Infrastructure Organisations

In Wigan we don’t have a CVS.  Apparently, fingers were burned so badly last time we had an infrastructure organisation that the baby has been thrown out of the bath water.  Although, the CVS in Wigan was never sufficiently resourced, so it was easy to say it didn’t fulfil its function, and then what came after it was destined to fail.  The bulk of the financial resource has always been with the Council.  I participated in a consultation a while back about this and suggested that community development resource might be able to act in a more liberated way if it was freed up from town hall red tape.  I never heard back about the outcomes of the consultation.  There was a restructure though, and they kept hold of all the resource so I suppose that was my answer. 

I’m continually hearing this story that we don’t need an infrastructure organisation, because we have or are planning to have a dispersed leadership model.  The story is two years old. I don’t see anything emerging and I don’t know how I can get involved in influencing it or joining in. The cash to get going with it from 10GM is in a local bank account. The sector hasn’t been asked to get involved in designing anything.

 I also don’t feel like I’ve been asked if I agree with this idea that ‘we don’t need an infrastructure organisation’.  It’s like this story that we are the naughty ones in Greater Manchester, doing something so much more innovative, is presented as fact. And I for one, don’t think we are. I think the borough has been navel gazing for far too long and there’s much more creative and imaginative ways of network hosting all over the place.  This on the other hand feels like a ‘done to’ approach.

I’ve been meeting with the people tasked with organising it for eighteen months, and even arranged a meeting with Cormac Russell last November to explore how it might be convened, and still no movement.  Well maybe behind closed doors, but not with the sector.  In fact I resigned from meeting with the two people who sit at the decision making tables and believe ‘we don’t need an infrastructure organisation’ because I became sick of going round in circles, whilst their organisations appear to do pretty well out of local commissions.  I’m not after the cash they have, but I do know a lot of very small groups that might like a fairer share of the pie.

I think we do need some form of infrastructure organisation for the sake of transparency and accountability to the sector. Or we need a process of convening, a bit like the one I’ve just experienced with the Participatory GrantMaking process with Greater Manchester System Changers, that might help create a decentralised network.  You cant see the future when you wear the same old glasses. As it is I feel like I can guess who will be picked to be part of the dispersed leadership model. And, I also feel that the model will need to be submitted for approval first too. Mum and Dad will need to sign it off.

When I worked at Sefton CVS, they had a convening role, so I’ve seen how it can work. Developing and supporting fora or networks.  There were no hand picked people representing a whole community of interest or place.  And decision making was transparent. And the learning from Greater Manchester System Changers is in plain sight too.

I don’t see this in the town I live, work and play in and I want it. It’s only fair and just. It will require some tough conversations but if we want to grow associational life and the social enterprises, cooperatives and land trusts to turn back from models that extract people and land, then they are conversations we need to have, with all of us in the room. Perhaps thats why we keep reinventing wheels and creating monsters? Perhaps what we need is more courage for tough conversations and more decentralised and self organising containers to hold them in.

I’ve been saying this quietly for a long time, having the same conversation. It’s now time to say it out loud.

Shout out to Volodymyr Tokar for the amazing photo.