Designing for Civil Society

Time for a participation guide with participants

There are stacks of guides and toolkits designed to help professionals engage with patients, service users, and wider communities affected by public projects and policies. But what is there written from the point of view of the participant? Not much, unless I'm looking in the wrong places.
I've been writing recently on the theme of "participation isn't working" - items here - and coming to the conclusion that change now is most likely to come from people starting old-style campaigns for improvement to services, and maybe using new-style digital technologies to help. For example, citizen journalism is entering the mainstream as Simon Waldman wrote recently, and in Teesside Steve Thompson is showing the way for some bottom-up e-democracy. mySociety is building terrific digital tools like Pledgebank and WriteToThem, and the BBC is doing its bit.
That meant I was particularly interested when an editor of learning materials called up to see I can could contribute a training and self-study module about how to represent other public service users on official committees, and to get fellow users, patients or carers involved in seeking improvements.
Before agreeing a brief, I did some Googling and found research by the National Association for Patient Participation which cites two pieces of work: Training and Facilitation Resources at the University of Birmingham, and the National Consumer Council's Strong Voice programme. The latter offers a substantial toolkit and induction programme to trainers for a £500 licence, and is based on years of development and testing. As a sample page shows (pdf here), it covers some key issues for participants, and suggests that representation is about:

a voice for others
obtaining information and passing it back
being involved in decision-making
accountability
access to the views of others (being represented)
developing a consensus (or not)
experience of users
effective advocacy – getting the message across accurately.

However, both of these resources, are written for trainers - not participant/users. I also found an excellent guide for professionals called "Asking the experts: A Guide to Involving People in Shaping Health and Social Care Services" (disclaimer, it does quote from a guide I wrote a few years back). It provides an extensive overview of the issues, and lots of guidance .... but again it is for professionals.
There are lots of courses and books on the separate issues involved - like being on committees, organising with others, communicating effectively, developing your confidence. But I couldn't find anything which brought those issues together with the challenges of finding your way through the bureaucracy, and deciding how far to go along with the type of participation on offer. I wonder why? Is it because there's an easier market in developing kits for trainers ... and the organisations that fund this sort of work may be disinclined to give too much help to citizens and service users who may challenge them on the services that they offer?
The nearest thing to a guide that I found was on the BBC Action Network: How you can get involved in improving NHS services in England, though it is by its nature fairly broad-brush, and concentrates on signposting.
I'm going to write around a few people who have taken a radical position on user empowerment in the past, and see if they know about something I missed, or might be interested in helping developing something new if there is a gap. Any ideas welcome - add a comment, or you can find me here. I've bookmarked my researches in a rather haphazard fashion - main tags are participation, and health.
My immediate conclusion is that the editor who approached me is right - a new guide is needed. However, a major challenge will be to create something that really works for the reader/user ... with navigation to suit different situations, skills, styles and roles. How to do that? Well, my suggestion would be to involve some users in the development of the guide, in workshops and also online. Otherwise there's a danger that in our enthusiasm to produce a guide for users we becomes just another example of 'experts know best'. Of course experts may know best, if they get the question or problem right ... but how can they do that if they don't ask the users in the first place? I'll suggest the task is to produce a guide with users.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Participation is a culture, not a tick box

I've just caught up with an article by Nick Wilding which elegantly connects three key themes important in participation: developing more participatory organisations; power-holders letting go of control; and adopting an ecological worldview that sees "a radical inter-connectedness between all things". In Slow down... go further he warns that for professionals faced with polices for engaging with the public, "participation could easily become the next thing to do on a check-list in a busy day in a rushed week".

Participation is about much more than a tick-box. It's about a radical challenge to a culture that isn't working at local, regional, national and planetary scales. A culture that has valued profits over people and planet, and limitless consumption over sustainable relationships between people and places. The emerging, participatory, ecological culture requires that we find the time for community and conviviality. Practically, that means getting together with our friends and colleagues who we can trust to learn together about both doing participation and being participative. It means having the confidence to tell each other stories that matter to us in our job-roles as well as people concerned for people and the planet. This needs some practice. And practice needs good, reflective time and a good, reflective space.

Nick then expands on the three themes, and concludes:

This article has been about creating a participatory culture of learning by doing where failures are understood as the best teachers. This is a culture of celebrating successes, of projects that emerge organically as participants slowly build the confidence to accomplish small things first, and then be surprised at how the seedlings flourish over months … years … decades. This is a long-term culture, a culture with its feet and hands in the soil - and its heart and head working together to nurture ecological and community regeneration. This is a culture where the expert is ‘on tap, not on top’. Most of all, this is a culture of (as the Buddhists might say) ‘beginner’s mind’ – that is to say, a culture of learning and inquiry where it’s not the answers that matter but the quality and depth of the questions that we learn to ask of our own practice.

Nick Wilding is a culture change consultant and action research facilitator, and a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology. The article was originally was published in Scottish Natural Heritage's annual publication, 'The Participant'.
Earlier here:

• Participation language doesn't work either
• Participation often isn't working. Anyone listening?

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Participation language doesn't work either

After I wrote a piece on Participation often isn't working recently, my friend Alexandra Rook dug out an article she produced a couple of years ago, but didn't publish at the time.
Alexandra makes the point that not only are the processes of involving people not working, the language isn't either. Councils and other power-holders have taken on the words, but not the appropriate attitudes:

The old mantras of ‘bottom-up’, community-led, ‘experts on tap not on top’ are now coming from those at the top. And that’s the problem: it remains a top-down initiated process, demanding that ‘the community’ gets off its backside and participates. (I put ‘the community’ in parentheses because it has become a much bandied about, hackneyed and increasingly de-valued term. It’s become part of the regeneration jargon. Forgive me if I refer instead to ‘local people’, those ordinary individuals who live in a certain area or get together for common purposes-those ‘communities of place and of interest’.) Participation has become something of an end in itself. In the nanny state there is an imperative to get out of bed and be a good citizen (we don’t remind ourselves any more that technically we’re all still subjects).

Alexandra adds:

‘The community’ is expected to not only identify its needs (relatively easy), but to prioritise those competing needs for limited resources (not so easy) and then to come up with solutions to those prioritised needs (much harder). Wasn’t it Tony Benn who said if democracy worked, they’d abolish it. Well, we don’t have much experience of participative democracy as opposed to representational democracy, and we all know what people think of that, because they’re voting with their feet. So we’re struggling with participation and the need to be ‘inclusive’, to reach those who were deemed to be ‘hard to reach’ or the 'hard to hear’ (recently re-badged, I noticed, as ‘the hard to find’; they must be running as fast as they can from the regeneration field).

Alexandra works for the Civic Trust, who do excellent work in regeneration and community engagement, so her views - while entirely personal - are based on wide experience. You can read the whole article below. It resonates with the research I was quoting, and also with an article written a few years back by Drew Mackie Dancing While Standing Still. I'll be looking out for more reality checks on participative democracy, and how to address the problems revealed - which is much easier if people like Alexandra and Drew help by being honest about the issues.

Participation often isn't working. Anyone listening?

A colleague of mine said the other day that "there's more policy directives on community participation than ever before, and more toolkits and consultants ... but somehow it feels as if things are getting worse and people are engaging less". The fact that "try harder" isn't working for participation comes up quite a bit in conversations I have with people in the field - and now there's some research that seems to confirm that, and help explain why.
The question now is: how much more research do we need? What do we do about it?
First the research: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have just published Effective participation in anti-poverty and regeneration work and research, by Peter Beresford and Martin Hoban, with these key findings:

* Powerlessness is central to people's experience of poverty and disadvantage. Conventional bureaucratic and managerial 'top-down' approaches to participation have very limited success.
* Existing experience identifies barriers to people's participation at four levels: personal; political and institutional; economic and cultural; and technical. All need to be addressed for participation to work.
* People are much more likely to get involved in work if they have a strong sense that something tangible and worthwhile will come out of it.
* Supporting independent organisations which people themselves develop and control, at local level and beyond, is a vital building block for effective participation.
* Capacity building to develop people's confidence, self-esteem and understanding supports their empowerment and participation. It is not the same as skill development to equip people to work in the way that agencies traditionally work.
* Such capacity building is particularly helpful in encouraging diverse involvement and ensuring the participation of black and minority ethnic groups.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Western Australia demonstrates innovation in community engagement

I've just caught up with Tom Atlee's report on a wealth of innovative deliberation techniques demonstrated at a recent conference in Perth, Western Australia, where the government has been pioneering what Tom calls a "committed experiment in democratic collective intelligence".

The conference, organised by Janette Hartz-Karp, immersed participants in demonstrations of methods including 21st Century Town Meeting, Deliberative Polling, World Cafe, Mind Mapping, Citizens Jury, Wisdom Council, and Dynamic Facilitation.
Panelists also provided a list of suggestions on how to ensure people are included in deliberative processes, among them:

* Learn the historical and cultural factors important to the populations you want to reach.
* Understand the dynamics of oppression and how factors such as race, level of education, economic status, disability, sexuality, gender, and religious background can combine to exclude people from being chosen or, once chosen, from speaking up and being taken seriously -- and work to counter such suppressive factors.
* Identify and engage the key players and opinion leaders in those populations.
* Explore how physical, geographic and economic factors may play a role in people's ability to participate, and compensate for these (such as by providing transportation, child care, payment, etc.).
* Find out what kinds of interactions they've had with other such projects, with officials of various sorts, and with mainstream society.
* Make it clear how their participation will make a difference. Be honest and don't making promises you can't keep or be too grandiose in your proposals.
* Provide enough time and realistic information for them to consider your project.
* Use random selection, with special efforts to reach such people if they don't turn up (e.g., don't have phones).
* Give them opportunities to speak in their own way and to be well heard and respected for what they contribute.
* Increase public employees' and officials' awareness of these factors and improve their ability to handle them.

Tom is also facilitating development of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation wiki, which provides more detailed explanation of methods he mentions. Discovered via Happenings - Thataway

Urban regeneration in theory and practice

David Brake in Urban regeneration in theory and practice alerts us to a study of the regeneration of a Sheffied housing estate that highlights how difficult it is to make community engagement and partnerships work in practice. What's different about this study is that it concentrates on the experiences of the individuals involved, rather than just the procedures:

Laurie Taylor in his excellent Thinking Allowed radio programme recently interviewed Simone Abram at length about her anthropological study of tenants' experiences of "urban regeneration" in Norfolk Park, Sheffield (she has produced a film about this as well with accompanying website). The programme also features interviews with the residents themselves. Strangely enough she concludes that even with the best of intentions the connection between consultation and results on the ground can be very tenuous - especially when a public private partnership (or a tangle of overlapping partnerships) is involved!

The Listen Again link on the BBC site was down when I tried it, but a publication is promised on the website. I can't say I'm entirely surprised that best intentions are not always fulfilled on these projects. As I've written before, I think that for partnerships to be successful you have to work on three aspects: the outcomes, the procedures and the relationships between different interests. It sounds as if the Sheffield study could give us some real insights into the challenges that presents.
Update: I alerted Radio 4 to the link problem and was very impressed by a swift reply offering to copy the interview to a CD if necessary, followed by acknowledgment that there was a problem that had now been fixed.