When seeking support for new enterprises, we should not just look to government and private investors, writes Ed Whiting FRSA, a co-founder of a crowdfunding business. He argues that the RSA is well placed to become a beacon of crowdfunding for enterprise.

The recent RSA Jobs Summit has provoked some fascinating writing on a vitally important subject, including in the Spring 2012 RSA Journal. Unfortunately, I missed the event but there was one paragraph of Matthew Taylor’s roundup blog that particularly piqued my interest: “Entrepreneurship is vital to future growth and job creation and there are probably more budding entrepreneurs around now than ever before. But we are still quite in the dark about the characteristics, which make for a successful entrepreneur and the context which most favours them. When we do find people who have, and act on, great ideas we should cherish them and encourage them to develop this talent in others.”

The way in which ‘we’ is interpreted matters enormously. Too often we look to government, policy institutions and think tanks; I think that would be a flawed conclusion. In supporting new enterprises, we should look to crowdfunding, a relatively new way of using social media to raise funds for exciting creative ideas from wide ‘crowds’ of people. Since 2008, crowdfunding has taken off with some gusto. My recent experience in starting a crowdfunding business – WeDidThis – has made me think that the only way we can create the context described above is to truly socialise the process of devising and growing new businesses. In short, we must create new avenues of popular support for very early-stage social enterprises, by giving micro-funders the chance to help and influence the growth of game-changing ideas right from their inception. The RSA could be hugely influential in making all of this happen.

Making new ideas really come to life is hard work. As I found with WeDidThis; you need to be willing to be a full-time evangelist for your idea, battling hard to get it heard, even when few seem willing to listen. At the start, it can be really tough to find the small pots of cash that you might need to research, test and develop your idea. That is why when getting off the ground, a lot of enterprises have to rely solely on the self-funding and family and friends, creating a risk that entrepreneurialism becomes an exclusively middle-class game and making it difficult to get really honest and constructive feedback.

Crowdfunding can be a really exciting way to break this cycle, by enabling new value to be created for both funders and entrepreneurs. For the micro-funders who back crowdfunding projects, the process of donating creates a relationship that makes them feel they are playing a valued and powerful role in making new ideas happen without needing to contribute the kind of money that would normally get your name over the concert hall door . For entrepreneurs, crowdfunding is a great way of creating the context where their ideas are indeed ‘cherished and nourished’ by a large number of people.

Judging by the feedback from project leaders, it is hard to overstate the benefits from opening projects up to offers of financial and non-financial help. As successful crowdfunder Rebecca Jones, of Just Jones &, puts it, the backers for her theatre project are her ‘crowdfounders’: “The [biggest] reward for us, is knowing that we now have a group of people and organisations who are taking an active interest in what we do and why we are doing it. This is worth as much as the individual pledges.”

On WeDidThis, projects with a clearly articulated social benefit seemed to be the most likely to be successful, for instance, our most popular projects had a really clear social purpose, like teaching street dance to kids in Rwanda and running arts clubs at Peckham Space gallery for children.

The RSA is already supporting many of these sort of projects: those that have succeeded in obtaining RSA Catalyst funding show real potential to make a difference to local communities and social groups. A couple of projects have successfully supplemented their Catalyst funding through crowdfunding on WeDidThis: a workshop teaching textile skills to women in East London and a new busking festival in Bedford. With such a great alignment of a values-conscious RSA Fellowship and a pipeline of socially valuable Catalyst projects can we do more?

There are over 27,000 fellows in the RSA, all of whom have signed up to the organisation’s clear and strong social mission. If we can support Catalyst projects to open themselves up to new supporters through crowdfunding, and convince just 20 percent of you to support RSA Catalyst crowdfunding projects with your money and skills, we will have created 4,000 new micro-philanthropists. Even at the relatively small average donation size that we saw with WeDidThis (£200) we will create a new £54,000 funding stream to complement the direct grants made through the Catalyst fund. Fellows would have a direct say in what gets funded, and with every project giving them the opportunity to help and influence its growth.

I would love to see the RSA become a beacon for crowdfunded social enterprise. Supporting entrepreneurship should not just be about governments and big investors picking winners from those who have been lucky enough to secure increasingly rare seed finance, with ‘ordinary’ people on the sidelines until products are brought to market. We must create a society where big ideas start with small experiments, backed by many people making small donations, who passionately want the project to succeed. Starting with the RSA’s Fellowship.

Ed Whiting has spent most of his working life in the public sector. In January 2011 he co-founded WeDidThis.org.uk, which was merged in March 2012. For further examples of crowdfunding, see US platforms like Kickstarter.com or Indiegogo.com.

In the wake of the Education Select Committee’s report on Great Teachers’ this week, Ndidi Okezie, Teach First ambassador and Assistant Principal at Burlington Danes Academy in West London, asks ‘What is a good teacher?’

Things have changed. That was the first clear thought I had after encountering a – let’s call it lively – GCSE class back in 2003. I walked away from my first lesson dazed and shocked because the automatic respect that I had expected to find as the adult and teacher was not forthcoming. Instead, I was greeted by looks of defiance that challenged me to try and impart knowledge, if I so dared…

That moment is a key one for any new teacher. Training, tactics and literature flash across your mind, but the reality is that you have a decision to make and I believe that the outcome signals whether you have a key characteristic of being a good teacher. Although the experience had shown me that my expectations regarding respect and behavior were misplaced, I did not lower them. In fact from that moment on, I knew I had to raise them.

I realised and accepted that part of my role was to model and establish the values and norms of behavior that were no longer an automatic given. Teachers often experience what I call the ‘fronting’ mirage, where students who do actually want to learn deep (deep) down, will not allow you to see that need or desire immediately. Instead they act out and misbehave.

It is not that good teachers do not encounter bad behavior but, regardless, they do not expect it to be a part of their classroom experience. And so in that moment, when a student acts out or challenges them in a negative way, the response is swift and firm but there is always that visible element of surprise and shock, with comments along the lines of “that behavior is beneath you” or “I really expect so much more of you than that”. As a teacher you need to expect all students to engage in learning, to do their best and be respectful. When they do not it is unacceptable. Regardless of how much these standards are tested, a good teacher’s expectations remain high, resolute and earnest, and so invariably their pupils will rise to them.

I understand why so often we gather to debate whether social context is (or even whether it should be) relevant in our schools, and whether teachers should in fact be all things to all children. I understand that there is a heavy load on teachers. Teaching today is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Yet the most prevalent mistake I feel people make when trying to understand the context of learning today is to try to compare it to when we were at school or to how we grew up. Things have changed. One week in an inner city school will reveal this immediately.

The social context that children live and learn in does of course play a role and external pressures are manifest in our schools every day. There are thousands of our children languishing in schools, brimming with ability, potential and the desire to excel, but they are too often ignored as staff try to combat the more volatile issues that creep in.

Are these issues that teachers should be trying to tackle? To be frank, no. There are other agencies, structures and institutions that need to be having their own debate and stepping forward to work more collaboratively with schools.

In almost a decade of teaching I have had the privilege of seeing and experiencing young people that have beaten seemingly insurmountable odds, battling issues that are heartbreaking. For many children it takes great courage and fortitude to be a successful student. The issues that pull on them, vying for their time and attention, are vast and various, and all too often dangerous. If many of us tried to juggle these pressures we would be advised to take time off work and seek professional support. Yet time and time again, when you ask students what made the difference and helped them to overcome these difficulties, they will say it was a teacher. A stubborn and persistent teacher. A good teacher.

Of course there are barriers. However, a good school will not fixate on external problems to the degree that their hopes and expectations for the child diminishes. Instead, a good teacher is one that is able to navigate the varying degrees of unsettling influences on a child’s life, whilst still insisting that this does not excuse them from achieving educational success. External problems should not be used to justify limited aspirations or apathy. Indeed, often, the good teacher will be that voice that consistently says “I believe in you, in-spite of every obstacle in your way, even when that obstacle is you”.

Teaching can change lives. I have felt overwhelmed by the weight of this fact. When these moments come, I remind myself that I am blessed to be in this position and to have navigated my own way out of circumstances that have limited many others. That I now have an undeniable obligation, to pass on the things that helped me, ensuring that all my pupils are also empowered to excel.

The truth remains; teachers and schools can make or break their pupils. Often they are the deciding factor between whether a child achieves educational success or settles for average. Good teachers accept this reality and will tell you that they are intensely aware of the potential impact of every interaction.

As Assistant Principal at an inner London school, I measure successful schooling by asking whether each child been equipped with the skill set, tenacity and aptitude to access opportunities, formulate and actualise positive goals and dreams for the rest of their lives? When I consider whether a teacher is ‘good’ I ask whether they recognise the duty they have to all the school’s pupils, to not only educate them but also to celebrate, challenge and inspire them to be more than what they can see around them.

We are all teachers. Gone are the days when we can just pretend that inadequate education is someone else’s problem. If we agree that it is time for a change, surely we can see that the solution requires all of our hands, working in partnership to create environments and infrastructures that ensures that all of our children will be educated in schools bursting with good teachers.

Ndidi also took part in a debate on the same topic at the RSA, the first of a new series of Education Matters events organised by Teach First and the RSA.

By the end of 2012, it is predicted that networked devices will account for a fifth of internet traffic, logging and processing in various ways the ‘behaviour’ of the street. Barbara Anderson FRSA argues we all share a responsibility to shape how these technologies will shape our lives.

Over the last few years, we have seen a huge variety of familiar objects and surfaces – from televisions to bus shelters – transform into networked sensors that gather, process, store and display information.

Cities are now producing and collating information about our activities, movement and behaviour. Leading development projects pre-suppose a fully sentient environment. This means every resource – from private buildings to public spaces and their individual parts– will have an IP address (the unique identifier for a networked device) and potentially an interface that makes the information generated visible and accessible. The vision of the future is one where responses are dynamic, and constants become variable: for instance, where a building’s membrane can respond to CO₂ levels, or a road can respond to traffic.

Inhabitants of these new environments are engaging in their curation: the way in which digital assets are created, preserved and maintained. Browsing one minute, searching the next, we move seamlessly from private to shared information environments, offering insight into packages of urban experience. We can rate an interactive work of art, or get the inside track on where to get shirts ironed fast and cheaply. In London, we can even use a smartphone at a Tube platform to find out which carriage will deposit us closest to our exit at the next station.

If all this sounds a bit ‘Big Brother’, it can also be seen as the natural conclusion of a free market of information. However, if civic authorities, businesses and designers take collective responsibility, this presents a huge creative as well as commercial opportunity. It could even save money for some: use of urban digital media, on both a temporary and permanent basis, may to some extent remove the obligation on different parts of a city’s services to establish and fund their own communications and promotional networks. It could also help to measure and improve environmental impacts, safety, and navigability, and generate additional income streams. Of course, as more of us use digital urban media, our personal experience of cities will change; these are new tools available to designers and patrons to regenerate city spaces and enhance urban initiatives.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to visualise the services available today, to see more fluidly integrated experiences becoming available. Imagine an arrow that appears on the pavement or on your sunglasses to tell you which way to go, or even a docking station that unfolds as you approach to lock up your bike. The logical extension of this is an architecture that moulds itself to the activity within a space. An exhibition organised by the Architectural League of New York, Toward the Sentient City, explored art and design projects with just this theme back in 2009.

When completed in 2015, New Songdo City in Korea will be a test bed for new technologies, with the city’s infrastructure intended to exemplify a digital way of life. Dubbed a ‘ubiquitous’ or U-City, it will be one of the largest scale examples in the world where all information systems (residential, medical and business) are linked, and could provide the prototype for the cities of the future.

But social network models for sharing information can be problematic: too much information on your neighbours can serve to undermine a community, limit conversation and prevent cohesion. Knowledge that is too explicit – for example, the political or religious affiliations of a community – can dissolve the diversity and richness key to new developments.

Furthermore, the expense of these ‘new tools’ has meant that many of us associate large-scale urban digital media exclusively with digital advertising hoardings. These are often (though not always) ugly and disrespectful of the surrounding urban fabric, and rightly invite challenge regarding their profit motive, light and information pollution, and energy consumption.

Regardless of whether we think it best to have all the information available all of the time, the pace of these innovations is very likely to continue, with financial imperatives already driving implementation. Experts believe that the best of these digital city concepts are the ones that enhance the people, networks and institutions that are already on the ground – ones that use technology to build the social capital that is already there.

On a less dramatic scale than the Korean project, a number of European cities have realised the benefits of the creative and digital industries to aid regeneration. Some of the more successful examples of this in the UK include Glasgow, Sheffield, Huddersfield, the Northern Quarter in Manchester and Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, as well as the Barbican and Southbank in London. The UK 2012 Olympic Live Site programme now has 22 urban screens over with three million viewers in the UK.

The mediated environments, such as certain areas in Glasgow, are clearly the most successful because they reflect (and are shaped by) people’s actions. In these examples, designers and patrons have considered the possibilities of urban digital media in the broadest sense, and have properly exercised their duty of care.

We all share a responsibility to shape these technologies and see that they are used thoughtfully for the benefit of all, sensitive to the moral hazards that they bring. In particular, designers and developers need to work together to take up this challenge. If they do not, we risk seeing our urban spaces undermined by poorly considered experiments. If they do, Digital Media has the potential both to change the way our cities run for the better and to improve the quality of life for their inhabitants.

Barbara Anderson FRSA juggles a career as a non-executive director with advisory roles to art and design organisations with a social and environmental purpose.

The stigmatisation and misunderstanding of addiction can only be overcome when recovering addicts are prepared to share their stories, according to Beth Burgess. She argues until more people join her, the vicious circle of secrecy and shame will continue.

The British have a very special way of rooting for the underdog. We cheer for giant-killing football teams, celebrate the unlikely winner and still revel in the evacuation of Dunkirk. It is in our stories, our culture and our history to want to see the smaller and the poorer, conquer. We delight in rags-to-riches stories, survival against the odds and tales of redemption. So why don’t we do the same with recovering addicts?

Addiction is an illness but while you see cancer survivors and people with missing limbs running marathons and sailing around the world, recovering addicts do not celebrate like that. In fact we do not celebrate much: as addicts we hide away, getting treated secretly and anonymously for our ‘shameful’ problem. It is not seen as inherently shameful to have any other illness, so why this one?

The stigmatisation of addicts is so great that even when you have beaten the illness and are in recovery, you are still not encouraged to stand up and be proud of being a survivor. Perhaps it is also in our stories, culture and history to stigmatise addicts. That may be because we fail to understand them.

Alcoholism in particular is ridiculed and mocked in a way that you would never see with people suffering from any other illness. Alternatively the media parades horror stories of excess and ‘shames’ celebrities with tales of their misadventures. The media bears a huge responsibility for the widespread misunderstanding perpetuated around addiction. People who party too hard or get caught drink driving are not necessarily addicts. They may not necessarily know how to cope with fame or wealth or stress and end up living their lives in a state of excess. That is their choice and many of the people who we now label as addicts really are not. Addiction is not a choice.

My friends’ grandparents were both extremely heavy drinkers. They lived for the pub and drank for most of their lives. One day their doctor told them both that if they continued to drink they would die soon. One of them stopped. The other didn’t and died of an alcohol-related disease. Addiction is characterised by an absolute compulsion that overtakes everything else.  It is not the same as problem drinking. It is not even on the same continuum.

At the moment it is impossible to predict who is going to become an addict and who will not, although certain patterns can be detected in hindsight. I believe the roots of addiction lie in epigenetics; there seems to be a triggering event in all addicts’ lives that switches the addiction gene on. It is usually a trauma or something of that nature. Surely that is something to be sympathised with, not ridiculed?

But just because we throw the addict label around indiscriminately, this does not take away from the fact that addiction is not an uncommon problem, one that can strike anyone. Addiction can affect your postman, your doctor, your local shopkeeper or your professor. It is not just the people we read about in the newspapers. Either the local crackhead who causes crime and chaos, or the celebrity starlet with a champagne problem. Addiction has no bounds of gender, colour, class, age, religion or race.

Addiction should be treated like any other illness. But instead, addicts choose or are advised to be anonymous and join secret groups to recover. We are not supposed to share our stories of recovery – let alone addiction – with the outside world.

Professionals working within the field are told not to self-disclose if they have a history of addiction. As a practitioner and former addict, I believe that constitutes one of our worst practices. How on earth are addicted clients supposed to gain hope and feel they have a recovery worth fighting for, if the professionals treating them are not allowed to share their stories? This does not encourage others to see a bright future when the potential role models around them are forced to hide away.

This is where the problem lies. In order to challenge stigma and promote understanding many former addicts choose to work from within the addiction field. Recovering addicts have to be prepared to stand up and tell their stories. Some of us are proud of our recovery, and communities and initiatives are starting to spring up among those committed to celebrating their recovery from addiction, such as the National Recovery Walk. When I write about this subject, often the responses I receive are anonymous and along the lines of ‘Good for you’ or ‘I wish I could do that’ or ‘I would but I have kids to think of’. This vicious cycle will only be broken when enough of us stand up, unashamed and ready to educate.

The tide may be turning but there is a long way to go. We need to continue to strive for the destigmatisation of addiction. Again, I am happy to start by standing up and saying I am an addict in recovery and I’m damn proud thank you very much. Talk to me about it, ask me questions, let me give you hope and understanding. I am proud of my recovery and I do not care who knows it. But I wish the rest of you would join me. Please?

Beth Burgess is an author, a speaker and the founder of Smyls Recovery Coaching. Her mission is to destigmatise addiction, and to help addicts overcome their challenges and believe in themselves.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are often characterised as helpless victims of 21st century expansion and development. Patrick de Flufy argues that this characterisation is inaccurate and ignores the complex reality on the ground.

From the isolated tribes that get contacted by the outside modent world, to cultures destroyed by resource exploitation and a seemingly inexorable acculturation, virtually all indigenous peoples of the Amazon are being enormously affected by the vast forces of modernity, over which they often have little control.

But this is just one side of the story. The peoples of the Rio Corrientes are an example of the other. Forty years ago, the Achuar, Urarina and Kichwa communities living on the Corrientes had very little contact with the outside world. That was when the first petrol companies struck oil there, quickly erecting large installations and pipelines, but building them in a slovenly manner with no respect for the local environment.

There have been regular oil spills ever since. For Pucacuro, the village nearest to one of the earliest and largest installations, two large spills into their fishing lake, in 1978 and 1980, have meant a slow poisoning by the lead and cadmium that accumulated in the fish. As a result, many of the young people of Pucacuro are experiening a range of health problems including brain damage and thyroid problems. Even today eating local fish can result in illness. So far the victim narrative has played out. But the people of the Rio Corrientes have fought back. In 2006, after years of being fobbed off by the petrol companies and the Peruvian government alike, all 36 communities of the Rio Corrientes got together, blockaded the river and shut down the oil installations, costing Pluspetrol an enormous amount of profit. This resulted in the Act of Dorissa, an agreement that Pluspetrol would start to clean up its operations, and signalled the start of a gradual shift in attitudes. Today the Federation of Native Communities of the Rio Corrientes (FECONACO) employs a network of highly trained environmental monitors and regularly goes to court over oil spills. They recently had a meeting with ministers and congressmen in Lima, resulting in a multi-sectoral commission examining the extent of pollution in the river basin and considering strengthening the environmental laws.

The Nahua tribe from southeastern Peru are usually held up as a classic example of the horrors of first contact. They story is that they were contacted by loggers in 1984, and very quickly over half of the group died, apparently losing their indigenous culture almost entirely and can be seen pitifully poor in the streets of Sepahua, a nearby town.

But the Nahua tell a different story; not least that it was them who actively made contact. They say that they ‘fell out of the forest’ because of their enormous desire for metal objects such as machetes. Those first contactors appeared superficially acculturated in about five minutes; the first thing they did was to demand the clothes of the Yaminahua loggers they had met and on their first visit to town, while getting his hair cut, a Nahua man said: ‘I want to become a Peruvian like you’. The Nahua are clear that this man was not saying that he wanted to leave his own culture behind and live in town. Indeed, part of the Nahua culture is a belief that the way to understand something foreign to themselves – be it an animal they hunt, the spirit world or the world of outsiders – is to imitate it, or ‘become’ it for a brief period, and thus learn about it.

While the Nahua do go to Sepahua to acquire desired goods, they also have a territorial reserve to live in unmolested. This helps protect nearby tribes who are choosing their own futures by voluntarily remaining in isolation. For example, the Mashco-Piro – a nomadic isolated group who live for part of the year near the Nahua – actually break anything metal they find and anthropologists believe they have even given up agriculture in order to remain in isolation.

Then there are very acculturated groups who are reclaiming their indigenous cultures: Curuinsi is an association of indigenous students in Iquitos, the capital of Loreto, who are doing just that. Started by poor Huitoto students who could not speak their own language, they now have a traditional maloca – communal building – in Iquitos, where they are learning from some of the last sabios, or knowledgeable elders, of their tribe, at the same time as studying at university. The students share a powerful vision for the maloca. Indigenous students of all tribes will learn and share the wisdom of their different cultures. They will adapt their traditional cultures to the modern reality, combining western and traditional medicine, writing down their sabiduria – loosely translated, their cultural wisdom – putting it on the internet, inviting foreigners to come and learn with them. The aim is for the maloca to eventually become a training ground for the next generation of leaders.

These are just a few of the many examples of indigenous peoples carving their own futures out of the clash of the Amazonian and modern worlds in which they are living. Currently they are doing so with very little help indeed. Pluspetrol is making huge profits from Rio Corrientes and still causing untold damage to the environment, but gives very little back. Ruben, the president of Curuinsi, occasionally has press interviews in Lima, but more often than not he must go to bed hungry. And the Matses, a large group on the border of Peru and Brazil, receive inadequate medical provisions and almost nothing else; neither their leaders nor the few Matses at university in Iquitos get any help when they enter the world in which money is a necessity.

Perhaps most unfortunately of all, when help is given, projects are generally designed by the funders and NGO’s, rather than the indigenous people themselves being facilitated in creating projects suited to their cultures. Perhaps we should stop making assumptions about ‘primitive’ cultures, and instead start listening to their aspirations and allowing them the means to achieve them. That way, we might learn something valuable from them too.

Patrick Le Flufy is working with FECONACO, Curuinsi and IIAP and will shortly be spending two months living in a remote Matses community. Visit Patrick’s blog.

Learning to drive is increasingly expensive and out of the reach of many young people, whose chances of securing work – already reduced – are further diminished if they cannot drive. David Homewood FRSA argues that insurance companies need to be encouraged to find ways of overcoming this barrier.

As the fall out of the credit crunch bites and the cost of living rises, it is becoming increasingly clear that today’s young people face very different economic conditions to, not just compared to their parents, but to every generation since the Second World War. As youth unemployment and housing costs rise, travel becomes even more important.

Yet, if anyone wishes to start driving these days they, or their parents, are looking at a total cost of at least £5,000, and more often £10,000, in their first year. This is as much as the cost of a year at university. Of course, both are important when trying to get a good new job; the difference is that a student is able to get help to pay for university – grants and low cost loans repayable only after having got a reasonable job – but there is no help towards the cost of starting to drive.

The cost of a provisional licence (£50), driving lessons (20 hours for £500), extra insurance to drive your parent’s car (£200), the driving tests (£93), a full licence (£50), and the purchase of a second hand car (perhaps £1,700), road tax (£130), car maintenance, MOT, and 900 litres of petrol to do only 20 miles a day on average (about £2,000), totals about £4,700.

All this may seem reasonable and justifiable in the age of climate change, reduced public spending and rises in fuel prices, but the new young driver is asked to pay an additional £3,100 (the lowest amount quoted by the main insurance companies and comparison web sites), or £7,000 (quoted by many insurers).

Worse still, insurers frequently demand a high excess of several thousand pounds in addition to the very high premium. Whilst it is appreciated that new young drivers are more likely to have an accident than older more experienced drivers, there must be a question as to the reasonableness of demanding such a massively higher premium and in addition demanding a very large excess; this suggests that insurers are covering themselves twice over.

Furthermore, these costs are making it so difficult for a young person to find this very high premium, that it will prevent some from driving and persuade others to break the law and risk driving without insurance. It also fails to reward those that drive carefully and have no accident, providing no incentive to the new driver to do so carefully.

As I understand it, there is at least one insurance company that offers to reduce the cost of insurance for drivers who agree to fit a meter to their car, which records the speed at which they are driving, any occasion when they break the law or drive badly and so on. There are two problems with this seemingly good idea. The first is that it is only one of the smaller, less well known companies. The second and main problem is that even they start by charging the same high premium and only reduce it when drivers prove themselves competent. In effect, this approach actually increases the amount the poor beleaguered driver has to find to start driving (by the cost of fitting the meter), and only reduces it later. It would be more helpful if they allowed the driver who fits the meter to enjoy a more normal premium and increase it if the driver fails to drive properly.

There is a real danger with the current level of premiums that it will prevent many young people from starting to drive and seriously hamper their chances of gaining employment. This must be affecting about a million potential new young drivers every year and will impact on almost every family at some time.

Is it not time to help find another way? Can we not help insurance companies recognise the problems they are creating for our young people and for employment and to find ways of more fairly spreading the cost of insuring new drivers?

Amongst the many Fellows of the RSA, there must be many with ideas to overcome this problem. Surely there are many Fellows out there who work within the insurance industry or large driving schools, and whose businesses must be reduced when less young people start to drive? How about persuading your business to promote discussions or seminars on this important matter? Why not suggest your ideas to the RSA, and persuade your company to offer to support further thinking in this area?

David is a retired economic development consultant to local authorities and general manager in international fast food companies, now doing voluntary work for local charities.

In the last year the headlines highlighted large-scale, sometimes violent, rejections of the status quo.  Tessy Britton FRSA argues it was also a year in which citizen-led creative and collaborative local projects came into their own.

As regular citizens, we have a number of well-established routes to participating in society. We participate through being consumers, supporting the economy, circulating money while trying to provide valuable livelihoods for ourselves and others. We participate through generosity, giving what we can spare and volunteering to help others, both at home and abroad.

Many of us choose to get involved in social governance. We may take on formal roles and responsibilities, become school governors, stand as a local councillor, act on committees and community forums. And, of course, we can vote. Less formally, we may also get involved in public consultations and – when we feel our concerns have not been are sufficiently listened to – we can challenge decisions more directly through campaigning and protesting. So, with so many opportunities to participate, why are we seeing people engaging in their communities in new, more collaborative ways, and what can we learn from this?

An example of these new creative behaviours might broadly be described in this simple scenario: a person has an idea of how their street or community might look or feel different. They might think that a few benches in their street would create new opportunities for neighbours to get to know one another better through informal contact. Historically, they could take their idea to the local authority or their ward councillor, where it would be supported or not.

But if that person knocked on their neighbours’ doors, described their idea and managed to collect some donations and, together, they bought a bench or two – or even designed and made their own, then this would be a significantly different approach. They would not be acting out of charity, or representing anyone, or campaigning. They had a creative, socially informed idea and, working collaboratively with neighbours, they made it happen.

This same pattern is emerging around the world, from community fruit collections and skills sessions, to resource sharing and many projects relating to food, growing, cooking, making and learning. What we are seeing is not nostalgic and is culturally structurally very different from what we have witnessed before.

Knowledge about systems, the social connection needs of people, the ideas and methods of making these social projects work, is slowly becoming more widespread, making these innovative projects more sophisticated in their design. Some professionals are deploying their expertise in their own communities voluntarily. There is a much deeper and wider appreciation of the idea of waste; whether of people’s talents, ideas and energies, or physical resources. Collectively, these strands of thinking represent opportunities to act in clever and successful ways that have the potential to transform how we live day-to-day.

People are rediscovering the pleasures and benefits of common activity: neither as passive consumers, nor as needy recipients of charity, but as active makers and designers of the social, economic and physical infrastructure of where they live. There is a new sense of agency emerging, of optimism and of control, and it is revealing itself through positive activity on a human scale.

For some years, I have been working on a project called Social Spaces, concentrating on understanding these phenomena as they have emerged. We now have 45 collaborative books in production –The Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe –collecting stories about these new types of local projects from around the world, projects often characterized by their powerful ability to gently bridge widespread social divides. Last month in Rotterdam, I spent the morning in the Living Room, a beautiful space that is funded by members of the community, each paying three euros a month, and managed by volunteers. In Israel, the practice of communities renting a shared house for community activities is becoming commonplace in some areas.

Over the past 15 months, Social Spaces has worked in around 80 communities, asking over 2,000 people what they would like to see more of in the places where they live. We have worked in all types of communities, including less privileged places, and the answers are the same everywhere. Not a single person has asked for more restaurants, clothing or jewellery shops. Instead, people in the UK said they want to live in communities where the divisions between age, culture, wealth (and lack of it) are bridged. They told us that they want to live in beautiful places and, very importantly, that they want new types of common space, places that can help to build more sociable communities. They want to create a sense of community, to pool their ideas, talents and to build on their innate resourcefulness and resilience through simple activities.

They believe that these activities, added together, can start to make significant steps towards transforming their communities. Research confirms this. What has emerged from this work is an amazing collective vision: a homemade vision that is not being imposed by social theorists, the media or Hollywood.

So what impact could this new type of creative and collaborative participation have on the body politic? It is often happening without the need for state funding or permission and has the potential to seriously disrupt many of our existing systems. If local people can connect with one another easily, improve their neighbourhoods through collective activity and deploy sophisticated and strategic thinking – improving health and wellbeing, reducing employment and crime, for example – without so much as a nod towards politicians, what happens to political power and vested interest?

In some respects, these patterns of activity chime with the stated ambitions of today’s politicians: citizens getting more involved, relieving the state of financial burdens, generating positive, networked effects that no linear, direct government intervention could ever hope to achieve. Yet, despite this, it may turn out that a significant shift in politicians’ behaviours is needed, if they want to stay relevant.

Take one example involving a small but impressive group of people in Cornwall. They have successfully negotiated with an energy company to create a large community fund. This would make it possible to become collectively self-sufficient in generating green energy. The fund will be managed by the community, for the community. Not a single line of responsibility or credit for the project originally passed through the existing local democratic system.

If you are a local councillor, you might fall in love with all this place-shaping and making; you have vegetables popping up all over the place, more people riding bicycles, perhaps even more people smiling. New projects are blossoming, there are new children’s nurseries co-managed by parents, young people are involved in creating and managing intergenerational spaces and people are sharing their stuff. As a result of all this sociability and industrious activity, crime is going down, unemployment is going down, the local economy is improving, without you, the councillor, making a budget decision or lifting a finger. So how exactly do you get re-elected, if there is no direct route of attribution between you and this transformation?

The penny finally drops for this councillor. While there will always remain a need for all types of participation she or he is going to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in more energetically than before, because they realise that it is the only way to remain relevant. Before you know it, they are digging up vegetables and painting walls, removing administrative barriers to community progress, and connecting people, ideas, expertise and resources both in the community and in the council, helping to create more collaborative cultures, as though their life depended on it.

So, next time someone asks you to plant carrots, build a bench, transform an empty space, or bake a pie, share a skill, anything in fact that creates relationships and builds trust, don’t think of it as trivial. It could turn out to be the most politically radical thing you could do.

Tessy Britton is Director of Social Spaces and previous Chair of the RSA Fellowship Council. Social Spaces is a project working to develop new knowledge about innovative community-led projects and has been collaborating with Zero Zero to develop The Civic Crowd, a civic project mapping platform. 

Martin Willis FRSA directed an intercultural community project as part of the West Midland 2012 Cultural Olympiad earlier this year. He argues that more time should be spent celebrating this kind of grass roots activity, which captures the spirit of the people’s Olympics.

On Tuesday 13 March, over 100 people from community groups, voluntary and religious organisations, schools and colleges gathered for the launch of the West Midlands 2012 Cultural Olympiad. They represented thousands of people in grass roots groups who are celebrating the Olympic values of respect excellence and friendship. Their projects range from a two-day festival of learning disabled dance led by Mencap; a six-metre high Godiva awakening in Coventry with actors, dancers, musicians and fireworks; an exhibition examining children’s lives from the 18^th century to the present day; and over 30 community games inspired by the 1850 Wenlock Olympian Games.

A few days before, we had all been sent a special email stating that the Leader of Birmingham City Council and the Director of the London 2012 Festival would be making an exciting announcement prior to the general launch of the whole West Midlands programme. What might this be? Extra funding for local cultural and sporting groups? An award recognising the work of community champions? A film project to capture the grass roots creativity of West Midlands people?

On the contrary, the assembled throng were decidedly underwhelmed by being told of the plan to stage the world premiere of Stockhausen’s six-hour opera Mittwoch in Birmingham. The revelation that this will include an extravagant section, in which a string quartet performs in four separate helicopters, was in sharp contrast to the work of local volunteers and community groups, often done on a shoestring.

To be fair, there was mention of the West Midlands Cultural Olympiad events in later speeches, long after most of the dignitaries had left. Right at the end of the 90 minutes launch, we enthusiastically applauded a dance show by a group of young men from Worcester. Is it any wonder that when the Guardian conducted an on-line poll asking readers whether they ‘get’ the Cultural Olympiad; 27 percent said “Yes: this celebration of British art and culture is something to be proud of,” whilst 73 percent opted for “the Cultural O-what-iad?”

A member of the London 2012 creative team explained to me that the Stockhausen announcement secured more press coverage for the programme, including a lot of international press coverage particularly in the US and Germany. But is the Cultural Olympiad about raising international profile, or a way of engaging communities throughout the country in what the UK bid called “the people’s games”?

In the case of the West Midlands, as in many parts of the UK, ‘the people’ is made up of a wonderful mosaic of different communities and cultures. Indeed, London’s cultural diversity was highlighted right at the start as being key to the bid to win the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This view was warmly supported by Nelson Mandela when he praised London as: “a wonderfully diverse and open city providing a home to hundreds of different nationalities from all over the world”.

The City of Birmingham Choir’s Equinox project is one of many examples in the West Midlands where local groups have embraced the belief of the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, that the games promote understanding across cultures. Over this two year project, we worked with 350 singers and three percussion groups drawn from the region’s Chinese, Arabic, Indian, African Caribbean, Eastern and Western European communities to co-produce a celebration of West Midlands cultures in Symphony Hall. Singing and percussion were chosen because these are the two oldest forms of music making. They open the potential for collaboration and communication between peoples that overcomes the barriers of language, politics and beliefs.

The Symphony Hall event climaxed with all performers combining in the world premiere of a unique composition, Koinonia, by Midlands composer Christopher Long, conducted by Adrian Lucas. The text in Hindi, Mandarin, Polish, Arabic, Swahili and Latin was chosen by the performing groups. We believe that no-one has ever attempted to compose and perform an inter-cultural work on this scale before; one which respects each culture’s different style of singing and harmony, whilst creating a unified whole.

Our performance inspired astonishing exhilaration amongst the audience and performers: “Multicultural Birmingham at its best”; “ I felt as excited as if I had been singing myself”; “Fabulous concert, really blew me away. ” Asked after the event how it was, the leader of the Arabic group said he was: “Still coming down to earth after the buzz of Saturday, the finale piece still ringing in my ears.

This was a rare occasion to witness an audience of Black, Asian, Arabic, Chinese and White European people sharing their music together in Symphony Hall. We were delighted that the West Midlands RSA supported the event and hosted a pre-concert talk. Is it too late for the organisers of the Cultural Oympiad to drop their fixation on extravaganzas aimed at international media and embrace the vision of the people’s games? Fortunately, here in the West Midlands, we are doing it anyway.

Martin Willis FRSA is the City of Birmingham Choir Equinox Project Director. He writes in a personal capacity. Find out more about Equinox.

The old corporate cliché that ‘our people are our greatest asset’ is based on a fundamental truth. Michael Echols FRSA argues that the way we evaluate economic success and the impact of investment in people needs to reflect this.

In a knowledge-driven economy, organisations depend on the intelligence, talents, skills and expertise of their employees to create value.

The problem is that our macroeconomic theories, standard accounting protocols, evaluation tools and decision-making structures do not allow us to properly recognise, value and invest in these seemingly intangible, yet vital, assets.

As we search for new sources of innovation and growth in the context of a weak and fragile economic recovery, attention has turned towards investment in infrastructure as an important source of economic stimulus in the short term, and growth in the longer term. However this has tended to focus on physical infrastructure rather than the human resources upon which our economic prospects depend. In the US, as in the UK, the service sector dominates the economy.  It is the acquired expertise, knowledge and skill – the human capital – that drives productivity, innovation and competitiveness. The fruits of this human capital can be seen in new and effective products and services, patents, designs and breakthrough technologies.

It is through a combination of informal learning and formal education that professionals acquire these capabilities, and as a result, provide value for their employers, customers and society at large. Yet many employers encounter significant obstacles to investing in the innovative and productive capabilities of the workforce. Given the clear link between human capital and value creation, why should this be the case?

Some barriers are obvious: for example, the standard protocols of accounting practice class investment in workforce development, training and education not as ‘capital’ but as a period expense or cost. This makes the company appear less profitable. It also makes it seemingly rational for senior executives to limit their spending on developing their employees. The result is a short-term focus on improving quarterly returns and profitability at the expense of the long-term prospects of the company.

The result is a distortion in the apparent value of firms, at least from an investment perspective. In knowledge-intensive, high-value companies such as Apple and Google, less than 5 percent of assets reside in the physical infrastructure recorded on their balance sheets. Even in these innovation-driven enterprises expenditure on developing people is not recognised as value-creating investment even though it is integral to the company’s success. And this problem is replicated at national level, all underpinned by a macroeconomic theory that discounts the value of intangibles.

Another obvious barrier is the difficulty of measuring impact and the limitations of current value evaluation tools. While US firms spent approximately $171.5 billion on learning and development in 2010 many corporate leaders currently lack the ability to truly ascertain the return on this investment. This is not to say that measurement is easy; it is difficult to disentangle causal relationships between investment and outcomes. More importantly effective evaluation involves methodology not familiar to the accounting and finance professions.

But the challenge is to make such intangible value more tangible, and therefore suitable for investment-based approaches to human capital development. This will require specific, executable actions that policy makers and executive decision-makers can take to create value for individuals, organisations and nations.

Some positive change is happening. First, in both policy and analytic circles, there is heightened interest in recognising and measuring the value of intangible assets (including human capital) as drivers of innovation and value creation. For example, in a 2011 paper Gang Lui estimated that the value of human capital could be up to 10 times larger than that of traditional physical capital.

This progress is welcome. But the times we live in require much more attention to be given to this still neglected aspect of our economic recovery. Only then can we tackle the more specific barriers to the much needed and valuable investment in human capital. We at Bellevue University in the USA are pleased to be working with the RSA over the coming year to do precisely that.

The joint project will look at different ways in which human capital can be developed and measured, and look for ways to overcome obstacles to greater corporate investment in human capital development. If you are interested in getting involved please email Julian Thompson, RSA director of enterprise.

Footnotes

Liu, G. (2011), ”Measuring the Stock of Human Capital for Comparative Analysis: An Application of the Lifetime Income Approach to Selected Countries”, OECD Statistics Working Papers, No. 2011/06, OECD Publishing.
doi: 10.1787/5kg3h0jnn9r5-en

Public service ‘improvement’ strategies are, in reality, very often measured by organisations’ success in delivering a process, not how lives improve for individuals and their communities. Dr. Peter Dudley FRSA argues that it is third sector organisations that are leading the way in taking a different approach.

 “‘It hurts when I do this.” “Then, perhaps, you should stop doing it.“ Parents will recognise some or other variant of this most frustrating of conversations and, no doubt, will have given some or other form of the same reply.  Having heard it countless times before, my 16 year-old certainly gave a wry smile as she proofread this piece. So why is it that we tolerate a similar attitude in the management of our organisations and (in particular it seems) when it comes to our institutions of state?

In any civilised society there are three main areas that should be of prime concern to the established state: health, education and civil security. The managed provision of services in these areas forms not only a necessary basis for wealth creation but also, and in the most fundamental sense, any claim to legitimacy.

The difficulty with such fundamental provision – especially when it is free at the point of consumption – is that the drivers of adaptive change can become divided. What constitutes a successful hospital/school/prison can look very different to the consuming patient/pupil/prisoner than it does to those who are responsible for its funding. And so, the notion of ‘improvement’ must be open to interpretation.

There are many examples but a few will suffice: hospital trusts who, despite often paying for expensive advice, seem to believe that the way to improve acute health services is at the expense of patients’ wellbeing.

For example the case of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where the Healthcare Commission found that “the care and assessment of patients fell well below acceptable standards” and that senior doctors were “disillusioned” as their concerns about the impact of “the lack of staff in A & E [and] the £10 million cost savings” were not heeded.

Or schools that prioritise educational dogma over student achievement. Despite major changes in education over the years, a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report published in 2009 states that 16 percent of the adult population lacked literacy skills and 21 percent lacked numeracy skills at: “levels [that] represent the best approximation to what counts as functional competence for everyday living”.

Or a criminal justice system that seem to have been designed more to ensure a steady supply of prisoners, rather than make any real attempt at rehabilitation or the reduction of crime. Sentencing policies seem to ignore evidence of what works and actively promote re-offending. Our policy approach has resulted in a comparatively high (compared to other European countries) and growing prison population, without much evidence that we are succeeding in resettlement.  So, even before we calculate the cost of re-offending, the government looks set to continue to spend the £3.5 billion or so a year that this costs.

Broadly speaking, all organisations depend upon the ability to create or provide social value. Even the grand institutions mentioned above – however varied and diffuse their formal or legal structures may be – depend for their survival on the ability to convert whatever social value they create or provide into internal organisational value. Therefore, when social values in their field changes, so too, if they are to survive, must their ability to create organisational value from its provision.

Over the last 30 years the mechanism for reform favoured by governments has been the ‘grand initiative’; the National Curriculum in relation to schools, NHS Foundation Trusts and short-sharp-shock sentencing and the privatisation of prisons. All of these changes are underpinned by the underlying narrative of managerialism, focused on process efficiency and performance, and the propensity to ‘sweat’ the capital asset. This creates at least three problems.

First, although it would be naive to deny that any of these service areas have a significant capital element, this is secondary. The primary asset is human. Sweating the facilitating (capital) asset requires sweating the human asset, which will lead to system failure.

Second, a managerialist attitude to process tends to lead to a narrow focus on performance metrics, initially as proxies for whole system performance but, eventually, as outcomes in their own right.

Third, the notion of improvement is subject to interpretation and will be defined in relation to the core model. As the consuming constituency is diffuse, this will tend to be defined by senior managers and their political masters who are incentivised, either financially or by political expediency, to optimise the processes for which they have performance metrics. All of which means that process optimisation will be prioritised over outcome attainment.

Processes can be endlessly altered in response to emerging changes in social values but the inability to manage the whole organisation towards the achievement of its (primary) purpose will be compromised.

As Geoffrey Vickers, a pioneer in the field of systems practice, said: “The nature of the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped.” This focus on the process of delivery (and its efficiency) to the exclusion of its effectiveness – the extent to which it achieves its purpose – is the trap. Politicians, civil servants and managers become stuck in a mentality where only incremental local ‘improvements’ are possible, and even then only at the expense of causing wider problems. They are, in short, condemned to getting better at doing the wrong thing.

These are difficult and worrying times, which bring challenges that require a great deal of personal, institutional and political will. The third sector (especially) is taking up these challenges: not least, the RSA, which continues to make major contributions: in the fields of drug recovery, education (where the organisation has moved into direct delivery) and the field of prisons, offender management and rehabilitation (where the RSA has set out a new vision of institution). New social enterprises, special interest charitable organisations and, in many cases, individuals are making a difference.

In Liverpool for example, Fusion21 has (amongst others) an established job creation program, the success of which is measured in terms of the permanent jobs they create.  It isn’t rocket science but it does give strong clarity of purpose, and a firm basis for assessing the effectiveness of their work processes.

However, it is not so much the program as their attitude that is important.  By recognising that activity is subservient to outcome, and embedding the structures to support this, any organisation can become more adaptive, more able to learn about itself and its environment and, therefore, more able to make changes that are outcome focused. In this way internal value always follows the social value created, and the organisation will stay both relevant and successful. And so, if it still hurts, perhaps you should (be thinking about how to) do something else.

Peter Dudley is an independent consultant and academic working in the field of organisational performance. He is a Visiting Fellow of Manchester Business School and currently working in the area of Third Sector involvement in the Industries in Prison initiative.