For one, I might be encouraged at the prospect of a funding-free environment since the social enterprise model we deploy operates on that basis, re-investing more than 50% of profit into a social objective.

In many ways the funded environment has hampered progress in that it renders our kind of operation invisible. Those that issue grants publicise the recipients and the media tunes in accordingly.

In some instances we observe our own plans being reproduced and funded while we contribute to this in being corporation tax payers.

It was something else that I tuned into on your page Patrick that interested me greatly, the reference to Matthew Bishop’s call for a Big Society approach to international development.

That’s pretty much what we’ve been leveraging in Eastern Europe for the past decade, starting with the work that leveraged investment for a microfinance bank in Tomsk, Siberia.

The last 6 years have focussed on Ukraine where impact from our 2006 strategy plan can be observed in several areas. One component yet to be actioned is the plan for a centre for social enterprise, which seemed to have paved the way for the British Council’s arrival this year in the same context. Yet they have been very reluctant co communicate or collaborate.

Only recently I discovered that our paper seems to have been passed off as the achievement of a third party, seemingly with the aim of painting us out of the picture.

Ukraine as you will know is a kleptocratic state, which can be seem as the primary social problem. Yet our own government enters with something founded upon dishonesty and at the same time excludes those like us that Big Society is supposed to be empowering.

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=155776

Jeff Mowatt

You’re right that we probably agree on much more than we disagree. My attitude is that proper public services really ought to be delivered by professionals who are properly paid and properly supported. But it doesn’t look like that’s the way things are headed, so…

My bug/feature point was really one of perspective – what one thought was an error on a computer is actually just a program working in a different way to how one expected it to. A bit like someone loading up Emacs thinking it would work like Word – whose fault is it? There’s a good argument that it isn’t the guy who programmed Emacs.

I’m stretching this analogy to breaking point.

Anyway, I think my overall point is that public and third sector is now a very different place to what it was a year ago. The way that councils work is having to change dramatically, and that change is has to happen in the community and voluntary / third sector as well. I genuinely believe that a lot of the assumptions that people make about what is required to get stuff done are over-the-top. Your points are correct (although I might quibble the libraries one) though – but that might be where local authorities come in, and can lend their infrastructure to the people filling in some of the gaps.

I work a lot with local councillors, who are often the school governors, and the volunteers, and they do tend to come with a fixed mindset around how stuff is done, which may not now be terribly relevant. If there’s no money, there’s no money. So do we do something or nothing?

It strikes me that right now, not many people contribute a lot, and where we need to be is where we have a lot of people doing something: more in the aggregate but less individually (if that makes sense). Maybe that’s what makes society ‘bigger’?

I dunno.

I and my #SmallSociety idea are mentioned in “Big and small societies” by that @DaveBriggs [link to post]

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