Abstract

‘Good Works: the mission of the community sector in a time of change’:

Shelley Mallett, Danielle Thornton

“We stand at a crossroads. From Westminster to Wellington there is an emerging consensus that the political and economic order that has dominated the social service landscape for the past forty years has run its course. We have learnt from experience that markets cannot satisfy complex human needs, and government has neither the will to address the root causes of disadvantage, nor the capacity to tackle multi-faceted social problems. Increasingly, governments are relying on the expertise of the community sector and seeking access to the social capital of NFP organisations embedded in their local communities. But how should we navigate this ‘turn’ to community? How can community-based organisations drive progressive change while also avoiding ‘capture’ by governments wedded to actuarial investment thinking?

In this address Professor Mallett will argue that community-based organisations must renew their vocation; strengthening their ties to local networks, deepening their commitment not merely to provide services, but to serve. In all, working with communities to develop the resources and capabilities they already possess, in a radical, alternative form of social investment.”

SLIDE 1 Song Wiyathul

SLIDE 2 Title slide

Maori Greeting/ Acknowledgement

First I want to thank Ros Rice, EO of Community Networks Aotearoa http://communitynetworksaotearoa.org.nz/people/ and Trevor McGlinchley EO of New Zealand Christian Council of Social Serviceshttp://nzccss.org.nz/about/secretariat/ ; for the invitation to join with you here in Auckland to re-imagine the vocation of community organizations to work with and for the people and communities they are serve.

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SLIDE 3 GREETINGS & PURPOSE

Greetings from across Te Tai-o-Rehua. The Tasman and especially from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. At the risk of romanticizing or being seen to promote the Brotherhood or worse still, boring you, I want to say something of its foundational ethos. I feel sure that our story will resonate with elements of the foundational stories of your organisations. There is purpose in my approach. For here I foreshadow some of the processes principles and ideas that, I take up later in the talk that might inspire our efforts to renew the vocation of the community sector and its work in and among communities

SLIDE 4 OUR INHERITANCE

Inheritance

Founded by Father Gerard Tucker, an Anglican priest in 1933 the Brotherhood was developed in the inner city suburb of Fitzroy Melbourne in response to the Great Depression. Today Fitzroy is teeming with hipsters, but then it was largely ‘slum’ housing made up of crowded tenements with poor sanitation. Originally an Anglican religious order named after St Laurence, patron saint of the poor, post-war the Brotherhood morphed into a faith-based welfare organisation [SLIDE 5] that provided services and support to inner-city Melbourne’s poorest families, the unemployed, homeless men and youth. It worked together with and among the poor, in the places where the poor coalesce.

Tucker’s motivations and reasons for the work were simple, yet profound-. It stemmed from his understanding of God’s boundless love for each of us. He said ‘everything I do I do because God loves me.’ For Tucker then Because we are all equal before God we all have our own identity in God, all people are to be offered the dignity and respect of a person worthy of God’s love “(Treblicock 2017 unpublished) To love God is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and to love our neighbors as ourselves is to love God. This is a relational understanding of God and of people. For Tucker this calling to love people, to serve people, to create human relationships based on love on care or caritas, was not a transactional act of charity designed to diminish others. Rather, in its fullest expression it was a calling to develop human relationships that are mutually enriching, that, in todays terms, the language of positive psychology or sense capability approach create human flourishing. For this reason the early Brotherhood prioritized the value of ‘self-help’, and self-help groups and saw its role as not merely ‘doling’ out charity, but most empowering poor people to develop the means to support

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themselves through employment and mutual support. No matter where we stand in relation to faith Tucker’s calling can be seen as profoundly egalitarian.

SLIDE 6- OUR OBJECTIVES

Tucker’s vision for the Brotherhood extended beyond services. For him service delivery alone was never enough. His focus was always the building of communities where people could join together, alliances that bring about justice and equity for the vulnerable. A fierce campaigner for social change, especially social housing, he recognized the importance of campaigning, advocacy and evidence to drive reform. In short he did not back away from the view ably prosecuted by William Temple, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury at the time that the Church and welfare agencies are called to speak truth to power (Temple, Christianity and the Social Order, publ 1942). Even and especially when it is against their own interests.

SLIDE 7 OUR CAMPAIGNSReflecting this heritage the organization has always been clear that its cradle to grave service footprint is designed to seed innovative evidence informed program and practice models that ground policy reform. To this end it has had a research capacity since 1943, which today represents the largest Research and Policy Centre in a Community sector agency (CSO) in Australia. And it is an active national campaigner – especially around unemployment (REF)

SLIDE 8 STATEMENT OF MISSIONLike many faith based organizations, no doubt including the ones represented here today, the Brotherhood values its foundational religious stories and, in our case Anglican roots; Among other ways this is reflected through the composition of the Board and its current chair, the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, enduring, constitutional links to the Melbourne Anglican diocese, recognition of its Christian heritage as a source of inspiration in its mission statement.. However, today it is also a thoroughly secular organization, inspired by contemporary ideas and ways of understanding and committed to equal opportunity, human rights and enabling individual freedoms, including, of course, freedom of religion. We understand secularism not simply as atheism but also as spiritual diversity. Through our work we recognize sustaining presence of our core being or essence - what some term spirit and others well-being, or life-force however we do not contain this idea to a religious understanding. Rather our work is conceived as a gift of service, of love and justice if you will, in which we acknowledge the importance of nurturing the whole person; ourselves and others (Treblicock, 2017,

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unpubl).

Our interest in the sustainability of the community sector and especially small organizations including volunteer based organization stems from our values to pursue the common good and not simply the individual good. As Maurice Glassman so eloquently described it at a recent Brotherhood oration

SLIDE 9 COMMON GOOD

“This has its roots in Aquinas as well as Machiavelli and is based upon the reconciliation of estranged interests, on leadership from poor communities, on a reliance on neither the state nor the market but upon each other. A politics of relationships and civic peace that views our natural environment and institutions as a shared inheritance to be strengthened and honoured rather than to be exploited and managed. It retrieves exiled traditions and wishes to place relationships, resilience and reciprocity into our welfare system; virtue, vocation and value into the economy and solidarity, status and subsidiarity in our politics. The Common Good is part of the big story that is happening but there is also a necessity for a renewal at the roots of our society, a learning of an old truth which is that if society has no power it will be exploited by both the state and the market” Sambell Oration 2014, BSL website)

Our commitment to subsidiarity which we have also inherited from Tucker, gives further drive to our interest in enabling organizations, embedded in their communities to thrive. Subsidiarity is the principle that governments and service providers should always look to support and maintain the effort already being made in the community rather than supplant it, even if this negatively impacts on our own service footprint. We have applied this principle of enabling others, of not doing for people what people can do for themselves to the development of services and organizations. Wherever possible we seed or collaborate with smaller locally-based organizations to deliver programs, rather than squeeze them out of existence or absorb and rebrand them as Brotherhood franchises. [Hanover Welfare services (now merged organization Launch Housing), the Tenants Union, North Yarra Community Health Centre, and Community Aid Abroad ,– a for- runner to Oxfam, the Ecumenical Migration Centre are examples of now independent organizations we have seeded alone or in partnership with others].

This work is based on the understanding, even aspiration, if not conclusive evidence, that smaller organizations, embedded in their local communities can,

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provide an anchor role in those communities, but only if they claim it, leveraging their deep social networks to tailor more personalized response (Hunter, Cox and Round (2016, p. 2) to people’s needs. Furthermore the additional social value that community-based organizations produce exists in these relationships, in the relationships between people, paid workers and volunteers, government, agencies and businesses, which as they multiply then create networks and form communities. More recently we have come to understand that this work, born of necessity and ambition, must be underpinned by clarity about our own and others expertise and resources in these networks; we should be careful to leverage this rather than duplicate effort.

SLIDE 10 PRECARIOUSLY POISED

But faced with rising inequality and a crisis of meaning and consensus in our polity, the Brotherhood, together with like-minded secular and faith-based community sector organizations –(CSOs) in Australia and New Zealand, is grappling with how to renew its vocation, its calling, in the Brotherhood’s case (SLIDE 11: VOCATION)

To enable all Australians to experience true freedom by having the capability and opportunity to build a good life, to live a life of common dignity and to contribute to the common good

One way or another we here today are grappling with what, if anything, is the particular contribution of not for profit community sector organization in its dynamic relationship with government, the market and the broader civil society (Fyfe, 2005; Marshall (see Smyth). It is a contested space open to interpretation and it is moving at such a pace that we barely have time to think.

This at a time when the welfare state itself and the ideas that animated it during and following the Second World War is under threat. Tightening welfare budgets, increasingly conditional social security, and highly targeted social services, all in the name of efficient social investment is creating unprecedented challenges for community sector organizations and the people they serve. It is a contest of ideas and of language about the nature of the good society and how to achieve it; and it is a contest in in which both the left and the right of politics use terms like social

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investment, choice, agency and independence to mean different things. This with real consequence

SLIDE 12: MARKETISATION/INDIVIDUALISATION

These challenges are exacerbated by fundamental changes to way government’s commission or procure services with greater competition and marketization of human services and the emergence of Individualized service models. By removing block funding from service providers transferring it to individual “service consumers” who contract directly with providers of their choice (NDIS, CDC, Job Active) in the name, not of citizenship and consumer agency and choice. As researchers and others have observed in New Zealand, the UK, and Australia these shifts are fundamentally threatening our service and business models, and even our existence by eroding funding certainties, reducing collaboration and diminishing the rich social capital and social networks that CSOs have developed and leveraged to build social inclusion and address the complex needs of the people we serve (New Zealand, Neilson, Sedgwick and Grey (2015;In Australia (Brotherhood of St Laurence 2017; Considine et al. ) Even the full funding models, in NZ and Australia that can render CSOs as dependent arms of government and the celebrated New Zealand commissioning agency model are posing some concerns. And all this is occurring, when governments of all persuasions are trumpeting the value of co-design processes to access the expertise and social capital of CSOs to tackle the disadvantage and exclusion in local communities.

SLIDE 13 MERGERSConfronted by these momentous changes, many CSOs are facing an identity crisis signaled by a corrosive shift in the language that they use to describe their work – away from service sector, mission, service, service-user or citizen, to market, business, brand, product and consumer. This marks a subtle but significant shift in understanding of their purpose- for whom they work, how as well as scope. Some are privileging survival over purpose, competition over collaboration, professionalization over care, efficiency over effectiveness. They are shadows of their former selves, hybrid commercially driven organisations. Connections with their founding communities - secular or faith based- are becoming frayed and evacuated of meaning, purpose and substance. In short, many are attempting to survive by imitating the competitive, acquisitive behavior and business models of for profit -providers, with some losing sight of their historical roots, distinctiveness and common calling (, Hunter, Cox and Round (2016; Lloyds Bank Foundation 2015). This calling to uphold justice, fight for equity and

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inclusion, insist on the positive freedom of persons while working for the common good once more or less unified and animated the community welfare sector. Now we risk reclaiming the terms to justify our own ends.

In the midst of this change small organizations embedded in and serving their local communities are particularly vulnerable

SLIDE 14: HOPE

However, it is not all bad! There is also great cause for hope, even optimism in the midst of the threat to the welfare state and the forms of social governance that shape the relationships between CSOs, Government civil society and citizens. As Leonard Cohen, sings there is a “crack, there is a crack in everything that’s where the light gets in”

Both globally and nationally we are in a moment of economic and political disruption and struggle which is seeding new ideas or resuscitating old ones. We see this through Brexit and the rise of the democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Trump and the emergence of Democrat Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the US, and closer to home your newly minted labor Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern in New Zealand. Each in their way are championing justice and equity. From Westminster, Montreal Washington to Wellington, citizens are registering dissatisfaction with the inequality wrought by neo-liberalism (1980s -1990s) and the threat to economic security posed by automation and the consolidation of global capital with the wealthy few. Many are also disillusioned with the arrogance and power of ruling elites who have shaped social governance without reference to the hopes and ambitions of ordinary citizens for themselves, their families and their communities. They are impatient with the discrimination and exclusion consolidated under dispassionate market driven economic and social reform. They – we are looking for a new vision.

And citizens are not alone in voicing concern. International agencies –the OECD, UN World bank and ILO - are also recognizing the limitations of markets and marketization in driving economic growth and service delivery, including human service delivery, noting that the drive for efficiency over the last three decades, has been at the expense of fairness and equity. For them, rising inequality threatens economic growth. Whether it is the UN (REF) or the OECD (REF) there is growing recognition of the need for new forms of inclusionary social governance and economic development built on partnerships and participation collaboration

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and networks at co-production between government, civil society, and business and service both the national and local levels.

And closer to home we have seen a plethora of government and non-government sponsored reports and submissions in NZ and Australia about the future of social services in and the role of Community sector organizations. Each in their own way are attempting to identify and understand the unique social value created by CSOs and the forms of commissioning that will enable them to thrive, or alternatively maximize their effectiveness, and deliver value for money! (NZ PC; etc.). Some are seeking to revive a lost vison others to re-imagine new ways of working.

SLIDE 15 THE CROSS ROADS

We stand at cross-roads. With visionary leadership and thoughtful stewardship from peaks, agencies and citizens , these shifts in ideas about the purpose, scope and subjects of our work, language we use the commissioning or procurement approaches we institute present opportunities for CSOs to develop inspired and inspiring policy, innovative services, multi-sectoral partnerships and new business models.

SLIDE 16 REIMAGINE SOCIAL INVESTMENTMost importantly, it presents opportunities to re-imagine and re-invigorate authentic relationships and alliances with people and communities. If we fail to accept this challenge is we will also fail to claim what many of us hold dear for people in communities who use our services – our own agency, voice.

In a time of social economic and environmental disruption, how can we re-imagine the vocation of CSOs? How can community-based organizations drive progressive change while also avoiding ‘capture’ by governments wedded to actuarial investment thinking? How can we strengthen our ties to local networks, deepening their commitment not merely to provide services, but to serve? How can we work with communities themselves- with our business and citizens to develop the resources and capabilities they already possess, in a radical, alternative form of social investment?

SLIDE 17 WIYATHUL Reclaim our heritage and our language our ethical authority

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But first I want to take us back to the song played at the beginning of my talk. This song – Wiyathul- was written and performed by the blind Indigenous song writer and performer - Dr G Yunupingu who recently passed away invoking national mourning. A multi-platinum recording artist, DR G has been described by some as the greatest voice Australia has ever recorded. A deeply traditional man, he eschewed the practice of most other indigenous recording artists by refusing interviews, preferring to let his music speak. Most importantly he did this by singing in language Galpu, Djambarrpuynu, Gumatj - his language, the language of his forebears. Unlike other indigenous artists his songs were not of protest, dispossession, or discrimination. Instead he sings his love of country, his deep material and spiritual connection to the land of his kin his mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, human and animal.

In the days that followed his passing, the airwaves in Australia were awash with tributes all reaching to define why his music so deeply moved and connected with people, why it so dignified indigenous people opening up the possibilities for authentic respectful and celebratory relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous in Australia, even though most did not understand the meaning of his words.

While singing in language was recognized as important, combined with the melody and spare accompaniment, most reflected on how this “voice of an angel” somehow touched a universal emotional wellspring, joining us as one in the listening across culture and time. Stories of loving, longing, yearning, loss, of fellowship with the land of cherished elders past and present of flora and fauna called into being through language and voice, connected us to something authentic, meaningful and true about relationships in time over time and beyond time

His example, his artistry, reminds us of the crucial power of language, of story, of voice to move us and connect us with the song lines that resonate in our worlds, and particularly for those of us gathered here today , the foundational stories or song-lines that bring our CSOs into being and enliven its work. Dr G reminds us that language and voice matters, who speaks matters how about what with for and about whom. And yet we are in danger of forgetting it of believing that we can substitute one word for another with little effect.

And so what are some of the ideas, principles and language that must matters to us that will enable us to shape a new a language and politics of welfare.

SLIDE 18 CALL TO ACTION

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This starts with a shared values that CSOs can align around. I have proposed a number of values (below) reflective of the Brotherhood heritage, however this is not intended as a prescriptive or exhaustive list, merely a conversation starter. I do not pretend this will be easy. But this makes it no less important

• Recognize, respect and leverage without duplicating complementary expertise - of citizen service users, of service providers, government, educators, business, civil society because service delivery alone will not provide the opportunities that people who use our services need to effect change in their lives

• Promote the common good rather than just the individual good

• Champion justice

• Create opportunities to build capability (the capacity to be and to do) and human freedom rather than simply addressing service need.

• Define and work with people around what they can do and be rather than their deficits. Become solutions focused rather than problem saturated

• Create service relationships that are mutually enriching and empowering for provider and users

• Collaborate rather than compete

• Reclaim and assert our rich heritage and language

SLIDE 19: RENEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORK

I propose 6 things we could do; I am sure this is not exhaustive. I will say just a little about three before I provide some examples of the ways the Brotherhood is working.  

Lead with values, ideas and language Build and understanding and evidence Reform our commissioning- fit for purpose commissioning

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Re-imagine and re-balance our work or the weight from service provision to enabling organisations (skills of staff) that leverage complementary expertise

Foster unlikely alliances to effect change

Lead with values, ideas and language

While I cannot hope to do justice to this in this talk let me say just a few words about notion of welfare itself and a welfare state and the ideas about persons, community freedom, and agency, choice it seeds. In recent decades under the stewardship of both conservative and labor governments in Australia and New Zealand this term has become increasingly impoverished and impoverishing. It is typically deployed as a term of abuse – welfare recipients, welfare cheats, and welfare frauds. Most perniciously it is used to create and reinforce a division between the haves and have nots the doers and the done to, lifters and leaners. People and families who rely on income support are cast as passive, dependent un-motivated weak, troubled, needy, chaotic, un-educated requiring activation. They lack agency. This despite the fact that all at some time in our lifetime will avail ourselves of welfare. And welfare itself is cast as burdensome to governments, and communities rather than a mechanism to drive economic growth and social cohesion; it has come to stand for income support and crisis services rather than universal services that are utilized by all and promote the common good – e.g. hospitals, healthcare centers, education facilities, urban infrastructure. This can also rub off on service providers who are sometimes cast as soft, naive, failing to effect change and achieve outcomes, semi-professional,

This is a far cry from the original meaning of welfare - to fare well, to get along, a source of well-being; a blessing; a good; something that aids or promotes well-being "for the benefit of all”. SLIDE 20 It is also somewhat at odds with its use by the mid twentieth century architects of the British welfare state, - economists William Beveridge John Maynard Keynes and especially the highly regarded and widely read but now little known William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, who coined the term Welfare state in 1941. In the drive to effect post-war 2 reconstruction and economic growth, following a period of immense disruption, the British welfare State designed by Beveridge and underpinned by Keynesian economic reform sought to address need – what

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Beveridge termed the five 'Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. In practice this led to policies and universal services organized around - income, health, education, housing and disability, underpinned by a commitment to full employment and public service spending.

But it is William Temple who offers an alternative politics of welfare and the welfare state that promotes wellbeing of persons in community through a fierce commitment to justice not charity, the expression of love, the recognition of freedom and choice

William Temple in his 1942 essay ‘Christianity and Social Order’ which Keynes reviewed, insisted that the welfare and a welfare state- exists for the sake of its citizens, both collectively and individually. As Rowan Williams notes the idea of welfare and the welfare state that Temple progresses is a state that “deals with human beings in their fullness in their capacity for creativity, self-motivation and self-management, that is the state deals with human being in their freedom not just their need.”

Temple argues that the charge against our social system is one of injustice… He asks if we are all equal before God Why should some of God’s children have full opportunity to develop their capacities in freely chosen occupations, while others are confined to a stunted form of existence, enslaved to types of labour which represent no personal choice but the sole opportunity offered?  (p.37) Why should some be in the position to dispense charity and others to need that kind of charity? For Temple respect for every person simply as a person is paramount. He refuses to use the word individual for this in itself is a denial that we are always ever persons in relations to other persons and communities...

The idea of freedom and choice is central to Temple’s understanding He says

Freedom is a great word, and like other great words is often superficially understood. Freedom so far as it is a treasure must be freedom for something as well as freedom from something. It must be the actual ability to form and carry out a purpose… Freedom in short, is self-control, self-determination, and self-direction. To train citizens in the capacity for freedom and to give them scope for free action is the supreme end of all true politics’. (68)

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Consequently society must be arranged as to give every citizen the maximum opportunity for making deliberate choices and the best possible training for the use of that opportunity… Our first consideration [must be] the possible extension of personal responsibility; it is the responsible exercise of deliberate choice which most fully expresses personality and best deserves the great name of freedom

Temple’s notion of positive Freedom anticipates the Capabilities approach developed in the late 90s by economist Amartya Sen and refined by political philosopher Martha Nussbaum . This approach taken up by some governments across the globe, including at points the NZ and Australian treasuries provide a more productive and effective responses to address complex social issues.43 IIt is an approach employed by the Brotherhood to inform our policy, program and practice work . Put simply, it is an approach that focuses on what people can be, rather than on their limitations or problems. This is not to be confused thought with strengths based approaches that de-emphasize the structural dimensions of inequality. Sen’s capabilities framework was based on the understanding that the freedom to achieve wellbeing is a moral right andis understood in terms of people’s opportunities for doingand being what they have reason to value. In Sen’s words, capabilities are ‘the substantive freedoms [a person] enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value’.44 Nussbaum subsequently critiqued and modified Sen’s approach, emphasising that people’s actual capacity to express, show or realise these capabilities is affected by their life circumstances or context. For Nussbaum then, it is not good enough to focus on what people can be, on their potential. We must also focus on what people can do, on the quality of life that they are actually able to achieve: ‘When comparing societies and assessing them for their basic decency or justice what is important is what each person is able to do, and to be’.45

SLIDE 21Provision of and access to opportunities and not just services are fundamental to this approach.SLIDE 22: FIT FOR PURPOSE COMMISSIONING

As CSOs look to renew our vocation these framing values and ideas are critical- welfare, choice, freedom agency, justice are Ideas and values are important, but so too is the way we commission or procure our services as the experiences of marketization and individualization has revealed in the UK, US Australia and NZ.

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Our conception of commissioning is close to that of the New Zealand Productivity Commission, which describes it as ‘the set of inter-related tasks that need to be undertaken to turn policy objectives into effective social services’ (p. xi). To be effective, commissioning should not merely translate policy into quality services, but do so in a manner that empowers individuals in their communities by investing in local, community-based solutions. We weed a rebalancing of service provision so as to give greater voice and control to citizens. This need not mean government delegating wholesale responsibility for program design, but rather working with individuals in their communities to identify need and develop local solutions that build on existing networks and infrastructure. Our experience suggests that such an approach not only improves service quality and responsiveness, but by strengthening community capacity it is far more cost-effective in the long term

We share the view of the NZ PC that devolution including the devolution to a commissioning agencies can offers governments a means of maintaining strategic oversight of services while giving agencies the flexibility they need to develop innovative locally adapted responses. However we do not think this will always achieve the desired outcomes.

For this reason we have developed a fit for purpose commissioning framework that endeavors to commission for purpose, and ensure program design, provider selection, implementation and model of co-ordination all serve policy goals. This approach is guided by the following elements

SLIDE 23: ENABLING ORGANISATIONSCommunity hubs offer one model of how diverse community organizations can work together to address the relative disadvantage of size without giving up their identity and community roots.

Another model involves the creation of an intermediary body that can mediate on behalf of smaller or less experienced or less resourced organizations while simultaneously enabling them to combine their effort and expertise. Entities of this type are a feature of the Collective Impact model in which, as you will know they are described as the ‘backbone organization’ but also appear in Government programs in which responsibility for commissioning and coordinating an initiative is devolved to a non-government partner. E.g. Facilitating Partners or FPs in the Commonwealth Communities for Children program, or or the commissioning

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agencies that sustain New Zealand’s Whanau Ora or ‘Family Well-being” initiative.

The purpose of such entities is expressly not to enforce adherence to a standardised program logic, but to strengthen downwards accountability, authorise adaptation to local conditions, and facilitate collaborative ways of working between different local actors. The capacity of such entities to balance government’s need for upwards accountability with the flexibility to develop services tailored to community need makes them particularly suitable for place-based approaches.

SLIDE 24 ENABLING DIAGRAMHowever The Brotherhood currently plays a comparable role in several programs for which we are also registered providers. This approach—in which BSL delivers a program while concurrently collaborating with other providers to build their capacity—is sometimes described as ‘having skin in the game’, the idea being that direct experience of delivery helps us to appreciate the practical challenges staff face, and prevents a ‘disconnect’ opening up between the front-line and the back office.

The role of the enabling organisation Our commitment to this enabling role stems from our belief that organisations with deep roots in their communities are far better placed to leverage local networks and the altruism of volunteers than ‘Big Charity’ providers (Dalton & Butcher 2015). However it does not automatically follow that all smaller organisations will possess the necessary capacity to do so effectively. The concept of the ‘enabling organisation’ has evolved to resolve this contradiction. The functions of an ‘enabling organisation’ as we define it include:

Mediating between government and small providers where the department does not have the time and resources to build a collaborative relationship with each provider. This role enables governments to get the benefits of commissioning local community-based providers without arduous performance management, and enables smaller providers to gain funding for their programs while maintaining their distinct organisational mission and culture. Where sufficient flexibility exists, it may enable providers to gain authorisation for innovation or adaptation to local conditions. • Capacity building where a local provider has the requisite community networks but does not yet have the capacity to comply with reporting requirements, lacks

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expertise in a particular service area, or is having difficulty finding experienced staff . By providing practical support, training and other resources the enabling organisation helps the small organisation to become more effective. • Resourcing collaboration between providers, including creating formal and informal opportunities for sharing practice experience (e.g. a community of practice), and investing time and resources to support collaboration. Where providers are clustered around a particular community’s needs, the enabling organisation may also support collaboration as a prelude to greater service integration

SLIDE 25 BSL PROGRAMS

We currently involved with five programs as an enabling organisation.

HIPPY Home Interaction Program for Parent and Youngsters (National)Education First Youth Foyers (State based with National reach)Transitions to Work (National)Work and Leaning Centres (State)Saver Plus (National)

For instance, in both HIPPY and Victoria’s Work and Learning Centres, BSL is not only funded to manage sub-providers, but also—and more importantly—to develop providers’ capacity to build strong networks in their own communities. In the Education First Youth Foyers the BSL, together with Launch Housing, mediates between the key stakeholder departments and Foyer staff, as well as building the capacity of both staff and students to develop relationships with the adjacent communities of Broadmeadows and Glen Waverley. The Brotherhood’s role as an ‘enabling organisation’ is most clearly realised in our convening of the Transition to Work Community of Practice (TtW CoP). The explicit rationale for setting up a community of practice was to develop collaboration between employment service providers. As the convener of the CoP, the BSL aims to ‘enable’ member organisations to contribute and develop their complementary expertise, rather than directing them on how to deliver the model. The goal is that sharing practice lessons will develop CoP members’ capacity to work effectively with communities and local employers to create sustainable employment pathways for young people.

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Our experience demonstrates that enabling organisations can offer practical assistance to providers to help resolve some of challenges that arise during implementation. SLIDE 26 WHAT IS POSSIBLEWhat’s at stake à social change?• Asked about Roberto Unger: says good social science:

“Associate the explanation of what exists with the imagination of transformative opportunity. Not some horizon of ultimate possibles but the real possible which is always the adjacent possible

SLIDE 27 WORKSHOPAnd create more embedded and enduring forms of collaboration or co-production which is more than the sum of its parts;

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