Journal of Community Practice ISSN: 1070-5422 (Print) 1543-3706 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wcom20 The Community Organisers Programme in England Robert Fisher & Kristin Dimberg To cite this article: Robert Fisher & Kristin Dimberg (2016) The Community Organisers Programme in England, Journal of Community Practice, 24:1, 94-108, DOI: 10.1080/10705422.2015.1129006 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10705422.2015.1129006 Published online: 25 Mar 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 170 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wcom20 Download by: [University of Michigan] Date: 02 September 2016, At: 13:22 JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PRACTICE 2016, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 94–108 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10705422.2015.1129006 COMMENTARY The Community Organisers Programme in England Robert Fisher and Kristin Dimberg School of Social Work, University of Connecticut, West Hartford, CT, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Community-based initiatives for meeting social need and pro- Civil society; community; moting social change are widespread and expanding through- community organizing; funding; international; out the globe. Part of conservative Prime Minister David neoliberalism; United Cameron’s Big Society alternative to the Big State is the Kingdom Community Organiser Programme (COP). Begun in 2011 the COP met goals to hire and train 500 “senior” community organizers and educate and engage 4500 volunteers in com- munity organizing basics by 2015. Obvious contradictions and limits about its neoliberal underpinnings, theory of change, and selected organizing models notwithstanding, COP is one of the boldest initiatives in the field in a generation, not the least because it is funded by the national government. Its innovativeness is especially evident in comparison to efforts in the US, where community organizing is heavily reliant on charitable donations and where, in our contemporary political economy, public-funded hiring and training of community organizers is unheard. There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. (Stephen Stills, 1966) We live in a globalizing world, with information and capital moving across continents and oceans at unprecedented velocity. But people in the United States are still often unaware of social policies and innovations outside their borders. The Community Organisers Programme (COP) in England is an excellent example. Begun in 2011, the COP ended in September, four years later, con- current with the election and term of the David Cameron administration. The COP was always seen by the administration as an experiment, with a central part of the experiment to find, after 2015, its own source of funding for community organizing (CO). Nevertheless, David Cameron’s reelection in May, 2015, for a second term as Prime Minister, despite the near secession of Scotland from the United Kingdom in 2014 and continued unpopular and painful austerity mea- sures, has markedly increased the likelihood of the administration continuing support for CO, albeit in a reduced and different format. Accordingly, the importance of the COP, in theory and practice, derives from both the lessons CONTACT Robert Fisher [email protected] School of Social Work, University of Connecticut, West Hartford, CT 06117, USA. © 2016 Taylor & Francis JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PRACTICE 95 one can draw from its history, as well as the debates it stimulates regarding the future of government-sponsored CO. What the COP fully represents is not so much unclear as it is contested. Is it more of the same neoliberal (mis)uses of community-based initiatives so widespread in the United States and throughout the globe? Or is the COP an innovative experiment that offers alternatives for expanding CO in an age of fiscal austerity? This commentary argues that it is both. Studying the COP raises critical questions about organizing models, the politics of community organizing, the role of social change theory, and funding CO (Emejulu, 2010; Fisher, 1994; Shaw, 2013). It is widely agreed that community and community-based initiatives for meeting social need and promoting social change are widespread and expanding throughout the globe (Edwards, 2011). Community is touted as an antidote to widespread social ills, whether public school perfor- mance, individual health, violence prevention, or challenges to egalitarian democracy. One paradoxical source behind the turn to community is contemporary economic globalization (Ashbee, 2015). Neoliberal forms of contemporary capitalism imply that markets should be open and, as far as possible, free of state interference. Within this context, a major shift occurred in social service provision and meeting basic human needs. The most obvious privatization trend has been the withdrawal of the public sector from direct provision of social services (Fisher & Karger, 1997). Less obvious but equally significant has been the decentralization of economic and social development functions to local communities. In the United States, most welfare programs are contracted to nonprofits via grant opportunities, which result in a not-for-profitization of the state (DeFilippis, Fisher, & Shragge, 2010). This shift to decentralized commu- nity policy in the United States has four ingredients: state retrenchment, devolution of state functions and shrinking of state scale, policies that redirect activities to community-based nonprofits, and community efforts that adjust and respond to state policies and market imperatives. Recently, England has followed a similar policy path but developed a pioneering one with explicit support for community organizing. The coalition government led by Prime Minister Cameron developed a Big Society alternative to the Big State (Imrie & Raco, 2003;Powers,2012; Taylor, 2011;Wiggan,2012). The Big Society initiative, begun in 2010, promoted retrenchment and shrinkage of the social welfare state by shift- ing involvement and responsibility to local communities. Most important for community practice, the Cameron initiative included a COP to recruit, hire, and train 500 community organizers who would be supported by an additional 4500 trained community volunteers. Not since the Great Society programs of the early 1960s in the United States has a nation encouraged such grassroots participation. Although there have been public-supported 96 R. FISHER AND K. DIMBERG community-based programs in the United States since the 1960s and in the United Kingdom since the 1990s, the COP seems unprecedented. No nation has ever officially and explicitly trained and hired so many com- munity organizers. It is not uncommon for shifts in civil society to follow transformative structural changes. As Michael Edwards (2011,p.3)putit,“From the time of Classical Greece, thinkers have returned to civil society as one way of generating new energy and ideas around old and familiar questions as the world has changed around them.” Although the contemporary moment would appear a fortuitous one for community organizations, the reality is more ambiguous. Community organizations continue to play roles that both reinforce and contest dominant political and eco- nomic relationships. Clearly, the Big Society concept explicitly supports the turn to community as a complement to state retrenchment and unprecedented austerity measures (Ashbee, 2015; Clarke & Neuman, 2012;O’Hara, 2014; Taylor-Gooby, 2011;Wiggan,2012). But any mass hiring and training of community organizers has the potential to unleash grassroots democratic fervor in opposition to neoliberal politics and policies (Edwards, 2012). The Big Society as neoliberal turn to community “ Invitation to Join the Government of Britain: A Conservative Manifesto,” the 2010 document that drove Cameron’s 2011 election campaign, intro- duced the Big Society. Blaming Labour’s “big government” for the prolifera- tion of social problems in Britain but building on New Labour’s “Third Way” initiatives, the Conservative Party promoted the shift to a decentralized, community-oriented alternative to the “Big State” (Conservative party, 2010, p. 38). Cameron and his party presented constituents with a broad, multifaceted plan of “progressive conservatism,” the most innovative feature of which was the educating of 5000 citizens in community organizing. The Conservative Manifesto proposed to “use Cabinet Office budgets to fund the training of independent community organizers to help people establish and run neighborhood groups and provide neighborhood grants to the UK’s poorest areas to ensure they play a leading role in the rebuilding of civic society” (Conservative Party, 2010, p. 38). The initial Big Society campaign was framed as a bottom-up approach to redistribute power to the people. But organizers from the most respected UK community efforts vigorously chal- lenged the communitarian-sounding but ultimately neoliberal motives behind the Big Society concept and the COP (Taylor, 2011; Taylor-Gooby & Stoecker, 2010). Prior to the formation of the Coalition government, Cameron argued the growth of the state resulted in the decline of civic engagement and social JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PRACTICE 97 responsibility in the United Kingdom. He expressed the need for individual and community empowerment and redefined the role of the government as helping create the Big Society (Cameron, 2009). Using activist rhetoric, he argued for a strong role