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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
06 March 2019
Updated: 23 October 2020
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Earlier this year, in collaboration with The Social Change Agency, we hosted Leading the Movement: Women, Power, Change, our women's conference designed to bring together senior and emerging feminist leaders, new allies, and leading figures in the women’s movement.
The day saw a great range of inspirational speakers and participants come together to develop movement-building skills and a common vision for the future of the feminist movement. The tone of the day was set by Fiona MacTaggart, Chair of Fawcett Society, Agenda, and former Labour MP for Slough, who opened the conference with a plenary speech focused on how we can use the lessons from past feminist movements to drive the present movement forward.
"Women’s movements have always had to be brave because they consistently challenge the status quo."
The speech provided an engaging account of the past feminist movements, addressing some pressing and relevant questions: What can contemporary feminist leaders learn from the challenges and accomplishments of the past women’s movement? What are the issues we are facing today? And what should leaders do to ensure we’re comprehensively and effectively challenging inequality?
To capture the insightful remarks, we have transcribed the speech into a pamphlet which can be downloaded below.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
05 February 2018
Updated: 07 December 2020
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It may sound counterintuitive to criticise a word like ‘care’ as it is difficult to envisage any negative connotations. Many, many charities and social sector organisations are involved in the provision of ‘care’ and I have no doubt that the staff of those organisation genuinely want the best for the people with whom they work. But I would question whether it is enough for effective social leaders to want to offer care to people, and if instead we should be striving to ensure that those people no longer need to be cared for by an organisation.
The very notion of professionally ‘caring’ for someone is inherently limiting - it can eliminate hope and aspirations. A courageous social leader should cast aside their professional ego and strive to make their services redundant; this can’t be done through administering care but by encouraging an organisational culture of ambition and adventure, of mitigated risk taking.
This approach comes with a certain amount of risk and we need to acknowledge that there are limits on an individual’s abilities. It is about giving people the same opportunities to flourish by being equitable, it is not about treating everyone the same: different people have different needs and need different types of support to have similar opportunities. In a time where virtuosity is seen as the minimum competency needed to engage in many activities, we must lead in a way that acknowledges that most activities have implicit value.
The trope of ‘social mobility’ suggests that there is a preferred position in society that we should all aspire to and that we can only reach it if we work hard enough. I challenge the notion that reaching for ‘social perfection’ is acceptable as a cultural norm and I suggest that there is a place for everyone in society to be themselves, and not be compelled to be reinvented as a social migrant. The flipside of social mobility is the implication that if someone is incapable of achieving the hallowed goal of being socially mobile, the best society can offer them is ‘care’: they offer no contribution to the greater good so all we can do is remove as much discomfort from their lives as possible.
I appreciate that challenging the notion of social mobility is an unfashionable stance as it criticises the notion of care. I am a proud, successful working class person. I don’t want to abandon my heritage to be seen as a success, and neither do I want to promote a binary offer of social mobility to the people with whom I work. As a social leader, I feel that supporting people to define their own criteria for a successful life takes significant courage, and it requires an approach that rejects the professional in favour of the human.
In my provocation piece, I offer ten ways in which social leaders can adopt this approach; it embraces the human in preference of the professional, and it sees people as having potential rather than problems. This isn’t the easiest approach to adopt as a social leader, but then when was anything worth doing easy?
Stuart Dexter is the CEO of the Daisy Chain Project and a 2017 Clore Social Leadership Fellow. He developed this blog and provocation piece as part of his Fellowship.
Please share your views and comments below, or you can contact Stuart on Twitter.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
26 June 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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This blog introduces Athol Halle's full provocation piece which he developed as part of his Clore Social Leadership 2016 Fellowship.
Are we in denial about homelessness? The facts are out there - homelessness kills you. The average of death of a rough sleeper in England is 47, with one person dying whilst sleeping on the streets of London every two weeks.
Homelessness is growing. The number of people sleeping on our streets more than doubling since 2010.
Services are shrinking. Despite the rise in rough sleeping, there has been 20% reduction in the number of homeless hostel beds since 2010.
A lack of empathy – do we have a Personality Disorder? As a society, we know of the serious harms that homelessness causes to people, and yet we lack compassion and allow it to grow, before our eyes, under our feet. ‘An impairment in empathy: lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others.’ This diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder fits us well.
We waste our precious resources – is this self-harm? People are society’s most precious resource. Take Jimmy Carlson, whose Memorial Service was recently held at St Martins-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. Jimmy spent over 20 years as homeless. He then spent the next 20 years as an inspirational advocate for the rights of homeless people, contributing to national policy, setting up client involvement groups and creating social clubs for people in recovery from alcohol and drug problems. On receiving his OBE in 2012 Jimmy said 'You would have walked over me in the street 15 years ago and thought I was a lost cause, just another drunk. However, I picked myself up and turned my life around and I have gone on to make a decent contribution to my community. Rough sleepers you see on the street today – with the right support they have a lot to offer too. Never give up on anyone.'
When we allow people to rot away on the margins of society, we all suffer from the lack of contribution people have to offer. A 2012 government study estimated up to £1 billion was spent as a result of homelessness across all government departments. We waste our money on dealing with the consequences rather than addressing the causes of homelessness. ‘Deliberate injury to oneself, typically as a manifestation of a psychological or psychiatric disorder.’ This dictionary definition for ‘Self-Harm’ fits us well.
There is a complex relationship between homelessness and mental health, on an individual level, both cause and consequence. Heriot Watt University’s in-depth research showed that for the majority of people, mental health problems preceded homelessness; whilst the experience of homelessness is clearly damaging - Homeless Link show that 80% of people in homelessness services had some form of mental health issue, diagnosed or undiagnosed. However, the stark truth is that if you are homeless you are nine times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.
Denial? Lack of empathy? Self-harm? As a society, when it comes to homelessness, we have a mental health problem. Acknowledging we have a problem is the first step to solving it.
Athol Hallé is Chief Executive of Groundswell - this piece is also published on their website.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
14 February 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Despite using the word in the title of my provocation piece, ‘The challenge of co-production when we can’t be trusted to vote for anything’, the first challenge is the word ‘co-production’!
When I talk about co-production many people do not know what it is. Creating any change starts with a conversation, so it is decidedly unhelpful when someone needs to disclose their lack of understanding at the onset of that conversation. The person in the know is immediately in a slightly elevated position. Elevated positions are an unhelpful conversation starter when talking about something which is about equal standings!
True co-production is a way of thinking and working, it is not a standalone technique. For it to work you have to have an organisation that lives and breathes its key values. It will often need transformational leadership. The CEO and leadership team must believe in the moral and operational value of working with customers as equal partners, and must ensure that the values, systems and processes that define the organisation drive the appropriate behaviour.
I share in my piece five key steps to working in this way based on my experience of working as a co-production consultant on these issues in the social sector.
- Awareness: Share with all concerned the thinking behind the decision to take a co-production approach to illustrate transparency.
- Buy-in: For co-production to work, you need buy-in from all parties.
- Expectations: All parties need an understanding of expectations, and knowledge about what they mean in reality - what’s required of them, decision making and so on.
- Performance: Everybody needs to have the required skills to deliver. This is where training and guidance might be required.
- Feedback: Giving regular feedback is important - all parties must remain informed about the current situation, the objectives, the barriers and the likely outcome.
One of the key values in co-production is mutual respect and equal access to information. The theory is that when customers see the whole picture they will be able to help make better decisions and also understand why their ideas cannot be done (if that is a valid outcome). I argue in my piece that a tickbox exercise to consultation, which has been business as usual, is partly behind some of the votes we saw last year (Brexit, Trump etc).
You can’t expect the public to make reasoned judgements without mutual trust, open information and a genuine sense of equality.
If there is a lesson to be learned from 2016 it is that if you want users or the public to follow, you need to understand where they are at and allow them access to your world. You need to do more than listen and do it from a place of equality. By working collaboratively we will produce something better and something that it is much harder to argue against. Only then can we have confidence in our direction of travel.
Please share your views and comments below about her blog and provocation piece, or you can contact her on Twitter.
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
08 February 2017
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Social investment is a subject that has been much talked about in recent years. There are some within the voluntary and community sectors with strong views about social investment, either for or against. As someone who has spent almost a decade working in the realm of social investment, I am most definitely an advocate. But recently I have found myself becoming quite frustrated with the social investment sector because I am not sure we are adequately serving those who have social impact at the heart of their mission – charities and social enterprises.
It is no secret that the social sector is operating in challenging times. We are in our 6th year of government austerity and public contracts are feeling the force of that. Given this climate, is the social investment sector providing finance that these often small organisations can access and afford?
Recent research has highlighted the need for social investors to be able to offer not just finance which is lower cost, but also blended finance and finance which can take higher risks. Unfortunately despite this need, often this isn’t the sort of finance that is being offered (although there are a handful of honourable exceptions). What all of this points to is that what the social investment market is currently offering isn’t necessarily what the majority of the market we serve wants from us. We are not responding to demand, but instead we are asking others to fit our needs and those of our investors. And I’m not sure that’s the right way round to be doing things.
When I was interviewed to become a Clore Social Fellow in September 2014 I was asked what change I wanted to help bring about in society. My answer was that I wanted to help redistribute resources; that there is enough money in the world but that at the moment too much of it was accessed by too few, and that I wanted to change that. I still want to change that. And I want to change that because the charities and social enterprises we are here to serve are struggling. We need to:
- Look at new, different and innovative ways to get the money that already exists to a point where it can be used to help the organisations supporting the communities in need.
- Be able to demonstrate that the finance we are providing is creating a social impact and making a real difference to people’s lives.
- Ask investors to support us in offering the type of finance that charities and social enterprises want; simple, straightforward finance that they can afford.
Doing this will be no easy task, but it is something I believe we are duty bound to do. Because if we try we might just do it - and this will benefit everyone.
Please share your views and comments about Deborah’s blog and full piece below, or you can contact her on Twitter.
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