|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
09 December 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
OK, I was wrong, and it took a fellowship to Canada in 2015 to realise it.
I have been involved in the food movement for a decade, specialising in building good food communities. I continue to see many benefits to putting good food at the heart of a community, including increases in social capital and benefits to mental and physical health.
I became increasingly aware of the increase in the number of people visiting food banks and I thought that the sorts of programmes I worked on could reduce this number. I then went to Canada thanks to a Winston Churchill fellowship.
One of the reasons I went to Canada, a country where food banks have existed for almost 30 years longer than in the UK, was to learn how emergency food aid providers in Canada have gone beyond basic food provision to reduce people’s food bills and dependency on the state.
What I actually found was that food aid providers were increasingly disassociating themselves from the message that they were reducing food poverty. They realised that while people need feeding they must also raise awareness of the need to advocate for wider systemic change as, ultimately, that is what’s required to have the necessary impact.
Measurement of food poverty had helped greatly in bringing this to the fore. Whereas the UK government continues to reject calls to undertake national measurement, Canada has been doing so for many years. As a result they understand very clearly that the situation has only got worse despite an increase in food aid, and research from the likes of Valerie Tarasuk at the University of Toronto has provided evidence of the lack of impact that food aid provision has.
I’m not here to bash food banks though. People are hungry and hundreds of groups across the country, very often run by volunteers, are working tirelessly to feed them.
Instead, in my article I call for a need to change the narrative on food poverty and highlight the importance of all of us, including food aid providers, in getting behind this new narrative to prevent the further institutionalisation of food aid. I provide more evidence for why this new narrative is required, offer up suggestions for what we can all do to get behind this new narrative and highlight how in the UK we’re in danger of creating a segregated food system for the poor if we don’t take action now.
Please share your views and comments below, or start a conversation with Seb on Twitter.
Tags:
casestudy
change
charitysector
community
culture
health
nutrition
research
wellbeing
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
01 December 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
Joining Clore Social Leadership as the Director of Programmes and Leadership Innovation has given me the enviable role of meeting the social sector’s most ambitious and engaging leaders. Never more apparent than with the interviews for our 2017 cohort where they were asked ‘What is good leadership?’
This is one of the toughest questions to answer, not only because one search of that question presents 48,700,000 results on Google, so there’s no ‘right’ answer.
It is tough because we can all instinctively recall someone who we feel embodies good leadership and more often the opposite too, but distilling leadership can all too quickly become messy. Leadership is about people and they are complex, so it’s no surprise the topic can become full of confusing juxtapositions.
I’ve joined Clore Social Leadership at an exciting time where we want to make leadership development accessible for all in the social sector. We want to open up the conversation about social sector leadership so we have chosen to share our new Social Leaders’ Capability Framework. Developed using our experience of developing social sector leaders over the past eight years, and using our collective foresight to highlight the capabilities we believe social sector leaders need to face the complex challenges and opportunities over the coming weeks, months and years.
Our new cohort of 2017 Fellows will be the first to embody the mindset and behaviours exhibited in this Framework. They will help us critique it to ensure it stays relevant for the sector, and we hope that you’ll join us too, to help us continue to build a culture of good leadership.
So who should use this Capabilities Framework? My answer would be everyone because leadership is a mindset, a set of behaviours. A toolkit of skills and techniques. It can be developed in everyone and we should actively practice it every single day.
I believe this is leadership at it’s simplest. A demystified description of something that Joseph Rost, Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego found to have been defined in about 200 different ways over the past 75 years, detailed in his book ‘Leadership for the 21st Century’.
I agree with Barbara Kellerman that a leadership development ‘industry’ will only become an improved industry and deliver good or even great leadership to our communities, organisations and across the globe when it is ‘inclusive rather than exclusive’.
So whether you have leadership in your title or not, take a look at our Capabilities Framework. Share your views with us and help build a culture of great leadership in our sector where everyone has the opportunity to understand their strengths, and know what is required of them as social leaders.
Tags:
change
clore
future
journey
research
skills
value
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
13 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
Dawn Austwick is Chief Executive of Big Lottery Fund.
Anyone interested in the role and nature of leadership will not have been short of food for thought lately. The recent referendum debated at length Britain’s role on the world stage – with both sides keen to paint a picture of leadership either within or without the EU. In that debate, we will rarely have seen a more eclectic array of personalities seeking to burnish their own leadership credentials. And both the Conservatives and Labour have engaged in (albeit very different) internal soul-searching about the leadership they need to tackle the post-Brexit era. Theresa May now leads the country – tasked with bringing the country back together and forging a socially just, economically sound, future. A task not without challenges.
But for all this leadership talk, the referendum laid bare the fact that large numbers of people feel disenfranchised and ignored by the powers-that-be. That’s an immediate challenge, and one that civil society has a key role to play in tackling. At the heart of this is giving people and communities a sense of agency over their lives. Here at the Fund, our new strategic framework sets out what sounds like a simple vision: putting people in the lead in shaping their lives and communities. That means people and communities defining their own aspirations, and organisations (including us) supporting them to achieve it. It’s nicely encapsulated by the phrase ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’. And, in leadership terms that can be quite a challenge to what we are used to.
So what does great leadership look like in a thriving civil society? There’s a conversation starting to emerge around a concept I am calling ‘generous leadership’. John Donne has it in a nutshell:
"No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main."
And if I think back to my time as a trustee of conservation charity the Woodland Trust, it absolutely mirrors how we think of biodiversity - 'it's an ecology, stupid!' Everything is inter-linked and ultimately inter-dependent.
I’ve spent quite a lot of my professional career in the cultural sector. Over the last 25 years a pattern of generous leadership has evolved and developed: with national institutions like Tate and the British Museum jointly curating and displaying their collections with regional museums, training and developing curators and conservators of the future. The National Theatre has pioneered co-productions with smaller production companies and regional houses and sees its own box office as a platform for other companies to benefit from. And we have co-funded Battersea Arts Centre's ‘The Agency’ partnership with People’s Palace Projects, based on a model founded in the favelas of Rio to support young people to make entrepreneurial ideas a reality.
Fundamentally, these cultural institutions developed a more acute awareness of their place in a delicate ecosystem. Civil society has no less rich and diverse an ecosystem (the NCVO Almanac is a useful reference point). ‘Generous’ leaders need to think clearly about what they have that they can share with others – be it money, time, or assets. And that shouldn’t be thought of as a simple act of altruism, but as an exercise in mutual benefit.
Take for example, the acquisition of Only Connect by Catch 22. The latter provides strategic support, scale and greater financial security, the former provides a new innovative arm of the business alongside skills and closeness to community. For this to work, the generous leader has to have a burning focus on mission rather than organisational preservation. This might mean supporting other organisations working with a similar mission to thrive rather than pursuing perpetual growth. Or it might mean offering space and time for an emerging leader from outside the organisation to reflect and develop their ideas, as the Catch22 Fellowship programme does. Generous leadership with a focus on mission may also lead a CEO and Board to decide that income growth is not always the path to achieving that mission - a decision EveryChild took under Anna Feuchtwang’s leadership.
Charlie Howard’s MAC-UK initiative goes even further – set up on a ten year basis with the intention of changing the nature of mental health provision for young people, before exiting stage left. And that points to a further characteristic of generous leadership, of being networked with other people working hard for social change. Rather than simply telling a single story, generous leaders seek to be a part of a wider movement and to share in that narrative instead. That’s a lesson that we funders need to particularly reflect on, having traditionally been criticised for thinking in terms of ‘our’ money and what it achieves, rather than the bigger picture for people and communities: sometimes attribution can get in the way of the best solution. The Early Action Funders Alliance is an example of positive steps in the right direction, bringing together a cluster of UK funders to explore and test ways of preventing problems from occurring rather than simply coping with the consequences.
And so we return to ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’. As generous leaders, we must renew our championing of the grassroots, staying focused on our mission and how best we can facilitate the work of those we support – the people in the lead. We must be listeners and collaborators with our colleagues in the sector, recognising where and how we can add value. And, as generous leaders, we must welcome the opportunity to challenge our own assumptions of what good leadership looks like, and fully embrace the complexity that will provoke.
Tags:
challenges
change
collaboration
politics
value
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
06 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
Dr Henry Kippin is executive director of Collaborate an independent CIC focusing on the thinking, culture and practice of cross-sector collaboration.
Leadership is a slippery concept. A verb, not a noun. A spirit, not a skillset. It is a term that is broad and deep enough to mean both everything and nothing. But there is no doubt that if leadership matters (as Richard Harries’s excellent paper suggests), then we need to strive to make sure that the concept can hold the weight we ascribe to it. This means we need to work on it.
The concept of leadership development is becoming more tricky to grasp in line with the changing context around it. This throws up more questions than answers. But anyone OK with a degree of complexity and nuance should absolutely welcome that. Peoples’ lives are complex and multi-faceted, so why should we expect positively changing them to be any less so?
Collaborate’s work is about supporting people who want to lead change through collaboration. Our work is about blurring sector boundaries to improve outcomes for the public. By its very nature, it unpicks the way we define sectors and understand services, and in this context effective leadership may have some counterintuitive traits. Let me explain…
1. Great organisational leadership is necessary but not sufficient – those with an eye on health and social care reform (for example) will note the prevalence of high quality hospitals functioning brilliantly within places in which some social outcomes haven’t changed for decades. Does great leadership mean more of the same? Clearly not. But just as unwelcome is a narrow version of system change that might help to keep organisations sustainable but is just as far from real co-production as ever. If the Brexit vote shows us anything, it is the acute need to close this gap. Social sector leaders should be actively working together to do so.
2. Collaboration and consensus make awkward bedfellows – any meaningful change is hard to effect. Yet we often expect this to happen across different organizations with multiple incentives in a complex environment with a remarkable degree of ease. Hope over experience on a grand scale! Beyond creating good vibes in the room, collaborative leaders need to know how to be honest, when to say no (or even better: ‘I don’t know!’), and how to create the right commitment devices to support collective progress against shared goals with multiple stakeholders. That is why we talk about building ‘collaboration readiness’: it isn’t easy.
3. The social sector silo is dead. Long live collaborative social change – social change is not the preserve of the social sector, and nor can the sector deliver some of the aspirations it exists to address in-and-of-itself. Look at the JRF’s strategy for ending poverty: a clear role for business, government and society. Leaders need to care as much about their terms of engagement with other systems and sectors as their own independence, seeing their world through others’ eyes. For a 17-year old looking for work, a smartphone, a broadband connection and a mate with a job are the critical ingredients. None of these things are delivered as public services; none of these things are innate social goods. Yet social sector leaders recognize that part of their role is creating the conditions for these things to be accessible.
So how do we operationalise some of these insights in response to Shaks Gosh’s challenge of ‘new solutions’ and a need for ‘structured leadership development’? Collaborate’s own efforts have been written up recently as the Anatomy of Collaboration: the critical components of cross-sector leadership and delivery as defined by an expert group convened in partnership with Oxford University. One quote from a prominent social sector leader stands out for me: “Collaboration is an offer, not a demand. It should always come with a decent pitch”. One might say the same about leadership.
Please share your views and comments below, you can also follow Dr Kippin on Twitter @h_kippin.
Tags:
challenges
change
charitysector
collaboration
culture
inclusion
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
|
Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
12 August 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
|
Today is World Elephant Day, so I’m taking the opportunity to talk about the elephant in the room - the exclusiveness in our sector.
It’s almost two years since an analysis of the top 50 fundraising charities revealed that 88% of Chief Executives were white, and 70% male. In senior management roles 94% were white, and 56% male. This is a sharp contrast to the society that we all live in and yet not much seems to have changed. So, why all the white guys?
As part of my Clore Social Leadership journey, I am currently working with in Washington D.C. I’ll be here for six weeks and as I’m learning so much here, I explored with the organisation what I might feasibly do for them in such a short time. What are their priorities? I was delighted to hear the response of: ‘We’d like to be an even more welcoming and inclusive organisation’. Given my passion for leaders making decisions with, and not for the communities that we serve, I’m excited to see what I can do.
In exploring this important issue, I can’t ignore a social and political context to discussing diversity in our world today. Racial tensions in the U.S. are high as a result of disproportionate shootings of African American men killed by the police. Recent shootings of police officers have been called ‘revenge attacks’, and organisations such as are accused of race-baiting. Worldwide, we are hearing increased political rhetoric that risks inciting or spreading fear and can contribute to a feeling of different=DANGEROUS. I’m fortunate in Defender’s that the organisation understands the power of diversity, and have identified increasing diversity as a priority, so I don’t need to have the conversation here. But we absolutely need to be having the conversation in our sector.
In this context I ask myself, how do we have a conversation about diversity and inclusion that can create the change without making the white men feel excluded, or even threatened? (Then there’s a whole internal dialogue that argues ‘who cares if they’re threatened, they need to get over it’, but I’m not sure if that will affect the change we need).
Maybe we could start by making ‘diversity’ more inclusive?
Often our sector can see diversity as an HR issue, or we create tick-boxes to monitor how we’re doing. More progressive thinking recognises that diversity goes beyond race, gender, religion, age etc. It recongnises that I’m diverse in the speed in which I learn, as well my sexual identity. Diversity goes beyond the visible. As a sector, we should lead the way in celebrating all diversity. As a priority this must include recognising individual differences that cause disadvantage, such as the people’s race or religion, and making real and determined efforts to mitigate the impact of those differences in our employment practices.
I know that we need the best minds to solve the big challenges that face our sector today, and the more diverse those minds the better. I know that a diverse workforce can help to redress our unconscious bias, and give us the best chance to connect with and understand the communities that we serve. I strive to create an inclusive environment but I look at the teams that I’ve been responsible for recruiting and I know that we don’t represent Scotland’s vibrancy, and diversity. The question I really need to be asking myself is ‘why?’, and I invite you to do the same.
Tags:
chairs
challenges
change
charitysector
culture
diversity
inclusion
Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
|
Blog Home
All Blogs
RSS