Barking and Dagenham

Harder to go back than to move forward?

Avril McIntyre, LC Associate

Barking & Dagenham is a very interesting place to be right now.  I’ve been closely involved in the borough for many, many years in a variety of professional roles and now a resident.  

I could talk about the huge challenges for people in the borough.  We hit the heights of most deprivation stats.  It’s a critical part of the story, but I’m going to focus on what has been changing over the last couple of years.

Pre-pandemic, we saw a visionary Council leadership take bold steps towards a different way of working.  A major restructure took place, and they developed the Borough Manifesto, which identified how they would tackle the root causes of multiple disadvantage in partnership approach.  However, local VCSE organisations were struggling to keep up, there was limited ambition and almost no solution focused co-ordination.  At the same time, residents were used to decisions being made for them by the predominant paternalistic culture of the culture, so they weren’t quite ready to get involved in making decisions.   

Continued…

As with many places across the UK, things really changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit our community.   Suddenly collaborations were forming, people were mobilized to support others and there was a strong demonstration of ‘pulling together’.

Through BD_Collective an infrastructure ‘entity’ formed by a group of local leaders to set up a ‘network of networks’ where; power and influence would be shared across many, accountability would be real and connection would focus on building trust.  Working together during the pandemic was a significant opportunity to tackle competitive attitudes as well as provided a basis to share resources.   It felt different.  We started to get to know one another as people rather than competitors.   Social sector partners felt more trusted by the council, as we had to work out how to tackle the challenges together.  Council colleagues felt released from bureaucratic chains to work intuitively, being free to work with community partners in a more flexible way. 

At the same time, BDGiving, the local place-based giving organization was just getting on it’s feet.  It’s vision to create opportunities for people and organisations that have a stake in the borough to work together to address the most pressing issues.  The COVID crisis kick started a radically different way of funding.  The first participatory grant making scheme was enabled with a grant for £100,000 from Lankelly Chase Foundation to tackle immediate needs emerging in the community.  Those involved in this talked about how different it felt; the decisions made, the people involved, the groups funded.   

The introduction of the Learning Together group in October 2020 which brought together social sector leaders, residents and council officers to explore the issues of power in Barking & Dagenham.  There were 6 online sessions facilitated by Art of Hosting.  The most tangible difference it made, perhaps the only one, was that people started to have a different conversation.  We listened to one another better.   

The interesting thing for Barking & Dagenham, in my view, is that the pandemic has fundamentally changed how we operate as a system.   As I talk with people across the country, I don’t hear that so much.  It seems other places have gone back to business as usual.   To be clear, the challenges here are still great, but it feels like it is going to be harder to go back than to move forward.  A key to this is a genuine power shift and greater levels of trust and collaboration and I now want to describe what we’re doing to address this.

Today, in December 2021, the landscape is messy.  There are a million initiatives happening across the borough: really interesting models of participatory grant making within BDGiving and through Kingsley Hall involving  residents with lived experience; BD_Collective Networks building new collaboration within the social sector and with council & health partners; the infrastructure entities are collaborating, sharing resources and working together in partnership; the council recognizes it has to learn how to facilitate rather than lead new initiatives.

These are all amazing things, yet we could still wake up in 10 years time and be back where we were in 2019.  A disjointed, competitive, mistrusting system of organisations who want to make life better for residents in Barking & Dagenham.  So what might we do to ensure this doesn’t happen.

I think the key things we are learning are:

Power & participation are key

Learned powerlessness is easily identified across the whole system: council officers, social sector leaders, business and residents.   Paternalism is a driving factor across the political and economic landscape.    

We can have great relationships that offer genuine support and challenge, but if these never involve the people ‘not like us’ then we’ll change nothing.  To shift power, those currently with power need to be willing to open the door to those they don’t agree with.  Those who prefer to campaign against, need to be willing to start to work through solutions with people they don’t like.  It’s not the end point, but it is the start.  

However, recognizing this, we can build on what changed during the pandemic, ensuring things do move forward.  Over the next 18 months, we are focusing on: 

Devolved decision making  

• Exploring ways of distributing local funds (BDGiving, Kingsley Hall)
• Ensuring those affected, are involved in the decisions (BD_Collective Networks, involving people with lived experience through neighbourhood level activity). 

Greater collaboration and trust

• Building relationship outside of funding opportunities (BD_Collective Networks, infrastructure partnership, learning group)
• Consortium development involving agencies, organisations and people who are currently not ‘around the table’. ( funding opportunities, community assets, policy & practice conversations).

Learning at every level

• Ensuring learning happens through our learning partner(s) who will work with all parts of the system to embed learning across all activity.  This will include what isn’t working as well as what is.  

Check out some of the events coming up as part of our Barking and Dagenham week.

Cameron Bray from Barking and Dagenham Giving.

Cameron will be doing a takeover on power and participation through a Barking and Dagenham lens.

Why is power and participation important in Barking and Dagenham?

Follow via @lankellychase