quite a number of people who've been referred our way by JCP. And then, more recently, we've discovered that some people coming to us have been told their attendance is compulsory - in other words, if they don't come to us, they risk getting sanctioned.

What do we do with this? Nothing of what we're about wants to collude with the vicious, dehumanising system over which the DWP presides. But we'd rather people came to us than to some of the other places people get sent - one of our regulars contrasts us to a rather more corporate work club where, he says, "you're treated like dirt", pointed to a computer with barely an acknowledgement of your existence, let alone your humanity. We have been very intentional about trying to create a space where relationships work differently, where people are honoured and respected in their complexity and vulnerability, where people's gifts are celebrated and connected together as well as their needs met, and so on...

Resonances come from conversations with other people and places. We've heard recently of a Christian organisation that employs 'relational youth workers' in school settings, often taking 'referrals' of young people struggling within the school system, but seeking to create a very different kind of environment, where young people can be welcomed as gifts, rather than problems, and where friendships can be nurtured, rather than targets striven for. "In the system, but not of the system," is how the organisation describes their role, echoing an old formula from Christian theology.

And food banks too, while deeply ambivalent, are proving, in some places at least, to be the openings to relationships of mutual respect, friendship and reciprocity, and functioning to 'conscientize' often white, middle-class, naturally-Tory-leaning volunteers into an angry disgust at a political system that forces people into a desperate dependency on emergency food supplies.

What we're edging towards, I think, is a description of places, spaces, environments however temporary or fragile, where, to quote RS Thomas' wonderful poem, The Kingdom, "there are quite different things going on". Not separate from everyday, compromised, ambivalently messy reality, but in the midst of it - but "in the system and not of it" - 'threshold spaces', we might call them, from one world into another. This is language with which Christians are relatively familiar. We have been used to talking about it in relation to church buildings, and Christian worship. I want to suggest, picking up on the kind of messiness I tried to describe in my previous blogpost, that it's much less tidy than that. It is happening in spaces unrecognisable as 'church', in canvas encampments and midnight street-walking. It is happening among people who claim 'faith' and many, many who don't. But there is something profoundly eschatological, profoundly hopeful, about what is happening. And it is changing stuff - slowly, perhaps, but it's still changing stuff: one encounter, one relationship, one place at a time.

'Community Resilience' & its redemption?

Is 'community resilience' redeemable? Is it a concept even worth trying to redeem? Is it possible to highlight and strengthen a local community's social - and other forms of - capital, while at the same time building, and not disabling, its collective capacity for political - even utopian - imagination and active resistance to the structures of the status quo? These are the questions with which I ended my previous blog post.

Resilience and human geography

Today I've had the chance to read another, very helpful, critically reflective piece, 'From resilience to resourcefulness: a critique of resilience policy and activism' [Danny MacKinnon & Kate Driscoll Derickson, Progress in Human Geography (2012) 37(2) 253-270]. In their critique, the authors make three key points:

1. The concept of resilience, precisely because it is 'derived from ecology and systems theory, is conservative when applied to the social sphere ... privileg[ing] established social structures, which are often shaped by unequal power relations and injustice... [and] also clos[ing] off wider questions of progressive social change which require interference with, and transformation of, established "systems".'

2. Resilience tends to be defined 'externally' and 'top-down', 'by state agencies and expert knowledge in spheres such as security, emergency planning, economic development and urban design', and thus 'invariably place the onus on individuals, communities and places to become more resilient and adaptable to a range of external threats ... serving to reproduce the wider social and spatial relations that generate turbulence and inequality.' (This is Evans & Reid's key point in the paper I explored previously).

3. '[T]he concern with resilience of places is misconceived in terms of spatial scale... rely[ing] on an underlying local-global divide, treating scales such as the 'regional', 'urban' or 'local' as self-contained systems, thus 'foster[ing] an internalist conception which locates the sources of resilience as lying within the particular scale in question', while obscuring the reality that 'the processes which shape resilience operate primarily at the scale of capitalist social relations' (i.e. national and trans-national). (pp. 254-5)

Although MacKinnon and Derickson acknowledge that, 'among oppositional groups and campaigns', 'resilience' langauge 'is meant to prefigure alternative social relations in which social and environmental well-being is the system which is to be privileged (i.e. the resilient system) with capitalism seen as one of a number of disruptive and destructive forces', they conclude that the term has been so co-opted to be irredeemable, and go on to propose an alternative concept that, they suggest, better addresses the 'uneven access to material resources and the levers of social change' - or, in Spivak's words, better 'cultivate[s] the will to social justice' among everyday people' (p. 255, 263).

'Resourcefulness' as an alternative

What MacKinnon and Derickson propose instead, then, is the language of 'resourcefulness'. Firstly, they suggest, 'resourcefulness' is meant to focus the spotlight on how 'resources' (and power) are distributed, and to 'problematize' and contest the inequalities that emerge:

'The normative vision that underpins resourcefulness is one in which communities have the capacity to engage in genuinely deliberative democratic dialogue to develop contestable alternative agendas and work in ways that meaningfully challenge existing power relations.' (p. 263)

Secondly, they suggest, 'resourcefulness emphasizes forms of learning and mobilization based upon local priorities and needs as identified and developed by community activists and residents'. In contrast to the 'top-down' definitions of resilience, 'resourcefulness' is intended to promote a kind of 'local autonomy' understood as 'the ever-contested and never complete ability of those within the locality to control the institutions and relationships that define and produce the locality'.

Thirdly, addressing the issue of a false 'localism' which fails to recognise the interactions and power-relations between different spatial scales, the authors argue that 'resourcefulness' is 'not only spatially grounded in identifiable local spaces', 'focusing attention on the need to build capacities at community level,' but also 'outward-looking', 'open and relational in terms of both recognizing the wider politics of justice that often underpin local activism and emphasizing the need for alliances between community groups and broader social movements'.

Finally, 'resourcefulness' is offered 'as a process, rather than a clearly identifiable condition, amenable to empirical measurement or quantification. As a relational concept, resourcefulness cannot be understood as something communities possess to varying degrees. It is the act of fostering resourcefulness, not measuring it or achieving it, that should motivate policy and activism.' As a tentative framework undergirding the term, they propose four key dimensions: (1) an attention to the 'Resources' available (including e.g. spare time, social capital, organizing capacity, etc.) and their distribution; (2) 'Skill sets and technical knowledge' (e.g. in governmental procedures, finance and IT); (3) 'Indigenous and "folk" knowledge' (including cultural 'stories of origin', sense-making stories and shared visions); and (4) a cultural and political 'Recognition' which 'promotes a sense of confidence, self-worth and self- and community-affirmation that can be drawn upon to fuel the mobilization of existing resources and argue for and pursue new resources.' (p. 264-5)

There is much to be said for MacKinnon and Derickson's critique, but I must admit I'm not entirely persuaded by their alternative. 'Resourcefulness' is a good, evocative word, but while it deliberately foregrounds the question of the distribution of resources, I can't help thinking they're trying to have their cake and eat it. Can 'resourcefulness' really, at the same time, highlight inequalities (in 'resources') and yet resist measurement or quantification? Is 'resourcefulness' inherently and insistently a 'process', or is it just as vulnerable as resilience to becoming crystallised as a 'condition'? Neoliberalism's proven ability to co-opt the concept of 'resilience', even when the concept has been employed at a 'grassroots' level, suggests that 'resourcefulness' might not be immune to a similar kind of appropriation - I can imagine David Cameron quite easily conjuring up images of a wartime popular 'resourcefulness' in the midst of the London blitz - thereby 'disabling' the necessary 'politics of resistance' in exactly the same way that Evans & Reid so powerfully highlighted in 'resilience rhetoric'.

Resourcefulness in the wilderness: four 'arts' of survival and resistance

As a practical theologian, working with critiques of resilience like Evans & Reid's and MacKinnon & Derickson's, I find myself driven back towards theology for alternative metaphors and practices. Christian faith began in the context of an all-powerful Empire and huge inequalities, and while it has by no means been immune to being co-opted and domesticated by the 'powers that be', it has shown a remarkable capacity to reinvent itself, from the edges of the dominant regime, as challenge and alternative. (We might even call it 'resilient', if that wasn't the term we were currently trying to disentangle!)

In her remarkable book Sisters in the Wilderness, Delores Williams explores at length the 'survival strategies' deployed by African-American women, from slavery to the present day. While acknowledging that even these strategies can themselves be ‘exploited’ within the African-American community and in the churches, Williams concludes her study by outlining four such strategies, or ‘arts’, which have managed to ‘keep the community alive and hopeful’:

• An ‘art of cunning’, combining knowledge and imagination with ‘manual skill and dexterity’, ‘a wholesome shrewdness’ that ensured individual survival and ‘economic well-being’;
• An ‘art of encounter’, combining the twin ‘movements’ of ‘resistance’ to, and ‘endurance’ of, oppression – and knowing when to deploy one, and when the other;
• An ‘art of care’ - a ‘commitment, devotion and love’ not just for their own children and ‘the lovers in their lives’, but also ‘for their extended families, for their communities and for their churches’;
• and an ‘art of connecting’ - with the right people, and ‘the relevant social, political and religious structures’, that could improve the well-being of African-American women, men and children, educationally, politically and spiritually. (Sisters in the Wilderness, pp.236-8)

There are resonances here, for me, with MacKinnon & Derickson's conception of 'resourcefulness', but while that concept is targeted - with considerable effectiveness - towards questioning the distribution of resources, Williams' interconnected 'arts' do much better, I would suggest, at being explicitly relational, dynamic and contextual. They name the tension between 'endurance' and 'resistance', and they quite deliberately 'connect' into the larger structures of power.

'Distancing' and 'being liked'

Evans & Reid, discussing the cultural and political representations of American life post-9/11, point to another alternative to the governing discourses of vulnerability and resilience, encapuslated in Thomas Hoepker's photograph 'of people in Brooklyn relaxing and enjoying life against the backdrop of the attacks' on the twin towers.

The image, they suggest:

'unsettl[es] the dominant aesthetic dialectic of initial vulnerability and subsequent resilience. Instead, it depicts a perfectly normal state of affairs that was permitted by a certain distancing from the action. Indeed, as it emphasises, proximity alone offers no such guarantees for the constitution of a shared sense of experience. Many were far more deeply traumatised by viewing the unfolding of events thousands of miles away on televised screens than the subjects in Hoepker's frame.' (Evans & Reid, p.88)

Reading this, I hear more than incidental echoes of a reflective piece by Girardian theologian James Alison in the wake of 9/11, 'Contemplation in a world of violence' (Chapter 1 of Alison's brilliant On Being Liked).

Alison describes the way what was an essentially meaningless act -  'some brothers of ours committed simple acts of suicide with significant collateral murder, meaning nothing at all' - became a spectacle endowed with huge symbolic power, because of where it was (the World Trade Centre in New York), and because it was already under the spotlight of 'rolling cameras and a hugely powerful media network'. 'There took hold of an enormous number of us a feeling of being pulled in, being somehow involved, as though it was part of our lives.' Alison names the outbreak of unanimity in grief, and a fear 'not unrelated to excitement', and a sense in which '[w]e were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity.' (pp.5-6)

In a quite stunning reading of the Gospel of Mark's so-called 'apocalypse' (Mark 13), Alison argues that Jesus is seeking to wean his hearers away from the seduction of, and addiction to, 'the apparently sacred world of apocalyptic meaning', the world of 'wars and rumours of wars', where 'order [is] based on sacrifice'. He instructs them, says Alison, 'not to allow themselves to be pulled by their desire' or their fear, into that 'world which others will want to create'. He warns too of the inevitable violence from that 'order' against those who 'break the unanimity which is demanded' by it. (p.10)

Jesus talks of, and lives out, 'a quite different power coming, scarcely noticeably, in the midst of all those things', 'a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it' - a power which reveals us human beings 'categorised' as nothing else other than 'created', which means, in Alison's terms, 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfillment, fruition to, to share in just being'. 'In the midst of the false manufacturing of meaning and frightening power displayed by the satanic [Alison uses the term quite technically for the kind of 'fascination' or 'addiction' he describes above], we are being taught that our being liked and held in being is at the hands of something infinitely more powerful, infinitely restful, and we can live without fear.' (pp.13-16)

'Personally,' Alison concludes, 'the strongest feeling I have had over the last few months is the quite unexpected discovery that I am no longer frightened of Muslims, and that I like them, and that this is only the beginning of discovering what it will mean to rejoice in them and see them as part of an "us". Is this not the deepest act of treachery against the satanic order which was turned on in a part of all our minds and hearts by the events of 11 September 2001? And where on earth will it end?' (p.16)

Why have I spent considerable space here dwelling on this 'reading together' of the events of 9/11 and one of the weirder chapters of Mark's gospel? What Alison does, in a significantly deeper - and obviously more explicitly 'traditioned' - way than Evans & Reid's interpretation of Hoepker's photo, is point a way out of the captivity to the all-consuming 'unavoidable vulnerability - necessary resilience' narrative of Ulrich Beck's 'risk society'. Neither Alison nor Hoepker deny the tragic realities of death and violence where they happen, nor do they seek to freeze our instincts to compassion for those who are suffering, but they do seek to remove us from the kinds of manufactured fascination that insist 'There Is No Alternative', and demand only resilience, and not resistance, from those who the system ensures remain the most vulnerable.

What emerges, between Hoepker and Alison, is a kind of 'distancing' that functions as almost as an ironic opposite to the rich and powerful's 'gated communities' - a joie de vivre, not without compassion, but which rejects the fear-inducing 'securitisation' stories which seek to divide people from one another. It embodies the particular kind of 'indifference' that, in Pete Rollins' terms (which I've explored previously), rejects the 'token gestures' and the 'perverse protests' (which can enable us to feel like rebels for a while, but often turn out to be simply 'release valves in the system, opportunities for people to resist in a way that [is] ultimately authorized by those in control') in favour of 'insurrection', simply 'living a different life', building something new in the shell of the old, 'changing the system by ignoring it'.

Can 'resilience' be redeemed?

The critiques of 'resilience' language from Evans & Reid and MacKinnon & Derickson hit their nails squarely on the heads. But as with any word, it is the context and associations within which the word finds itself that create the parameters of its meaning. 'Good' words will always be co-opted and distorted - and that should not simply drive us to find a different word (as exactly the same dangers will still apply), but to work on the connections and webs of meaning which surround the words we use.

The core of Evans & Reid's argument was that the way resilience rhetoric has been deployed, functions to disable resistance among the most 'vulnerable' at the same time as it effectively removes the social bonds between the endlessly vulnerable and 'those who have the ability to secure themselves'. This 'containment' of the 'vulnerable', and indeed of the 'powerful' too, in their own forms of high-security prison, and their physical, relational and psychological segregation from each other, are echoed in MacKinnon & Derickson's critique discussed above - that the spatial scales of 'the local' and 'the city' are isolated from wider spatial relations which produce and reproduce unequal distributions of power and resources.

While the engaged 'arts' of 'resourcefulness' proposed by MacKinnon & Derickson, and fleshed out by Delores Williams, ironically it might be in the kind of 'imaginative distancing' which emerges from Hoepker's photo and Alison's exegesis, I suggest, that 'resilience' language could be 'redeemed'. It is a very specific kind of distancing, as we have seen: from the 'sacred centres' of power which generate the discourse of the unavoidable necessity of both 'vulnerability' and 'resilience', and perpetuate and deepen inequalities and segregations.

In Hoepker's photo, we witness an outbreak of what Ivan Illich calls 'conviviality', a distinctly embodied, attentive, face-to-face enjoyment of the company and friendships of other human beings in a way that resists, or better is outside the grip of, the technocratic, instrumentalizing drives of the systems and power structures of the modern world. Conviviality has a scale, a pace, limits that are appropriate to the kind of activity it encompasses - but limits which create thresholds for hospitality. As such it resonates closely with the more positive, grassroots uses of 'resilience' language - but at the same time refuses to be commanded, co-opted or corrupted by governments and the powers of global capital. If for some the word has resonances of exclusive champagne dinner parties, it refuses to be so confined, and is in fact alive and well in low-income neighbourhoods, resisting and ridiculing the stark choice offered within the governing language between 'hard-working' or destitution. It is not a 'means' to any 'end' other than itself, it cannot be the focus of any 'strategy' - and yet, at its carnivalesque best, it is infectious, catching, overflowing the local and disrupting the established systems and regimes of 'order' at national and international scales too. The ripples of the 'Occupy' movement and its 'politics of recognition', for example, have been felt far beyond the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, or the railings of Zuccotti Park.

'Learning how to die'

In Alison's more explicitly theological 'distancing' too, we witness a particular kind of breaking down of 'containment' into what we might call 'overflow': attentiveness not to the spectacle, but to the human faces obscured by it, in the context of the infinitely more powerful and yet infinitely gentle 'liking' of creation by God, enables the discovery, and the 'living-into', of an inclusive 'us' which - as he puts it - is 'treachery' against the established order of 'us and them'. Evans & Reid, following Cornel West, seek to liberate the 'resilient subjects' from their imprisonment by inviting them to 'give up the prospect of self-renewal' and 'learn how to die', 'turning your world upside-down' in the process and 'actually liv[ing] more intensely and critically and abundantly' (Evans & Reid, p.97). It is inescapably theological language, which Alison would ground in the very particular death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth ('a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it'), and to which fellow-theologian David Ford brings a particular clarity:

“the wisest way to cope [with being multiply overwhelmed] is not to try to avoid being overwhelmed, and certainly not to expect to be in control of everything; rather it is to live amidst the overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others. That is the “home” or “school” in which the practicalities of coping can be learnt.” (David Ford, The Shape of Living, p.xxv)

Perhaps, after all, resilience language does need to be jettisoned. Conviviality, as Illich describes it, turns out to be a very particular form of 'being overwhelmed' - a form which, within Ford's theological ecology, includes 'facing' and 'feasting', singing and dancing, thanking and lamenting, and more. From a very particular kind of vulnerability comes an 'overflow' of both joy and responsibility which cannot be contained by locality, ghettoed or gated communities, or structures which perpetuate inequalities. At the same time both liberating to 'live outside' the system, and liberating to engage with and resist the system as it is, it allows us to recover, among other things, a utopian imagination of the kind that Thomas Moore envisioned: 'a site of human togetherness and shared access to resources' (Evans & Reid, p.97).

We are being invited, I suggest, to engage in the practice what feminist theologian Sarah Coakley describes as a kind of receptiveness or 'contemplation'. When it keeps silence, it is certainly not being silenced: rather, she says, 'it is the voluntary silence of attention, transformation, mysterious interconnection, and (in violent, abusive, or oppressive contexts) rightful and divinely empowered resistance: it is a special "power-in-vulnerability"... Contemplation engenders courage to give voice, but in a changed, prophetic key' (Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the self: an essay 'on the Trinity', pp.84-85).

And that voice, as founder of community organising Saul Alinsky knew well, depends on a receptiveness to discovering a utopian imagination, and a freedom to start living it into reality, before our acts of resistance to the injustices of 'the world as it is' can be more than simply 'perverse protest'. We need to deliberately shape our political actions, Alinsky would insist, 'simultaneously to declare the unjust way to be untrue and to present a possible alternative through which all may flourish.' There has to be 'a constructive alternative', argues Luke Bretherton, such that 'the declaration of a "No" to something is always premised on the prior celebration and upholding of a "Yes" to another way, a way in which both oppressor and oppressed are invited to participate' (Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics, p.79). In other words, conviviality and resistance - both rooted in but overflowing the local - go hand in hand.

'Community Resilience' & its dangers

For the past 3 years or so, I've been playing around with the concept of 'community resilience' and its value for neighbourhoods like my own.

It's 'hot' language at the moment, popping up all over the place, from papers emerging from thinktanks, like DEMOS' Resilient Nation, and the much more 'earthed' and practical examination by the Carnegie Trust of resilience in rural communities, to policy documents published by the UK's 'Risk & Regulation Advisory Council' and the United Nations Development Programme. It's also fed - and this should ring a warning bell or two - by trends in philosophy (a shift from dealing in utopian ideals to a philosophical realism needed for 'coping in an intractable world'), politics (a 'localist' focus on 'what communities can do for themselves') and economics (what you can do when, so we're told, there's 'no money' for the kind of - supposedly - 'transformative' investment in 'community regeneration' that went on a couple of decades ago).

'Community resilience', in short, is about the 'personal and collective capacities' to survive and thrive in a world that is rapidly changing, unpredictable, and, in many different ways - from climate change to terrorism, from epidemics to austerity - potentially or actually hostile. It focuses on the 'assets', 'capitals' or 'resources' of local communities; it emphasises the positive 'agency' within communities in response to disruption and change; and, as a 'science', treats communities as complex, multi-levelled 'systems' including, in its broadest formulations, the ecosystems within which human communities are embedded.

In fact, the roots of 'resilience thinking' lie in engineering (how materials 'bounce back' from shocks, and resist under pressure), in social psychology (how individuals survive and thrive through, and after, stressing and traumatic life experiences), and in ecology and 'environmental management' (often deploying sophisticated mathematical modelling of a system's 'capacity to absorb disturbance and still behave in the same way').

There's a lot to commend a 'resilience' approach to communities:

•  The systems approach of CR relates individuals and households, to the community itself, to the wider environment, in a complex and ongoing interaction
• CR encourages an honesty about the potential ‘hostilities’ of the wider environment – particularly in the present time of international economic turbulence, severe government cuts, and global climate change
• CR describes a neighbourhood not just in terms of its ‘indices of deprivation’, but pushes towards ‘a fuller understanding of the collective history of [an area]’ (including ‘how they have been affected by previous economic decline, the impact of in-migration, their connectivity to any remaining sources of jobs’)
• CR’s positive, ‘asset’-focused approach, in contrast to prevailing ‘deficit’ models, values ‘what is’ in a neighbourhood, including the skills and gifts of local people
• Rather than a ‘top-down’, ‘professionalised’ approach that encourages ‘passivity’ and ‘dependency’ among local people, CR looks for, encourages, and focuses on agency and participation by local people – and brings individuals’ stories of resilience into the discussion of the community level
• As a move away from ‘regeneration’ language, CR makes it clear that communities can not be ‘made better’ simply by investing large amounts of money
• CR is interested in more than ‘coping’ or ‘stability’, but in ‘flourishing’, often ‘despite extraordinarily tough experiences and environments'

But there is what one author has called a 'dark side' to community resilience, that I'm finding more and more troubling.

One aspect of this 'dark side' lies in what 'resilience' is often defined 'against': 'vulnerability'. The working assumption is that communities find themselves in a potentially - and often, actually - hostile environment, and that resilience is about reducing a community's 'vulnerabilities' to 'a broad spectrum of risks' (as the DEMOS report puts it), including 'threats like terrorism and organised crime', 'hazards such as flooding, heat waves and snow storms' and 'major accidents' such as the King's Cross fire. But, as Ulrich Beck has repeatedly reminded us, the general fear and anxiety of a 'risk society' allow some, in the 'security business', to profit. Risk 'is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of the catastrophe', and as such, shapes our imagination in a way that 'becomes a political force that transforms the world'. Who decides what is and is not a risk, and why should we believe what they tell us?

There is more to it than that, though, and it emerges from community resilience's origins in ecology. Resilient systems, the scientists, tell us, are those which have a level of diversity, modularity (where 'subgroups of components are strongly linked internally, but only loosely connected to each other') and tight - but not too tight - feedback loops (where 'the consequences of a change in one part of the system are felt and responded to in other parts'). There is much to learn from the science of resilience - for example, about decentralizing control within institutions and networks; an increased awareness in the developed world of the consequences of our actions in the developing world; and the vulnerabilities built in to the dependence of a town or estate on one supermarket's supply chain (and the 'efficiencies of scale' that it promises), contrasted with everyone growing their own fruit and vegetables and sharing between them. There is an element of redundancy in resilient systems (the exact opposite of 'optimised efficiency', in fact), a more-than-optimal 'surplus', which enables an 'adaptability so that life may go on living despite the fact that elements of our living systems may be destroyed'. Such 'redundancy' is not tragic when it relates to supply chains or a garden's vegetable crop - we can probably cope if the cabbages don't appear this time - but what does 'redundancy' - the tolerable loss of certain 'elements' of the system - mean when applied to a neighbourhood? Is community life to simply 'go on' as the lives of some community members are destroyed? As some human beings within the neighbourhood are ground down, pushed out, broken?

Of course this is never explicitly said when 'community resilience' is invoked, but the question must be asked: where is the 'cost' of resilience to be absorbed? The question is sharpened when the focus is widened beyond an individual neighbourhood to the society of which it is a part. When a government advocates 'community resilience', is it, in fact, demanding it of those deemed most 'vulnerable', and insisting that their vulnerability is an inescapable part of their condition? Resilience rhetoric has as its target 'the insecuritisation of the most at-risk which politically threatens the security and comforts of those who are sufficiently protected' [Brad Evans & Julian Reid, 'Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the resilient subject', Resilience (2013) 1:2, pp.83-98] and, at the same time, places the responsibility for 'resilience' squarely on the 'at-risk' themselves. As Zygmunt Bauman sharply puts it, '[l]eft increasingly to their own resources and acumen, individuals are expected to devise individual solutions to socially generated problems, and to do it individually, using their individual skills and individually possessed assets.' [Bauman, Collateral Damage, p.17] For 'individual' read 'or communal', and we get close to the heart of the problem of 'community resilience' rhetoric.

What we're witnessing here is, as Brad Evans and Julian Reid argue, neoliberalism's 'politically debasing reduction of resistance to resilience': '[b]uilding resilient subjects involves the deliberate disabling of the political habits, tendencies and capacities of peoples and replacing them with adaptive ones.'

'To increase its resilience, in other words, the subject must disavow any belief in the possibility to secure itself and accept, instead, an understanding of life as a permanent process of continual adaptation to threats and dangers which are said to be outside its control. As such, the resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility.' [Evans & Reid, p.85]

If resilience rhetoric functions to disable resistance among the most 'vulnerable', at the same time it effectively removes the social bonds between the endlessly vulnerable and 'those who have the ability to secure themselves', creating gated communities for some, who are able to 'outsource the need to be resilient to other elements within the gated system ranging from barbed fences, physical walls, surveillance technologies, catastrophe-proofed architectures, insurance premiums to armed guards patrolling the perimeters.' [Evans & Reid, pp.96-7]

Is 'community resilience' redeemable? Is it a concept even worth trying to redeem? Is it possible to highlight and strengthen a local community's social - and other forms of - capital, while at the same time building, and not disabling, its collective capacity for political - even utopian - imagination and active resistance to the structures of the status quo? These are the questions for next time...

Living abundantly within limits: resilience, ABCD & intentional community

There's an exciting feeling of 'things coming together' at the moment. I'm someone who gets excited easily, but this feels particularly significant. It's a convergence of different trains of thought, but also of different trajectories of action - and when the thinking and the doing start joining up, then I reckon it's worth taking quite seriously.

One of the bits of 'joined up doing' is around food. I've blogged several times here about the rise and rise of FoodBanks, and on some of the many dangers of embracing them with enthusiasm. Locally, one of the things we're trying to work out is how to link up the desperate - and politically disgraceful - need for emergency food provision with opportunities for those 'in need' to maintain (or rediscover) some dignity, pride, a sense of giftedness, and the possibility of being a valuable contribution within their community. Inspired in part by stories from 'The Stop' in Toronto and other initiatives closer to home, but perhaps even more so by some of the passionate and gifted local people who are wanting to work together to may our neighbourhood a better place, we're exploring on our estate how we can develop 'community gardening teams' to help people with their gardens, pass on gardening skills and wisdom, and start transforming patches of wasteland into attractive, wild and fruitful green spaces. We're exploring how we can connect up neighbours with gardens they can't care for, with neighbours who want to grow stuff but don't have the space. We're exploring how we can get Firs & Bromford growing fruit and veg in every available plot of land, to supply a regular 'farmers' market / cooperative shop / community cafe' with fresh produce, alongside home-made jams and freshly-baked bread, alongside healthy cooking and eating sessions, and bring-and-share community lunches featuring speciality dishes from our many different cultures. The plan is that those who temporarily find themselves in need of emergency food supplies can also find themselves much more permanently immersed in a thriving ecology of growing together and eating together, giving and receiving, learning and sharing.

This movement towards local food links up with some 'big thinking' being done in the interrelated and overlapping fields called 'transition', 'permaculture' and 'community resilience'. An incredibly important report was published a few weeks ago entitled 'Climate after growth: why environmentalists must embrace post-growth economics and community resilience'. It was co-written by Rob Hopkins, the inspirational founder of the Transition Network, which began not too many years ago in the Devon town of Totnes, and is now a global phenomenon. At the heart of the report is the (deeply political) argument that 'the nearly ubiquitous belief of our elected officials ... that addressing the climate crisis must come second to ensuring economic growth' is utterly 'wrongheaded', and for two reasons: firstly 'because it underestimates the severity of the climate crisis', and secondly 'because it presupposes the old economic "normal" of robust growth can be revived'. Instead, the authors argue, we have entered into an era of "new normals" - in terms of our energy supply and consumption (because 'the era of cheap and easy fossil fuels is over'), our climate (with dramatic changes and severe shocks becoming a rapidly-intensifying reality) and economics (because consistent growth is no longer possible, after the end of cheap oil, and with debt mountains growing ever-larger).

Adjusting to these 'new normals' requires 'one common strategy', they argue: building community resilience. In practice, this includes developing 'community-owned, distributed, renewable energy production', 'sustainable local food systems', 'new cooperative business models, sharing economies, re-skilling, and more'. All of these initiatives are 'inherently local', and start small, but are already 'spreading rapidly and creating tangible impacts'. 'Done right', say the authors, they can 'serve as the foundation of a whole new economy - an economy comprised of people and communities that thrive within the real limits of our beautiful but finite planet'.

It's hopeful language, and the initiatives described in the report and the many more found within the Transition Network are real embodiments of hope-in-action. Across the world, at a neighbourhood level, people are beginning to do what is necessary to live within the limits of 'what is possible' for the future of our planet, and for our generations to come. Although the initiatives are almost entirely happening 'from the grassroots', it is, in many ways, a movement 'from the outside-in': it begins with the urgent, global limits on what is possible for our planetary sustainability (energy, climate and economy), which shapes action at a local level. Thinking global, acting local.

A lot of this resonates with an approach I've explored here a lot, that of asset-based community development (ABCD). But there is, I think, a difference of direction. If the direction of 'transition' and 'resilience' is from the 'outside-in', from what is possible global to what is necessary locally, then the direction of ABCD is, in many ways, from the 'inside-out', from what is necessary (locally) to what is possible (locally) - thinking local, acting local. Our basic human needs for health and wellbeing, safety and security, raising flourishing children, and ageing and dying well - among others - are best met by, and within, our local communities, through neighbourly relationships and communal activity. ABCD points us to the abundant possibilities we discover within community, when we decide to do 'what is necessary' ourselves. This is not - emphatically not! - to say there is not a place for institutions, and for the state as the 'institution par excellence'. But it is to put those institutions in their place, to be clear about their limits. We cannot know what we need (in the way of support or 'expertise' from such institutions, professionals, systems), until we know what we already have. We need to start with the question, 'what can we as a community do for ourselves?' before we can ask the question 'what do we need other people to do with us, or for us?'.

Into this swirling mix of connections I need to drop another one. This may be the point where some readers have a knee-jerk reaction towards the door (or the 'close' button), but I'd plead with you to stay with me, if you possibly can. The 'third dimension' for me in this big 'join the dots' exercise is 'intentional, Christian community'. 'Intentional' in the sense that hopefully is reasonably obvious: not just 'doing church on Sundays', but a deep, reflective commitment to 'living in community', 24/7, and drawing on the depths of our faith tradition to shape and resource that 'living'. Here in Hodge Hill, we're exploring this 'intentionality' in a number of different ways.

As a church, we've just launched an 'offer' - to congregation members, and to those who count us as their friends and travelling-companions - of a twice-yearly conversation with a 'spiritual companion', to explore our own personal sense of 'life balance', to be thankful for where it feels 'good', and to identify areas where we'd appreciate some help, or where we'd like to try something new. The 7 'dimensions of spiritual well-being' that we've decided to structure these conversations around are:

1. CONNECTING, welcoming and listening - finding ways to connect with other people, to offer hospitality and welcome others, and to be people who listen with care and attention, to friends, neighbours and strangers
2. DOING (with and for others) - finding ways to share our God-given gifts and skills, alongside and for the benefit of others, as well as ways to encounter God's presence in the work of our daily lives - nurturing humility in service, and action-in-solidarity
3. Presence, healing and PEACE-MAKING - seeking God's 'shalom' (wholeness, peace, justice, and the integrity of the natural world) for our lives, our communities, and in our world, through our relationships, our actions, our choices and our lifestyle
4. GIVING & RECEIVING - finding opportunities to generously share our gifts, time and money with others, and to receive in gratitude from others
5. LEARNING - broadening our minds and our horizons, and learning new skills, and in particular, going deeper into the Bible and 'inhabiting' the Christian story, firing our imaginations in new ways
6. PRAYING - finding ways (which work for us, now) of holding ourselves, our lives, our neighbours and our world to God, and opening ourselves to be sustained, energised, inspired and challenged by God - a 'mindfulness' that renews and sustains our compassion
7. RESTING & PLAYING - finding spaces to have fun, recharge our batteries, be ourselves, and enjoy the company of others - including celebration and feasting - renewing and sustaining all that we are and all that we do!

Five of these are remarkably similar to, or certainly deeply resonant with, the '5 Ways to Wellbeing' promoted by the (non-faith-affiliated) new economics foundation: 'connect', 'be active', 'take notice', 'keep learning' and 'give'. They're things that are good for us - for all of us - and we think they happen to be good for our communities and our world too. Alongside this 'offer' of companionship, we've been exploring, for some time, the possibility of a 'community house', where people can come and live and 'do community together', while actively seeking to build relationships of trust and friendship with their neighbours, and nurture a place of hospitality and prayer. A place of both 'engagement' and 'retreat' - an experiment in 'living a balanced and connected life' in the midst of a busy, urban neighbourhood. As I've blogged recently, we've had our ups and downs with this dream, but we're beginning to see some real, concrete (well, brick and grass, at least) possibilities emerging - but also the possibility of deepening and broadening the 'dispersed' (rather than 'residential') community of those of us who already live and/or work locally, by exploring and developing a shared 'rule of life' which might connect our local (and sometimes more explicitly political) 'activism' with some spiritual, relational, earthed 'foundations', in a way that might just possibly prove attractive to other friends and travelling companions in other places.

Now I realise the content of these last few paragraphs may well feel, in the words of one of my closest friends, 'a bit of a left turn'. But for some of us, at least, this is where all the dots begin to join up: the global and the local, the human and the non-human worlds, the necessary and the possible, living within limits and living abundantly, the 'outside-in' and the 'inside-out'... 'Spirituality' is a notoriously woolly, slippery word, but if it describes something that is about the whole of our being and our living and our relating, that allows us to embrace tensions and contradictions and 'otherness' and new discoveries, that gives us a deep grounding that allows some kind of 'centre to hold' while 'things fall apart', then what I am talking about here is the beginning of a spirituality of resilience and community building. Just the beginning. There is plenty of work to be done to 'flesh it out', articulate it, and live it out thoroughly and painstakingly and fully. But a beginning is the only place we can start, and this is my beginning, and potentially a beginning for many of us in Hodge Hill, and perhaps even beyond.

There is, inevitably, at least one more thing to be said. And that is to reiterate the point that 'doing what is possible and what is necessary' at the local level is no kind of excuse to let governments and those invested in the world's money-systems off the hook. We need not just for local experiments to become infectious, but for a growing movement for the just redistribution of money, resources, power and value so that 'what is possible and what is necessary' can be done on national and global scales too.

I'm currently reading two books about 'revolution' (among many others!). One is by a Christian, Ray Simpson, the founder of the Community of Saint Aidan & Saint Hilda. Ray's book describes The Cowshed Revolution: a new society created by downwardly mobile Christians. Features of this 'new society' include:

1. a relational economy (rather than a selfish one)
2. a sense of continuity (between, in Edmund Burke's words, 'those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born')
3. a 'freedom that is accountable to natural justice' (where 'the market' is 'harnessed to social responsibility')
4. subsidiarity (the principle 'that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organisation which can be done just as well by a smaller and simpler organisation')
5. restorative justice 
6. land cannot be bought without taking into account the natural and human life it supports
7. the media celebrate the common good, not what degrades
8. social wrongdoers are named and shamed through public information procedures
9. those who model goodness are honoured

While Ray has gathered plenty of evidence of small-scale, largely Christian-rooted, experiments with this 'downwardly mobile' trajectory, there aren't many pointers to it 'taking root' more widely. My other book, on the other hand, is by social theorist Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, and it describes some recent, large-scale revolutions - however partial and faltering - and how real change has swept across nations, continents, and the planet itself. From Egypt to Occupy Wall Street, Castells analyses the dynamics of these revolutions, and identifies some common features:

• they are networked in multiple forms (not just electronically)
• they become a movement by occupying the urban space - 'challenging the disciplinary institutional order by reclaiming the space of the city for its citizens'
• movements are local and global at the same time
• movements are viral (because 'seeing and listening to protests somewhere else ... inspires mobilization because it triggers hope of the possibility of change')
• they are usually leaderless movements, horizontal and cooperative, where the transition from outrage to hope is accomplished by creating highly reflective 'spaces for deliberation'
• they are, at least in principle, non-violent movements
• they are rarely programmatic, but are aimed at changing the values of society, and so are political in a fundamental sense
• they generate their own form of 'timeless' time - on the one hand living day by day, 'not knowing when the eviction will come, organizing their living as if this could be the alternative society of their dreams'; on the other hand, 'in their debates and in their projects they refer to an unlimited horizon of possibilities of new forms of life and community emerging from the practice of the movement' - 'they live in the moment in terms of their experience, and they project their time in the future of history-making in terms of their anticipation'

As a Christian theologian and (at least would-be) community activist, Castells analysis excites me. It raises the possibility of thinking globally, acting locally, with the possibility of infectious, global consequences. It challenges me to sustain those reflective 'spaces for deliberation' among my friends, co-workers and neighbours, and to venture together into those urban spaces that need reclaiming for us citizens. And it highlights what we Christians call an 'eschatological' perspective, of seeking to 'live the future in the now' such that no experiment in 'doing things differently' is irrelevant.

The dots are joining up for me. I wonder how they join up for you...?

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)

What needs to be done tomorrow? A Holy Saturday reflection

It's an odd day, Holy Saturday. An 'in-between' day, but a day which, if we inhabit it fully, is not 'in-between' anything - it is simply 'after'. After the so-called 'Good' Friday where the forces of death and destruction have, as far as anyone can tell, won the day - silenced life and hope, destroyed love and peace. There is, as far as anyone can tell, nothing ahead, nothing to look forward to, nothing to wait for.

So what are we left with? What remains?

When all that is, is what has been, we can be left with nostalgia for the good times - or grief, and guilt, and angry blame, for what has gone awry.

If I had been one of those first disciples of Jesus, I can almost feel the desperate fury at the chief priests, at Pilate the Roman governor, at Judas the betrayer, for what has happened to Jesus. A desperate fury that so many are feeling today, of all days, at what our present government, the chief priests and Roman governors of our time, are doing to people on the lowest incomes, to people in social housing, to people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, to people who are newly-arrived in the country.

But the Passion story we have re-enacted and lived through this week will not let us get away with righteous indignation - not indignation from a point of innocence, at least. We cannot pile all the blame onto 'the powerful' and, mirroring Pilate, wash our own hands of it all. Because we are the crowd. We are the ones who, all too fickle, greeted Jesus on Palm Sunday with joyful 'Hosannas' and yet, days later, shouted 'Crucify'. We are the ones who collude with the system, whether with the votes we cast, the money we spend or save, the 'news' stories we uncritically absorb, the opinions we parrot - or, perhaps most crucially, the silence or inaction or helplessness we allow ourselves to be sidelined into. We are complicit in the crucifixions going on around us - there is no place of innocence on which to stand.

And so the story goes. Nothing remains. Even Jesus' most faithful disciples have betrayed, denied, and scattered to the winds - their promises to stick with him to the end lying in tatters. Guilt is all consuming, shattering, paralysing. We are helpless, hopeless, until in Easter God comes breathing forgiveness.

That is one story of Holy Saturday. And it has much truth to it. But here, tentatively, is another...

The other, rarely told, rarely heard story of Holy Saturday is a story not of helpless guilt, but of responsible presence. Where the traditional telling places us 'somewhere else', anywhere else, but with the crucified one, this other story - a story of a handful of women, no less - is one of doggedly 'being there', staying, in the place of responsibility, of compassion, of - in a strange way - action.

There is a small group of women who, when the male disciples have fled in fear, follow Jesus all the way to the cross, and stay nearby, watching. They are witnesses. They are listeners. They hear his cry of god-forsakenness, they see his last breath.

This same group of women, so this submerged story goes, help take down the dead body and bury it, and get ready to return, a little over 24 hours later, to continue the work of caring for it - anointing it, embalming it, giving it those final touches of respect and love.

If, in the first version of the story, Holy Saturday is not waiting for anything, then in this second version it is most certainly a waiting time. Because these women have left the body in the tomb for the Sabbath - for a day, and no longer. They are pausing, stopping, because that is what the rhythm of the week demands, but they will return as soon as they can to do what needs to be done - 'early in the morning', 'while it is still dark', even.

In this version, we might imagine the Holy Saturday conversation going on around the kitchen table of one of the women. There is, of course, the grief at what has been, the bewilderment, the anger, the lostness and more. But there is also a doggedness, an insistence, that what the Romans and the priests imagine is the last word most emphatically shall not be. 'What needs to be done tomorrow?' is the question they will be chewing over, through tears and hugs no doubt, but with steely determination in their eyes.


Tonight, here in Hodge Hill, a handful of the more foolhardy amongst us will gather, as the sun goes down, in the wasteland on the edge of the Firs & Bromford estate - the rubbish-strewn no-man's-land in the shadow of the M6 in which, just last Sunday, we enacted the scenes of the Passion Story, from the Garden of the Gethsemane to the crucifixion at Golgotha.

When I advertised it, I suggested people brought something to sit on, a flask of tea to keep us warm, a lantern or torch for when it gets dark (there are no street lights in the wasteland), and a story of hope to share.

One of my newer friends and fellow-travellers here replied to the invitation: 'I can do trying to be hopeful - do you think that's as good as actually being hopeful?'. I replied that I thought that was 'a very Holy Saturday place to be,' that 'today is the ultimate day of loose ends, and of feeling whatever you're feeling.' When I invited people to bring 'stories of hope' tonight, I imagined that some might bring 'neatly tied-up stories of hope fulfilled', but that many more are 'likely to be loose-ended, elusive stories of hope glimpsed, deferred, reached for' - even apparently beyond our grasp.

We will finish, tonight, by throwing seed bombs, made earlier today in our community activity morning, into the hard-to-reach, bramble-entangled, rubble-ridden corners of the wasteland that framed our 'Bromford Crucifixion' last Sunday. A ridiculous, defiant gesture. But laced with the smallest seeds of a dogged, determined, barely-imaginable hope.


Easter will come to our helplessness and guilt, with the breath of forgiveness and liberation. But Easter will come too to our resilient, determined staying put and returning. As with that handful of women on that first Holy Saturday, God will come and do something with our stubborn presence, our small 'cracks' in the 'finishedness' of the story - and turn it into an eruption into the world-as-we-thought-we-knew-it.


We will stay with the crucified. We will keep our eyes open to their torture, and our ears open to their cries. We shall not be moved. We will doggedly show our compassion and love by our continued presence.

And together, we will rise.

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.