After 5 years or pushing forward the Shine concept, it is starting to feel like others are seeing the potential of the model to transform society. Or at least they are speaking in the same language. Our flagship model is both pushing forward to success in the worst economy and balancing on the head of a pin as we ride through the second dip. Recognition of the model could not come at a better time as we battle through 2010 with a great team now in place.
We have learned a ton over the past 3 years while developing and operating Shine. More on that later…
What’s really exciting, at the moment, is the way in which the Big Society may be realised with a Shine (or Hillside, or Priory Campus, or fill in the blank) at the heart of the movement. Lablets to be precise! According to Asheem Singh. Lablets to drive economy and return investment at a local level, while feeding best practice through the regional/national Labs. Importantly, this needs to be linked to investment and support because future Shines are not going to spring up around the community motivators like so many wildflowers exposed to the sun. How will the government support or even make this investment? I am betting the process looks much like the framework outlined in The Venture Society by Asheem Singh @ ResPublica. Recommended reading that helps clarify both the structure and potential of the Big Society Vision.
Related posts:
Lablets – lovely soundbite.
Challenges – affordability and accessibility.
Basing these things in buildings with a high cost base means high overheads. And one of the things you must have learned is how hard it is to get people to come into buildings that they don’t see as theirs and that they can’t afford the price of admission to. Even a team of enterprise evangelists out their full-time aren’t enough.
We need to find low cost and easily accessible opportunities for people to reflect, learn and experiment with overheads kept to a bare minimum.
We have too much built space – and increasingly fewer people who need it as they work from home, cafes, libraries wherever. Hence my interest in
Progress School – http://progressschool.wordpress.com,
Innovation Lab – http://leedslab.com/2010/08/25/meeting1/) and
Enterprise Coaching – http://localenterprise.wordpress.com
We have acres of underused space already in Leeds that is fit for purpose. Not all of it perfect, nor ‘designer’ but fit for purpose. Although much of it is world class and empty. Managers of these places are battling to win any business that will help to keep the doors open.
But the goal is not to keep buildings open but to provide the support that people really need, to make progress in their lives. We have to start where people are at – not where serves to keep the ‘developers’ bank balances healthy.
Sad to see the catalyst gone from Hillside – but hardly unexpected. Too big, too expensive, too disconnected from the local community and much too close to policy targets for business start ups to actually engage local people in their agendas.
Rolls Royce products at a time when we need to be sharing bicycles. HP started in a shed – not an architect planned and interior designed, refurbished, listed building.
In Leeds we have witnessed extraordinary sums invested into buildings with the goal of stimulating enterprise. Perhaps now is the time to shift what little investment remains into people, their aspirations and building the social capital in the community to support them in their progress.
And if we have ‘lablets’ in communities how about they drive ‘the community’ rather than ‘the economy’.
Economies have to serve communities and not the other way around.
Mike Chitty´s last blog ..The Regeneration Game – Builders- architects and developers