Enterprise Pathways Blog Autumn 2010: The Big Society

The future of Cambridgeshire’s economy is in a fog of the unknown! Its business support structures all undergoing massive change as the established commissioning agencies like EEDA, the PCTs, and nationally networks like Business Link, are earmarked for closure before 2012.

David Cameron’s Big Society has at its centre a vision of corporate responsibility and community leadership delivering seamless privatisation of public sector services through innovative partnerships recycling available resources and energies. And so Local Enterprise Partnerships are emerging.

We, in the East of England, now in serious review mode, have recently made our first response to government reporting back Cambridge Horizons’ vital recent consultation with business and industry. And at last week’s SEEE conference we heard of 7 models for managing and delivering economic growth across the region, all now submitted for governmental consideration. Breaths are now bated until the end of October/early November when those decisions will be known.

Local Enterprise Partnerships now hold the key to shaping our new economic direction. Will they cling to tried and tested formulas? Merely rebadge? Or will new collaborations and new entrepreneurs emerge to shape new synergies, create new opportunities?

What though of our 3rd sector? In particular, the voluntary sector which delivers so many public services on behalf of the statutory agencies? And many stand alone ones like The Big Issue? Their customer-centred flexible cultures have been able to respond quickly and with a minimum of bureaucracy to provide the necessary safety blankets for many disadvantaged residents. Haven’t we been here before, a generation ago with Care in the Community? At that time I was a harassed Social Services admin manager in Hackney! A laudable aim, the insufficiency of either funding or strategy saw it degenerate into a bleak hotch-potch of mental health after care services, and ultimately comic parody both in The Guardian and on radio – in Claire in the Community!

On the education front, Cambridgeshire’s performance is surprisingly poor given its school-leavers attain good qualifications overall. Inside East, the intelligence unit for the region, finds the region’s adult skills profile is weaker than in many other UK regions, so educational potential does not translate into good further and higher education attainment. Ranking 10th for graduates in the workforce, the region performs poorly when it comes to higher education. Some local areas within the region have especially weak levels of qualifications attainment which may limit their capacity for busines innovation. Clearly a challenge for the region.

Will enough new social entrepreneurs or coalitions emerge to back and sustain essential health, social care, training & education when government support is withdrawn? What will be their incentive? The most lucrative propositions like hospitals, schools and penal institutions will be ripe for privatisation, but what of the resource-draining supports like social housing, re-training the economically inactive? What of SME business support networks? And even more particularly, what of social enterprise development?

Bigger businesses and social enterprises may be heading off to the imminent Good Deals conference whose headline speakers include Sir Ronald Cohen Chairman of the Social Investment TaskForce whose investment fund is likely to include those unclaimed assets from dormant bank accounts. For smaller initiatives, funding is also uncertain though an ethical lifeline may be Buzzbank, an online platform providing a range of tools for ventures to leverage their social networks and gain new supporters. It brings together generous philanthropically-inclined people who are actively looking for ethical routes to provide backing for socially-positive causes. Backers are rewarded with a variety of benefits, not just financial. Investment is typically £5,000-£30,000.

All venture capitalists, even those backing social ventures, require a significant return on their investment. Social initiatives are no exceptions. However, there are ethical differences. Calculating a financial return on investment (ROI) is quite straightforward and commonplace for many businesses as the ROI is the number of times an investment is earned back by the investor. Such an ROI, however, fails to incorporate other returns like the social, environmental or cultural values (collectively the social impact) that have been created for its different stakeholders. Thus, Social Return On Investment (SROI) models are used to measure and evaluate the impact of the services being delivered to recipients and the wider community. Whilst these have emerged to serve different ethical perspectives they are all designed to capture those values, to inform board members and influence other stakeholders. The common foundation however of all SROI analyses is a rigorous methodology—one that is testable, replicable and verifiable, using a range of performance indicators:

• Feasibility
• Credibility
• Replicable
• Transparency
• Comprehensive
• Accessible
• Useful

See how your SROI measures up! Try the online evaluation tool http://www.socialevaluator.eu .

As someone with a lifetime’s experience running public sector services, I was regularly amazed by the sheer resilience of the human spirit in defiance of significant life challenges. I found relatively few service users who deliberately ‘worked the system’ though this is not how our media portrays it! Most had chaotic lives made so because they were struggling with a barrage of challenges made worse if they were personally disorganised, poorly educated and without belief in self improvement, poorly supported by equally chaotic families. Unsurprisingly, most disliked the ignominy and impersonal processing of our grants and benefits systems, but long-term dependence on state subsidies breeds apathy, low self esteem and poverty of vision – all of which is learned behaviour and can be unlearned relatively inexpensively with mentoring, retraining, volunteering or employment opportunities.

I am now a business mentor specialising in social enterprise and community development (and am also pleased to work from time to time for macrocoaches.co.uk which being government funded is significantly under threat). In January I set up a community volunteering project to harness local energies. The Community Coaching Café now has 32 volunteers from all walks of life. They befriend anyone who needs it: young people, teenage parents, the unemployed, older people, recent immigrants. It is personally developmental for both the befrienders and the listened-to, leaving both parties feel valued and strengthens community networks.

Equally, there are many other caring groups, community leaders and energetic people ‘out there’. Let’s galvanise all our energies and skills to support the Cambridge LEP in its strategic planning for Cambridgeshire’s economy.

We have no-one to blame but ourselves if we don’t!