Japan-UK Symposium 2001

CAN: Objectives and Activities

Presented by Reverend Andrew Mawson, OBE
(Direct transcript)

Can I say it is very good to be here in Japan. And, can I thank particularly the British Council and the organisers of this event for welcoming us here today.

The thing about social entrepreneurs like me is we are great at taking opportunities and spotting opportunities and meeting people and being the best out of each other. So, I am with my colleagues like Professor Paul Brickell, when our work was growing in Bromley by Bow and becoming bigger, we first met and because he visited the project and few years later he became our Chief Executive as I became responsible for wider things across the United Kingdom.

In 1992 following the visit of Princess Diana to Bromley by Bow I met Robin Rowland who was a businessman through a visit. And now he has become an international ambassador. Also in 1995, I was involved with other social entrepreneurs in putting a very big event together in London which involved 13000 people called the Great Banquet and to that event came Tony Blair who is now the Prime Minister, he was not the Prime Minster at that point, he was the leader of the opposition, and he brought with him Rev. Peter Thompson who is a very close friend of his and who has influenced much of his thinking on this subject. We formed a friendship and today Peter has been helpful in setting up Community Action Network in Australia.

I thought it was important, thought, to go back the beginning and ask where did all this come from. How are we to understand the macro questions of societies like the United Kingdom and Japan? How do we understand what is really going on? How do we understand what should be happen in Afghanistan at the moment with these very difficult problems? My suggestion to this is we have to start not with macro realities but with the micro realities. We have to look in a great detail at one community in one place and try to understand what is actually going on for from the micro we will understand the macro and not the other way around.

I began by going to Bromley by Bow in the east end of London back in 1984. This was one of the poorest communities in Britain. Within 10 minutes' walk of the church buildings that I took responsibility for that there are 50 languages and dialects spoken. There are people there from al l over the world, but it is a community and was a community that had many of the problems that Mr Sumitani has very accurately described. It was a situation where anyone who could leave and get out and go to something better, did so. As a minister of a church, I took responsibility for a large church building about the size of this room which had 12 elderly white people and we had a small amount of money in the bank. And a question was what should I do about this situation and the many social problems that I could see on the streets around me. At that time I did not know. But I thought I should spend time meeting people trying to understand what was actually going on in people's lives, starting with the micro.

What I saw in the first few months of my time there were many of the public institutions in Britain putting many millions of pounds into these communities and these ways of working were making very little difference to some of these poorest communities. They were not dealing with the micro difficulties of their lives. I saw parts of the old philanthropic charitable sector in Britain and that were having lots of meetings and management discussions and producing lots of minutes and lots of paper and lots of talk, but then I would come across a young woman of 23 in a block across the road who would say to me I do not want to join a management committee but when are we going to have a decent nursery around here or a decent health centre for my children? What one saw was the mismatch between a lot of the talk and the lot of committees and the practical realities of some of the poorest people in our society.

At this time a few of us decided that we would approach the problem differently. We would look for people who wanted to do something practical, not talk about it, to do something practical to change our environment. One of the early people that came along or group of people, a group of families that had been running nurseries, a small nursery in a small house down the road. And, they came and saw this big church building that was empty and said we would like to use this. And I said, "I will let you use this on condition we form a partnership together and begin to work together." They agreed that this was a good idea. So, we began to work together and we brought an architect on board and a young woman who lived in a rundown house down the road and one or two of us got together and came up with a plan. Why not rip out-empty all this room or all this clutter and furniture and take it back just the shell of the room. Why not develop a tent
like structure designed by an architect in the middle of the room and create a church for 40 people in the round rather than 200. This seems to be more realistic given a third of our population were Muslims not Christians. Let us build around this church and art gallery and involve some of the artists who were living in cheaper accommodation around this community and bring them together. And why not then around this art gallery develop an integrated nursery, so that we bring together in one place, not just poor children, but some poor children because I could see that if you brought 25 poor children together they all get poorer. If we bring some poor children and some children from doctors and teachers who we were trying to bring in to this area and who paid for the children to be there and some Bengali children, then we integrate children from different backgrounds and a new reality begins to appear. And then, this will kick in 11 creches a week with other children, a toy library in the cupboards around this room you could open and have toys during the week for local families. And the canopy over the church could lift upon the road and you could move the furniture of the church and put a theatre there, so it is a flexible room. This was the plan.

Then, we had the expert from social services, the public official, come to see this plan. We showed her this architect model and an exciting idea and she did not seem excited. She told me and she pulled out of her bag a big encyclopedia with a thousand reasons why this could not be done. Why you could not build in Britain a nursery within an art gallery with a theatre with a toy library all in one space, she told me the rules did not allow it. But I pointed out all the rules had created the very messy situation outside these buildings, so we needed to re-think the rules. She thought this was impossible. But we decided this could not be impossible because the realities we were facing were too great.

She agreed to bring the director of social services to see me and he came. And after a discussion, he admitted that the financial realities of what we were saying made sense. Actually he could build 12 of these nurseries for the cost of one very expensive one he'd built in another part of London. This was the first example in the public sector in Britain that I had met with of the 'can' mindset. Someone who wanted to make it happen, rather than a thousand of reasons why it could not happen. Today we have run this nursery for 16 years and we now run 2 other nurseries. Indeed, the public authority gave us one of their nurseries that was not working to run.

We then became involved in community care because many of the people working, living in our community were very vulnerable, disabled had mental health problems, were unemployed. They were stuck in the home watching the television and becoming poorer. And what we saw when we stood a back in our part of London was that many professional people lived 20 miles away in
nicer part of London came in the morning and did things to people, earned large salaries, and returned to a nice part of London, leaving this community dependent upon them. We thought this was very unhealthy for everyone. So, we began to realise that people needed to take more responsibility for their own lives and own community. We began to back individuals in that community who wanted to have a go.

And today if you came to Bromley by Bow, you would find our 3-acre park which was a deteriorated land is now ran by a man, 28 years of age who was stuck at home with health problems. He is now no longer on medication, he is well, he is married and has rebuilt the park. You would find a young woman that also was stuck at home with health problems has now received education and is teaching people community care. Today in Bromley by Bow we have over 100 staff, 58 percent of our staff come from the immediate surrounding community, not from 20 miles away, and they earn money and have learnt skills and have begun together with other people to change the reality and to re-negotiate our relationship with the public sector. Indeed, the public sector and ourselves have learnt a great deal from each other in this process. It has not been always easy, but it has been interesting.

8 years ago, a woman of 35 called Jean Biles was dying of cancer at 35 on our estate. She had 2 children, 16 and 2, sleeping in the same bed in a very small flat. She became part of our community care group and we realised she only had 6 months to live. And as we looked at the detail of her situation, we saw many public officials writing reports about her, but no one would be her friend. Jackie, a young mother with 5 children, would go in every morning to bath her. Here you had very poor person falling through all the cracks of social welfare, the health service and all the provision the state was meant to be providing in Britain. But it was not working.

Eventually Jean died and I did the funeral, and this case appeared in the national newspapers because the families were very upset at what had happened. And three weeks later, there was a big meeting at a hospital near our project. And at this meeting many of the officials were going around the table justifyingwhy they had done, or not done certain thing to Jean Biles. These were good people, not bad people, but the system that they were running had not worked. Half way though the meeting, I made the point that these systems were not focused on the customer who is Jean, but they were focused on systems and structures, which were the interests of the professional people involved. Then, the canner consultant and doctor from the hospital asked the local general practitioner, "Why did you not contact me to tell me that this situation was occurring?" The local doctor said, "Your fax number was not working." Then, for 2 hours the detail came out of who had not spoken to whom, what had not happened etc etc. These were not
bad people. These were systems and structures that did not work and falling though the cracks of these systems and structures was Jean Biles.

After the meeting, four officials said to me privately, " I agree, Andrew with what you were saying in that room, but I will not agree with you in public." "Why?" "Because the professional interests of the groups, people's livelihoods, their wages and their salaries were connected in with systems." People like me were beginning to say, " If the systems do not work, it is a time to change them.

Two weeks later, we were called back to this big meeting by which point we had a plan. We then said, "We will take over this 3 acres of derelict land behind our church buildings and we will build our own health centre in the form of cloister, a beautiful building like an Oxford College. And you will come in through a garden, so there would be something beautiful like a beautiful Japanese garden. Then you will come in to an art gallery, and there will be the reception to the health centre. Our doctors would be able to offer on prescription a wide range of choices, 125 activities a week, not just expensive medication but the opportunities to have an allotment in the park, some land, an opportunity to set up your own business, an opportunity to join in education. Because we began to realise that people's health problems were connected with their isolation, their poor education, their unemployment, everything was connected together, nothing was separate. So we said we would re-build the park and on the corner of the park we will build some housing for people with mental health problems, so we will not put very ill people in the middle of this estate where they are isolated, we will bring them into a caring community. And, we will connect housing with a park, and with a health centre, with a nursery, with a church, with community care, and we will bring it all together in the first integrated healthy living centre in Britain. This was a big surprise.

We then spent 3 years pioneering this new thinking and 3 years ago this project was opened, opened as the first healthy living centre in Britain by the minister of state. Our integrated reception on the health centre was opened by Cherry Blair, the Prime Minister's wife and today the government has put a large fund of money behind these ideas to replicate them across the country.

Today 2000 people a week come through the Bromley by Bow Centre. We employ over 100 people earning money, so the economy of the area is beginning to change. We have set up with our partners a two hundred million pounds housing company which is taken over five thousand units of housing in the local area which was traditionally ran by the public authority. And, we have started to create a mixture of housing integrating different styles of housing where people live, so we create a diverse and mixed community, some who are poor some who are wealthier and all points in between.

Because this work grew bigger, I needed to play a national role, and so Professor Paul Brickell became our Chief Executive and he will share with you with some of the wide details of what we have been doing in recent years. But out of this situation, I began to meet other people like myself across the United Kingdom, who had also been struggling with systems and approaches that did not work. But, often they were isolated and they found it very difficult to bring change. And so myself, Adele Blakebrough, who is another social entrepreneur in London whose project in south London deals with 340 heroin addicts a day and Helen Taylor Thompson who is 76 years of age who built the first mothers and children's hospice for Aids in Europe began to work together. And when we worked together, we found we could become bigger than the sum of our parts. We found that 2 plus 2 did not equal 4, but it equaled 6. So we began to bring together social entrepreneurs like ourselves 10 by 10 by 10. And Peter Thomson and I got on trains and buses and traveled all over the United Kingdom looking for these people who are on their own trying to do new things with environment, in health, in housing in social projects, many different projects. And we began to bring them together on the intranet using modern communication's technology. We began to realise we could build a market place on the intranet called CAN-online, and we could begin to support each other share our experience, begin to put projects together across the country, bring new money to bear upon our individual projects that none of us could actually do on our own. We began to create an environment that could grow and that was entrepreneurial.

We now have over 600 people like me connected together all over the United Kingdom. All of us are running very practical projects on the ground seeking to innovate in these areas of social welfare and community. As well as that we have now been developing 18 CAN (Community Action Network) centres in different cities and town across Britain. Bringing together in one place, people from business, some from the public sector, some from the voluntary sector because our view is new ideas do not come out of the clouds, they come out of the connections between people who have never before worked together.

Let me give you a few examples of these centres across Britain. In the north west of England, in a small town called White Haven, I came across a man called Jim Baker. In his town there is large unemployment because the mines have closed. In the middle of the town, was a run-down multi-storey car park that no one used because heroin addicts had been using it and it had derelict cars within it. He was starting to work with young unemployed people, so he persuaded the public authority, which owned the car park to give him the car park. He took over the car park. He cleaned out all the derelict cars, he got the young people to pay the walls of the car parks, so it was clean and nice. They began to run it as a social business and charge people for parking their cars with a nice little notes on your car to welcome you. Women and other people began to use the car park and it became a small social business, which earned money and unemployed young people gained skills. They, then, developed a small cafe which taught catering skills and some of these young people went on to run a small business. We then formed a relationship because we met. We persuaded a large business and the public sector together to give us some money to buy another building in the market place. This was a derelict building. He brought architects in and builders and rebuilt the building in 8 months very quickly and created a business floor, a health floor, some offices for the CAN director to go. Recently he has just won a million pounds to build the first healthy living centre in that part of England. By working together, we could do bigger things, newer things, imaginative things.

A second example, in Cardiff in Wales, we at the moment are putting in a bid, a proposal to take over a very large public building that is owned by the Council, which has had millions of pounds of money spent on it, but it is empty. Very few people were using it and this is an embarrassment to the Council because the national government audit office has been asking why all these money had been spent on this building that no one is using. So we have formed a partnership with the BBC and with the business and developed a business plan to take over this building. The Council will own the building but we will run the things within the building so that it becomes full of people, and so that the building throughout technology network will connect out the individuals like me across Wales. This is taking problems and turning them into practical opportunities.

Third example, in London to form the CAN centre in London by the London eye, the very big wheel there on the river Thames, we took over a we took over very large derelicts office block and created a very large office and created a very big open space like this room. We brought together 14 different organisations, some from business, some from the public sector and some from the social sector and we created glass rooms with a round table, the green room, the blue room, the black room. What has happened over this last year is we have begun to work together over coffee and we will meet round a table and one group if they are good at marketing, will do the marketing. If another group is good at writing a business plan, they will write the business plan. Together we will work of our skills to develop a project, and now many projects have grown out this environment. It has become an engine for change. One of the practical results of coming together in this space is that we have reduced all our costs of 14 organisations by a third. We have had one hundred percent occupancy of this room for a year. We have also employed an

office manager, and we have now created a project that does not rely upon government grants, but can stand up on its feet and makes a slight profit. This is a social enterprise whereas many of the projects often in the inner city of Britain were dependent on grants. Community Action Network is seeking to lay the foundation stones of an entrepreneurial way of working in the community.

I like very much this term, community re-invention, I am going to take it with me back to Britain, it is a very good term, better than any term we've got. This is a good term because we are about community re-invention. Because some of them are more traditional charitable approaches, or philanthropy that are well known in Britain, when you look at them over many years have created dependency not independence. What we have found is that individual people are a very great resource to help build communities, but we need to be close to them to bring them on board so they become part of the solution, so they become an inclusion not an exclusion.

Let me share with you some principles of what we have learnt in the United Kingdom as we begin to invent this new environment. The first principle we have followed is to put money and resources not behind committees, but behind individual people and their ideas, and who then bring another people around them and form a business team to make things happen. We do not mind whether these people come from the business sector, or the voluntary sector, or the public sector, the key thing we are looking for is the right person with the right mind-set who wants to do something practical. Second principle, it is about building partnerships between the public, business and social sector. Our experiences has been in Britain, new ideas do not come out of the clouds, they come out of the connections between people who have never normally connected. It is about getting all of us move outside the boxes in which we have traditionally lived and worked.

Third principle, it is about taking risks and about spotting opportunities.

Fourth principle, it is about opening doors, being flexible, not closing doors.

Fifthly, what this does when you start to behave like this in Britain, it starts to create a good environment. It started in Bromley by Bow to create housing and jobs and business opportunities. It started to reinvent social services. It started to include everyone, lots of different people from many different nationalities started to get involved. We discovered that everyone had a part to play. We did not pretend that everyone was the same, everyone was not the same. But just like a jigsaw, everyone had a piece of the picture. It began to reinvent the community.

Sixthly, this way of working began to celebrate diversity. The fact that we were very different community from many parts of the world became not a problem but an opportunity.

Seventhly, it created an entrepreneurial culture where people wanted to have a go. A CAN culture as against in those early days a CANNOT culture.

Eighthly, it created a learning environment for everyone to be involved. It created an environment of community reinvention.

It is important, a few final things I need to say, it is very important to understand in this process as we have grown Community Action Network across the country that business partners have become involved with us. Because they began to realise that we were applying some business thinking to some of these social problems. Some of the businesses that we work with at the moment include BBC, Coca Cola, BT Cell-Net, British Gas, they have found their business interests the social interests are connected together. Let me give you one practical example. In Bromley by Bow as we built this health centre, became aware of a very large superstore TESCO on the other side of the road. The manager came to a large meal we did with many different people. And half way through the meal, he said to me, " Is this who lives around here?" He again lived away came on a morning to the shop and disappeared and evening back to his house. I said to this man, " This is who lives around here." Then, he said, "If this is who lives here we are selling the wrong food. A third of the population are not using my shop." I said, "I have noticed this point." He said, "If you are building a health centre on this side of the road, why don't we look at building a pharmacy." We began to see that the social interests and the business interests were not separate, they were connected together. We live in a holistic environment, an integrated environment if we can find the opportunities to work together.

A key message in Britain is the new model we are developing the new way of thinking is moving beyond philanthropy, the traditional model of philanthropy in Britain, to social enterprise. The British government is wanting to encourage social enterprise where people are about self-help and taking responsibility for the future in a business like way.

If you would like to have more information, more detail about Community Action Network, on our website here (www.can-online.org.uk), is a lot of information about our network. If you trawl through the website and go through the map of the United Kingdom, you will see what has been happening around the country.

A great deal has happened in the Community Action Network in just three years. From a standing start launched at the House of Commons with a personal letter of support from Prime Minister. We have gone a long way.

However, we still have a lot to learn. We do not know everything, we know some things.

Therefore, we welcome these wider relationships with Japan. Because I have traveled and seen some of the things going on here in Kobe, in Osaka and in other places, I see that you also know a great deal about these things. We may have to learn things from you and you may have things to learn from us. I am also aware, because we have now developed a network in Australia, working with some of the aborigines in Australia. They also know things that none of us know. That actually the clues to this new environment are in different parts of the world, and just as I had to travel around Britain to find out who had worked out which clue. We have to also look in different parts of the world because there are our people who have found some very interesting solutions to some of these older problems we all face.

Finally, we very much have enjoyed being here. We have begun to learn a lot from you although our knowledge is still very limited. We would welcome the opportunity for a deeper longer-term partnership with Japan. Where we begin to explore together 'community reinvention'. I believe we have a great deal to learn from each other and to teach each other. Thank you very much for inviting me here today to share a few thoughts with you. Thank you very much.

Keynote speaker profile Andrew Mawson

Please see
http://www.can-online.org.uk/aboutus/biogcvs/cvam.htm
http://www.can-online.org.uk/aboutus/biogcvs/biogam.htm