The Social Entrepreneur E-Book

Andrew Mawson

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

When Andrew Mawson arrived in Bromley-by-Bow in the east end of London, in the 1980s, it was in a state of social, economic and material disrepair. Living there, getting to know the residents and institutions, he soon realized that by unlocking its untapped potential, the community could begin to turn itself around. The result: the Bromley-by-Bow Centre has encouraged literacy, housing, business, health, welfare and enterprise in the area to flourish. Time and again using the same approach, Mawson has succeeded where the government and others have failed. His inspiring and timely book will demonstrate, through his own experience how, by seeking creative, dynamic, entrepreneurial ways of tackling seemingly intractable social problems, we can all make real changes in our communities.

Leseprobe

the social entrepreneur

Andrew Mawson’s career in the social sector has spanned over 20 years. He developed the renowned Bromley-by-Bow Centre in East London and co-founded the Community Action Network in 1998. He is currently involved in developing London’s Water City. He was awarded a Life Peerage in 2007 and in the same year was named in the Evening Standard as one of London’s most influential people.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2008 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Andrew Mawson 2008

The moral right of Andrew Mawson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

Map illustration copyright © Mark Rolfe Technical Art 2008

The moral right of Mark Rolfe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

The author and publisher would like to thank HarperCollins and the Tolkien estate for permission to quote from copyrighted material: Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien © The trustees of the J.R.R. Tolkien 1967 Settlement 1954, 1966.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechan-ical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good anyomissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention atthe earliest opportunity.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 9781782396796

Atlantic Books

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For Susan

Our children, Liam, Fern and Angel

And our staff and friends at the Bromley-by-Bow Centre who have shared this journey with us

Contents

List of illustrations

Foreword

Introduction

Bromley-by-Bow

Accepting the challenge

Twelve steps towards an entrepreneurial future

What next for East London?

Further reading and resources

Acknowledgements

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way,

When many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings

list of illustrations

Andrew Mawson and family in 1984 (Bromley-by-Bow Centre archive)

The archway before restoration (Bromley-by-Bow Centre archive)

Ethel with donated bus (Bromley-by-Bow Centre archive)

The church hall after conversion to nursery (Ros Smith, Wyatt MacLaren Architects)

Santiago Bell in his workshop with one of his sculptures (Barclays PLC)

The church hall set up for worship (Gordon MacLaren, Wyatt MacLaren LLP)

The other side of Bromley-by-Bow (Bromley-by-Bow Centre archive)

The derelict park before redesign and landscaping (Bromley-by-Bow Centre archive)

Tessa Jowell with Andrew Mawson and the Bromley-by-Bow team at the opening of the medical centre in 1998 (Lorenzo Lees)

View of the park as it is today (Gordon MacLaren, Wyatt MacLaren LLP)

Andrew Mawson with the Prince of Wales in 1995 (Lorenzo Lees)

The architect’s plans for the centre (Gordon MacLaren, Wyatt MacLaren LLP)

A note from Tony Blair to Andrew Mawson (Author archive)

Andrew Mawson meets Tony Blair in 1995 (Lorenzo Lees)

A mosaic by Sheenagh McKinlay (Gordon MacLaren, Wyatt MacLaren LLP)

The front courtyard as it is today (Gordon MacLaren, Wyatt MacLaren LLP)

foreword

I write this book, deliberately, as a polemic. I argue passionately for a particular entrepreneurial approach to achieving social goals which questions the liberal consensus, and I do so based on my experience of over twenty years working in one of the most historically socially ‘failing’ parts of the country, Bromley-by-Bow in London’s East End. I pose a direct challenge to the prevailing approaches and attitudes of policy makers, politicians, social commentators, journalists, the civil service and the charitable (or ‘third’) sector in order to encourage and open up a debate about how we might finally get to grips with this country’s most deeply entrenched social problems and make real, lasting change for generations to come.

Please note that some names have been changed to protect the identity of certain members of the community in Bromley-by-Bow.

introduction

As a young man I was bought up on a diet of liberal theological education, the virtues of philanthropy and a healthy suspicion of business. Twenty-four years later the realities of working at the heart of some of Britain’s poorest estates had turned me into a social entrepreneur, committed to applying business principles to social issues.

The term ‘social entrepreneur’ first appeared in the UK in an article in the Independent in June 1995 referring to me and my colleague Adele Blakebrough. We were part of the small group of individuals who founded the social entrepreneur movement in the United Kingdom, before we even had a term to describe who we were and what we did. Nowadays, the term ‘social entrepreneur’ is frequently bandied about and I fear it is in danger of coming to mean different things to different people. I want to shed light on what social entrepreneurship is all about and who social entrepreneurs are – to lay out what sets apart this entrepreneurial way of working from what has gone before and show how it challenges many of our current assumptions about the provision of public services within Western democracies. I do not want to develop such a tight definition that all creativity is precluded – indeed, creativity lies at the very heart of any definition of the term – but I do want to make a clear distinction between the traditional approach of the state and charitable sectors on the one hand and the approach of people with a more entrepreneurial mindset on the other.

I want to show how we might all embrace this new way of working. Because this is a genuine attempt to get to the heart of a serious problem I will have to tell some uncomfortable truths along the way. If human creativity and a commitment to changing the world remains at the core of social entrepreneurship, people’s aspirations for social change can be turned into realistic, practical action on the ground in their neighbourhoods, on their streets. It truly does make a difference.

Social entrepreneurs worth their salt do not follow conventional ways of working. Their view of the world begins with people, passion, experience and story – not policy, statistics and theory. One of the methods they use to animate a given environment is to challenge people to metaphorically ‘rearrange the furniture’ in ways that unsettle, challenge and confront them. I hope that this book will have a similar effect.

In my own work, I have quite consciously gone into failing situations to shake things up. This immediately stands me apart from the crowd and draws attention to my message. In this way I have found that I can quickly draw kindred spirits to my campaign. This approach is far more effective when building a team than placing a Guardian advert. Playing the enfant terrible is in fact very purposeful. It can really bring a situation to life and remind people that nothing is actually fixed in their world, that change really is possible.

In my own tradition of the Christian church, this methodology of dissent and challenge is well known, but often overlooked. The prophet Ezekiel, for example, alone dared to suggest that all was not well within his society. Social entrepreneurs belong to this ‘left field’ tradition, representatives of which can be found in ancient and modern cultures throughout history and across the world. Time and again they are the real agents of change. The nonconformist churches in Britain, which were built in the main by dissenters, have now to a large degree been taken over by conformists who talk endlessly about ‘making poverty history’ but are not prepared to do the hard work or embrace the business logic necessary to do anything really practical and to scale about it. This is with some notable exceptions, of course, and where they exist they are often impressive. Eric Blakebrough, for example, my early mentor and a Baptist minister at that time, founded the Kaleidoscope Project in Kingston-upon-Thames to challenge the prevailing views in the sixties and seventies about drug abuse and has given a lifetime of service to this often neglected community.

Social entrepreneurs know from hard-won experience that the trick is first to demonstrate what you are proposing to do for people in a small and tangible way and then to expand the sense of possibility. What you say and do really matters to people: seeing is believing. Integrity is the name of the game. Social entrepreneurs are not being difficult for its – or their – own sake. They seek to change the ethos within which people live and work and create paradigm shifts. They seek to initiate change at a number of different levels at the same time, thus creating momentum. Jamie Oliver offered us a great example of this in his 2005 School Dinners television series. Not only did he run a very successful campaign, he also demonstrated a way of working which bought profound change to one of London’s poorest communities.

Jamie did not begin with the think tanks, committees and research documents so often favoured by civil servants and politicians. He began with the inner dynamics of a very human situation, with the head dinner lady, Nora, and her school kitchen at Kidbrooke Comprehensive in south-east London. Innovation in public service did not come via the usual processes of government: it came through building strong relationships with Nora and her team of dinner ladies, and by observing and coming to really understand the daily inner dynamics of a school kitchen. This was the ‘theatre’: together they had to write the play.

Jamie is an animator. We watched as he inspired the dinner ladies to get back in touch with the passion for food and cookery that had brought them to the school meal business in the first place. He then went further, engaging with the children and their parents, the head teacher, the local education authority, and eventually central government and the Prime Minister. Jamie Oliver almost unwittingly developed an approach to working with people which conferred on him real legitimacy. Millions of people across Britain supported him. Many of our politicians would give their right arms to have such popular backing. He became credible, of course, not because of what committees he chaired or sat on, not by whom he claimed to represent, but by what he actually did. This is the classic ‘inside-out’ approach of the social entrepreneur, which begins with people and the building blocks of human relationships.

Jamie demonstrated a way of tackling a social problem that fundamentally challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. I would wager that, had it been allowed to mature over a period of some years, it might have brought directly quantifiable change to Kidbrooke; it might have changed the social and political landscape and achieved in practice, in a poor inner-city area apparently firmly resistant to ‘change’, what New Labour and David Cameron’s Conservatives have so often talked about rhetorically but have so rarely achieved. But this was a television series, a piece of entertainment. This early innovation in school meals has now been handed back to government, to the very same structures and methodology that contributed to the problem of poor-quality food in the first place.

Government created a representative committee, the School Meals Review Panel, to take the project forward. They made recommendations. They were followed by the Schools Food Trust. They have been concerned to make this a national project but in my view this very focus on the national aims, rather than the local ones, have stopped any real innovation dead in its tracks. Yes, the food may improve in schools across the country; millions of pounds of public money will be spent to ensure it does. The chips might be replaced by sautéed potatoes, but the real possibility for innovation which Jamie Oliver’s series demonstrated – the opportunity for long-term change in a difficult inner-city area – has been lost. It was lost when government failed to grasp the implications of a more entrepreneurial, organic way of working, which enabled one person to be a change maker and did not compartmentalize human creativity. Once again, government puts its trust in and gives its backing to structures, rather than individuals.

Social entrepreneurs often defy easy definition. When you think you have them neatly placed in a box, like Houdini they find a way out – for we are, by nature, creative spirits. However, I think it is possible to identify some commonly shared principles – in particular our concern to apply business experience and business logic to social questions.

‘Learning by doing’ – this is a phrase we associate with children and childhood. I recently watched my young son struggling to put together the four pieces of a Noddy jigsaw. His first two attempts were very frustrating. There were tears and a bid to leave the room. But we persevered and on attempt number three, as if by magic, the pieces all fitted into place. Success! I came home a month later to find that he’d put together a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle on his own. I recount the story because I think it illustrates very well a ‘can-do’ approach to tackling what seemed, to my son, to be an insurmountable problem. Had government been enlisted to help my son out with his problem, here’s what my experience tells me they’d have done: they’d have set up a committee to assess the situation, full of highly educated people who had probably never put a jigsaw together, but who knew all the theory behind it. They would spend a long time examining the pieces before writing an extensive and expensive report on their findings. They would present this to my son. They would tell him, also, that a policy paper would be forthcoming, which would explore what could be learned from his struggle to put the pieces together and what measures could be taken to ‘move forward together’. At no point would they think to simply join him, take hold of the physical pieces of the jigsaw and get stuck in and help him figure things out. Their approach would seem to value the ‘bigger picture’ more than it would value finding practical, detailed solutions to an urgent problem. The result, for my son at any rate, would be: nothing. He would be left exactly where he had been in the first place, with a lot of pieces and no idea of how to do the puzzle. He’d feel frustrated and he’d feel paralysed. Paralysis by analysis.

The ‘learning by doing’ approach is the tried and tested approach of the social entrepreneur. We call into question the systems and processes of government, which are still run by well-qualified civil servants who rarely get hold of the pieces themselves and whose approach has so failed many of our poorest communities.

What marks out social entrepreneurs from business entrepreneurs and other kinds of charitable and public-sector workers is that they are not driven solely by financial profit or ideology, or by a career or a pension scheme. Instead they are often driven by a desire to make their mark on the world. They feel they have something important to share that must be demonstrated both emotionally and practically. In my experience they care a lot about people and are talented at forming relationships and creating committed teams and communities around them. They are very serious about learning from, and applying business experience and ideas to, social questions. They are fundamentally interested in what works in practice and how you scale up ideas to achieve effective growth. They are often not easy people to be around, particularly if you are not interested in what they are doing. They are very focused.

The Artic explorer Robert Swan, the first man to walk to both Poles, once told me that the people he chose to join him on his journey were not the suave, mild-mannered people so often favoured to run public-sector bodies: they were rough diamonds who had a real passion for their field and who, when you joined them together with the right team, were capable of getting you there and back alive, with enough to eat and still some to spare. Those are the kinds of people who make good social entrepreneurs. They are like nails: the harder you hit them, the further they go in.