Not one to follow soaps, I’m only an occasional Archer’s listener, mainly by podcast nowadays, although in childhood I used to listen every night with my parents (we had no television).

But I happened to catch Lizzie and her mother Mrs Archer today discussing whether Lizzie should be carrying on her business when she’s still close to her bereavement. You may have missed the outpouring of fury when daffy but popular character Nigel Pargetter was killed falling off a roof in the 60^th anniversary episode, and the escalating storylines about bereavement. There was a reasonably good discussion about whether children should attend the funeral on Woman’s Hour last Friday, which if you’re quick you can still hear on iPlayer.

Lizzie was robust about the ‘getting on with it’ aspect of her dual process; I refer to the bereavement theory which says we switch between backward-looking grief and going forward as the business cliche popular just now has it. I’m puzzled about the psycho-speak that ordinary people (Mrs Archer represents sensible ordinariness to the nth degree) put about that explicit distress and taking a period of keeping out of action is the thing to do in bereavement. This is no better than forcing everyone to go into black-edged mourning for a year.

There are ripples of despair: what about listener bereavement, say some comments on the BBC Archers blog, but you can get the full glory of listener reaction on the Archers fan club. Slightly more interesting is discussion about whether writers should spice up their stories with death, made a little bit more controversial by the sudden infant death storyline on Eastenders over Christmas. Of course I am old enough to remember the famous death of Grace Archer which was said (the BBC always denied it) to have been timed to draw media attention away from the first night of ITV in the ‘50s, so the BBC has form in this matter, as indeed does every long-running drama producer.

This is silly; people die. Therefore, of course they will die in continuing stories. Dan Archer (the original patriarch) did not die through the deaths of several of the actors playing him, and his son Phil, whose real-life counterpart, Norman Painting, died before the writers could write him out of the plot with a dramatic departure, popped off in old age. Presumably the long-running new patriarch, David will have his turn around 2030, unless more drama is decreed earlier. And his wife could always get a recurrence of her breast cancer. People are just too sensitive about death, and we should generate a bit more robustness about it, or at least dual process, and certainly writers should never give up on dramatising reactions to it. It gives us an opportunity for people like the discussants on Woman’s Hour and elsewhere to encourage a more nuanced range of reactions in literature and the media.

Extensive comment on the Archers Official Fan Club website (which also contains a ‘catch-up’ so you can follow the story line):

http://www.thearchers.co.uk

The Woman’s Hour discussion can still be heard on iPlayer until next Friday:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xb0rz

The Harriet Smart blog on writers who use bereavement as a dramatic situation and upset people as a result:

http://www.harrietsmart.com/?tag=the-archers

The Winston’s Wish article on bereavement on the Archers blog (read some of the comments, too):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thearchers/2011/01/childhood_bereavement.html

The government’s green (consultation) paper on ‘Giving’ is frou-frou (see the end of the post for a definition if you need to); even so I am going to spend quite a bit of space on it. This is because it gives us an important clue and direction sign to how the ConDems understand the idea of the ‘big society’ and how they are going to implement it. It also has considerable implications for how end-of-life care is going to be supported and funded by the present government, since most of it is charitable.

The paper is on the internet at:

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/Giving-Green-Paper.pdf

So you see that it comes from the Cabinet Office and is a document that applies across government and implements the government’s philosophy, rather than just being about a particular department’s interets. It is, therefore, an important general signal about what the government is trying to do.

Starting point

The government’s Green Paper on Giving is mainly white, but has shifted to a new yeuchy-yellowish-green theme colour. I presume their marketing people think this is cool; I think it’s like vomit.

Green papers are theoretically consultations about policy. However, do not be misled. You are not being consulted about the policy; you are being asked to come up with more ideas than the government has come up with to do what it has decided to do. What you cannot do (or you can but they obviously won’t take any notice) is say: ‘Well actually I wouldn’t mind paying a smidgeon more tax to help provide state services, if everyone is going to pay according to their wealth and income, and especially if bankers are going to stop leaching off the country and pay their own way’. No, instead you can have ideas about how they can arrange to get money and more volunteers to support the services they’re not going to provide, through your donations or money and time to charities and similar organisations, provided they’re run like businesses. Not, God forbid, to the state.

A good way, according to them, is to take a slice of your money every time you use your bank’s hole in the wall to pay presumably to a few charities that the government has selected to do the things that it won’t be doing. I wonder what the banks are going to charge for that? Presumably proportionately more than the Inland Revenue (sorry Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) would cost for adding the same amount on to my tax bill. Well, don’t worry, because on principle I, along with everyone else I know, will not be cooperating with this in any way at all, so the banks are not going to be overcharging me for that as well. This is a worrying politicisation of giving to charity, which is going to turn a lot of people off, certainly a lot of people I know.

The real weakness of this document is that it is written by people who are in marketing and believe in it. Frou_frou.com will lead you to a heaven in which cool, computer-linked , computer-kinked all-sharing people who have lots of frou-frous that don’t matter too much to them will contribute their frou-frous that you didn’t know you needed and improve your community custard tart.

I repeat what I’ve often said on this blog: the voluntary sector is created by what people, voluntarily, themselves want to do. It would not be created for what the government wants to do; if the government wants it done, it should do it. In a small way, the voluntary sector sometimes gets money from the government to provide some of its services. Most voluntary organisations don’t do this. Those that do, like hospices, get a fairly small proportion of their income from government. A few (usually noisy) voluntary organisations get most of their money from government. They have to be noisy because they have to influence policy to make sure they continue to get that support. But as soon as the government sees the main purpose of voluntary activity as providing what it wants to provide, then it ceases to be voluntary, because it ceases to be free to decide on how and what it is going to help.

The government seems to think that by setting up lots of local community organisations, social enterprises and supporting voluntary organisations, they will be able to have a flock of providers keen to reduce the monolithic character of government health, social care and other things. But the problem is that independent organisations do not necessarily do what you want them to; the government cannot implement their policies by telling independent organisations what to do. The history of edgy NHS relationships with GPs (whose practices are small social enterprises that have been in existence for more than 60 years) should tell them this. And then, of course, all these little local organisations may sell out to big multinationals. Or big multinationals may be preferred providers because they’re less trouble to contract with. But they also, of course, have considerable power to do what they like. Then, like banks, if they are providing most of your services, you can’t let them go bust. I see 2035 as the date for the bailout of the health and social care multinationals.

You’ll have gathered that I don’t come to this Green Paper very enthusiastically, but I have nerved myself up to it, because as major providers of excellent services to the public, palliative care organisations and hospices, not to mention other voluntary sector organisations have a very real interest in how the government is going to go about this. And our patients and everyone else has an interest in how they think they are going to make the ‘big society’ work.

The context: a culture change

The Introduction to ‘Giving’ (it’s not just money, it’s your energy and commitment) puts this bit of their policy in context; this is helpful direction-setting, trying to identify the network of footpaths that will lead to the big society. The aim is:

-        Empowering communities – policies and actions to encourage or allow local communities to do things for themselves.

-        Opening up public services – allowing (in this order) charities, social enterprises, private companies, employee cooperatives to take on running public services

-        Encouraging social action – encouraging people to give time, money, assets, knowledge and skills ‘to support good causes and make life better for all’.

They will do this through:

-        a localism bill, giving people the power to change their local community

-        public service reform, allowing people more involvement in local services.

The main values expressed are to ‘acknowledge the limits of government’, emphasising ‘the role of reciprocity’ and to use technology, particularly ‘social media’ (things like Facebook and Twitter). There is a big emphasis on culture change, the assumption being that we don’t do enough collectively for other people. They hope to get local communities to play an important role and businesses to provide ‘support’ by enabling their employees to do more.

On ‘community’, the sociologist in me comments that this is all about local communities rather than communities of interest (people who share similar interests) or, indeed, online communities, which sociologists have recently begun to recognise. Bearing in mind their interest in using new technology for many of the things in this paper, it ’s rather surprising the paper seems to miss out on this; to a ConDem obviously only ‘local’ counts as community. This is fifty years behind the sociological times.

There is also nothing in this about families and carers. Not, I think, that they are against family and carer support, but the emphasis in this interpretation of ‘giving’ is on organised support outside the family. I wonder why this is, since all the research shows that people are more likely to offer support to relatives than neighbours and more distant members of their community. I also don’t think that localism necessarily generates mutuality and shared interest; we get more support from people with shared interests, wherever they are. Social networking connects with this: some people make their connections in ways that do not slot in to localism. It also fails to tell you how all this new giving is going to interact with families and carers; it’s too busy pulling together examples of cool things that it wants to do to think and plan about how it fits in with the most important forms of support in our communities. Alongside families and carers all this sort of thing is frou-frou.

On the other hand, social networking has to be taken a step further than computer or mobile or Twitter communication; it requires real human interaction to cement it into a group of people prepared to take action in some way. I think we have to be more thoughtful about how we turn technological social networking into interpersonal social networking. That transfer from networking to action cannot be taken for granted. Some of that reciprocity has also to be there and it has to be planned for and worked at.

And, on top of all that, I go back to the government getting what they want. The whole principle of any kind of giving is that givers choose what they give, how they give it and what they give it for. The whole history of social action is littered with examples of governments encouraging community participation and then finding that what the communities want from their participation is something the government doesn’t like. As a result, participation gets taken away pretty smartly. That is going to happen here too, if the frou-frou social marketing-speak ever gets taken towards anything real on the ground.

The people I talk to are saying fairly clearly that the government is not going to get what it’s looking for from these initiatives. First of all, people won’t give if they believe the government is giving up. Second, it takes a lot of hard work to create community initiatives and people are not going to do it for objectives that they don’t agree with and that don’t really benefit them. A local community organiser said to me a couple of weeks ago that she wasn’t doing newsletters and trekking round the streets in her estate just to do something that she wasn’t interested in and that the government should be doing anyway. Looking at the recent social care ‘vision’ document, I commented on the idea that dealing with adult safeguarding (stopping granny-bashing in normal-speak) through a neighbourhood watch model will not work. People are just not going to sit in the front rooms and check up on neighbours who neglect their elderly relatives. They expect to be able to report it to officialdom and for there to be a lot of well-trained officials to do something about it.

The main actions

To achieve its desired culture change, this sections tells us what the government is going to do. Perhaps you won’t see this in the typography, so I’ll point it out; it comes as an acronym or possibly a nemonic: GIVES. This kind of cutesy stuff turns me off government documents. It makes it more marketing frou-frou than an effort at engaging me, and I do not like to be marketed at; I don’t know a lot of people who do.

Here it is:

-        Great opportunities, so it’s exciting and convenient to do giving;

-        Information, so we know how to go about it;

-        Visibility, so we see other people giving and do more ourselves. This is a sort of ‘keep up with the Jones-Smythes’ on the giving front, obviously we’ll all want to do what our friends are doing.

-        Exchange and reciprocity, so we all see the benefits of giving much more.

-        Support communities and charities to take on more responsibility and scale up what they’re doing.

Great opportunities

You’ve seen the press comment on easy giving using new technology. Examples are; every time you click on the internet, every time you get money from the hole in the wall, rounding up to a pound every time you make a card payment, easier donations through the internet, on your mobile phone, volunteering slivers of time from home through the internet. Yes, come on, offer your sliver of time via your computer to the person dying in the next bed to me; I’m sure the highly qualified nurse will find it very useful. Volunteering is real people in real places when required, not an exciting marketing concept. And real professionals have to provide the services, and not spend all their time organising slivers of time from people on their computers at home.

Other ideas are creating ‘trigger moments’ that catch people’s attention, getting civil servants and local government officers to volunteer, for example providing training. Dying as a trigger moment might get a lot of people’s interest, but I happen to think a service providing for people’s needs during dying and bereavement is demeaned by seeing it as a ‘trigger moment’ in a marketing campaign for increased giving to charity.

From the point of view of an ordinary, possibly donating, member of the public and from the point of view of the common or garden hospice in their local community, I’d like to know how I choose who I’m donating to. Will it be some government-selected charities that they like, perhaps those that are helping them fill in for their cuts in services? Or will I be able to select any of the thousands of local charities for my slivers of money and time so conveniently donated? I can see that every local bank might be able to offer a choice of, say, a local community fund as well as three or four national charities to choose from in the fourth pages of my hole in the wall process (which already has too many buttons to press to get my cash), but how is that fund going to choose the organisations that get the money locally?

We’d all better start buttering up the bank managers who design what charities are on the front page of the bank machines, or fund organisers who decide on the local grants. I’ve actually done that job for a local fund years ago, and what it led to is a few thousand a year at most, more often just a hundred of two, for many local charities. And anyone who’s worked for a grant-giving charity (or government department) will tell you they spend much of their lives with people pitching clever re-designs of their organisation to meet the latest cool criteria that teh fund-gier has come up with so that they can market their exciting grant-giving to the outside world and the trustees. And it always leads to grants given for projects, in the same way that foundations provide now. This is not the way the provide funding for solid continuing local care services. It’s likely to be no good at all to your local hospice spending a few million a year on supporting dying and bereaved people with a consistent service.

Then on to volunteering. The offensive paragraph about volunteering is apparently drawn from the Commission on the Future of Volunteering; did this really say that volunteers provide ‘a personal, human touch that staff might be prevented from providing, making services feel genuinely caring’? Obviously, nurses, doctors, chaplains and social workers can’t provide genuine human caring according to the Commission. Or at least the way some ignorant marketing professional working for the government has re-written it. Neither can they provide ‘innovation and a fresh perspective’ and ‘a source of local and other knowledge’. Not too knowledgeable all these qualified staff, and of course our nurses and health care assistants doing shifts all day and night must be living miles away from the hospice and have no local knowledge at all. In case you didn’t realise, that sentence was ironic. Perhaps the staff will be so driven because of all the cuts in services that only volunteers will be able to do anything human. I’m sure that sentence was ironic too. And perhaps that one was.

One of the laughable examples is how another of the government’s green papers aims to stimulate people into local social action in providing effective punishment, rehabilitation and sentencing of offenders. I must make a note to read that document, because my lifetime’s experience (I was working in offender services forty years ago was on the board of one more recently and retain a concern) is that people do not want to get engaged in voluntary working with the nasties in life. The number of people wanting to help punish, rehabilitate or sentence offenders through local community action is likely to be infinitesimal (except in the local teenager castration clinic, but probably the government is not going to want to go that far). I can see that loads of people might enjoy being a volunteer for the Olympics (another example). It’s time-limited, it’s nice, it’s in the summer, so they’ve had a lot of applications. And, yes, hospices might be OK because although people do tend to say that they can’t imagine working in a place where a lot of people die, when they’ve experienced the services, they find it interesting and worthwhile. But there are not going to be a mass of volunteers to work with middle-aged alcoholics, or twenty-something druggies or prostitutes.

And I’d forgotten we’re going to have ‘National Citizen Service’ for over 16s to give their time. I’m sure lots of them will, particularly since so many are going to be unemployed and not going to university or getting education maintenance grants: but are we really going to run the country on this basis? Apparently so, because there’s going to be some funny money to support ‘a volunteer infrastructure programme’ for organisations that are recruiting, training and supporting volunteers. That’s presumably to make up for all the local authority grants that are going to be withdrawn from local volunteer centres that have been doing this job for decades (I ran one in the 1980s and there are several very good ones in the St Christopher’s area, that have been imaginative in supporting volunteers with special needs) Of course, the government knows about these organisations, but presumably also knows that it needs to come up with some realistic financial support for volunteering, because it’s not cheap, it involves a lot of people to support and train volunteers effectively. The problem is, I think, that training and support is best done close to the service that the volunteers are working in; on the hospice ward, in the hospice home care services, in the day centre or chaplaincy. Some generic support agency does not really have the expertise in the job to be done. Of course, I’d forgotten that only volunteers have knowledge and the human touch, so it’ll be all right; sorry.

Information

One of the ways slivers of time and money is going to work, apparently, is to have websites set up for volunteers to apply through and for charities to show what they’re doing and for donors to track the impact of their contributions. I’m sure there’ll be funny money to support this initiative too, so what this means is that there’s going to be lots of jobs for redundant local authority workers organising local charities to provide information about how all this money and time is being used, and they’ll need even more volunteers, because the staff are going to be run ragged providing all this evidence of impact. My job’s safe: there’ll be many more audits to persecute doctors, nurses and social workers with so we can feed information to these websites to demonstrate to everyone what they’re doing.

Here’s an interesting point; ‘There’s much that we can do as government to make sure the right information exists’ (p 12). What can this mean? Is there loads of information existing that’s not right, and the government’s going to correct it? Or is it: ‘Ve haf vays to ensure zat your information fits vat ve vant it to be’. Here’s the answer: ‘The volunteering initiative ‘Work Together’ was launched earlier this year to encourage all unemployed people to consider volunteering and to ensure that people have access to the information they need to find local opportunities’ Ah, so it’s: ‘Ve haf vays for you scroungers to find out how voluntary arbeit mach frei’.

And then there’s transparency. Apparently, people are not concentrating on the ‘right metrics’ (p 12) in deciding who they are going to donate to and support. Ah, so it really is: ‘Ve haf vays of making sure zat your information fits vat ve vant you to sink’.

Visibility

Logically, if you’re going to make everything transparent (see above), you’re going to have problems with visibility. This section is about making sure people are aware through social and traditional media that it’s OK to give time and money to charity, and that all their friends are doing it too. And celebrities that they’ve heard of. Delia will be tweeting every time she buys her eggs: ‘I’ve rounded up the price and given the money to the anti-obesity project for community cooks’. In case you hadn’t counted that’s only 78 characters, so there’s plenty of space for the donation website URL. But I suppose Delia, while trusted, may not be exactly cool with the younger set: Cheryl Cole, then, but while she may be supporting anti-obesity, it probably won’t be community cooks.

But don’t worry, the government is going to lead by example. That’s actually a sub-section heading; I have to quote this in its entirety:

Government has the opportunity to encourage its employees to lead by example, and in so doing help build new social norms. Plans are already underway to develop a ‘civic service’, whereby civil servants are encouraged to contribute to their communities. Our aim is to provide civil servants with opportunities to use their skills to support civil society organisations and to play their part in growing the Big Society. We will do this by promoting social action as a means of professional development for civil servants, and providing better recognition for those giving their time.

Phew, that’s all right then, the government is not going to lead by example: George (Gideon Oliver, Wikipedia tells me) Osborne is not going to be at my bedside to provide that human touch as I shuffle off this mortal coil, they’re only going to encourage their employees to do it. I thought there weren’t going to be any surplus civil servants, so how are they going to be building new social norms from their central London base in Whitehall? And if there were, they don’t have any worthwhile skills, do they? According to the government, skills only come from business.

Are they including all the hospital nurses and doctors alongside the local jobcentre clerks among their employees? The NHS as a really big government employer is obviously going to be a big target for this sort of project; not really worth it to get volunteers for the London area from the comparatively few pen-pushers (sorry, keep up to date Malcolm: keyboard-tappers) they have in Whitehall. Might be good to have nationwide civil servants from the NHS, though – judging by Casualty, I’m sure local hospital doctors and nurses could all fit in an extra shift at the local hospice once they’ve completed their undemanding day jobs. And all those unemployed PCT civil servants too.

They’re also going to promote the charities they work with on government websites – yes, Nick Clegg and his civil servants want to tell you that their favourite charity ‘Keep your word at any cost’ is a really top-notch place to volunteer and donate your hard-earned slivers of money. No, on second thoughts, it will have to be like cigarette packets. They discovered that the only way to give credibility was to say: ‘The Chief Medical Officer says smoking kills’ (I’ve never seen a cigarette packet in recent years so I don’t actually know what it says, but the point is it was definitely a no-no to send a message from the government). Being approved of by a government in decline (in three or four years time, of course) is going to be even less of a recommendation.

I also just have to quote the next one:

Finally, we want to consider whether we should be trying to establish social norms directly. For instance, some have advocated that we aim to make giving one per cent of income a social norm – but others would say that the level should be far higher, as much as ten per cent, which is in line with tithing levels. And there are similar questions about levels of giving of time. The government can play a role in creating the choice architecture and entrenching norms for giving… (p 15, emphasis original)

Well if giving 10% should be the social norm, it’s all right to put taxes up by 10% to pay for government services, isn’t it? But I agree I don’t want to pay it to the government. I’d happily pay it to my local council or the local NHS though, because they provide really useful direct services.

And ‘choice architecture’? Did anyone tell them about meaningless business jargon being a real turn-off. Either they all speak like this, or nobody with any connection with the real world read this before they published it.

Exchange and reciprocity

We’re nearing the end now. Here we go again, a quotation:

While powerful motivators in many situations, the prospect of feeling good about ourselves, making new friends or gaining experience, are not enough on their own to encourage us to give in new ways, to new causes or for non-givers to start.

So making a contribution to good in the world is not a relevant motivator then; bit inconsistnt with the rest of the document perhaps? Therefore:

Peer-to-peer lending and financing platforms like Zopa, IndiGoGo and Sponsume allow people to give money to individuals or projects who post requests for funding online. They enable a clear sense of connection between sponsors and those needing funds, and allow for reciprocity – in the form of benefits in kind, or a real financial return on money invested.

So sponsor St Soandso’s Hospice and we’ll reserve a bed for your wife when she’s dying. That won’t work because nobody thinks that they or their wife is going to die and she might not die for ages yet. And are only the donors going to get the beds? ‘I’d better get a quick donation in now my wife’s got cancer’. Working for a hospice, I have met some people who think this way, but it’s not the way I want end-of-life care provided in this country. The government shulds realise that this form of reciprocity is just not a realistic approach for many of the activities that charities provide for.

Then there is a list of organisations like freecycle that have come up with a good and useful idea (for those who don’t know, it’s an e-bay-like website where you give away things you don’t need to other people who do ). I know young people for whom this has been a godsend to find free furniture and household items; it’s a mutual Salvation Army clothing and furniture store on the internet without the SA as an intermediary. The government would like to encourage more of this. But such ideas are round the edges of life. I want to give away some palliative care books, but it doesn’t seem to have worked: perhpas death and dying freecycle could pass them on to someone who can use them. If you’re dying or bereaved, you want a coherent, consistent service available from trusted people. Yes, it’s supportive to get reliable information from the internet, but at the centre of the service there need to be well-qualified competent people; you know, those human being types that we used to see around so much.

Finally, support

People in communities will be encouraged to ‘step up’ to take on responsibilities. This business motivational jargon implies that they wouldn’t be able to and they’re not prepared to.  In forty years of being involved with voluntary organisations, I’ve seen people prepared to ‘step up’ to massive responsibilities if it connects with them and they believe in it. Let’s be clear that nobody is going to ‘step up’ to do what they think the government should be doing. People are not all failures in community commitment, in fact most people are very committed to helping others around them, but on a human-to-human basis with people they know and about issues that they feel connected to and believe they can make a contribution with.

So, here comes the funny money; since this is all about marketing, I’m going to start calling it funny munny.

Funny munny 1: a ‘community first’ programme will provide grants to help local people implement projects and plans (and employ all those unemployed people on short-term contracts until the project is up-and-running, when they can move on to the next project).

Funny munny 2: £50m of ‘matched funding’ to support community endowments. Matched with what? Local business is going down the tubes, self-interested banks won’t lend, so they certainly won’t donate (how can they justify it to their shareholders across our globalised world?) and more people are going to be cautious because they’re more likely to be unemployed. And endowments don’t lead to immediate projects, that people can’t use the internet to track their slivers of time and other contributions so that they can see that they’re ‘making a difference’. They imply a build-up of funds over decades, so the banks and financial services can invest it to produce income for the future. So, is this really a goody for the banks? If it is, let’s remember that investments are not earning real rates on interest at the moment, and stocks and shares have not increased in value for quite a while. There will be no community endowment, because endowments don’t grow in the present economic climate.

Funny munny 3: A ‘community organisers’ programme to train 5,000 people to ‘galvanise’ (p 17) people around them to be more active. What this will be is more money to employ unemployed community work lecturers or support courses in universities and colleges which are struggling because nobody is funded to do adult and further education. On short-term training projects, rather than building up solid, long-term education courses.

Then there’s ‘Every Business Commits’. This was a Cameron announcement at the Business in the Community AGM in December, so you may have missed it through not being focused on community development in the run-up to Christmas, which is the time most people make donations to charities, so I can see you’ll have been busy. It appears on their website: http://www.bitc.org.uk/business_and_the_big_society/business_commits/index.html as a series of recommendations by Bitc that all businesses should pursue; the government seems to have taken it up. The five main points are:

-        Reduce carbon and protect the environment

-        Support your community

-        Improve skills and help create jobs

-        Improve quality of life and well being

-        Support small and medium-sized enterprises

Alongside gems like ‘pay suppliers on time’ which funnily enough over decades no one has been able to get government organisations or big businesses to do, the supporting your community stuff is what the Giving green paper covers; these proposals are all circular. To improve quality of life and well-being, the following clear and concrete proposals are:

-        Make your workplace more family-friendly and offer flexible working wherever possible

-        Take further steps to improve the health and well-being of your workforce

-        Support diversity in the workplace.

This is the equivalent of: ‘Now I do hope you chappies are going to do jolly nice things in the future’.

But don’t worry, it’s not just business they’re supporting. There’s going to be more funny munny to help charities and social enterprises encourage volunteering:

Funny munny 4: The volunteering match fund of £10m to match private donations that support volunteering projects. I can already see voluntary organisations redesigning their accounts and talking to donors to prove they’ve got donations coming in to support volunteering. This is just another wheeze to take some money from state services and claim they’re supporting voluntary effort.

Funny munny 5: A Volunteering Infrastructure Programme of £42.4m (that is £10m a year again; you’ll remember I mentioned this above) to provide brokerage and ‘front-line’ support to volunteers that organise and manage them. This is another job creation programme for unemployed people to shift from public sector employment to supporting volunteering.

Funny munny 6: They’ve already announced a Big Society Bank that will ‘capitalise the market’ (p. 18) for social investment. If this is like Chris Huhne’s similar project supporting eco-friendly  projects, I presume the Treasury will stamp on it in case it overspends and nobody ever repays its loans, so it will not become a genuine bank that can borrow money and support social projects, but will be another grant-making scheme to help ‘social enterprises’. So I count this as more funny munny. This is not for charities because of course they are not real businesses, even if they provide useful services, and so therefore cannot be capitalised. I suspect there might be a bit of corporate redesign among the aspects of charities that can turn part of themselves into social enterprises.

Funny munny 7: A Transition Fund of £100m to help charities hit by local authority voluntary sector cuts over the next financial year, until the massive growth in business and community support for voluntary organisations in the new Big Society replaces it (you may think that was another ironic comment, but it’s actually not far from what the document assumes to be the truth). Since they say that local authorities should not be cutting stuff because they should be more efficient, it’s not quite clear to me how they’re going to allocate this. Hence, I designate this too as funny munny. But I presume at the end of the year, the big society won’t have arrived yet (just slightly delayed of course) so I anticipate an outcry at the withdrawal of this support which will embarrass the government, leading to the ‘transitional support’ becoming ‘pro-transitional’ and in later years ‘post-transitional’. Another wait and see there.

Finally, there is the suggestion (they are consulting on this; you may have a view) that they will make foundations pay out a minimum every year. So this is the new free choice Britain: ‘Ve haf vays of making you pay, even if you don’t vant to’. There no suggestion of a problem with this limitation on the freedom of decision-making of foundations. Apparently some other countries do it; I’d like to know where and I’d be interested to know how it works, because my long experience of people who make donations to charities is that they really, really want to support things that mean something to them, and they don’t like being told what to do by government.

But I wonder how the government thinks they’re going to do it, since they haven’t managed to get the much richer banks to lend, or even reduce their bonuses. Of course, foundations are much less powerful in the economy, when bankers won’t make ‘yes’ as an answer, so perhaps it’s easier to bully them.

And another aspect of free choice is venture philanthropy: get a grant from our tame foundation stacked full of businessmen and management consultants who are no longer employable because the government is cutting back on business consultants, and they will interfere with your objectives and management because being a real business they will have much better management skills than your pygmies. Many of their staff probably come from banks and financial services companies for example, real examples of entrepreneurial skill. Sorry, that’s another ironic comment; I must stop this. Perhaps some charities might go for this, because it might be better than having local government and NHS bureaucrats interfering with their objectives and management on grounds not of ability but democratic accountability for their grant-aid.

Now you mention it, there’s not been much so far about democratic accountability in this green paper. Of course, you don’t need that if everyone is building the big society outside government; nobody has to be democratically accountable to anyone. Except that I suspect the government is going to continue to take a very close interest in the big society doing what it wants, not what people in the big society want. This is because I don’t think they can quite imagine that some people don’t think like them, so it will be quite a shock when quite of lot of people start creating a big society that disagrees with the government. It’s happened with every other community development initiative in the world.

The supporting evidence

This account covers about half the pagination of the green paper. So what about the rest? The next big section offers the evidence in support of the proposals. This can be summarised as evidence that there is wide variation in giving across the population, and a lot of them simply aren’t asked, so if you can get at more people they will give more money and time. Also, as NCVO has said in one of its reports, if you make the ‘ask’ clear and attractive, you will get better support. Then there is a comparison between the UK and other countries: the UK already does better than most developed countries in getting people to give  to charity and 70% of people volunteer in some way. The US does a lot better, but has a completely different culture; presumably the government’s culture change is designed to emulate that culture.

However, there are a string of statistics here which show that many people don’t give money (or time but most of this section is about money and shows where the government’s main emphasis is) and there is mention of making it easier to make tax reclaims, to give larger sums, to engage a wider range of corporate donors and so on. All of this is predicated on the evidence that some people (or corporations) give, but more people (or corporations) don’t. The paper therefore makes the assumption that more people and corporations would give if giving was marketed to them better. Marketing rules OK.

I think it might have something to do with how rich the potential corporate donors are (I notice manufacturing and media companies are not big givers and I suspect this is because they are under the competition cosh, so can’t afford it) or what they can achieve by donations (I notice financial services give a lot, possibly to try to improve their seriously tarnished image, and they and other retail companies need to gain public approval and charitable giving is a useful marketing device to this end).

Consultation

At the end, there are several pages of consultation questions. These are more about how they can do what they intend to do, so mostly are not worth answering if you don’t accept the basic premises of the way they talk. I don’t, so I’m not going to bother with them.

The government believes that they can get community involvement through stronger marketing of their opinion that everything would be better if everything was run like a business but not by government. My view is that community work is a longstanding and well-established profession, with a long history of achievement across the world. It has demonstrated again and again that to engage people in community and mutual support you have to make a personal and human connection with them and get them involved in things they believe in and can make a personal commitment to through social relationships with like-minded people. Marketing is not going to work. And social networking has to develop an interpersonal interface to extend its reach into real community support.

On frou-frou

You may be wondering what frou-frou is. My internet dictionary says: 1. Fussy or showy dress or ornamentation. 2. A rustling sound, as of silk.

Yes; that’s what I think of the thinking behind this document.

Burial’s dull, why not melt your corpse?

This is the somewhat tactless way a Metro article introduces alternatives to burial this morning. What tells you that there’s a shortage of news? It even has a large picture of a mist-enveloped Cambridge City Crematorium, which rather confirms one’s stereotypes of climatic conditions in the Eastern flatlands.

However, the article usefully points up new developments in disposing of bodies developed by British companies (perhaps it’s a small business feature really, rather than a rare palliative care article in a tabloid). One is cryomation, where you are freeze-dried and turned into compost. Another is resomation where you are dissolved in a hot vat of potassium hydroxide. This is a Scottish invention, not just British.

The feature says that Cambridge (and presumably others) are adding this to their offer as part of a ‘forward-looking service’ ‘delivering good value’ and ‘improved returns’ to ‘future investment’. Yes, this sounds like a business feature, although I suppose it could be a ‘we’re gearing up to the cuts’ bit of publicity for Cambridge.

It’s also a green feature, because turning us into compost quickly and with zero carbon emissions wins out against cremation (each cremated body releases 260kg of carbon into the atmosphere). So the Metro is ticking loads of boxes in just one article.

Social workers and palliative care staff need to keep up-to-date with what their clients may be offered, and help them in understanding the meaning in their bereavement of alternatives to traditional means of disposing of loved ones’ bodies.

So here are some websites:

http://www.resomation.com

http://www.cryomation.co.uk

http://www.funeralinspirations.co.uk/information/Cryomation.html

I think this is important for social workers, particularly when dealing with bereavement. Nearly fifty years ago, my father was the first in our family to opt for cremation rather than burial, and it aroused a lot of discussion among uncles, aunts and grandparents. but they all followed suit when it came to their turn. I have often wondered whether this change in family tradition came from his experience of cremation in India, where it is the norm. He served there during the second world war.

Whatever, a change in such a culturally important practice can have powerful meaning for relatives and communities, and we need to help people think through the implications of their decision. Of course, achieving an eco-friendly burial may be an important motivator for change, but being dissolved or freeze-dried may also have implications for how people feel about the remains that they are left with, and how these feelings affect bereavement need to be thought through.

There’s a lot of thinking about memorialisation going on, and I have posted about the research on contemporary funerals at Hull University, now finished and available in report form – presumably publications will appear.

In an interesting paper on memorials of their loved ones by individuals and families in at an anniversary of a death or at the time that someone is dying, Andrew Goodhead points up a similar theme to the funerals research. Increasingly, he says, people don’t need professional memorialisers, like ministers or religion, to mediate their response. We can see in internet memorial websites, and all sorts of informal processes, people can express their own attachments to deceased people, in a colloquial style. He points to roadside memorials and informal obituaries that you see in some newspapers nowadays – I often think the ‘Other Lives’ section of the Guardian contains more interesting presentations of what was important to people in ordinary lives than the Guardian’s sometimes bizarre selection of obscure cultural icons and forgotten politicians and film ‘stars’.

He was researching notes people stuck on a fake tree in the St Christopher’s Hospice chapel, or handed in at memorial services.

But if memorialisers don’t need professional mediation, what about the professional work of social workers helping people with their life tasks (saying goodbye, thank you, I love you, and sorry when they are close to death) or doing a life review? Is an information sheet about how to do a memory box or a salt sculpture enough?

I think that, as always, people are different and need different levels of help. Some of the complex family relationships that dissolve into vituperative conflict around a death or divorce, some of the chaotic families and seriously shaken up individuals that social workers see need a human being to work through a difficult hand of cards that life has dealt them. Others can work through their troubles by using the human capacity for adaptation (or repress them – I’m not a believer in routinely letting everything hang out). And a bit of self-improvement can take people a long way. The whole point about the human brain is that it helps us to adapt to the environment out there.

Goodhead, A. (1020) A textual analysis of memorials written by bereaved individuals and families in a hospice context. Mortality 15(4) 323-39. This sounds heavy going by the way, but it isn’t massively sociological and not theological at all, and it gives a very affecting insights into people’s feelings about their loved ones which can inform us all.

A  picture reflecting life and death, from a photography blog:

http://www.mymodernmet.com/photo/photo/show?id=2100445%3APhoto%3A317375

My bit at the Devon Dying Matters conference was about ‘engaging communities in end-of-life care’, following up on Allan Kellehear’s work. He argues that health promotion (the Dying Matters public relations approach) almost says you will never die if you only have a healthy lifestyle, while palliative care focuses on just a few people whom happen to have some major illness at the end of their lives.

This is my argument with the NCPC/Help the Hospices view of the world, and indeed the approach of many hospices. Palliative care sells itself as providing this really caring service for dying people, when most dying people do not have a nice clear illness that doctors can manage the symptoms of and nurses can provide oodles of loving care for. Instead, most people become increasingly frail with all sorts of things that leave them with a dreary and restricted life, which needs developing social relationships to give them a bit more brightness. They never get near palliative care because they’ve got no clear symptoms to manage or care for.

Kellehear says we should improve everyone’s skills in human relationships with dying people, because this deals with the reality that we have an ageing population and not a lot of care services, so we’re going to need everyone to cope better with death and bereavement, which a lot of people find tough at the moment. Unfortunately for the healthcare world, this does not mean paying lots more doctors and nurses to do lots more medical and nursing interesting things, so it’s a bit of a struggle to focus on engaging communities.

The other problem of ‘engaging communities’, which community workers have been saying for decades, and have to say very strongly again whenever a Conservative government gains power, is that the whole point about communities is that they have their own shared priorities, and these are very often different from what governments want to achieve (which is cheaper or no services, especially if you’re Conservative).

It doesn’t work like this with communities, in exactly the same way that it doesn’t work like this with volunteering. Look at the dictionary. A community has shared interests; volunteers choose what they want to do. They cannot be commissioning by NHS administrators to do things that are not in what they perceive to be their shared interests, or relevant to their choice of activity.

You can certainly build communities, you can certainly recruit volunteers. But be prepared for disappointment, because you can’t build or recruit them to do what you want, you have to build and recruit them to develop greater solidarity and mutuality and then you can hope that some of them will grow an interest in what you want to do.

It’s the same with dying matters. If you strengthen communities generally, some of them will be engaged in real relationships around death and bereavement, so they’ll be wanting to use their developing solidarity to make dying and bereavement better. But the Dying Matters coalition (or the local GP consortium) cannot tell them to do this; it has to arise from the greater solidarity and we have to build this before we get the outcomes that interest us. As new governments find this out, they usually give up on engaging communities; I’ve not doubt it will be the same with this one too.

Back from the Devon Dying Matters conference. Dying Matters is the ‘alliance’ that tries to focus minds on thinking about good care for dying and bereaved people and their families and communities.

I’m a bit doubtful about public relations style promotion of concern about social issues, because I think that people only really take a social issue into their minds when they come into contact with it in their everyday lives. You need a personal relationship to work on to push you into trying to get your mind round something. A bit of video with a weepy end does not do the business of finding out how you feel and how you are going to react. When you’ve got an older person in your family who needs care or a dying person to care for, you see pluses and minuses. Without that real contact, you get a sentimental ‘isn’t it awful, I’m glad that’s not me’ response. With real contact, you get a link from the present troubled time with past good and bad times, and you see people and their families and communities in the round, rather than as people with social care ‘issues’.

In fact, I hate the whole language of saying ‘I’ve got issues’ about something; it’s a vagueness about something that allows people to avoid saying why this is important to them, how they are trying to tackle it and what is happening as they are working on it.

However, you might find something useful on the Dying Matters website, which has well-presented information. It’s a bit medicalised, becuase the NCPC, which leads on this, is part of the healthcare world that doesn’t really think about dying and bereavement as social relationships, but as problems for healthcare professionals. In this case, they’ve selected  ‘getting people to plan their care in advance’ as the focus, and building up professional skills to talk about dying; these are both things you can do something about. But they’re still too stuck on advance care planning in the last few months, instead of seeing it as something that should be going on from later middle age onwards.

On the web: http://www.dyingmatters.org/

And incidentally, a thought from the beeravement conference, you’d almost think that psychological and social workerish people really love people to have a bad time emotionally. Why do we so need to use deficit psychospeak about people who are going through a perfectly normal social process like bereavement? Our loved one dies, we re-organise our relationships and feelings and adapt to a new way of life. Why do we have to be looking for distress, or in a recent document, ‘overwhelmed’, ‘vulnerable’ or ‘controlled’ behaviour in their psychological reaction. Why can’t we measure something positive like their adaptation to a new life?

Get rid of the deficit psychospeak.

To Dundee for the National Conference on Bereavement in a Healthcare Setting, where I was taking part in a panel discussion on assessing people for their bereavement needs. Of course there are lots of proformas for doing this, and some people think my views are a bit controversial.

Historically, in hospices, some sort of assessment has been done, often based on Colin Murray Parkes’s bereavement risk index. I have an aversion to saying that someone is at risk of anything like bereavement that is a perfectly natural social process, so bereavement risk is not my idea of an appropriate way of looking at it.

Other people agree, so recently, people have been talking about bereavement need, which I think is just as bad. When my granddaughter says: ‘Grandpa, I need an ice cream’, I wonder in what sense of ‘need’ this is. It’s different a doctor or social workers using their experience and the evidence in comparing you with other people and saying you need some specified kind of help. But deciding to assess a whole category of people for their needs smacks of unnecessary labelling, when we know that most people don’t need or want bereavement help other than support from their family and friends.

Also, I know and understand that caring nurses and doctors see someone very distressed when their loved one is dying and want to make sure they’re all right, but they are seeing them at a very difficult time and how they are behaving is probably untypical of how they are reacting to their bereavement. They might be well controlled, so you wrongly think they’re OK, or all in pieces so you wrongly think they’re not OK. Looking at them at the time of death is a red herring, so getting nurses to assess them or provide information at the time of death is very likely to be misleading. It only makes the nurses and doctors feel better; it doesn’t help a bereavement service to decide whom to help, except in a very few cases, and you can ask for permission to refer them then.

Thinking about it, what right have we to intervene anyway? The patient is the one who died, so who gave informed consent for a psycho-social referral of a carer or family member to the bereavement service? And how can you be sure that you’ve picked up the distant members of the family who might be distressed but the hospital never met. And if we’re collecting up information about potentially in need carers from the patient’s case record, we’re processing information from this record to create a new record about someone else, without their permission, without them even being a patient, and, in most hospital situations, we’re also passing it on to an outside service like Cruse bereavement counselling or some other local organisation. This is processing personal data in a way that is probably contrary to the Data Protection Act.

So I say wait until someone comes forward to ask for help and assess them then, within a therapeutic relationship with the bereavement service worker. But what about potentially suicidal or very distressed people? If you really think they’re at risk, ask their permission to refer them.

And I think we should work on making a lot of people – the GP, the minister of religion, the lady in the post office, the milkman – bereavement-literate, so that they know what to say if someone is distressed by their bereavement, and can refer them to a trusted service  in their locality. And of course that means we have to make sure there is a universal provision of a trusted bereavement service: we’re a long way away from that too.

To Hull to attend the final meeting of the research advisory group for the project on spirituality in contemporary funerals, final because it’s nearing its overall report after attending 46 funerals and talking to the participants about them. It seems that while, as most people know from personal experience, funerals nowadays are more about celebrating the person who has died than they used to be, this individualist celebration also reflects their spiritual conceptions; that is, their views about what is important in life. I’ll look forward to the final report, and you can get a copy by writing to the team at their website.

Research team website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/socsci/research/research-projects/spirituality.aspx