Learning from Successes and Failures

Leading Community Projects around the Country: Learning from Successes and Failures

What Works!? Evidence Based Practice in Child and Family Services Conference, Association of Childrens' Welfare Agencies/Centre for Community Welfare Training

Swiss Grand Hotel, cnr Campbell & Beach Rd, Bondi, 4 September 2002

I

I want to begin my talk today with a mea culpa; follow it with a nationwide survey of social entrepreneurial ingredients that seem to work; throw in a spot of political analysis; and then hopefully identify a couple of new points of departure for those of us who are committed to the development of a new social welfare practice that works for all in our times.

II

First mea culpa. There is a saying that academics like me appreciate very much and that is: there is nothing as practical as good theory. It gives us a reason to believe in ourselves. But I think there is a flip side and that is: there is nothing as damaging as a bad theory, especially when it is universally applied.

Over the past couple of years we have embraced and promoted a new concept of social entrepreneurship and I have argued that the new social state that we so badly need will emerge from social entrepreneurs who are empowered by governments and bureaucracies to develop new kinds of organizations and services in their communities. I think there is a lot of substance in this concept. (Botsman and Latham 2001)

All of you will recognize individuals who always seem to be at the heart of action or change in our community. There is an old saying in the bush that 2% of the community do 98% of the leadership work. The theory was that if we could transfer resources out of the silos to a new breed of social entrepreneurial leaders we could create more responsive services for communities and turn passive welfare dollars into active community development investments.

What I think was wrong with our theory was the tendency for social entrepreneurship to be about the valorisation of individuals and a rather narrow concept of what creates social entrepreneurial activity. I think the mirror image of our concept of social enterpreneurialism was the sort of business entrepreneurialism of the 1980s. I don't believe we have had the equivalent of Alan Bond, Christopher Skase or Rupert Holmes a Court in the social entrepreneurs movement, but I think we have unfairly set people up to fail, by talking too much about individuals and not enough about organizational and resource environments. We invested too much in the idea of a super individual social entrepreneur and not enough in the environment and team that makes good community organizations and practices work.

Of course there are individuals. I think Father Nic Frances at Melbourne's Brotherhood of St Laurence is an extraordinary individual entrepreneur. I think Rev Andrew Mawson at Bromley by Bow is another extraordinary individual social entrepreneur. If you think in an Australian context we have our Fred Hollows, our Mum Shirl's, our Ian Kiernans and our Noel Pearsons. But the problem is that in the current environment, when there are some really extraordinary and insurmountable social problems to overcome, such as unemployment, or for example, the lasting consequences of deinstitutionalisation for developmentally disabled people; or the whole Pandora's Box of social tensions that emerge from over 25 years of inequality concentrated in increasingly definable areas, the problem is that we set ourselves up to fail when we assume that some super individual can suddenly change things for the better.

So rather than individuals I would rather say that our goal is to set up social entrepreneurial organizations or services. There is also something that I don't want to walk away from at all, and that is the idea of using very high level business skills to run public and community organizations. Let me cite a somewhat controversial example. If you start to assess the Federal Government's budget analysis it is becoming clear that the new Job Network is running for about 75% of the cost of the old Commonwealth Employment Service, and it is achieving outcomes that are better than 20% more efficient in terms of placing people into jobs.

Now I am currently looking into these figures in detail and we can sit back and dispute the basis for these calculations. But I believe in the area of unemployment that Job Network is just the beginning of a revolution in employment services and we can envisage, from many European examples, a new wave unemployment organization that receives a long term unemployed person takes them on, and by any means necessary, gets that person into a job. If transport is the chief obstacle to getting a job then I can imagine the new wave unemployment agency of the future investing in a car to get that person into a job. Now let us say that is a $15,000 or even $20,000 investment, I imagine the unemployment organization of the future being able to show, on a balance sheet to government, how that was a superior investment than a further year of below poverty wage payments in the form of the dole. I think we should be carefully developing these models of social entrepreneurial organization, and thinking about the politics of this new wave agency. That is partly what social entrepeneurship of the future is about. It is about the transformation of a rule based civil service into a risk taking government sector that transfers this risk and authorizes social entrepreneurial agencies to get things done.

At the beginning of the year I completed a year of chairing a review of a very dynamic new Queensland disability program called the Family Support Program. The Family Support Program is a brilliant program that involves supporting children with disabilities by working with families, to invest in areas that will make the biggest difference to those families. In other words, DSQ got away from a formula which said if you have a child with severe or mild disability then she or he was worth so much in payments a year. One of the things we wanted to avoid was what one of my fellow family evaluation steering committee members called "the hysterisation of children", the necessity of making a loved child, a crisis before support or funds would flow.

Under FSP a whole series of flexible investments were funded through the Queensland Government. For example, cement pads were paid for by DSQ if it meant that a caravan could be moved on site so that a carer could stay overnight if needed. Holidays for families were paid for. New washing machines were paid for. Car repairs were paid for. Respite, involving flying grandmothers or family members up to look after a child, was paid for. The standpoint was that case workers and families could identify the best investments to support families, and DSQ would then stand by these assessments and investments.

This is a bold new world for governments and for case workers, for government organizations and for government accountants. Using taxpayers money creatively to solve problems is sometimes a big ask. We all live in dread of a Daily Telegraph article that says something like "government disability department funds family holiday". However, one of the most encouraging findings of our survey was that when the community understood the full context of what I would call, creative investments in family capacity building, they too supported them.

The Queensland Inquiry, conducted by Brisbane's Enhance Management, asked a random sample of the community to consider five scenarios of innovative cases that DSQ was funding.

First the Queensland inquiry asked whether it was acceptable to provide financial assistance to pay for holiday accommodation for a country family with four children two of whom had an intellectual disability and who had not had a holiday in twelve years. The mean community acceptability rating out of 10 was 7.9.

Second we asked whether it was acceptable for the government to subsidise the electricity and telephone bills of a family of a child with disability with high medical support needs. The child needed a temperature controlled environment, separate fridge for medicines and there was high telephone support needs involved in organizing doctors, specialists and hospital visits. The mean community acceptability rating for this investment was 8.78 out of 10.

Third we asked if it was acceptable for a family to substitute the $7500 payments each year they were receiving for a carer to help with bathing and lifting their child, for a one off capital payment that would enable them to modify their bathroom so that the child who used a wheelchair could have independent access to the bath, shower and toilet. The mean community acceptability rating was 9.29 out of 10.

In the fourth scenario we asked whether we could buy a new washing machine for a family dependent on Centre link payments with four kids under ten one of whom was a toddler with a disability. The mean community acceptability rating was 7.26 out of 10.

In the final scenario we asked whether instead of paying a $2000 out of home respite care fee, the government could pay for a $550 airfare for a grandmother to come up and provide support for a single mother with two children, one of whom had a disability as well as behavioural problems. The mean community acceptability rating for this 7.73 out of 10. (2001)

III

We all know community agencies that have done all of the above, it is hardly revolutionary thinking, the difference is that in Queensland it is being done directly under the auspices of government. There is a lot to learn from DSQ in Queensland and from the findings of our surveys. One can imagine each of these scenarios being a politicians horror story if it appeared out of context on page 3 of the Daily Telegraph. But in context, these innovative investments in family capacity building win widespread support.

I am very optimistic that we will see far greater flexibility in the kind of support payments that governments make in relation to a range of different areas. But of course the sobering reality for us in Queensland was: no matter how innovative we were there simply wasn't enough money to properly meet the needs of children with disabilities.

And its here that I want to return to my theme of social entrepreneurship and of building a stronger concept of what social entrepreneurship really means. If it is not super individuals we are talking about when we talk about social entrepreneurship, what is it? My view is that we have to start to talk about social entrepreneurial teams and organizations that are capable of growing funding to meet needs. The fact is that already the vast majority of federal, state and local government funding goes on health, education and social security and the general social welfare umbrella. (Botsman 2001)

We have to create organizations that are capable of growing funds and I guess what I am thinking of here is an amalgam of a cooperative, a church, a business and a social services agency. To be able to grow social funds we need to have the highest level of business skills at our disposal. So when we create community organizations and start to think about the skills of our board members we really need to be thinking that we want to have the highest level of business skills working with us and I think that is a new thing for many of us old hands in the child welfare or social services area. This is why projects such as the Social Entrepreneurs Network and Social Ventures Australia are so seminal and important. They have an enormous role to play in linking skills and people with new kinds of social organizations and strategies.

In my address to the New Zealand social entrepreneurs movement last year I started to sketch out the criteria for a successful organization or project based on my own observations from projects that I had seen in action around the country. I wrote: "the recipe for a successful social entrepreneurial project seems to be:

a reserve of social capital or capacity, for example, common culture and solidarity in the indigenous community, or familial love in the disabilities community, or a sense of pride and capacity in a small town;
the capacity to find and re-develop existing resources, for example, a budget for repairing a housing estate, or a local business fund in a small town or some form of social support, some land or buildings or infrastructure;
preparedness to own a problem, for example, where an indigenous community shelve white do-gooders and takes responsibility for solving a persistent problem themselves;
a bit of innovative majic, for example, where the mother of a disabled child is empowered and comes up with a program for linking a therapy based at home with a therapy based at school or where an indigenous leader links up with Cisco systems network training. (Botsman 2001)

I then went through fifty indigenous, disability, community, small town, youth, health, drug and alchohol projects and analysed them in terms of their ability to utilise social capital, access to the redevelopment of current resources, preparedness to own a problem and to be able to access innovative ways of doing things. There were many projects for example, that are outstanding in one or two areas such as the utilisation of social capital for example, but are very poor at being innovative or where there was not preparedness to own and solve a problem. The idea was not to put a tick in every box but to try to either compensate or create the missing capacity in some of these programs.

Let me give you an idea of what I am talking about. Patrick McClure and Noel Pearson and Mission Australia and Cape York Partnerships met in Cairns last year. The question was: How could Mission help the Cape York Partnerships strategy? We went through a long discussion of the many areas of work between the two organizations. After discussion we thought that given Mission's programs to help struggling homeless kids to find themselves, and the famous Milton James' Cape York first offenders program called Boys from the Bush that we might be able to match needs and skills. Milton needed to have more freedom to explore the full possibilities of Boys from the Bush than perhaps his government based position allowed him to do, Mission could provide support, a high level of experience and supportive independent NGO base to work from. I have not closely monitored what has happened since, but when I last visited Patrick he had the famous Boys from the Bush euclyptus oils on his desk, so I think it is going pretty well. The thing is that Mission could potentially provide Boys with the Bush with the capacity to potentially re-define itself and it allowed one missing cog in the necessary attributes of a successful social entrepreneurial organization to emerge.

Westpac is involved in developing Cape York's Family Income Management Strategy, Boston Consulting group is involved in Cape York's enterprise development hubs and a range of other organizations is involved in filling gaps in expertise or in the vital ingredients that make a social enterprise fly.

So in a sense evaluating projects successful or otherwise through these five prisms of social capital, resources, ownership and innovation is quite a useful way to take stock of particular projects and their needs.

IV

I said I wanted to add a little political analysis into the pot. So here goes.

At a recent Centre for Independent Studies lunchtime address at Coolum in Queensland, on 8 July, people said that I looked shocked. Perhaps my initial feeling was even that as a nemesis of free market ideas I was even there at all. Then these words 'Medicare is one of the best health care systems in the world - halfway between the US private for profit model and English socialised medicine' emanated from the sound system across the grassy space. These words, which I myself had used on many electoral occasions against successive conservative campaigns to privatise Medicare, were emerging sweetly from Prime Minister Howard's lips.

Was I dreaming? Howard was unveiling a social agenda and the new ground he was covering was profoundly shocking to me. The Coolum speech has not been publicly released, but parts of the speech emerged in the Prime Minister's W.A. Liberal Party address on 22 July. "We have not fallen for the line that you should do a certain amount of reform and then give it a break ...There are reform challenges that lie ahead of us." Aah back to business deregulation as usual, I thought. But no, 'One of the "bbq stopping issues for John Howard was "paid maternity leave." ' 'It is something that ought to be considered' the Prime Minister said!

The Prime Minister went on to espouse the ideas of Catherine
Hakim. Her book "Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century", based on empirical surveys, maintains that the great majority of women (80%) had aspirations to work either in full or part time work. 'This cannot be ignored', the Prime Minister of the celebrated white picket fenced 1950s family told us. 'I understand that, at some point either before or after children, most women want to work and that unless we create more flexible policy to support these 'adaptive women' we will be failing our community'.

While I was falling off my chair at Collum, I could still hear my left colleagues sniping: it's all a con, the Prime Minister will never deliver anything like the ACTU package on paid maternity leave.

But that was not the point, what was clear, not only from Howard's speech but also from Noel Pearson's opening speech to the conference was that the conservatives were moving in and seizing opportunities to define a social responsibility agenda, that at least since the Whitlam era, had been Labor's province. Furthermore, as Pearson made abundantly clear, social progressivism of a Leftist kind was failing to deliver in many areas.

Why are social policy issues are coming to the fore in the PMs recent speeches? In some cases, such as Howard's 19 July 2002 speech on early childhood intervention and Larry Anthony's bumbling incentives for families to rear their children properly, the conservatives have a lot to learn.

But my view is that there is an interesting battle for the middle of Australian politics. In a recent US electoral analysis of what has been called "the new progressive centre". John B. Judis and Ruy Texiera's are predicting a major move by middle American to more progressive social policy that will favor the Democrats.

The Judis/Texiera argument is that in the 2000s, post industrial society is creating a fiscally conservative, socially progressive centre of Western politics. The Australian idea of an aspirational working class mirrors this kind of development. New professionals, 'adaptive' working women and upwardly mobile ethnic communities favour conservative economic policy with socially responsible policy that supports their own needs, aspirations and ideals.

The new progressive centre should favor the Democrats in the U.S. and Labor in Australia, but Howard, with his highly perceptive political antennae, is starting to articulate why the new middle Australia should stick with the Liberal Party. The fight for the new political centre could mean that we get a more rigorous and competitive policy debate around social issues. I think it is useful that the conservatives are moving into social policy arenas with a degree of seriousness and rigour.

I believe that while the last 100 years belongs to the Labor Party on social issues there is no coherent left or right that will give us our "great society", old ideological compass bearings make no sense. What is more the fight for the new political centre could be useful if we can use it to leads to new solutions, innovations and ideas.

V

Let me end by talking about what I see as a couple of principle challenges ahead.

Making the transition from informal to formal organization

The social entrepreneurs network of which I am a board member remains for me one of the hopes of the future. However, our first year is illustrative of the challenges for a new wave of community organizations around the country. We went from being a highly profitable, volunteer based, highly entrepreneurial organization in our first year, to being a loss making, professional and rather formulastic organization in our second. Now you can blame us board members for that. But I think part of the issue that we need to face is that we don't have ready made innovative models and structures to support social entrepreneurial activity. Making the transition from an informal to a formal organization seems to be the stumbling block for many, many organizations.

I think the Social Entrepreneurs Network is moving forward and perhaps once you move to the concept of social entrepreneurial activity it is important to understand that you will not get a kind of step ladder to success. The latest model for the development of the social entrepreneurs national organization is for there to be a series of franchises and chapters around the country that will support local social entrepreneurial organizations and individuals and the centre of the organization will develop a series of common infrastructures and ideas that will be utilised nationally. It is a sort of Harvey Norman model of where we go in the future and I have every confidence it will work.

When you turn to models of formal organization, what do you find? You find business models of corporate governance that I am increasingly coming to view as inappropriate for the new kind of social agency we seek. You find the American model of a business where a CEO is also Chairman of a Board, you find an Australian model of a Board of Directors operating as a kind of check and balance with the CEO and you find the concept of a cooperative, which I think is the closest thing we have to being a community model, where the cooperative's members have a much greater say in the activities of the company. But if you think of the American model of corporate governance as one extreme and the cooperative as the other extreme then you have to ask yourself is a member based organization really going to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurial behaviour. In my view we need to be considering some sort of hybrid organization.

But part of the problem is that we have done enough thinking about these issues, we don't take the training of board members seriously enough and we haven't thought hard enough about how social agencies can be entrepreneurial in their activities. It would be nice to think that a bit of work could be done these ideas and issues and that we could be developing some evidence about what works and what doesn't beyond what are in effect private business models of corporate governance.

Working with government

The second area I think is one of positive note is the new experience of working with government. As you will note in my writing over the last few years I have often viewed government of all political colours as the problem and certainly not the means of finding solutions. Even the most innovative strategies such as whole of government approaches and joined up government and regional portfolio cooperation have sometimes seemed to create worse problems and deeper layers of bureaucracy than the problems they were designed to solve. It has been necessary to run a polemic against such practices. But now, as you can see from my DSQ example, I am becoming more optimistic about working with government departments and Ministers because I think there are ways of taking risks and we can teach governments to take acceptable risks that have strong levels of community support. In NSW the community capacity building strategy of Premiers Department is a great hope; in Queensland DSQ and the Premiers Strategic Policy Unit are a great hope, in Tasmania, which in my opinion leads the way with its Tasmanians Together strategy, there is a great hope in government. But it will be up to us to teach governments how to take acceptable risks to create better social policy and better childrens services.

The dilemma of working for all

Finally I want to mention a dilemma which is an interesting one for a conference on evidence based practice and the assumption of professional practices that deliver uniformally excellent solutions for all and that is the "one size fits all dilemma" and entrepreneurial behaviour. When we try and develop solutions with whole populations in mind, too often we create monolithic solutions that do not fit everyone perfectly but suit a majority of our clients better than any other solution. This is often a recipe for an uncaring and bureaucratic approach to services and people.

It would be easy for me to dismiss this as yet again another product of a bureaucratic social welfare industry. But we all know the importance of evidence and we all know the progress that this country has made because we have had at the best of times a spirit of egalitarianism, pioneered by Labor and unions, running through our best social programs.

But we need to make room for entrepreneurial solutions. My feeling is that the problem is not so much evidence based practice but it is that we tend to replicate ourselves, our professional orientations and our institutions when we collect evidence. I think there is room for evidence and enterpreneurialism to co-exist if we make a slight adjustment to our thinking and if we accommodate a little flexibility in our goals.

If I can end with this example. Over the last twenty four months Families in Partnership in Campbelltown has supported the development of a charter school for children with disabilities. The Macarthur area has more children under the age of 12 with a disability per capita than any other part of Australia to my knowledge. The idea was to create a parentally managed charter school with a best practice orientation that would be a light house for disabilities education in Australia. We got to the point where Dick Pratt was prepared to back the school on a dollar for dollar basis if Bob Carr also supported the school.

A consultant was hired, through the Department of Education, to assess the viability of the project. It was clear that what we were proposing was radical and would be resisted on a couple of grounds. One is to propose a charter school with parents at the helm was a new model. But secondly and I think most importantly there were already a number of special schools in the area, and the argument was made and I think it was a reasonable position, that rather than create a new school we should be supporting the existing schools in the area. This, it was argued, would support more children than one school with perhaps 100 children. In the end, we lost the argument, Bob Carr failed to back the project and Dick Pratt didn't support it as a result.

I still think the school should have gone ahead, but, in a context of scarce public sector dollars, I recognise the validity of the arguments against it. The question is how can we work with educational professionals to create a new model of disabilities education that supports the common and important goals of providing as wide an opportunity for all as possible and at the same time recognise our arguments for more innovative models of disabilities education?

The answer lies in addressing a problem that is outside the box. The problem with disabilities education is that it mirrors conventional education. We assume that a person with disabilities progresses through the education system in the same way as a person without disabilities does. Kindergarten, Primary, Secondary, Tertiary or Vocational Education from the ages of 5 to 18. In fact, whether you have a physical or developmental disability, your progress through education will have very different points of emphasis and it may take you a lot longer to progress through primary and secondary school. So what happens at about the age of 16 is that families end up with their children if they do not fit into the common pattern of secondary or vocational education. It is common for children to end up with a parent for up to twenty years and this is a period when parents have the greatest levels of stress and anxiety about what is happening and will happen to their child.

There are no current schools or teachers or facilities competing for these children, but it is an area where there is the highest level of need. So this is an area which I think we have to now pitch our call for the development of a new program of schooling. There is currently a baby boom of kids with disabilities progressing through the Macarthur area aged between 8 and 12 the new proposal that I want to see us develop with the support and collaboration of the existing special schools and teachers is for a post primary school education, training, life skills and vocational orientation that will provide ongoing education for children with disabilities from the ages of 16 to 30. I think here the evidence and the need for innovation will have a better chance for success.

I am not sure whether this idea will win Bob Carr's support. But nevertheless the lesson from this is perhaps things are not as clear cut as they seem or to cite that old Rolling Stones adage "sometimes we don't get what we want, we get what we need".

Thanks.

References

(2001). Family Support Program Evaluation Quantitative Findings (General Community Perceptions)presented to FSP Steering Committee. Brisbane, Enhance Management/Disability Services Queensland: 36.

Botsman, P. (2001). Social Wealth Creation II. Social Entrepreneurship Conference, Wellington Town Hall, New Zealand.

Botsman, P. and M. Latham (2001). The enabling state : people before bureaucracy. Annandale, N.S.W., Pluto Press.