Kaizen Partnership

Specialists in Consultation and Engagement

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We all need to be resilient

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Last week I co-facilitated a session on resilience at the wonderful CreativeCollisions conference. Way over 100 youth professionals and young people spent nearly 2 hours engaging with the subject, focussing on the following question:

• How can we increase resilience in young people and communities?

This is a critical question and gets right to the heart of community empowerment and positive youth development.

Resilience is one of those in vogue concepts that is used all over the place, but few people seem to be clear with what it actually means. In the session last week the first question I asked was who felt confident that they could define resilience – almost no hands went up. At a fundamental level this is important – it you can’t say what something is, how can you take steps to increase it.

There are lots of ways of looking at resilience – I like to see it as bounce-back-ability, like an elastic band that you can stretch out but will then return to its original shape afterwards. This capacity is vital for young people and communities and is a prime determinant on how we will cope with the inevitable stressors in life. We are all too aware of what happens when a rubber band gets stretched beyond its capacity – it snaps. This is also what happens to individuals and communities with similarly devastating consequences.

After the session I was reflecting with my co-facilitator, Tom Currie from Leap Confronting Conflict, and it occurred to me that there was a key area of resilience that didn’t get mentioned once – the resilience needed to be effective as youth and community professionals. We talk about developing resilience in others, but where is the talk about also developing this in ourselves?

Being a youth/community professional is incredibly rewarding, but also very challenging. We are faced with having to grapple with ‘wicked’ problems, with heart-wrenching sorrows, with unsolvable dilemmas, with pain and misery and injustice. No matter how hard we work our work is never done. No matter how much of ourselves we put into our work, we are not able to stem the flow of issues we face in our communities. And in the current economic climate we are facing increasing challenges with reducing resources.

It takes a lot of resilience to stay positive and active in the face of these challenges. Resilience is increasingly being recognised as an important factor and there are organisations looking at the issue creatively and holistically – both in terms of personal and organisational resilience (obviously there’s a connection as if individuals aren’t resilient, this impacts the ability of the not just the individual but the organisation to make a difference.)

When we aren’t able to stay resilient, we burn out and either leave the profession for other careers, or stay and pay an immense personal price (often measured in failed relationships and health breakdown). Neither option is a good one.

Now I’m not against people leaving the youth and community sector (it’s not a life sentence) but I do think that we are doing something wrong as so many people are leaving because of burnout. Aside from the personal cost, as a sector we cant afford to lose so much talent, experience and skills. We need them now more than ever.

So what can we do, as individuals and organisations?

• We can play the long game, and recognise that if we want to still be active, passionate and engaged throughout our career that we need to take care of ourselves
• We can invest in developing and nurturing resilience in ourselves, just as we do for others
• We can encourage funders to invest in maintaining and supporting existing professionals so that we can continue to be effective and reduce the amount of burnout

There are no easy answers, we will always be faced with the issues we grapple with today.

I personally fully intend to continue in this sector as long as I am working and able to contribute – there is no work I would rather be doing. I have been in the profession for over 20 years and feel as excited and committed now as when I started. I hope that I can say the same thing in another 20 years; and I believe that if I cant, then the fault will be mine for not doing what I need to do, to stay resilient.

@JonnyZander

Where is the good news?

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“Youth is disintegrating. The youngsters of the land have a disrespect for their elders and a contempt for authority in every form. Vandalism is rife, and crime of all kinds is rampant among our young people. The nation is in peril.” 

Quote from an Egyptian Priest, circa 2000 BC

It is all too easy to find out negative stats about young people in the UK – from unemployment to crime to teenage pregnancies. But why is it so hard to find positive stats that highlight how amazing, wonderful and talented our young people are?

Some recent research has shown that over 75% of media stories about young people are negative, and there is all sorts of evidence that public perception of young people is very negative and that this has a significant impact on young people themselves and on adults’ experience of young people (eg. if you see a group of young people and assume they are a “gang” rather than a group of friends, it is predictable that you might feel anxious and fearful).

Kaizen are mid process on a consultation with young people and youth professionals on behalf of a large national company who are wanting to make an impact with youth. We have conducted one on one interviews with over 400 young people and 93 professionals have also been a part of the research. The data (both quantitative and qualitative) is depressing – especially in answer to the question “how are young people seen and treated in your community”.

A few days ago I started looking for some positive stats about young people in the country, and pretty quickly it became clear that while they may be there, they are not at all easily found. I believe this is a significant issue and one that can actually easily be addressed (in contrast to all the other significant issues in the youth sector that can’t be solved so easily).

So what would be the benefits of having clear positive stats and data? There would be many including:

  • It will help us to redress the balance of negative information and mis-information about young people
  • We can use positive reinforcement to encourage wanted behaviour, attitudes and attributes
  • We can actually be more representative of the true nature of young people
  • We can celebrate the difference they (and we) make

Just to be clear I am talking about the following types of things (these are just examples):

  • How many young people are employed (we know there are 1m unemployed, but how many are in employment or training)?
  • How many young people volunteer, how many hours of volunteering does it represent, and what do they do?
  • How many young people are carers?
  • How many young people set up businesses and how much income/impact do they generate?
  • How many young people are part of shaping local or national strategy, from school youth council members, to youth trustees of charities?
  • What % of young people are law abiding (rather than what % commit crimes)?
  • What is the gap between what adults think about young people (on all sorts of metrics) and what is actually the case?

One possible route would be to take every easily available negative stat and find the positive reflection of it. But I think it would require a deeper dive to really pull together a comprehensive set of positive stats that could potentially help to reshape how we think about the youth of the country, and how they think of themselves.

We should be very proud of our young people – they are wonderful and talented – and I would love to be able to back this belief up with stats….

I am sure that there must be a funder out there who would commission such a piece of research……any thoughts on moving this idea forward, anyone???

We Must End This State Sanctioned Child Abuse

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I have been working in the youth sector for over 20 years and am not easily shocked.

But I am truly stunned and sickened by the news that I read yesterday, that there have been 43,960 strip-searches of young people in custody, in a mere 21 months.

This is institutionalised child abuse on an industrial scale.

Lets dig into the numbers (that have come from a FOI request) and were reported in the Guardian here

  • 21 months is approximately 638 days.
  • That works out to on average, 69 young people strip-searched every day. Or about 3 every hour, every day of the year.
  • Astonishingly, only .0001% of searches unearthed any illicit items at all – that is one time every 1000 strip-searches
  • To put this into perspective…I have seen it reported that Ladbrokes have odds of 500/1 that Tony Blair will be the next Pope so bookies would rate us having Pope Tony as being twice as likely as a strip search unearthing anything illicit.
  • In only .0008% of the searches was any contraband at all (usually tobacco) found.
  • On not one time was it recorded that drugs or knives were found
  • On 50 occasions physical force was used to conduct the search. This is getting right into the territory of violent sexual assault.

 

This is appalling. It must be stopped. Right now.

 

I believe the following 3 measures ought to be immediately put in place:

1. Rules governing the use of strip-searches need to be made so restrictive that unless there is a very clear, and extremely significant danger (that would warrant the invasion of privacy and emotional abuse that results from strip searches) that they cannot be conducted.

2. Any child who is subjected to a strip search ought to have the right to sue for damages if the situation did not warrant such extreme action. Looking for contraband or tobacco can never, ever be a justification for child abuse.

3. Any staff member who conducts an unwarranted strip search should lose their job and be never allowed to work with young people again.

I have trained and led crisis intervention teams working with some of the most challenging young people in our country and I am a qualified restraint training instructor. I have never ever thought it necessary to conduct a strip search – I have never even considered conducting such a search. In order to decide to put my hands on a young person I need to feel very sure that if I didn’t do so, that there was a significant danger they would be about to seriously hurt themselves or another person, or to dangerously damage property.

It is without doubt that subjecting anyone, and particular a vulnerable young person, to an intimate body search must be an even more extraordinary event that could only be acceptable in the very most extreme and unusual circumstances.

Finally I hope that the full data set from the FOI is released and that a thorough enquiry is launched to see if (as I fear may be the case) this may have in some cases gone beyond awful practice into deliberate abuse, and whether there are grounds for prosecution against any of the people who have been conducting these searches.  The enquiry should obviously begin with speaking with all of the young people who have been subjected to strip searches and that support for them should be made available as needed. This is a massive child protection situation and needs to be dealt with accordingly.

@JonnyZander

 

 

 

Gamesmakers, Olympic Ideals & Legacy

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Everyone is in agreement that the London 2012 Gamesmakers are doing a sensational job. They are a fantastic tribute, to themselves; to the British and non-British people who live in this country; to the spirit of volunteering and to the Olympics itself.

To set the context for this blog, I have been managing Olympic programmes for 4 years and am not an unbiased bystander to this whole thing:

  • I am currently managing the Waltham Forest Welcome, the Olympic volunteering programme for the Waltham Forest, one of the host Boroughs
  • Kaizen delivered all the training for the Hackney hosts, and the core and team leader training of the Hackney Olympic Volunteers
  • We also delivered another large Olympic training programme, for 3 years.
  • I have been a member of the LOCOG Changing Places Programme Board for the past 3 years.

Modern Olympics are dependant on volunteers to be their life-blood; and the volunteers are consistently excellent role models and hosts.

If we apply the core Olympic principals to ourselves as Gamesmakers, then this role involves not only being the best that we can be, but also building on the achievements of the fantastic volunteers in past Olympic Games. It is this second aspect that is interesting me right now as it feels like we are absolutely nailing the first aspect.

I think we can lift the bar on Olympic volunteering. So what could this look like? I would love to sit down with some other Gamesmakers and see what could be possible/what we want to be possible

There are somewhere over 100,000 primary volunteer Gamesmakers, and probably an equal number of secondary volunteer Gamesmakers.

Let me clarify what I see to be the difference:

  • The primary volunteers are all the Gamesmakers, whether LOCOG, London Ambassadors, Local Borough Volunteers, Ceremony Volunteers, transport volunteers, police volunteers, volunteers associated to other 3rd sector organisations (eg religious institutions, school staff, business volunteers; and others who work directly on the Games in one way or another.
  • The secondary volunteer Gamesmakers, are the husbands, wives, partners, children, parents, friends, employers and colleagues who are enabling the primary volunteers to do what they are doing. They are the invisible Gamesmakers but no less important for that. You can’t have 100,000 of the primaries without perhaps several times the number of secondary. While the primary volunteers get all the glory and thanks, I do think it is very important that we don’t forget all the people who enable and support them.

I have heard that this is the largest civil mobilisation of volunteers since WW2. That’s an amazing thing, and it ought to be surely possible for us to find ways to harness that energy and network post September 12th.

There may well be succession/legacy plans in place for the Gamesmakers, but I haven’t seen or heard of any. If there are not plans then now is the time to at least start the conversation – so we can transition post Games.

I think it is our responsibility as Gamesmakers to take ownership and lead the process. I am certain that we have the knowledge, skills and experience within our body to do this.

So what could this look like? I have a few thoughts but would be interested to be part of a wider group of Gamesmakers to chew this over and see what comes out. Here are 2 ideas, one immediate one longer term:

  • Gamesmakers could start and manage a campaign to collect donations of Olympic pin badges to raise money for charity (or to establish the organisation I mention below). The badges could then be auctioned. 100,000 Gamesmakers could surely collect 200,000 of them (and probably way, way more). What if spectators could show their appreciation for the Gamesmakers by donating a pin badge to our campaign. Imagine how many badges that could bring in. If they auctioned for an average of £10 that could raise millions.
  • London 2012 Gamesmakers could establish an International Gamesmaker Federation, to include volunteers from all past and future Olympic Games. We could co-initiate a global day of volunteering to involve Gamesmakers from across the world.

These are 2 ideas, I am sure that many, many more will come if we ask ourselves the question, what can we do to raise the bar?

If we can carry forward the Gamesmaker energy and passion into a post Games process then we would genuinely have created an extraordinary legacy for the UK and opened up a new dimension for Olympic volunteering. This is the very first Games with widespread social media activity. We have opportunities to mobilise and connect that have never been there before.

This is the Olympics, and for most of us we will never have this chance again. Lets squeeze every drop of benefit and magic that we can from it, and embody all aspects of the Olympic ideals.

 

 

 

 

 

Some thoughts on community participation

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Everyone wants to involve the local community in services, projects and local initiatives. But…

What does this actually mean in practice?

How can we, as professionals in the sector, ensure that we are providing an effective and attractive menu of participation options for people to take up?

And

How can we measure the effectiveness of our participation strategy?

We have developed the following model/framework to identify and explain what we see to be the different core archetypes of community participation. It can be applied at all scales and in all sectors; from a national perspective explaining the concept of how individuals can participate in the Big Society, to a local level, in a school looking to increase parent engagement, or a local authority wanting to address anti-social behaviour.

So, what does it mean to participate in your community?

We think it means you are doing one of these 7 things:

 

 

Reactive

  • You react to things that happen and say when things go badly, or when they go well.
    • Examples of this could be calling up to report a burnt out car, telling your child’s school that they are being bullied, or writing to thank the nurses at the hospital who gave such wonderful care to your mother

Responsive

  • You respond when asked for your view or opinion
    • Examples of this could be filling in a survey about your area, attending a community meeting, being part of a focus group, voting, or having any conversation with someone who works in your area, when you are asked: “what do you think about….”

Strategic

  • You operate at a strategic level and influence policy, projects or organisations
    • Examples of this could be being a parent governor at a school, being on your local tenants association or being a trustee of a charity

Supportive

  • You support projects and schemes that are already happening
    • Examples of this could be volunteering at the local charity shop, doing your recycling, being a special constable, or staying at the nursery for stop and play sessions

Generative

  • You generate new projects, organisations or initiatives, based on seeing something is missing
    • Examples of this could be being a social entrepreneur and setting up your own organisation, to establishing a free school, to starting a new project within your organisation

Engaging

  • You engage, catalyze, connect or encourage others
    • Examples of this could be network building, introducing two people (or organisations together) or facilitating and engaging others to be a part of a project, or to change their mind

Helping

  • You help out by doing things
    • Examples of this could be assiting your elderly neighbour with her shopping, or taking a pot of soup around to someone who is ill, or picking up some litter off the street. The difference between this type and being supportive is that this is informal, not on behalf of an organisation or programme.

 

All of these things help to build community.

All of them can apply as much to organisations as to individuals; in life and online.

This is not a hierarchy where one way of participating is better than another.

It is not a progression where one way leads to another.

What we know, is that at different times, for different issues, we all will contribute and participate in our communities in different ways. This is because at different moments in our lives, different things are important to us, we have different opportunities and interact with different people.

We use these archetypal models in all our community engagement and community building projects. We find the following benefits from using it:

  • Assessment of Opportunities: The model can be used as a framework for assessing the participation offer being made to a community. Gaps can be identified and filled. The model can be used to create a menu of opportunities that means there can be “something for everyone.”
  • Targeting: It enables us to devise engagement plans that are targeted, based on how someone might participate rather than purely by demographics. Even if engaging just one type, eg generators, there are sub-categories – they are not a homogeneous group (eg experienced and inexperienced generators). The model gives a framework to identify and engage sub-groups by looking at the needs of the individual.
  • Support: Different types of participation have different needs that have to be met to ensure effective and sustained involvement. By using the model we can identify and target support where it is needed, and design systems that make this happen. For example, for people to be able to be supportive they need to know what local schemes and projects exisit for them to be a part of.
  • Appreciation: It encourages the appreciation and valuing of all the different types of participation, rather than focusing on just one type. For example, reactive participation is almost always seen as complaining. Adopting this model can change the way people think and therefore act, so that someone calling up to complain about something being broken could be treated as a community member who is actively engaging with the council, and be valued for it, rather than being related to as a nuisance complainer.
  • Shared Understanding and Language for Partnership Working: the model creates a shared language that supports partnership working in engagement. For example, one person could tell another that they were seeking to engage people to be generative, rather than supportive, and there would be a clear understanding of what was meant for the collaboration.

If genuine and widespread community participation is wanted, then a vital role for government (central and local) and for third sector organisations, should be to ensure that there is a very wide range of opportunities, in each of these areas for people to participate.

And, if we, as individuals want to be involved and help to build our communities, then all we have to do is step up, and do more of the things that we can do.

It really is that simple.

 

@JonnyZander

 

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