anti-poverty environmental projects

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Anti-Poverty Environmental Projects:

Working Through The Practical Issues

Written for the the "Making the Links Seminar" organised by the Health in Your Environment

Voluntary Sector Forum and the Nottingham Health Action Group on 11th June 1999.

Introduction - devising holistic concepts systems is easier than implimenting them........

The task of finding a common concept system to unify social, environmental, health and economic policy is

actually not so difficult. But implimenting it, making it work tangibly, is a hard slog. In this paper I want to

describe such a concept system, one which I have been working to over a number of years, but then to go

onto describe many of the practical problems that arise in implimentation. It is largely based on my

personal experience as a mental health worker, interested in questions of local economy, developing an

environmental project called Ecoworks, where we encourage the involvement of people with mental health

problems. In describing the many problems actually experienced over the years developing Ecoworks, I

want to stress, so that the rest of this essay is not too discouraging, that doing anything that is relatively

new, either to oneself as an individual, or that is new more generally, is bound to be difficult. The difficulties

- or challenges! - are both because any individual doing anything new has to acquire the knowledge to

develop the orientation and skills to make good decisions - but also because, when one is pioneering a

process which is socially innovative, one does not have access to a supportive context and environment.

There is no matching infrastructure of support services, few like minded people to work with or to fall back

on, the issues are not only unfamiliar to you, acting as developer, they are unfamiliar to everyone else as

well - including funders; the techniques are experimental, untested and as yet non standard; the tools for the

job may exist somewhere in the UK and Europe but not in a local store; the 3D designs are few in number,

the practical material supplies that you want, are not conveniently available and so on. However, as you pioneer and other people and institutions catch on and latch on so the environment changes too - it

becomes easier for other people to do what you found difficult or even impossible. Other people pass the

point where you failed or gave up exhausted.

One possible holistic concept system

Economic and training programmes nowadays aim at "socially excluded people"; social and health services

work with vulnerable people at risk with a "high dependency" in "community care programmes";

community regeneration programmes aim to help "multiply disadvantaged people" in areas of "urban and

rural deprivation". While it is not totally true these are mostly one and the same group of people looked atfrom the different points of view of different public agencies. A unfiying concept system starts with that as

point one. Second point - a large part of the work to solve the problems of this common group of people

can be considered as linked to environmental agendas - this has already been de facto recognised by many

officials and activists in Nottingham in the discussions held during the so called FEAT seminars - on Food,

Energy Efficiency, Asthma and Transport. In each case the ideas from the environmental agenda were seen

as solutions, or linked to solutions to a variety of health, social and economic agendas - healthy and

cheaper eating, warmer and healthier homes, cleaner air, more exercise. This leads on to the third point in

the concept system - a need to go for partnerships in which the environmental activists, the community

regenerators, the health and social service workers start doing things together. The fourth point is in regard

to the insitutional and geographical location for these partnerships. While there is a place for community



entreprises aimed at formal employment much of the location for these activities is centred round home,

gardens and neighbourhood and, more generally lifestyles. The link to "the economy" is, at least in part,

through the domestic economy - a changed allocation of time and activities outside of paid employment.

Thinking of home and neighbourhood as if it were itself a production unit this is about thinking how you can

save on resources used ( e.g. water, energy, cash) and increase outputs ( e.g. self supplied food,

household artfacts etc.). The target groups to be helped are, in any case, often unemployed or non

employed. They are helped by organising activities and measures which should bring down living costs and

resource usage - if you cycle to work (and you don't have an accident) you should be healthier. This will

also bring down petrol costs. If your house is energy efficient your fuel bills are less as well as being better

for your health and the environment. If you grow part of your own food, using self made compost, your

food bills come down. The common idea here is personal energy and work in DIY activities brings down

(fuel based) energy and financial costs. (While the economy is effected through the domestic economy

there are at least some jobs to be gained in the process as these things require matching support services,

resources centres and pooled community services - whose formal organisation creates jobs - e.g.

employees in private or community DIY centres, community garden organisers, employees giving energy

efficiency advice and/or installing insulation).

Virtual change and real change

Possibly the main feature of this strategy for me is that it stands or falls on its tangible quality. It must be

possible to specify for projects a what, a where, a when, a why, a who, (and a how). The who must be

people whose first names you know, the what must involve an object that you could take a photograph of

or that you could photograph someone doing (if its a healthy eating project then that means things like

carrots, cabbages and lettuces, if it is an energy project it might be a solar panel or an layer of insulation

material etc, if it is a transport and exercise project then its someone riding a bike etc.)

You can approach healthy eating by researching what people eat and what you think they ought to eat and

then organise discussions of professionals and academics about what people ought to eat followed up by

making TV programmes and printing nutrition information leaflets that you leave in the leaflet racks of localhealth centres. You may go and talk in schools about what people ought to eat. Often programmes never

leave the realms of communication - and the work solely exists as written and spoken words (and

pictures). When these seem to not be achieving much you organise new meetings whose aim is to rethink

something called the "strategy". What changes the virtual programmes (e.g. virtual nutrition - what you think

they should eat) into real programmes is when it changes people's activity and relationships to the physical

tangible world. (real nuritition - what people actually eat).

Extra effort versus greater convenience - not, at first sight, a winning strategy

But investing personal energy to produce change in and around the home, garden, neighbourhood andlocality means extra effort or at least attempts to change long held comfy habits. A programme involving

extra effort is never going to be a panacea and it actually runs counter to most of the economic trends

aimed at the home where what is being sold by the supermarkets and departments stores are arrangements

for getting things done quicker and with greater simplicity. They sell gadgets, meals and other services

aimed at convenience (but which are fuel based energy intensive and ultimately, environmentally

destructive). To compete it is necessary to offer a different kind of package. In the past I have argued that

the attraction point in this other package needs to be sociability - i.e. you attract people to get involved and

active by making them fun, making them re-creational (the play on words is deliberate) and by offering

better and new relationships in common activities. This is because disadvantaged people are commonly

socially isolated. To bring them together in convivial activities is meeting a different kind of need. Here is



another wonderful idea, which, once again in the implimentation, turns out not to be so simple - sometimes

the interpersonal dynamics of projects can evolve quite nastily, despite one's initial good intentions.

You can also argue, of course, as I have done before, that the socially excluded people are poor people

and unemployed people - you can argue that they have the time on their hands and no money to buy the

conveniences anyway. So they don't actually have much of a choice and a strategy which puts more energy

into making their domestic lives more efficient is about as good as can be done for them. If, for example,

they have had breakdowns then they might have seen their whole previous way of managing their lives in

ruins and be looking for new activities, with time on their hands and not much chance of finding paid

employment. Nevertheless there is a problem here - problem number one. The danger is of a widening

split in which well paid officials, enthused by the new policy option, encourage less well off people to put

more effort and energy into making their domestic arrangements cheaper, cleaner and healthier - but as for

themselves they will continue to live with the "I'm too busy to have the time myself and need to buy a new

car to get in from my commuter village" high income plus convenience lifestyle. Observing such a widening

split the less well off are likely to end up thinking: "Yes, it would be cheaper to grow my own but I'm not a

gardener. In fact I'd rather have a job and buy the stuff, neatly and cleanly packaged, like you, from the

supermarket." or "It would be cheaper to get on my bike but you've got a car and I'd rather have one too -

especially as people like you might knock me off it".

Perhaps therefore we should rephrase one of those moral commandments that the Bible gives us -

recommend to others only what you already practice yourself.

Research and Development

So it is easier to find a concept system than to find a logistical system to make that concept system work.

Of course working problems through is what pioneering work actually consists of, no more and no less.

"Problem" is a word that means things are not straightforward and that you have to (re)search in areas

where you have no previous orientation and don't know the ropes. Doing this successfully or failing

depends on the resources available to you and the amount of tolerance for your trial and error approachthat the organisations that fund you are prepared to give.

Research and Development Departments are to be found in most large organisations in the commercial

field - R and D takes place also in the form of contracts to universities. Commercial organisations are

prepared to pay for R and D in order to continue to stay ahead of competition. In dynamic organisations R

and D is an integral part of their development plans. In R and D departments it is recognised that things are

developed on a trial and error basis. However in the environmental, social and health fields, as well as in

community economic regeneration, many of the new approaches are tried out by small not for profit

voluntary organisations. These small groups are usually dependent on inflexible funding programmes.

Funders almost always want you to specify in advance exactly what it is that you are going to provide andexactly how you are going to measure this. The increasingly tight way in which funders want to tie down in

advance what is to be provided leaves very little room for anything that is experimental, that involves

protypes, or that is done on a trial and error basis.

Organisational nightmares - working with people whose live are in chaos

I think this is important. At first sight the domestic economy orientation seems to mean that the intended

activities are relatively small scale and therefore simple to organise. Unlike those regneration strategies

which are about attracting huge inward investment for factories and offices, activities for home and garden

seem within the reach of community level organisation. However, once again, it is quite often not as simple



as that. Working in domestic and community settings with disadvantaged people actually involves some

very specific difficulties. For example, when you do not pay people, when you do not tie them down in

employment contracts, their involvement can be quite "crumbly" and sporadic. It can actually be quite

difficult to tie down the days and times that you can actually come together to get things done. This is true

for anyone involved as a volunteer, "disadvantaged" or not, because voluntary activities often compete with

domestic commitments which people need to be flexible about outside of their working hours - the need to

take children to a doctor, fitting in the shopping, putting up a visiting relative or friend. When you try to

work with people who have a variety of social and economic problems voluntary commitment can be even

more difficult to keep regular and consistent. Domestic relationships are likely to be stressed and

motivation, morale and self confidence quite low. The ability to sustain a regular, patterned and dependable

involvement with your bright idea for a holistic project will frequently crumble in the face of a mixture of

personal financial crises, crises brought about by interviews with the employment or welfare services,

disappointed hopes bringing about bouts of demobilising depression, illnesses or the illnesses of

dependents and relatives, crises creating distractions, forgetfulness and hangovers, incidents in which

people are the victims of crime and so on.

In these circumstances what can then happen is that paid workers structure their time chasing after people

whose involvement is irregular and haphazard in a way that is difficult to integrate with the need to organise

regular meetings with other people in the office. In the case of one of the projects I am involved with weare trying to help disadvantaged people renovate their own homes in an eco-friendly way. We are to be

monitored by our funders on how well we do this so the worker is under pressure to build up the numbers

and fits in with when her clients have the will and ability to do the work. She juggles her days in order to do

this - making it very difficult for her to organise jointly with other workers. The attempt to involve and

connect to people whose lives are in chaos may feed back chaos into the organisation that is trying to help.

In most formal organisations the normal hours and discipline of work and work style contracts imposes a

structure to involvement whereby people are either involved or they are not at the premises of their

employer and this enables a routine and regular pattern that makes possible joint activity. Working to try to

renovate the domestic and non work lives of disadvantaged people in their own space, in activity which isnon contracted, can create horrendously frustrating dynamics.

Working with people who are not very able - when social and environmental objects clash

There are other poblems too.....Many of the people who have had mental health or other social and health

problems are very capable and an environmental or other project may be just the thing that inspires them

for a new beginning to their lives. We have had in Ecoworks several such people who have got a lot out of

the opportunity and found in it new directions and new interests. This is when the environmental objectives

work well for personal rehabilitation as people pursue social and economic goals. However there are other

people who have given up. They have become institutionalised and/or are very lacking in confidence. Theyneed a lot of support to do anything at all. Inside projects they may get picked on, or take out their

frustrations picking on someone else. It becomes hard work working through complicated and bitchy

interpersonal dynamics. Quite rightly and quite justifiably their (statutory service) support workers are

always on the look out for new openings and new places for them and they can find their way into multi-

functional projects like Ecoworks. What then can happen is that the environmental objectives and the

social objectives, rather than functioning well together, come to be in conflict. One or two very dependent

people in a wider group can sometimes be carried along and grow in the process - but once a larger

number of more dependent people enters the frame the whole character of a group can change.

Paid or volunteer support workers, whose main interest is in the environmental or production activity, find



they have become mainly care workers. Perhaps they find themselves out of their depth in the interpersonal

and psychological issues coming up, or unable to devote themselves to the activities and objectives that

was their main interest. At this point a number of things may happen - if such key organisers are volunteers

they may decide they want paying to continue or, alternatively they may decide to leave. Or, yet again, they

may use the organisations that they are in to set up inititiatives and projects which are vehicles for their own

interests - which evolve separately from the social side of the project. The different objectives start to

evolve along different activities with different people on different days on different tracks...........

When paid workers are not very capable

Activities and projects aimed at disadvantaged people can provide environments where people can realise

their full potential. People suddenly find they have unexpected abilities. Their confidence grows and they

move on and through the organisations set up for them to other things. But in some organisations it is not

only the less able volunteers that get stuck - so too may less able paid workers. Moreover, as time passes

the old guard of once radical organisations can lose interest in the work but not in the money and be unable

or unwilling to move on. Organisations can lose their way but keep on receiving the public sector hand outs

- the officials who oversee their funding see that all is not well but are unable to see how they can be

replaced.

As the long standing workers struggle or lose interest it is vital to bring in new blood to renew and recreate

organisations. However bringing in new people is not always so easy especially when an organisation has

gone stale. It is difficult enough at most times. Creating activities that people can access and get involved

with when they want them can be intensly frustrating. What typically happens is that one creates a process

where, in the early stages people come and want to get involved before you have done the necessary

preparatory work. At the time of writing there are people interested in our catering project before our

catering trailer is yet finished and the prior work on health and safety and logistics has still to been done..

After a few weeks the people we envisaged as potential cooks have disappered. Alternative activites were

on offer to them that they could start there and then.

As a project developer I frequently go through weeks in which the days seem to alternate between steps

forward and steps backward. As people fall away and my morale sags, another person steps forward and

I become more optomistic again. I have reasonable confidence that in the projects I develop people will

keep on coming forward but it is a continual worry as to whether they will have the skills, confidence, time

and ability to stay involved and become part of the activity nework or team. I know from experience that in

the various activities some of the people who become involved will, inevitably, drop out fairly quickly. A

few will adhere to whatever the project is and become regular participants. Some will get a lot out of the

project, perhaps taking up responsibilities inside it.. The next stage of their involvement is that they will end

up wanting to stay with project and to get a job with it. At this stage things can start to turn sour. The most

sour circumstances are where the chances of finding money are slim and where the keen volunteer findsthemselves working alongside people who are paid but who have lost interest in their jobs or who are not

very competent. They are putting in a lot and taking out little and it is inevitable that they clash with people

who are taking out a lot and not putting in much. In such circumstances tensions can become extreme.

Discontent builds and the volunteer may come to resent the pay of the worker and leave, pulling down

some of the social networks and activities that have formed around them while they worked hard for no

pay....

This may leave behind shrinking numbers in tiny cliques that are actually not very capable but are highly

dependent and who cannot do anything else. The radical and innovative character of the projects

disappear. Paid workers find they are managing non productive day centres that do not really interest them



- and the emphasis turns more and more on support and less and less on whatever the original positive

agenda was. The inward looking clique of users make it very uncomfortable for newcomers...

Sustainability - what is left several years after the PR photocall

I think it necessary to see things in the longer term. The whole social welfare, regeneration and

environmental field is full of projects and indviduals who do short term projects, set things up and then

move on. Indeed some organisations specialise in the quick turnover of short term projects. This is not

always a bad thing since some people will only get involved in things which they see as short term - they

cannot and will not commit themselves to longer things. Many activities in the home and garden andneighbourhood are short term. The organisation of events rather than projects is in many cases very

valuable in its own right. Ecoworks gets a lot out of organising seasonal festivals. However with some

things some people do have to sustain the longer term process. In a community garden, you have a

wonderful venue for seasonal festivals but to keep the garden itself requires at least one person who will

provide the long term continuity, the framework for the involvement of the short term sporadic volunteers.

Sustaining the long term is important but the time horizons of many organisations is a year, or three - set by

funding cycles. During this period funding agencies are concerned but then lose interest. Workers create

funding applications, they set up projects, making a name for themselves as innovators and then disappear

to a more exciting job somewhere else. Other people are left taking up the post and break their backs

making the brilliant ideas work.. Organisations move into an area, make promises, work with people to

plant up a site, get photocalls for their PR brochures and funding strategies, then are gone. A year later the

plants are gone, ripped out by local vandals and not a single person from the local community that helped

would do it again because they are bitter and disillusioned by what happened to their hard work for local

people.Their impression is that they were really there to justify the pay of the organisers.

The relevant watchword here is sustainability. Many organisations and initiatives gain a reputation for

achievements in the honeymoon phase of their work - before the problems emerged. What gets

remembered at conferences is the enthusiastic founder proclaiming the message that has inspired thefunders. In the honeymoon years people got involved and things went well. But 5 years later the same idea

of the organisation is still being proclaimed, except now it is because those who are left behind want to

keep their jobs. At the same time the reality behind the facade is much sadder. Newcomers who are

attracted to the organisation discover after a while that things are not up to scratch, try to change things but

hit a wall of indifference or hostility and leave.

The devil is in the detail - pitfalls which are obvious with hindsight

The appearance and the essence of things are often in contradiction. When one starts out with a new idea

one cannot possibly forsee all the pitfalls and issues which only reveal themselves in the process of implimenting them. Project plans forsee processes and look into a distant time frame. Everything seen at a

distance appears smaller than when it is right up close. Right up close the details are visible and, as the

saying goes, the "devil is in the detail". Working through these details is not intrinsically difficult if you have

the time, money and support, but in a tiny organisation that is just what you are often lacking. In a small

organisation you have a number of diseconomies of the smallscale to grapple with:

(1) You are unlikely to have the range of specialist in house expertise that you need and have to look for

this among friends, allies and volunteers who, to repeat, may have other agendas and priorities or find it

difficult to maintain a sustained involvement. Take the Ecoworks catering trailer project for example.

Money was granted in a bid to kit out a trailer with solar technologies to provide a place to prepare food



at the Ecoworks allotment site in hygienic conditions. This is a good example of a project that strives

towards a "holistic approach" because it is about encouraging healthy eating, the take up of allotments,

involving people with mental health problems. At the time of writing the trailer is being converted to use

solar water heating. But putting the combination of aims together creates problems in implimentation since

one is off the beaten track in what one is trying to do with few resources to do this. The installation of the

solar water heater on the trailer involves technical skills none of the paid workers in Ecoworks has or has

time to learn. It was always envisaged we would bring in support to do it. And we have. A lecturer at

Nottingham Trent University is doing the work with his student group. This is one of the "partnerships" that

is generally hailed as the way forward. Yet this has inevitably meant that the work has to fit when the

student group and lecturer could do it -i.e. when they have time. The work has taken longer than we

thought because it had to be juggled around term times, exams, student assessments and the other

commitments of the lecturer. Involving mental health service users has been possible but the involvement

has then come to be a bit of an add on because they have to fit in with what is possible for the students and

lecturer. Involving a variety of organisations in an ad hoc "partnership" has been possible but this too has

involved considerable liaison - the other groups who have been prepared to help have been in Derby and

in Wales.

(2) When the resources are limited the scope for error in the usual trial and error process of prototype

development is not there. The money is not there if mistakes are made to have another go and this puts anextra stress on the technical developers, making the process a lot more nerve wracking. In the case of the

catering trailer the design issues proved much more complex than previously thought and several possible

designs were worked through juggling to find the optimal design which takes into account issues of safety,

cost, robustness and ease of use with the installed solar water heating.

(3) Issues that are obvious with hindsight in practice only turn up when you have started and radically

determine the nature of the project. In the case of the catering trailer there have been extra running costs

which we had not thought of - like insurance. Making a provision for insurance seems pretty obvious but it

isn't when you have only a few hours to put together a bid before a deadline and, in any case the financial

pot is only for capital and not for running expenses. This in turn pushes us towards finding revenues....

Pitfalls that emerge as a project evolves -

Then there are issues which arise which, even with hindsight, do not seem obvious. For example it was

necessary for the catering trailer to be found a secure place that it could be parked when not in use (which

is also a condition of the insurance deal), where its food content could be loaded and unloaded from. We

needed to find expertise in catering, food safety and hygiene too. These combined influences have almost

inevitably driven Ecoworks into a partnership with the mental health rehab project, SPAN, at Foster Drive

at Woodthorpe in Nottingham where there is a locked car park, training kitchens, a catering worker who is

sympathetic to working with us and, what is more, there is contact with mental health users who are our target group for involvement. But association with SPAN at its Foster Drive base had unforeseen

consequences. The issue of finding volunteers has suddenly become complicated because SPAN users do

catering work for which they are paid (therapeutic earnings). In the original Ecoworks concept the use of

the trailer at our allotments was seen solely as being by unpaid volunteers who were up there anyway.

However the people who might have done this have moved on and the garden worker feels that if we want

to do catering we need new people. The idea of non paid new volunteers has however become an

apparent non-goer if operating to and from SPAN, when SPAN itself pays their people. Users of the

mental health service who have so far expressed an interest in doing work with the catering trailer have

automatically assumed that there would be money involved and have been rather taken aback to find out

that this was not the original idea. In any case there is the extra cost of running a trailer - insurance, gas, the



extra diesel involved in towing and so on which Ecoworks must find a way of getting back.

I have dwelled on the catering trailer project to show how what is at first sight a simple idea turns into a

huge managerial challenge to a part time worker, making the princely sum of £700 take home pay a month,

with many other projects to support as well. When the project was first bid for I knew there would be

problems, because there always are, but it seemed simple enough. We would buy a trailer, hand it over to

the technical boffin contacts of Ecoworks, take it back from the boffins a few months later, hand it over to

the garden organiser, who would tow it up to the allotments to be used by the normal volunteers to prepare

their food. This simplified picture misses out the detailed issues that arose in the process - none of these

issues is particularly difficult on its own and none of the issues are insurmountable. Single people do run

catering trailers after all. However, adding on the innovative elements and then slipping the catering trailer

into the rest of the organisation has meant a need to learn about and develop safety policies and

procedures covering gas safety, towing safety, food hygiene hazard assessments and water safety. It has

involved developing accounting arrangements; it means the recruitment, training, and supervision of future

volunteers; it involves acquiring kitchen and other equipment, developing funding monitoring arrangements;

it requires liaison with other organisations and working out agreements for joint working. To repeat it is not

that any of these things on its own is particularly difficult....it is that the list of tasks seems currently to be

endless......

When you are the bottom of some else's priority list

One of the greatest ironies I have recently experienced is of getting really sucked into these and other

responsibilities and so getting pulled away from devoting enough time to another project. This other project

has been quite successful in every respect but one - it hasn't got enough money to pay the people who

have been organising it. The project is a craft group, mainly of women, who come together every week to

recycle textiles with sewing and other artistic skills. The group that I neglected, then came close to

collapsing because of the lack of funding but then came back from the brink, the crisis provoking hurried

action that obliged me to do some emergency work bringing it to the attention of officials who then stepped

in with the money to save it. This crisis is, however, instructive as an example of the kind of paradoxes thatoccur in a sector where a lot depends on volunteers who, when they get something out of the group do not

necessarily want to hang around. Because the group was highly valued the number of participants rose.

These were mainly people who had had mental health problems. The two volunteers who were running it

had been involved for three years without pay. One wanted to move on and get a job. Being involved in

the group had helped her but the success of the group has, ironically, meant losing her.... The other

volunteer is now skint. With the numbers for whom she was taking responsibility increasing it suddenly

became too much - especially when she still seemed to have no prospect of earning anything. She and her

partner were getting sick of being used and feeling themselves to be on the bottom of other people's

priority list, despite her long running loyalty and commitment. With my other commitments I had been

moving at a snails pace towards helping get this group charitable status and getting bids in for it. Recycling

fabrics was not sexy for big money and having to spend time developing things like the catering trailer

turned my attention away. Then the crisis occurred. Fortunately, when they found that they were about to

lose a group that was highly valued the relevant officials in social services moved quickly to give support.

A unified concept system for combining social, environmental, health and economic initiatives at the local

level is easier to think up than to actualise. Sometimes the objectives - social, environmental,

rehabilitation/therapeutic and economic - work well together but they often conflict. Because taking place

at the local level, and involving small scale domestic, home and garden level activities, it seems as if the

managerial and logistical aspects of organising the activities should be relatively accessible and

sraightforward .It seems as if these things should be well within the capabilities of the small community level



groups which draw in and train local disadvantaged people in an empowering learning process. This

viewpoint also is far too simplified. Although many of the activities taken on their own are rather simple, in

their combination, working with volunteers, and organised with funding that must be accounted for, and in

organisations that must be managed and work to constitutions, there are considerable organisational

difficulties. There is a shortage of managerial and organisational talent to keep the show on the road and to

keep pushing it forward.

Management training for the Third Sector is useful........up to a point

In recent weeks I have come across several examples of training schemes for social and environmentalentrepreneurs. There is an MA in Social Innovations at the University of East Anglia, there are NVQ3

accredited courses in managing sustainable community enterprises; there are cascade training schemes for

"social animateurs" focused on socially excluded groups spcifically focused on developing knowledge of

European Union programmes (the Cicero Project); there are developments occuring transnationally - e.g.

MOPS organised by the Social Work Departments of the Universities of Hamburg and Hannover creating

a Curriculum for Professionals in the Third System - "to enable local people to be partners for the

improvement of the social, cultural and economical infrastructures of their neighbourhood". There is

certainly a need for these kind of training activities - and yet I still have mixed feelings. The reason is that

my experience tells me that one learns above all else on the job and working over a very long term. This

gives you a feeling for situations and people which, as I have shown, is even for experienced people,

frequently wrong, but at least an approximate orientation to what is possible and what is not. No short term

formal training programme can substitute for the experience of taking decisions without full infomation

(about people, about technical processes, knowledge of how long things will take, funding etc) and under

time pressure. Academics are often like media people or consultants -their involvement is as short term

visitors and they can get a very superficial feel for things. They can be very useful helping you work though

technical processes - e.g. installing solar heating panels - or teaching formal topics - like charity law

obligations. However on issues of on the spot organistion and logistics what they can offer in training is

much more limited. Such training schemes will be able to help to a degree but will, above all stand or fail on

their ability to work with people doing practical work, in the field, supported by people who have thatexperience of work in the field.

Relationships with officialdom and the policy makers - Bottom up and top down

In addition to managerial skills the other area that one must consider is the relationship of 'holistic projects"

to the public services bureaucracies, the policy makers and officials in health, environment, social services,

community regneration, employment and economic development. Here the issue is frequently described as

top-down and bottom-up. In the early stages of developing holistic projects the public sector is of course

an important source of funding - but the funding almost always comes from specialised budgets that then

skew the supposedly "holistic project" heavily in the direction of the funding agency specialism - as youhave to meet monitoring targets framed in a particular way. In Nottingham only the HIP budget is explicitly

aimed at projects which hit several themes (health, environment, social) at once and the HIP budget is very

small indeed. What this has meant, for example, is that Ecoworks has always been more of a mental health

project than an environmental project - even though there are many who have wanted it more the other

way round.

As ever paradoxes abound in the relationships between the officials and policy makers and the practical

organisers on the ground. One paradox is that too much help can harm you. Once an idea gets hold of the

policy makers then the meetings to which you, as a practical organiser get invited, suddenly multiply. You

are suddenly in demand by people who want you to go to their meetings partly so that they can work out



how they can help your project and other projects like it. However, after a time you begin to feel, that

these meetings are eating up the time you need to actually develop the work in your own office and in your

own project. Yet you are frightened not to go to the policy makers meetings because the next thing you

know a helpful policy maker has organised a meeting that will create a "strategic framework" for projects

like yours which is in danger of setting the funding options for a year ahead in concrete - a strategic

framework that would chop your own plans for refunding your organisation into two and set it off in a

direction you never envisaged. Later it turns out that the development of the strategic framework is to be

by the arrangement of a series of meetings at which lots of like minded organisations will be invited - with

considerable finance getting eaten up in organising meetings.

The issues and paradoxes here are complex. Without doubt it is helpful, for example, that in Nottingham,

the FEAT seminars(on holistic approaches to food, energy, asthma and transport) took place and have

created a different vision among policy makers. It is helpful to to have seminars about holistic visions for

the future. And yet the links and partnerships that actually work are those that are developed by the grass

roots organisations themselve. These are links that make practical and logistical sense in the step by step

development processes of the organisations concerned. If we understand "bottom upwardness" as the

growth and development of practical projects and initiatives they will, quite naturally, as I have shown,

seek and find partnerships that are useful and necessary to their growth. I have shown already how the

Ecoworks catering trailer project went into a partnership with a lecturer at Nottingham Trent Universityand SPAN. Yet I would be prepared to bet that no official would have been likely to have thought of the

department of manufacturing engineering at Nottingham Trent University as an invitee to a food "strategic

framework conference".

There is a difficult judgement here for policy decisions about budgetary allocation - do you spend

resources on employing people to organise meetings on developing strategic frameworks (which does

widen the view of the policy makers) or do you put the scarce resources directly into the grass roots

projects and leave it up to them to find the partners that they need - thereby allowing the strategic

framework to emerge organically in the objectives and partnerships that actual form around sustainable

practical work.

In conclusion

To repeat something said earlier. I have described many difficulties here - but any job is about working

through difficulties - that is what managers and developers are paid for. If you describe the difficulties

instead with the different word "challenges" then there are people around who relish such things. People do

all sorts of things that are difficult - like climbing mountains. Many of these difficulties or challenges are not

specific to community holistic projects but are the sort of things that millions of small business people take

on - albeit motivated by the hope of personal gain. These difficulties/challenges are to a considerable

degree the diseconomies which adhere to any small scale organisation where multiple tasks andresponsibilities, which would be done by specialists in a large organisation, must be done by a much

smaller number of paid staff or not very reliable volunteers, in the small one. This produces a not very

liberating high level of stress - or alternatively an exhiliratingly steep learning curve which is an opportunity

for personal growth - depending on your point of view.

The idea of involving socially excluded people in environmentally related economic activities has now been

tried around Europe for a number of years. Indeed it is a world phenomena, recognised by organisations

like the Worldwatch Institute, that there has been a growing number of not for profit organisations, seeking

to work directly with disadvantaged people on social, economic and environmental issues at the local level.

Partly disillusioned by the failure of the big ideologies for social change, people have taken the small is



beautiful idea and done what they could where they were to tackle problems directly - thinking globally

and acting locally. In Europe there have been organisations like the European Network for Economic Self

Help and Local Development and Europan wide networks of training organisations that set themselves the

goal, not only of training disadvantaged people in environmental technologies, but of working together

European wide to do this. This has been a process with set backs - for example the bankrupcy in Berlin of

the training project Atlantis, which originally inspired the creation of Ecoworks.

Such set backs are perhaps inevitable. The problems and issues described here have a certain inevitability

to them. To try to develop things "holistically" should therefore not be seen as a panacea. It would be

wonderful if working towards social sustainability with disadvantaged people automatically provides the

ideal conditions for environmental sustainability and economic advancement in a set of mutually reinforcing

virtuous circles. Unfortunately some of the relationships are not mutually reinforcing but mutually

contradictory. When you move towards one goal you move further away from another one - you are

forced to work out what is the trade off or relaionship that you want with more of one meaing less of the

other. The word 'holistic' is sometimes used by authors who can only see the win-win combinations - but

the world is not only win win situations. It sometimes is, but sometimes it is also win-lose situations. (In

permaculture there are plants which, when grown together enhance each others growth, but there are also

plants which, when grown together compete and impede each others growth).

One must always seek for a better way of doing things because organisations that stop doing this lose their

life, their internal interest, that which keeps people involved and they die. They may indeed live on in a

formal sense but eventually wither. Indeed organisations involving disadvantaged people, without skills and

dynamism, are sometimes in danger of going this way, if their principle members cannot change. If they

cannot change and look at new ideas they inevitably go into decline, fail to attract new members, and

eventually end their lives as small unproductive cliques, perhaps held together by ideas that were radical

and innovative at one time but which are now irrelevant. No wonderful new way of working will remain

wonderful and new. Ideas cease to be new and innovative when they have shown their inherent limits - at

this point what remains is normal work, normal slog, a new set of distinctive problems, a new set of

paradoxes and tensions where it is necessary to make different kinds of compromises and trade offs. If this process seems to be more and more unproductive then, at some point, it is necesary to give up and try to

turn to something else.

Final Words - the Millennium Bug - breaking the old links and starting again - a personal fantasy

This paper is not about the Millennium Bug but it is worth noting that many of the recommended

community level preparations for the Millennium Bug draw on the local economy and environmental ideas

to be found in my paper. Towns like Portland in Oregon in the USA have based their community level

Year 2000 strategy on the community ecological strategy for the city. This makes sense because if the

Year 2000 does lead to extensive disruptions to infrastructure and economic activities people will fall back on having to help each other, to pool their resources, to adopt measures to save on energy, water and

other materials, and to perhaps exchange more locally. Perhaps it is a cheeky fantasy but I have an idea of

an optimal Year 2000 crisis which does not involve too many disastrous accidents and environmental spills

but does, perhaps, lead to a lot of officials, academics and "communicators" finding that their departments

were not considered "mission critical", that their computers will not work, and that nothing much has

happened when they stop working anyway. As the taxation system will also be rather ropy, and revenues

plummeting in a bug induced recession, a lot of intelligent specialists would find themselves "downsized'.

This would be rather like a dissolution of the monastries where a large number of clever people would find

that they must now actually do practical things and gain a greater respect for people that work with their

hands and get their boots muddy. Despite the horrendous initial shock the disruption would turn out to be a



blessing in disguise. There would be a new respect for practical people and a new understanding of the

difficulties of organising things, as well as a real sense of our common vulnerability as animals in Nature,

which would kick off a new millennium to a really good start in 2001. Well, you never know....

Brian Davey

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