Building community relationships - Julies birthday

This document called Time Together Gorseinon is a proposal to collaboratively remodel services in a local community.

It will bring commissioners, provider and citizens together in a close partnership to build mutually supportive relationships and to put people at the centre of setting priorities and developing services.

Time Together has 3 aims:

• To create a collaborative Time Together Alliance of social care and support provider organisations, commissioners, and community leisure groups to work together to coordinate and develop person centred support to people living in the Gorseinon area.
• To develop in partnership with the citizens of Gorseinon a membership based Time Together Network within which members can contribute to the work of the project and the social care and support of each other and are rewarded by time credits through which they can access community activities and events and eventually support provided by other network members.
• To use the Swansea People social networking website to support equal and open communication between agencies, citizens and community groups to support the work of the Alliance and the Network.

At the moment this idea is really up for discussion, but it would be a practical way forward to creating empowering citizen led social care while building social capital within our communities.

You can download Time Together Gorseinon here

The New Wealth of Time

The excellent New Economics Forum together with Time Banking Wales and Time Banking UK have recently produced a very helpful report entitled

• The new wealth of time: How timebanking helps people build better public services.

This report can either be downloaded from NEF by following this link or from this website by clicking on the report title above.

The NEF says about this document:

• The New Wealth of Time describes how timebanking, as a tool to stimulate co-production, is already helping to create better services across a range of areas, including mental and physical health, services for young people and older people, regeneration, housing and criminal justice.

Co-production is an idea that has appeared before both in the blog and in the Sustainable Lives group discussion. It is a theory based on the premise that people and societies flourish more readily where relationships are built on reciprocity and equity: enabling people to give freely, yet also facilitating the give-and-take of time, knowledge, skills, compassion and other assets.

Timebanking is a practical tool that enables co-production. Unlike the money economy, timebanking values all hours equally: 1 hour of time = 1 time credit, whether you are a surgeon or an unemployed single mother. Timebanking recognises that everyone, even those defined as disadvantaged or vulnerable, has something worthwhile to contribute. Timebanking values relationships that are forged through giving and receiving.

I think that Time Banking is a very significant idea that due to the current weakness of the market economy is now getting the recognition that it deserves.

As part of the Sustainable Lives process we will be organisation a semina on Timebanking later in the summer.

He says:

Care and Support - a Community Responsibility

• Social care has become isolated from mainstream society and its recipients are cut off from their neighbourhoods and from each other;

• The voice of service users must be amplified and heard;

• Consideration needs to be given to a new form of social contract, offering incentives to deliver care and support whilst making explicit the relative responsibilities of the state, family and community.

David Brindle argues that the delivery of social care has become isolated from society and that ‘in the longer term, however, the roles and functions that we have come to call social care must be re-embraced by society as a whole’.

He also sounds a cautious note about the focus of Individual Budgets at the heart of the personalisation agenda, he quotes Sophie Moulin who says in the IPPR report Just Care? (2008)

• “By only considering the relationship of individual users with services (for example, through individual control over service budgets) we risk achieving independence at the expense of inclusion, focusing on consumer relations to the neglect of caring relationships. In practice, equal access to opportunities for those needing and giving care depends upon collective as well as individual participation in services.”

So how is social capital to be developed?

David Brindle suggests that approaches like ‘Time-banking’ and ‘Care Share’ schemes are very useful, however he feels that there needs to be something more and this he suggests this ‘would be a comprehensive agreement of rights and responsibilities across the social spectrum – including, critically, neighbourhoods and communities’. This social contract would be underpinned by a fundamental re-evaluation of the value of care within our society, and through this the balance of responsibility for care between individuals, communities, and government becomes far more explicit.