Anger is an energy

Cathy Come Home was a BBC television play from 1966 about the lives of people experiencing homelessness.  Back then, our popular vision of 21^st century living was unlikely to include a society where people struggling to find work are handed sanctions instead of support and depend on food handouts to survive.  But that is where we have got to in the current script for Aspirational Britain. Ken Loach, Director of Cathy Come Home, has called for ‘public rage’ on the issue. 

In 1966, Loach recalls, people who learned a trade could get a job for life.  Now there seem fewer guarantees for working people to be in control of their destiny.  Loach sees it as part of a system of ‘conscious cruelty’.   In a nutshell, the popular image of ‘skivers and striders’ has manipulated the narrative of the ‘deserving of the underserving poor’ to cover up the failures to manage a changing economic system as capitalism enters a new phase of development.  Indeed the ‘politics of cruelty’ feels an apt phrase for a period of modern government presiding over growing levels of division in wealth and assets.  It was symbolic that Loach’s comments quoted in The Guardian were reported on the same day that Joseph Rowntree’s report on Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion    painted a dismal view of a society where significant numbers of young people are being hung out to dry (Four times more likely to be unemployed, 5 times more likely to be on zero hours contract, with the numbers of kids in poverty in private rented housing doubled over ten years). These days, young Cathy’s are being told to F-off as the welfare state is shrink-wrapped before our eyes.

Cathy Come Home’s portrayal of homelessness and poverty on TV in 1966 was quickly followed with the establishment of charities Crisis and Shelter. While public interest never followed through into systemic reform of the causes of homelessness, it set the ball rolling for a wave of innovations, including the introduction of the Foyer Movement to address youth disadvantage, and the Places for Change programme to transform services for people experiencing rough sleeping.  Fast forward from 1966 to 2015, and where is the rage that Loach calls for?  What has really changed in how we ‘deal’ with disadvantage in modern Britain? What would housing campaigner Shelia Mckechnie say, who served as a Director at Shelter in 1985 where she helped to set up the Foyer Foundation in the 1990s? I expect she would have written a far better blog than I can.  She would have certainly written something in the void.

Over the last few years, I’ve met countless people defending the use of negative charity advertising against my critique that it does nothing to engage public consciousness in changing the narrative of disadvantage.  The consequent dangers become very evident in the ‘conscious cruelty’ played out in the reform of welfare and tagging of so-called ‘skivers’. After all, nobody does the narrative of disadvantage better than a Government seeking to deploy austerity to reduce the size of the state and trickle down its debt.  Every exploitative fundraising poster and self-serving campaign only fuels a social consciousness that is unable to see beyond the stereotypes and is increasingly mistrusting of the message.  It is when we are challenged to see other people as we do our own children or our self, that we realise the people we dehumanise as ‘homeless’ are worth investing in with a ‘hand up rather than hand out’.  This is the whole point and purpose of what I called Advantaged Thinking at the Foyer Federation: to understand people as people and thus find the best ways to develop their abilities, skills, resources and connections so they stand a chance of thriving in the future. The real issue is why we can't  create advantage in everyone instead of our obsession with disadvantage.

So where is the ‘rage’ tonight, this week, this month, this year, about what is happening to young people - and what we can do to make a difference to harness the abilities of those in danger of being 'youth labour's lost' (Demos, 2011)?  For Cathy to come anywhere near home now, charity needs to find its capacity and locus of control to inspire meaningful social change.  And by inspiration, I mean the 1% genius type of solutions, not the 99% of fundraising perspiration it has got mistaken for - understandably though, in part, through the current squeeze on resource.  It’s not Cathy who needs a sanction; it’s the ‘conscious cruelty’ that defines what we cruelly mistake for leadership in the politics of our times. 

 John Lydon once sang that ‘anger is an energy’.  Some anger about the lack of an alternative offer might be a good thing.  But the rage Loach is calling for is best defined as the articulate voice of people who give a shit, have an idea, and can focus on the mission to deploy the resource required to actually get it done. 

www.inspirechilli.com -

The Armour of Amour

As the sound of gunfire hit Paris, I received an email with the subject heading ‘love’.  Inside, the words breathed its opposite: someone who decided that my writing about love was a sign of evil.  I had been ‘noted’ it accused – unlike the writer, instantly dismissible among the horrors of the night.

Like all coincidences, receiving an unloving email at a moment of such tragic significance must have a meaning.   Somewhere between young men firing machine guns at a culture they rejected with such profound hate, and our growing mistrust of what is and is not good around us, there will be a connection we need to make about trust, belonging, and love or 'amour' as they say in France.

There is lots to feel proud about in our collective response to Paris. But it can’t remove our focus from an age where the connections between people, our sense of social inclusion, grows increasingly fractured through the economic and social challenges that face us.  The roots and foundations of our social values are shaken on a daily basis in tiny ways that the horror of Friday explodes into consciousness from a different but linked perspective.  While we defend ourselves with the notion that these people we call terrorists were not human, we fool ourselves from the truth that the atrocity committed perpetuates throughout history our dangerous capacity for exclusive extremes.  The question is, how can humans be driven to commit actions of such inhumanity?  The ability to love and hate at the same time, to do and be in entirely different ways, is the darkness within which everything inauthentic, manipulative and deceitful lives in our history.  Exploitative fundraising practices and the policies of austerity might feel a very long distance from suicide bombers on the streets, but they are all on the same tarnished road to an extreme place where our humanity for each other slowly dies.

It would be easy to think that charity has no purpose to offer at a time when missile strikes and security become the order of the day.  But I can think of no other moment when there is such a desperate need for charity to shine out the leadership our age calls for.  The real war is far bigger than a country or cause. The war for our future is as much with ourselves, our concept of what it is to be human, and our capacity to create the conditions to maximise love, trust and belonging in our society and world.  It is not just additional armed guards that will protect us now; it’s also the arming of values and purpose for a better world. The armour of 'amour'.

I feel no shame to believe in a sector that should nurture communities of love within itself and those it cares for.  I feel nothing to hide about demanding that youth charity should be shaping communities of greater belonging and authenticity, for which its ability to collaborate, create meaning, harness diminishing resource, and believe in what young people can do, all need to be upped in urgency. 

At the time of the London riots in 2011, the Foyer Federation wrote a powerful analysis about the importance of giving young people a stake-in-society, and the positive effects for us all when young people have something of value they do not wish to lose.  It’s a vision worth holding onto over the winter ahead of us.  While we react to the threat of terror around us, we must also pro-act to create its opposite through an equal intent for good.  How we choose to love and invest in our young people now might never have been so important.

www.inspirechilli.com

Why we are missing one percent

Say ‘one percent’ to someone from a housing association, and the face that will greet you is unlikely to be smiling with energy.  One percent has become the vexed question of how associations can find unplanned savings to fill the sudden hole in the fuselage exposed by the Government’s demand for 1% reduction in social housing rents to restrict the spiraling costs of welfare.  A redistribution in cuts, as one put it to me.  Perhaps the choice of one percent is purely mathematical, but it’s a phrase of symbolic depth that can offer insights into the current drama preoccupying minds and budgets.

2006 saw the heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune release a film called One Percent.  It was a documentary alerting us to the dangers of a world in which a small group of super rich owned nearly half of the wealth in America.  The phrase stuck, and by 2015 Sam Wilkin was sharing the low down of how we too could join the world’s new elite through ‘Wealth Secrets of the One Percent’. The commodification of the aspiration to ‘make it’ as a member of capitalism’s VIP class had a catchy name in the new evolution of one percent societies.  It’s a trend with many dangers, as outlined in the stats from the Amex-Harrison ‘Survey of Affluence and Wealth in America’ (2012).   The behaviour patterns of the one percent in the survey suggested a sense of increasing disengagement in risk taking activity to benefit others, played out against a society in which the one percent were increasingly vilified by those not in the club (Amex-Harrison, 2012).   Part of the Government’s justification for its ‘one percent’ is that housing associations, with large surpluses, have become part of their own one-percent style club in the ecosystem of social profits.  Only that view is to grossly simplify a more complex picture.  A one percent cut for a housing association in the top deck might in the end be affordable, by reducing services and switching priorities; but for smaller organisations, without the luxury of choice, one percent can mean the difference between running a service and merely keeping it going.  As ever, our approach to distributing assets and deficits across society ends up deepening existing economic divisions.

When the cuts are played out, what becomes evident is that they are the lazy policy tool of a system that has lost an important one percent in its thinking mind.  I refer here to the 1% genius in Thomas Edison’s famous equation of what should drive our 99% perspiration of doing.  A one percent cut is now defining business decisions in a way that lacks good business sense.  We have all the perspiration at the moment with none of the genius.  Sure, savings to the public purse might be made from reduced welfare costs for social rents, but the quality of support available to people in welfare will in some cases be reduced as organisations without capacity cut off limbs to keep crawling.  In the long term, that means social savings today will be stolen back at twice the cost in whatever system we have left to pay for the carnage of future care for those affected.  Why? Because a one percent cut is not a solution to the question of how best to support people through welfare and what happens to them; it’s merely a reaction to the aspiration that we should spend less on doing it. 

The important thing is here is the question of technology.  The one percent cut is a form of economic technology that looks like a hybrid between the Trotter van from 'Only Fools and Horses' and a surgeon trying to delicately reshape the human brain with a jackhammer. It’s as lacking in sophistication as it is in ability to achieve a positive outcome.  I use the term technology here for a reason.  The one percent in Edison’s phrase is very much a different type of technology – the genius to find the source of thinking and action that can transform what we do; or what entrepreneur Peter Thiel calls the jump from ‘zero to one’. Applied in our social context, it should be the one percent that focuses us on the deeper questions of how we do welfare and how we provide people with access to homes.

I don’t think our welfare system requires either a one percent cut or a one percent increase; nor do the housing association social rents linked to them.  What is needed is a different approach to what welfare is meant to be and do; what its outcomes are meant to achieve; what type of society we are trying to create together; and how we can make the smartest investment decisions to maximise our potential.   For that to happen, services need ‘freedom with expectation’ to create the small steps out of our current game of coping with disadvantages and cuts – the type of ‘one percenter’ sprints, kicks and tackles which, in Australian rules football, are known to win games.  Welfare is fast becoming a losing game that needs to be revitalised and strengthened with a different carrot and stick.

Should the Government and social good sector wish to trade in the Trotter van and jackhammer, what and where is the technology to replace it? The technology of one percent inspiration is not easy to source, partly because our understanding of inspiration is wholly inadequate to the task.  Countless programmes, initiatives and organisations use the inspiration label, but few have ever properly researched into the DNA of what inspiration is, how it can be harnessed, and its huge potential to transform current work.  While vast amounts are now written about theory of change logic models, there is little attention to the science and art of inspiration.  Now is not the time to buffer up the Trotter Van for one more drive round the policy block, one more spin in charity’s Nurburgring of funding crashes.  We must  look into and beyond ourselves for how we can find a different technology to reimagine our futures.  I call that the technology of Social Inspiration.  I can’t guarantee it will get you a life of wealth, but I’m 99% sure it will find the one percent we are missing.

The Social Inspirator’s curriculum is due for release in the early New Year at www.inspirechilli.com