Barking up the right tree

Posted on 16th March 2008 at 7.52pm by Julian Dobson

Meet Mark Calvert - dog trainer and social entrepreneur.

Mark doesn't just do the easy stuff: he trains dogs with behavioural problems, and catches them before their owners decide to get rid of them.

'We're turning the dogs around, and people are happy to pay for the training and keep the dog,' he says. His business - Dogtastic - is growing rapidly through recommendations from a local vet and from Lancashire German Shepherd Rescue, an animal rescue centre. But as he says, that's relatively straightforward.

'The easy route would be just to turn it into a business and earn some money. The hard thing is to engage with people who would not normally be my customers.'

Mark's vision is to use his dog training skills as a way of getting isolated older people to socialise, and to provide an opportunity for people with disabilities to improve their quality of life. But to do that, he needs a centre where he can work with groups of people, and so far his search has been fruitless: 'A lot of people hide behind health and safety. It's like people are saying it's a nice idea, but not here.'

Mark's come a long way, though. He had been running a dog training club in Preston as a hobby, but the first Wigan Extreme event gave him the idea of turning it into something bigger. He took early retirement from a job he hated and hasn't looked back.

He also chairs Pulse - People United in Local Social Enterprise - the fledgling social enterprise network for Wigan and Leigh. Pulse grew out of Wigan Extreme last August, and is working towards being formally constituted this year.

'What's been holding us back is that we're all working on our projects, and that's the priority,' he says. 'But we have some big ideas for it. We want it to be a self-financing organisation that can help other social entrepreneurs.'There's a core group of between 20 and 30 people, and meetings are held every month.

Sometimes it's disappointing when progress seems slow, Mark admits. 'Like everybody else I am up and down. But when you come back and talk to other people it re-enthuses you - it puts the fire back in your belly.'

Power to the people?

Posted on 15th March 2008 at 6.02pm by Julian Dobson

We're two days into this event in Wigan, and some questions and themes are beginning to emerge.

People with ideas have begun to express them; some are beginning to turn those ideas into the beginnings of real projects and the foundations of business plans. On Monday there will be workshops on finance and fundraising, and opportunities to develop those plans further.

In the meantime there are questions about who's here and who isn't. In particular, why are there so few people from statutory agencies?

One answer may be the timing: an event put together at relatively short notice, not because it had to happen at this particular point but because the public sector's financial year ends on 31 March. At the same time, the end of March is when local authority staff traditionally use up their annual leave.

Another may be that local government staff are happy to sign up to the concept of change and to national policies that suggest change should happen (the duty to involve, requirements to engage with those furthest removed from the labour market). But do they want it sufficiently to change the way they operate? Is the cultural shift from the ordered world of committees and agendas to the messy realities of ordinary people's lives simply too much for many local government staff to cope with?

A third issue may be capacity. This isn't just capacity in terms of having time or resources to do things, although that's a factor. It may be more a case of lacking the skills needed to make this concept of empowerment workable. It's accepted at a strategic level and by the grassroots enthusiasts, but do middle managers consider it achievable - or do they secretly resent the potential disruption?

Obviously, people don't fit neatly into categories according to where they sit in the local government pecking order. But it does appear that while the most senior staff support the kind of approach exemplified by Wigan Extreme, and it seems to make a lot of sense to local activists, there are many people in between who are unwilling or feel unable to engage with it.

There's a reflection here of a national picture. At government level, Hazel Blears and her civil servants argue that the mechanisms for empowerment are in place. Ministers have repeatedly emphasised the importance of local discretion. So councils and local strategic partnerships should implement plans for community empowerment as they see fit. And if what they see fit to do is to disempower people, to withdraw funding from local networks and to remove resources from community activists, what can government do? After all, the power has been devolved - hasn't it?

from glue sticks to computers

Posted on 15th March 2008 at 12.40pm by Julian Dobson

Things have moved a long way since the cutting and sticking of Friday morning. People have been working with a team of advisors from Community Innovation UK to put the ideas that inspired their models onto big sheets of flipchart paper. Small groups have been beavering away, and now they're creating business plans on computers. Some stayed late on Friday evening, and now they're back on Saturday to keep working on their project ideas. By the end of this process they should have something that can be taken to a bank manager.

What’s it all about?

Posted on 15th March 2008 at 11.00am by Julian Dobson

Why all this effort to encourage people to form social enterprises? The picture says it all: for people who have been out of work, have felt depressed or ignored, or haven't had the opportunities available to others, it's about breaking the cycle - taking control of your life.

A social whirl

Posted on 15th March 2008 at 10.55am by Julian Dobson

How do you have a good night out when you have learning disabilities? It isn't easy: the models of care and support on offer frequently fail to take social needs into account. If you want a social life, you often have to negotiate that through your support worker.

If your support worker doesn't want to accompany you to the pub or a club, you don't get to go. Long-term relationships are fraught with difficulties because you can't just get on with meeting people and making friends.

Francis, a support worker with IAS Services, has been working with John and Graham, two men with learning disabilities, to do something about that. The idea is to stage social nights that would be open to people with learning disabilities across the northwest.

'They didn't have an opportunity to go out and meet people, or form friendships and relationships,' Francis says. 'I have worked around different houses, and a lot of people have been saying this. So we said let's try it as a group.'

The first social night was a handful of people at a local hall. It wasn't much, but it was a start. The group went on to arrange a proper disco, with a bar and DJ, for around 20 people at the Orwell pub.

The events have made a big difference to John and Graham's lives, and those of others with learning disabilities. 'We're finding people are more relaxed,' Francis says. 'There's less desperation about people's lives. Their parents are saying people are not as depressed.'

But Francis doesn't have the time to develop these social events properly. The number of people who could benefit from regular social events is huge, but Francis has a full time job. 'All it takes is to get some funding from somewhere, put someone in post and there's so much you can do,' he says.

Could it work as a social enterprise? Francis isn't sure, but he'll be coming back to find out.