We had an interesting round table discussion with two of the leading thinkers and do-ers in the worlds of social enterprise and mental health yesterday – Mark Brown and David Floyd.

Mark is editor of leading mental health magazine One in Four, whilst David runs Social Spider – the social enterprise, which, amongst other things, publishes One in Four.  David also writes what in my opinion is the best UK blog on social enterprise, Beanbags and Bullsh!t.  Well worth a read if you want an honest, front-line take on the world of social business.

We’d invited Mark and David to Leeds because we’ve been chatting to various people over the last few months about exploring new ways to support people with a mental health need.  And, just as importantly, exploring ways that people can help themselves.  Mark and David had written a thinkpiece about the potential for a Big Society approach to helping people to improve people’s mental health – so we were keen to hear more.  The thinkpiece is excellent (but not available online yet) and yesterday’s discussion was fascinating.

I’m no expert in the field of mental health – I’m just someone who cares about this stuff and is interested in trying to work out how to do things better.  But it strikes me that some of the things that can contribute to a person’s improved mental health and sense of wellbeing could include:

• Active involvement in the development and delivery of the support that they receive and the opportunity to influence things (you might call that co-production)
• Support from and contact with peers – people who are – or who have been – in a similar situation – with an emphasis on self-help and peer support
• Appropriate, non-institutionalised, personalised services
• A sense that they matter – they’re not just a statistic in a faceless world of health and social care

So, with that in mind, you can imagine how an approach – which you might call Big Society – could work.  People setting things up themselves to support eachother.  Local charities and social enterprises setting up services which are funded through contracts and charges to paying customers.  All sounds great doesn’t it?

Except the discussion yesterday – whilst highlighting the potential of a Big Society approach – also emphasised the barriers that are in place if more of this stuff is to happen.  Fundamentally, it comes down to money.  Where is the money in the mental  health field?  Much of it stays within the NHS and the local authority.  Some of it goes out through contracts – to deliver pre-determined outcomes, tightly monitored through Key Performance Indicators.  And a bit of it – if you’re lucky – might go on innovative, local, risky, do-it-yourself initiatives.

And please don’t tell me that Personal Budgets could fund this kind of thing.  They could – in theory – and should.  But our experience – and increasing amounts of evidence such as this report into Personal Budget pilots in Scotland – suggest that few people with a mental health need are getting support which is different in a meaningful way through a Personal Budget.

Locally, we’re hearing that the local authority will approve a Personal Budget to cover someone’s transport costs to get to an activity (which could be a Big Society, DIY, self-help/peer support activity) – but they won’t pay for the activity itself.  So how is the service supposed to develop?  And, given that many people with a mental health need are on pretty minimal benefits, they will tend to struggle to pay for that activity.

Solutions?  I doubt there are any quick fixes.  But, as always, the starting point needs to be an honest assessment of where things are.  Big Society approaches aren’t going to magically spring up out of thin air.  If the State decides that more of this kind of thing should happen, then we need to invest in it.  In Leeds we’ve made a start with the Ideas That Change Lives investment fund, which has teamed up with UnLtd to offer support to people with good ideas.  It’s a good start, but we need plenty more.

I went along to Revive Leeds this morning for the launch of the Vision for Leeds 2011-2030 – Our vision to be the best city in the UK.

More on the Vision later, but first a few words about Revive.  It’s an idea that’s been a long time coming – I chatted with someone there who was exploring this idea eight years ago, and someone else reckoned he’d been talking about it fifteen years ago.

Revive Leeds is a Re-Use Shop which is based at a tip (sorry, recycling site) in East Leeds.  It’s run by a Community Interest Company – which in turn is a collaboration between three well established Leeds social enterprises – Emmaus Leeds, St Vincent de Paul Society and Slate.

The idea – and it’s a good one – is that people can drop off stuff that can be re-used whilst they’re dumping other stuff at the tip.  As someone who despairs whenever I go to the tip at what people are throwing away, I’m delighted to see this up and running.

First impressions?  The shop is attractively laid out and has a good range of stock.  The stock was generally good quality.  I think there’s work to do on pricing – as a charity-shop regular I think some of the pricing was a bit on the ambitious side.  £10 for a second hand iron, £175 for a decent but unremarkable three piece suite, didn’t strike me as realistic.  But these things take time – and they’ll have had to second-guess who their customer base will be.  They’ll know better who their customers are in six months time – and I’m sure their pricing will reflect that.

It made me think of my visit a few years back to another Revive (unrelated) in Liverpool – part of the FRC Group.  They take stock primarily from their Bulky Bobs bulky waste collection service (which I notice has today been successful in the Big Venture Challenge) and sell it in their high-street shop.  Shaun Doran, who was responsible for Revive, was frank about they got it very wrong in the early years at Revive.  In short, they took little notice of who their customers were – who was walking past their shop front in that part of Liverpool.  Once they realised who they were really serving, the shop became more successful.

I liked their emphasis on quick turnover of stock – I can’t remember the detail but let’s say it was something like “Have an item for two weeks at full price, two weeks at half price, then move on”.  It’s important that customers see fresh stock regularly – it’s what keeps people coming back.  You might make a bit less on each item, but you’ll sell (and divert from landfill) a lot more stuff.

I also liked their pricing strategy – with different prices for products depending on whether you had just walked in off the street, were on benefits, or had been referred by a FRC partner organisation.  It sounds like a logistical nightmare, and could be a bit embarrassing for people if it was implemented poorly, but it seemed to work well.  The £175 three piece suite brought this pricing strategy back to me – who’s the customer with £175 in their back pocket?

But let’s not take anything away from the people who’ve worked really hard to get Revive Leeds up and running.  They’ve done a great job and I wish them every success.  And it’s been a long road.

Which brings me to the Vision for Leeds.  This was the softest of soft launches I’ve ever witnessed – I’d be interested to know why the Council has gone for this approach to launching the Vision.  At most there were 50 people there – perhaps 10 of whom were unrelated to the Council or to Revive Leeds.

I’ll be honest, I really struggle to get excited about long-term visions.  The ten minute video which accompanies the Vision (not online yet) is all very nice but voxpops with loads of people saying how great Leeds is (it’s friendly, it’s diverse, it’s a great place to do sport/learn/do business etc) just leave me cold.

But, let me try my best to suspend the scepticism.  There’s something quite refreshing in the idea of trying to be the “best” city in the UK.  As the Vision says:

“Not the richest or the biggest, but the best for all who live and work in Leeds – our children, our communities and our businesses.”

Maybe that’s something I can get excited about over time.

It’s worth reflecting on the story of Revive Leeds, alongside the Vision for Leeds.  Revive Leeds will hopefully do well, but we can’t wait another 8 years for the next great innovation.  The Councillor at today’s event was very proud of the Council’s collaboration with three local social enterprises – and that is undoubtedly a step forward.  But we have to get better – and quicker – at coming up with creative ideas which make a real difference.

And this is where things might just get interesting.  Leeds Council – according to this article by the Council Leader in the Yorkshire Post – seems to be opening up and suggesting that in the future it needs to become more entrepreneurial – for example by collaborating more with other organisations.

As someone who’s worked with the Council closely for a number of years, let me just say they’ve got a long way to go before I’d use the words entrepreneurial and Council in the same sentence.  But acknowledging that things need to improve is a starting point, at least.  The hard bit will be moving from nice words to messy practice.  Councillors and Council officers have a steep learning curve ahead of them.

We ran a seminar with Adult Social Care at Leeds City Council yesterday exploring the idea of timebanking.

If you’ve not come across timebanking before, you can find out more on this Scoop.It site that we’ve put together – or by visiting the Timebanking UK website. You can also find out more about Just Add Spice – whose co-director, Tris Dyson, spoke at our seminar yesterday. In essence, it’s about give and take. People offer time to eachother, and get credits in return – which can be used to buy in the time of someone else in the timebank.

If you were to look inside my head you would discover the remnants of a lifetime of discussions between my sceptical self and my idealist self. I love the values behind timebanking. The idea of helping people to focus on what they can offer, as well as what they need. The concept of everyone’s time being of equal value. The importance of putting some kind of value on the social capital which makes life worth living.

But I worry that it’s one of those things which is much better in theory than it is in practice. My worry isn’t about people abusing the system – taking and not giving, or perhaps even stealing. Instead my concern is that people won’t take enough. They’ll give for a while – and then not get round to taking. For timebanking to work, we need people who are willing to accept help and support – as well as people are happy to give it.

There was a lot of discussion yesterday about how a timebank would work – in particular focusing on the role of the broker – the person who will help to ensure that people give and take. The impression I get is that in most cases we have to aim for a fairly light-touch broker, for two reasons. One is that there isn’t much money about – so we’ll struggle to sustain any timebanks which rely too much on paid staff.

Secondly, I think part of the attraction of timebanking is its DIY nature. I fear for timebanks which end up with a broker housed within a third sector or public sector organisation – unless that broker sees their role as that of a catalyst – moving on – or at least stepping back – once things are running smoothly. We really don’t need brokers who feel they need to cover their backs by routinely getting everyone to have CRB checks for example.

I’m not gung-ho about safety concerns, but I think part of the value of timebanking is the opportunity it gives us to start taking some responsibility – and making our own decisions about whether we want to accept a service from someone. I think there’s far more danger in communities that don’t talk to eachother than there is in connected communities where people are dealing with eachother on a more regular basis.

But as I say, the scepticism – and the desire to work out what might stop timebanking from working in Leeds – is balanced by a real sense of what it could achieve. There were various ideas discussed yesterday – from simple neighbourhood (person to person) based timebanks, run on a voluntary basis, to slightly more involved ones, (often agency to person) where people might be able to redeem credits not just for services from within the timebank, but for services from the local authority, or local businesses. So an hour at a Housing Association consultation might be exchanged for an hour at the local council swimming baths – which needs more customers to survive. Or a local coffee shop might want to acknowledge the efforts of local volunteers by allowing for a time-limited exchange of credits for coffee and cake.

But isn’t that going against the very nature of volunteering? There’s a discussion to be had about that I think, but my own take is that we need to lose this idea that volunteering is all about selfless giving. Self-interest – what’s in it for me – is an important part of the reasoning behind giving. If people give more because they’re acknowledged, and get something in return, then in my opinion that’s no bad thing.

Personally, I’m most intrigued by the anecdotal evidence I’m hearing time and again of the impact timebanking can have on improving people’s mental health. It makes a lot of sense. I know myself – you probably do too – that one of the best ways of dragging myself out of occasional dark places is to do something for someone else, to be reminded that I have skills to give and have a value to others. There’s far more to better mental health than that, but it could be a starting point for some.

I’ll write more about this in the future – but in the meantime, if you’re in Leeds and you’re interested in exploring timebanking more please get in touch. The Ideas That Change Lives fund that we work on is interested in investing in timebanking – and we’re planning another get-together later in the month. We’re particularly interested in chatting with individuals (not just people working in organisations) who want to see something happen in their community.

The Government recently announced who will be the Prime Providers delivering Work Programme contracts across the country.

The Work Programme is basically about supporting people to get them back into paid employment.  I don’t doubt for a minute that we need some fresh thinking here, and I’m not opposed to private sector involvement.  But there are various issues which are causing me some concern in the way that things are happening.

Social Enterprise Magazine has done some good work looking into this in more detail.  The Department for Work of Pensions and the Minister for Civil Society have been keen to assert that 40% of the work will be carried out by voluntary sector providers  – as sub-contractors to the (mainly private sector) Prime Providers.  In other words, this is a massive boost for the Big Society.

But it’s not easy to work out exactly where that 40% figure has come from.  A quick look through the letter from Chris Grayling, (see pdf at bottom of article) outlining which sectors the subcontractors on each Prime Provider contract come from, invites you to challenge whether 40% of the fees will find their way to third sector providers.

Take, for example, my patch, West Yorkshire.  The two Prime Providers for our area are BEST and a collaboration between Ingeus and Deloitte.

The letter from Employment Minister Chris Grayling seems to suggest that none of BEST’s subcontractors will come from the third sector, whilst 8.2% of the work on the Ingeus/Deloitte contract will be delivered by the third sector.

That doesn’t feel like a victory for the West Yorkshire branch of the Big Society.

What bothers me here is that it feels like another example of dogmatic belief getting in the way of hard analysis of facts, and experience of how such contracting arrangements may not always work in the best interests of smaller providers.

I’ve written before about how I see parallels between the category management approach often adopted by supermarkets, and the Prime Provider system which the DWP is using.  Whilst, of course, there’s a world of difference between purchasing tinned fruit and procuring job-readiness training, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is potential for difficulty when a big company (the Prime Provider) is tasked with collaborating with lots of smaller providers.  Government would have us believe that they’ll all play happy families, nurturing the young’uns and small’uns so that together they can share the proceeds and make the contract a success.  I’m afraid I just don’t believe that it will turn out like that in a lot of cases.

Others have written about their concerns about how the Work Programme will pan out.  There certainly seem to have been issues with regards to an over-emphasis on low prices, in place of quality.  That doesn’t bode well – and certainly doesn’t feel like the kind of environment where the smaller, perhaps more innovative, approaches will thrive.

I spend a lot of my time working with third sector organisations.  Usually – and this isn’t a criticism – it’s just the reality – what people want from me is a little vague.  Often someone has been tasked by their management committee to “find out how we can become a social enterprise”.  Whatever that might mean.

What does it mean?  It’s a question perhaps for another post.  My response to that kind of question is to fall back on the social enterprise as a verb not a noun stuff.  What is it that you do that is socially enterprising?  How are you enterprising in achieving your social mission?  How could you be more enterprising, more effective?  And how could I help?

The trigger for many organisations exploring “becoming a social enterprise” is that the markets that they work in are changing rapidly.  Funding is increasingly hard to come by, and, in fields such as social care, money is starting to follow individual “customers” – rather than being allocated to organisations as a block grant.  These issues present massive cultural and organisational challenges.

This transition – I saw it described the other day as “from wholesale to retail to bespoke” won’t happen overnight – but the direction of travel is clear.  And in my experience this is causing significant anxiety for a lot of third sector organisations.

If we borrow the language of the transition movement, how does an organisation respond to “peak funding”?  The problem we have is that peak funding has already happened – whereas peak oil is perhaps a few years away.   How do organisations plan for a pretty immediate future where they’ll need to be more resilient in order to survive?  Funding being cut, contracts shortened, commitments from commissioners postponed.  It’s very tough.

I don’t have a simple answer.  There isn’t one.  But perhaps we can look to the transition movement for inspiration.  What is inspiring about the transition movement is that people are coming together to come up with practical ways to help their communities to become more resilient in difficult circumstances.  They aren’t relying on others to sort out their problems.

It’s not quite that simple for third sector organisations.  But I do feel that there’s a tendency amongst some people to look outside of their organisation for a solution, rather than considering what they can do themselves.  And of course I know that lots of third sector organisations are proactive and are coming up with ways to do more with less money.  But I see plenty of others who seem to be waiting for someone else to sort things out.

I have news for them.  They’ll be waiting a long time for that bloke on a big white horse to come galloping over the hill.  I hear he lost his job in the cuts.

Things feel pretty gloomy this morning.  I’ve been spending the last couple of days telling myself and others that we need to stay hopeful.  That the word prosperity has its roots in the latin word for hope.   That we don’t need growth as we’ve always known it anyway.  We’ll work it out, I tell myself.  There are opportunities here, we must look for them, not lose hope, I keep repeating.

And I do believe all that stuff.  I have to, because I think if you don’t, you might as well just give up.  And I’m not prepared to do that.  I  have a son who’s 4 and we owe it to his generation to try to think of ways to work our way out of this mess.  But that doesn’t stop it feeling pretty bleak this morning.

I grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s.  I was 7 when Thatcher came to power.  I’m not pretending that my life was all Boys From The Blackstuff gloom, far from it.  But Liverpool, caught between Thatcherism and Militant, was a pretty grim place in the 1980s.  The city is recovering, but has never really recovered.  Many families and communities were scarred for life.

I haven’t digested all the news from yesterday yet so I don’t really feel like blogging about it today.  So in true blogger style I’ll just talk about myself instead.  What am I going to do now?

If I truly believe in my strapline – make it your business to change the world – then I need to see our current situation as a big opportunity to make a difference.  Once the cuts start to hit there will be service after service which people say “We can’t lose that”.  Amidst all of that, some of those services could be run by people themselves.  Perhaps I can help there.

But I’ll also need to help by working with people to be realistic about opportunities.  Lots of my work is done in areas where there is market failure – where the market has been propped up for years by funding of one kind or another.  Sometimes even the most socially entrepreneurial group of people can’t do anything if the State retreats and takes its money with it.  Or, the best they can do is think of a totally different way to meet the need.  We need to be careful to not go down a load of dead-end streets which just waste everyone’s time and cause more anger.

And personally, where will I get my work?  Like most people in the social enterprise sector I am overly reliant on the public sector to fund my work.  I know the dangers in that but that’s where the money’s been.  I don’t work in a sector where entrepreneurs come to me, wanting to spend some of their money on me.  Other people pay me to work with entrepreneurs – Business Links, local Councils and the like.   That money is going to be thin on the ground.

Big Society, I hear you cry.  There’s a big opportunity there.  Perhaps.  But as I suggest above, social entrepreneurs aren’t social alchemists.  Big Society will need investment, on a big scale, and a big change in mindset.  How, for example, will third sector organisations, accustomed to funding, go about setting up new enterprising services?  They’re used to finding funding for salaries etc for the start-up phase.  If they’re not there, will they find other ways to bootstrap the start up?  Or will they just not bother?

So I will need to continue to find new ways to work.  I’m not your average consultant, and I’m by no means a clock watcher, but I still get paid, generally, on day rates.  That’s likely to need to change.

I’m onto it – with my business partner Gill I’m running a DIY Business Planning course next month.

The next few years will be very DIY – as the State retreats people will need to become more resilient and do things themselves.  This is our first attempt to meet some of those needs.

So I don’t feel gloomy, but I feel realistic.  I feel hopeful, but I’m not stupid.  I know full well that the next few years for me will see me fielding lots of interest from people who want to do something, but don’t have any/much money to pay me to do it.  So I’ll have to think of different ways to work.

My interest, and concern is in how we hold together as a society in times like this.  Clearly the cuts will hurt a lot, but its the cumulative effect, the possible loss of hope, and loss of a vision for a better society, which is most worrying.  That’s the world I work in.  So I need to get to work.

The Lib Dem Minister for Care announced this week that from November everyone in receipt of social care will be able to choose to receive an Individual Budget. In short, this means that they can choose to spend the social care money that they are entitled to in ways that they choose – as long as it achieves agreed outcomes. It sounds great – and potentially it represents a life-changing step forward for millions of people.

This is an area I’ve been working in a lot recently – for example on this project in Bradford and this one in Leeds. Our main focus in each project is supporting organisations to set up services which people may choose to buy with their Individual Budget. The big hope is that lots of innovative services will spring up in place of the one-size-fits-all services of the past – day centres and the like.

As we’ve seen elsewhere recently, there’s a lot of faith placed in the market, in competition, and the transformational power of individual choice. It is assumed that the market will develop so that the best services (those for which there is most demand) flourish, whilst those which don’t meet people’s needs disappear. It’s an attractive vision in lots of ways, but I think we all know that markets don’t work quite so perfectly, particularly for those people without much power in the market.

Working with Gill, my business partner at Social Business Brokers, we’ve spent the last few months trying to get behind the rhetoric of Personalisation so that we can start to support people to set up services. I think we’re making some good progress, and I remain hopeful. But I can assure you that when you really start to try to understand Personalisation, it isn’t quite as rosy as it might first appear. Here are some of the issues that I think need to be addressed.

(For clarity’s sake, the points I’m making don’t relate in particular to one local authority – they are issues that we’ve come across in our work and in research into personalisation across the country.)

Anecdotally, we’re hearing that a good majority of people are continuing to receive the same services that they received before – even though they are now statistically classed as having an Individual Budget. It would seem that some local authorities are classifying someone as receiving an Individual Budget if they have been through the social care assessment process. So, in short, that means that their needs have been assessed, nothing has changed in terms of what they receive, but they’re now classed as being in receipt of an Individual Budget. That, to me at least, isn’t right, and presents us with misleading statistics.

It would appear that the majority of the support planning and brokerage work – to help people to agree how they’d like to be supported, and then find appropriate services, is being carried out by social workers. Now I have nothing against social workers, but I would think that there is a link between the point above (that most people are getting what they always got) and this point – that the people who’ve always done the support planning are still doing the support planning. Anecdotally we hear that Individual Budgets are seen as a right pain to administer – and with recruitment freezes and the like you can understand why an overworked social worker might gently encourage a client to stick with what they’ve got – particularly if that lack of change gets hidden in the statistics as I suggested above.

We’re not seeing a great deal of evidence of innovative services setting up. It’s still early days – and I’m sure there are people like us in other parts of the country trying to encourage the development of new services. Much emphasis is being put on third sector services (particularly social enterprises) being set up. But, as you’ll know, times are currently tough for the third sector, and insecurity in terms of funding isn’t providing an environment in which many organisations feel comfortable setting up new, risky, customer-facing services. There is also little funding or investment available to set up new services. And given that, anecdotally at least, most people seem to be sticking with what they’ve got, you can understand why some organisations may make the judgment that the market doesn’t exist for new, innovative services which individuals could purchase.

You can probably see the problem here in terms of market development. Customers can’t be expected to choose services which don’t yet exist – whilst businesses are reluctant to set up services where demand appears weak. It’s a classic chicken and egg situation. Will it be the third sector that drives innovation here? We’re certainly doing what we can in the work that we’re doing – but I think on a broader scale we need to be realistic. Setting up services which individuals can choose (or choose not) to pay for is as big a cultural challenge for the third sector as it is for the public sector. Innovation may come, but it may take time. My hunch is that it will be the private sector which leads on this.

So what do we do about this? At a national level, I hope for some leadership from people such as the Care Minister, to listen carefully to what’s happening, and to try to get beneath the rhetoric and the good stories (people buying season tickets in place of day care etc) to really understand what’s happening on the ground. We need to not be hoodwinked into believing that loads of people have Individual Budgets, when in practice nothing has changed (or improved) for them. And I also think that we need more honesty about the role of social workers in making change happen. Are they best placed to do support planning and brokerage? Or are they best placed to maintain the status quo? I think we need more creative and innovative ways to support people to decide what outcomes they want – and then to help them find the right services.

And, of course, we need a good dose of social entrepreneurship. That doesn’t mean social enterprises will solve it all. But it means that we need enterprising people finding creative ways to create change.

At an event we ran recently, one third sector representative confidently told the room that Personalisation will have been long forgotten by 2020. We’ll be back to State delivery of services, he reckoned. By then we’ll have seen that Personalisation was just a big waste of money and didn’t work. I didn’t agree with his analysis, but I do think that if we don’t up our game a fair bit, he could well turn out to be right.

I’ve had a bit of a moan on Twitter this morning about some poor service we recently received from a third sector organisation. We booked a room for an event – and to cut a long story short they offered friendly but poor service. We did most of the running round to confirm the booking details, and then on the day they gave the projector we’d hired to someone else. Then, to round things off, they didn’t put enough postage on the invoice, so we ended up paying £1.14 for the privilege of collecting our invoice from the sorting office!

I’m interested in understanding the root causes of the poor service we received. I think there’s an issue about diversification and the need to generate income. I imagine the organisation in question started off years ago as a community development organisation, renting a room in a tatty corner of a council building in the neighbourhood where they grew up. And along came European millions to enable them to build a multi-purpose venue, which housed the work that they do and also gave them the opportunity to rent rooms to other people.

There’s no problem with that necessarily. And you can’t really argue that much with organisations which look to diversify in order to bring in various sources of income. But what if you don’t have the skills to compete in your new marketplace? Venue hire is a massively competitive market, and customers are very demanding.  To compete, you need to be good at what you do.

There’s a good argument to say that you should stick to your knitting. It’s tough though, particularly at the moment as funding streams dry up. It can be tempting to come up with bright ideas which will supposedly generate “free” money to keep you going.

The one that I’ve been asked to help with most is the community cafe which wants to expand into outside catering. The argument goes: “We can charge £5 per head for the kind of stuff we sell in the cafe for £1.50.”  True – to an extent. But it’s a whole different market – with different customers and competitors. That’s not to say that you can’t make it work. But it’s not necessarily the case that a community cafe can sustain itself through a Robin Hood strategy of selling paninis to office wallahs whilst offering cheese baps to the urban poor.

So what do I do about this? I work with people to help them to assess their ideas. Nothing particularly clever, and no scientific formulae to help us to understand whether a particular idea offers a chance to generate income. But we start by considering:

1. Does this idea involve selling more of our existing services to existing customers?
2. Does it involve selling existing services to new customers?
3. Does it involve selling new services to existing customers?
4. Does it involve selling new services to new customers?

The theory there is that there’s likely to be greater risk in developing a new service, and selling it to a customer group that you know nothing about. It may also require more resources in terms of time and money. That’s not to say not to do it – but grouping ideas like this at least gets people talking about risk – and their ability to take on new business ideas.

It’s hard to work out whether your idea is likely to generate income.  And unfortunately, the more outlandish the idea, the harder it can be to argue against it.  You can be accused of lacking vision.  But with money so tight, we have to try to find ways to help people choose the right way forward, instead of digging a deeper hole.

If I wrote about myself on the blog in the way that many third sector organisations talk about themselves, you’d probably have the impression that I was a 6 foot hunk with a beach body and sparkling wit and charm.

I’m not all that bad, but I don’t quite match up to that image. But all the talk of Big Society has seen politicians, commentators and sector leaders trot out the same old stuff about heroic third sector organisations, close to the people they serve, dynamic, enterprising, efficient and all-together miraculous. Social alchemists R Us.

Anyone who’s been within moaning distance of a third sector organisation will know that this is a daft caricature. There are plenty of fantastic third sector organisations out there who do great work. I’m lucky enough to be working with one at the moment – HALE – who do health promotion work in West Yorkshire. They’ve recently won a national award for what they do – and it’s well deserved. They have a clear mission, they’re enterprising and they have a positive can-do culture. I bet they deliver good value for health commissioners too.

But alongside the great organisations there are plenty who are good (good enough?) and far too many that are mediocre to say the least. You’ll probably know a few – they tend to have been around a long time, they like having a good moan, there’s never enough funding, it’s always someone else’s fault. And even though things are so awful, they’re convinced that they’re the only people who could possibly improve the lot of their service users. And yes, you can bet they’ll be service users. Such a beautiful term which tells you all you need to know about their relationship with the people they serve.

I don’t want organisations like that running services in place of the State. But if we spend the next couple of years in a Big Society love-in, with a load of hangers-on realising that this is the Next Big Thing (post social enterprise) that they can hang their hat on, then we’re really not going to make much progress as a society.

I’m not looking forward to the next round of cuts. I personally think it’ll be chaos. But amidst the chaos I hope that less funding will result in some of the mediocre and poor third sector organisations, which have survived through rounds of ERDF and the like, will finally get out of the way and give some room to people who might make a real difference.

As I mentioned in my last post, we had to work hard to make sure our holiday money stretched to the end of our stay in France. Conveniently, for this story, £1 was worth around 25% less than it was last time we were in France. So the daily lunchtime beer in a cafe was out, replaced by a beer back on the terrace at the flat. The daily late-afternoon ice creams came from the supermarket, not the ice-cream parlour. It was hardly the 1930’s, but it wasn’t 2008 either.

So we changed our behaviour to adapt to our circumstances. The other time we did that was when Francis was born. We agreed that Antonia would take a year off. Again, handily for this story, that meant that we had to cut our budgets by around 25% (one salary lost for 6 months). We took advice from Alvin Hall, and tips from Martin Lewis. We worked out what money we would have, and set ourselves a budget. Most importantly, we went back to the cash economy. We agreed what we could afford to spend, and then took that cash out of the bank at the start of each month.

Handing over bank notes focuses the mind in a way that paying with plastic never could. It feels like real money, and gives you a greater sense of whether what you are about to purchase feels like good value, and is really needed. Anyone who gives you advice on how to spend less will tell you to start dealing in cash.

I’m fully aware that there are millions of people who are in a far worse position than me financially, for whom weekly budgeting, on far less money than me, is a painful fact of life. So my 25% cuts aren’t anywhere near as painful as someone else’s. But they are still significant – for me at least.

I’ve been thinking recently how (or if) I should work with organisations which are going to have to slash their expenditure by 25% or more. I enjoy a lot of the work I do. That doesn’t feel like the kind of work that’d be much fun.

But how could I help? I think that one thing I bring to my work is that whilst I’m driven by helping people to achieve social change, I’m also a realist and a pragmatist. I can separate the emotion of a social mission from the hard realities of the market. Maybe that’s one way I can help. Any discussions about budget cuts – particularly if there is a real/illusory desire to involve all staff – will be full of emotion, and rightly so. Trying to find a workable way forward in those circumstances will be very difficult. An outsider might be able to help.

Helping people to “think the unthinkable”, and challenge long-held assumptions, which have been sheltered from real life by the odd parallel universe that is the World of Funding, might be of use too. Could organised abandonment of that cherished, but less effective, project, be better in the long term than cuts across the board? And might it be worth looking at the way we work, and how we deal with our customers, to see where there is failure demand in our systems? In other words, demand (and therefore spent resources) that is only there because things aren’t dealt with properly first time. There is no one big idea which will help to cut expenditure less painfully, but I personally find the idea of failure demand pretty useful.

One thing is clear, any answers that I help people come up with won’t be my answers. Just as I don’t write business plans for people, I won’t be advising people on how to cut their budgets. But it might be that I can be part of something in Leeds or elsewhere where a group of organisations come together and share the burden of finding ways to continue to deliver change with less money.

If you have any thoughts please let me know by leaving a comment below.