On the chain gang now

The Home Office has announced a new scheme of Community Payback.

Home Secretary John Reid today announced that all communities in England and Wales will have the opportunity to get something back from offenders who have committed crimes in their area.

The "Mayors' Community Payback Scheme 2007" would provide a platform for mayors to choose a worthy project in their area that would benefit the community. The project can be nominated by the mayor or be initiated through suggestions from the public, media or local community groups. The successful project would be announced at the mayoral installation in May.

Community Payback-visible unpaid work by offenders-was launched in July 2005 in six pilot areas, and in late November/early December 2005 across the rest of the country. The aim of Community Payback is to give the community an opportunity to see the unpaid work carried out by offenders and to give them a chance to decide what projects they work on.

Growing up in America (and particularly in the American South), I'm quite used to seeing offenders doing useful work - giving back to the community. Oftentime they did work of a similar nature (if not side-by-side) that "non-custodial" volunteers from the community were doing, too. Meaning that the work itself isn't stigmatised (e.g. litter picking, beautification projects).

My British husband was less used to the idea and I remember visiting an outdoor "folk museum" in Mississippi that was being maintained by prisoners. He thought they were just part of a chain gang "living exhibit" - until he saw that there was a real guard with a real gun.

I don't expect that the Home Secretary's version will run quite the same way. I do think it's a stroke of brilliance getting Mayors to select the project. The vast majority of mayors still hold honorific positions, but spend a lot of time and hard work on promoting their area and worthy causes within it. It also creates a sense of accountability and community that the project might not otherwise have.

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New communities

Working on PM Partner has been a really interesting experience of collaborative knowledge-building. The site is still active and focused on performance management in partnerships, but we've opened a couple of new communities of practice as well.

These are hosted on the IDeA's community of practice platform - this is a semi-private online space. That is, you have to register to view any of the content - but anyone can join the two communities we've started

Policy and performance: this community is aimed at people who work in the area of developing or implementing improvement policy.

Performance management: this community is for people who want to share the latest developments on performance management - particularly around more detailed or technical aspects.



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Users and community networks

Topics: users, community, network, social capital, co-production

There are two really fascinating briefings from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on user partcipation and networks. One focuses on local governance and the other is based around using the knowledge of users (e.g. in health or social services)

The user briefing raised an issue in my mind I hadn't thought about in a while. For some years, there has been a lot of talk about trust and government or trust and professionals. How much do the general public or individuals trust their doctor, their local politician, their social worker, etc. JRF found that:

Service users feel that their knowledge is generally not valued or taken
seriously by professionals, policy-makers and services. The closed culture of
health and social care services and their own inadequate resources restrict
service users' capacity to develop and share their knowledge

But this is really about trust in another direction. How much do professionals trust us to choose the right treatment or package of services? How much are we trusted as a neighbourhood or community to know how we want to run our park or choose the right transport plan. Trust is a two-way street.


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