Over the next month or so you will hopefully see some free and open WiFi appear in the main church at St John’s. WiFi provided like this, in this context, is beginning to go out of fashion these days due to the ubiquity of mobile internet – but we’re not introducing WiFi to be useful, we’re introducing it to be welcoming.

Continue reading at commsblog. →

This morning, the Riots, Communities and Victims panel published their report into the causes of last summers riots. I have’t had time to read the report in full yet, and won’t for a while, so these are my thoughts at this stage. This morning I was on BBC Local Radio (WM and Radio Derby) to talk about the identified causes of the riots – so I’ve blogged here my thoughts on each of the main areas that the report identifies.

Schools
There is some amazing stuff already going on in UK schools to work with young people at risk of getting involved in gang culture or rioting. The trouble is, there clearly is not enough of it. Mentoring programs in schools are fantastic – I probably wouldn’t be the same person today if I hadn’t been part of a mentoring program in my secondary school (not to say I was ‘at risk’ of rioting though) – but this isn’t an easy time for schools/local authorities/whoever to be increasing that – they are still having to save millions every year. But this is where the ‘big society’ (you’d forgotten about that, hadn’t you?) really comes into play; youth work charities, community groups, faith groups and more are well positioned to get involved – and you might be surprised how open to this schools are. XLP (who I mentioned on WM) are a great example of this, by the way.

Poor Parenting
By far the easiest direction to point the riot-blame finger in, while clearly parenting does play a part, we need to be careful and not get carried away. Apart from anything else, if you’re a rioters mum and the world starts slagging you off even more than we have already it’s hardly going to help the family situation. However – I do think this is a good time to talk about the lack of male role models. There are a number of reports (which I don’t have time to find I’m afraid – but this is a rough overview) which highlight the high proportion of single-parent families where the father isn’t present. Combine this with the lack of good male role models in society and schools – and you’ve got a problem for our ‘riot-age’ blokes. Again I want to highlight the value of mentoring programs and the involvement of civil society in addressing this.

Materialism
Materialism is one of those words that can cover so much and become an excuse for an awful lot of things. In this case, taking it purely to mean the emphasis on following trends in material possessions, I don’t think it caused the riots. It may, however, have helped them spread. It’s often the way in civil disorder like this that it is the minority who are out to make a point, and the rest are there just because there’s a riot on and they want to get involved. I’m not saying the extent to which this was the case last summer, but I’m sure it was an element. Stuff = Status, and when some people were presented with the opportunity of getting that stuff for nothing, they took it. This additional volume of rioters may have given  the edge in helping them spread across the country.

Lack of Confidence in the Police
I happen to think the Met do a brilliant job. They have a hugely challenging job, and in light of those unique challenges, I think they do remarkably well. But a lack of confidence in the police is not good, and one thing I think is partly responsible for this is the culture of police automatically being the enemy in so many films and TV shows. We also need to not be cutting neighbourhood policing. Despite what you might think, talking to a friend who works with young people who were actually involved in the riots, it seems community police are relatively popular with young people, and are good at building relationships. It’s a massive challenge to maintain these soft and relational aspects of policing when so much pressure is put on maintaining front line services during cuts. But, ultimately, policing another set of riots will be a hell of a lot more expensive than increasing the number of community officers working with the young people involved, and we would be stupid to ignore that.

So I think my key point is that now, more than ever, is the time for civil society to get involved with young people at risk of becoming next summers rioters. There are a heck of a lot of good people out there, who would make fantastic role models – we just* need to get them into contact with young people through mentoring, community projects, and other initiatives. The report identifies that young people who statistically should have been rioting but weren’t, weren’t because they felt they had something to loose – a stake in their community, and we need to help those who did riot find their stake and get hold of it.

*I’m not suggesting we simply pick people up throw them into mentoring roles by the way, but there are plenty of charities who will happily have you as a volunteer and train you for it.

This post has been brewing for a while now – I mentioned the story to someone the other day and realised I’d never actually blogged about it. Obviously where I’ve not mentioned who people are, that’s because I don’t want to.

We need to start with a bit of back story: Quite a few years ago, while I was at doing my a-levels at a 6th form in south Birmingham, I was involved in running a community project supported by the school. One of the things which that project did was put on a Christmas party for local elderly people (lunch, ballroom dancing, presents from santa, that sort of thing), and that was my main area of involvement. This required funding, and the place we went for funding was our local councillors’ Community Chest fund, which we had access to with the help of a ward support officer.

Tea Dance - from Natalie Wilson on Flickr: CC BY

We applied for the funding we needed, and were approved soon after. All was well. As the event approached we got round to inviting some extra guests, a headteacher from down the road, community centre manager, the councillors, that sort of thing. We also invited the local MP. We invited the local MP because they were nice, friendly, and a popular ‘local figure’ regardless of politics – they would have been a popular ‘special guest’ with the people attending.

The ward support officer found out that we were planning to invite the local MP (I presume they just saw it on a CC’d email or it came up in conversation, nothing malicious). During a planning meeting with the ward support officer, they brought this invitation up – the message was essentially this:

You cannot invite the MP. The councillors do not get on with the MP. If the MP is attending then the councillors will not attend and you will not receive the Community Chest funding.

I can’t remember exactly what was said – and I’m pretty sure the bit about funding withdrawal wasn’t said outright, but that was the message that came over loud and clear.

This was only about 4 weeks before the event, and luckily the invitation was still in my bag (for posting that afternoon), so we accepted it, binned the invite, and carried on.

If this happened today, as you can probably imagine, I wouldn’t let it rest. But that wasn’t really me at the time. But that’s not to say it didn’t annoy me – I (and my colleagues) were seriously pissed off. More at the cheek of the councillors and the lack of choice we had – there was no way we could have got money from anywhere else in four weeks.

From Ell Brown on Flickr: CC BY.

On the day itself our three councillors turned up and (un-announced) brought their colleague from a neighbouring ward – who – it turned out was going to stand as the parliamentary candidate at the next general election. While our three councillors were pretty mediocre party guests, their guest saw the situation as a fantastic opportunity to canvas votes for an election that hadn’t even been set yet. Great.

So all this, along with a few other little niceties they exhibited on the day, left me pretty pee-d off with the whole idea of government and politics-y stuff on a local level. I think I said several times that was the absolute end of me and local government.

Luckily however, last January, I found myself at UKGovcamp, and then at LocalGovcamp in June. I wasn’t really expecting it, but these sort of woke me up to a few things:

• My experience was certainly not representative of council officers the country over, especially in Birmingham.
• There is hope. There’s tonnes of ridiculously crazy innovation and change going on in local government – things can and should be changed.
• There is more to local councils than what I had come across (and written off). This is the most important thing I think, I’d experienced such a tiny bit and used it as an excuse to write off anything related to the word ‘council’.

I now know that local government rocks. I get excited about the innovation and change happening in local councils, and am (ironically) now often found defending them & their services during arguments. I’ve even met a few councillors who seem to understand the point of their job and care about it – and heard of a lot more.

#localgovcamp 2011 - from 1gl on Flickr: CC BY-NC-ND

This turn-around didn’t really happen overnight, after one magic revelation – I just slowly started discovering more and more good stuff that was going on – and realised how blinkered I’d been to just my own experience.

There tonnes of things that showed me how cool localgov is – but here’s just a few people, who’s blogs I’ve been reading for a while, who are inspiring through their innovation and determination to do things better – and they deserve a quick thank you: Dan Slee, James Cattell, Carl Haggerty, Simon Gray and Lou Kidney. That’s quite a comms-heavy list, but that’s only because that’s one of my big interests at the moment, there’s plenty of this stuff elsewhere too.

Annoyingly I can’t remember who most of the councillors I’ve met at these events are, and I haven’t managed to find any good blogging ones yet – but it’s fairly safe to say that this lot are good eggs and represent something special.

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Govcamp has the power to change opinions that are pretty set in. That’s powerful. And it’s one of the reasons I have so much admiration for the event and the people who embody the community around it.

Aside from the obvious, I think I’ve also learnt a valuable lesson about letting small experiences influence my viewpoint on something much wider. It’s dangerously easy to let it happen.