A Problem Shared is a Problem Halved

“There are always two people in every picture, the photographer and the viewer” Ansel Adams.

At Give2Gain, in Stockport, we offer a range of networking meetings and workshops that promote local cross sector relationship building. We are big fans of the stakeholder experience. As we account for the social good we believe we provide, the process is brought alive by the role our stakeholders play in exploring information and testing assumptions.

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Social impact and challenging the ‘sacred cow’ of how financial accounts are presented

Definition: ‘sacred cow’ (noun) – a belief, custom, etc. that people support and do not question or criticise: Example: They did not dare to challenge the sacred cow of parliamentary democracy (Cambridge Dictionary)

Challenging ‘sacred cows’ is a bit of a dodgy business and may get me into hot water.  But I take courage from the work of John Pearce and his life’s work which was always challenging the status quo and trying to approach economic, social and community problems in a different, innovative and often pragmatic way.

I had the privilege of working with John Pearce for most of my working life.  In many ways he was quite a complicated character – forming alliances, charming people, making enemies, challenging the norm… But always taking the side of the dispossessed, those with fewer advantages and the folk that are made to feel like pawns in, the supposedly ‘normal’, economic system.

John and the work that he did was ways ahead of his time.  I recognise that this is a cliché but it is on record that he started and developed initiatives that were only appreciated much later by the established mainstream.  Here are some examples:

• in the 1970/80s, he proposed that community development had to include local economic development in a much more tangible way. Money, earning power, ‘good’ work was integral to social change within communities – and he believed that local folk could take control of their own economic activity for the wider benefit.  John, along with others, started the community business movement in Scotland;
• he thought that acting locally but thinking globally was crucial to avoid community and national introversion. John, again along with other like-thinking people, established COMMACT (an international network dedicated to sharing community development practices);
• in 1990 he pushed for the establishment of a fund owned and controlled by the community business movement to enable community businesses to have access to capital which was not being provided by high street banks or traditional investors. John led on the formation of the Scottish Community Enterprise Investment Fund which was active for 10 years before it was incorporated into the Charity Bank;
• he recognised that organisations with a central core purpose of social and community change had to get better at explaining and reporting regularly on their social and community impacts as well as their values, approach, and credentials. John initiated the process of social accounting and audit running alongside financial accounting and audit.  This moved him (alongside others) to found the Social Audit Network (SAN).

I could go on explaining some other aspects of John Pearce’s approach and work but they have been documented elsewhere and re-surface annually in the John Pearce Memorial Lecture.

Essentially, John’s work often challenged the ‘sacred cows’ of traditional economic community development.  He believed that social and community enterprises/businesses should do things differently and not ‘ape’ traditional business.  He pushed for business planning to become a more relevant form of social enterprise planning; for social capital to be part of a local community enterprise strategy; and for social benefits to be recognised as having an integral and tangible value.

And this latter point brings me to an area that John worked on but never really followed through.  It has remained an idea, I believe, that is yet to come.  It is about changing the way financial accounts are presented to show the amount of time, money and resources that have been used by social and community enterprises in furthering their social and community aims.

Back in 2004, he referred to this in a short paper included in the Social Accounting and Audit Manual and called it the ‘Social and Economic Impact Accounts’.

What John was trying to show was that financial accounts could be presented in a way that separated out the Trading Costs from the Social Benefit Costs.

Please bear with me and I shall try to explain using an example of a community-owned shop and cafe.  In the interests of illustration, I have used a table – which is rarely normal, and the figures are made up…

John reckoned that this simplified but traditional accounting of profit and loss could be recast.  The re-cast shows Revenue Costs divided between Trading Costs and Social Benefit Costs.  By illustration, as follows:

The ‘sacred cow’ of financial accounting presentation has, of course, been subject to examination and change before.  Academics, in particular, often re-do traditional financial accounts to take account of environmental and social change.  They refer to this as ‘shadow accounting’.

Similarly, the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator (OSCR) asks for charitable financial accounts to separate out Governance from Charitable Activities.  I seem to remember that the new economics foundation presented their accounts in their annual report some years ago, applying a similar principle to the example I outlined above the one above.

I realise that thinking along the lines John outlined, will require a lot more work by qualified accountants and their respective bodies – but hopefully, the principle could still be applied.

If social and community enterprises adopted this as a regular practice there are a number of clear benefits, namely:

• there is an openness in understanding the social and community enterprise priority towards social and community benefit;
• it can help a Board of Directors make more transparent decisions over resource allocation;
• it can, to a degree, help in our collective understanding of what a ‘social enterprise’ is actually doing; as opposed to what it says it is doing;
• it can lead to better management of a social or community enterprise as it can assist a social enterprise to assess just how much social benefit it can afford to engage in without compromising its financial sustainability;
• it might help when an enterprise asks for funding for its social and community aims as opposed to requesting funding for the overall expansion of its business;
• it can counter the argument for Social Return on Investment (SROI) that has received considerable support in recent years. This alternative approach requires a focus on the real costs of providing social impact rather than trying to monetise all the outcomes into an impact score;
• it is especially useful for a social enterprise whose audited accounts show that it is only marginally viable (or even loss-making) whereas the true picture is that it is fundamentally profitable but devoting (perhaps too much) surplus to social benefit.

I admit that the Social and Economic Impact Accounts are based, to a degree, on assumptions and allocative decision-making within the enterprise.  But at least there would be greater clarity and more understanding of the type of organisation it is, and how much it focusses on social aims.

Back to John Pearce.  I mentioned at the start of this piece that he was ‘complicated’.  True. but he was someone with a clarity of vision and a clear idea of how we, through working collectively together, can change things for the better.  He believed that the way to do this is within your own community – and if along the way you take a poke at a sacred cow or two, so much the better…

Alan Kay, Social Audit Network (SAN)
www.socialauditnetwork.org.uk

What is the role of funders in social impact matters?

He who pays the piper calls the tune.  Old British saying

Explanation in Cambridge Dictionary: the saying is said to emphasise that the person who is paying someone to do something can decide how it should be done…

This above saying is widely used and often in connection with funders and investors – those that provide funds to enable social economy organisations to get on and do things that have social or community benefit.

There is a fine dividing line between those that provide the financial resources and those organisations that carry out the work.  How much right have funders in dictating what the work should be, who should do it, how it should be done and how should the benefits be reported back?  It is not an easy and straightforward relationship, as often the funders are not always fully aware of the context, do not always understand the difficulties in the delivery of services, and, at times, can get overly involved in how the delivery organisation is managed and how it reports.

At times those that provide the money can over step the mark.  I used to work with overseas aid organisations and UK Government departments that provided much of the funding in the 1980s and they used to dictate to the aid organisations which consultants they should use, what suppliers they should buy from and so on.  In a benign way, this may have been meant to be helpful; but at worst it could be seen as interfering and dictatorial.

In the distant past when I worked for a community enterprise support organisation in Scotland we received a grant from the local council.  Each year we were expected to report on how the money had been spent.  They trusted us to deliver beneficial impacts arising from how the money had been used.

Over the past ten years the situation has changed dramatically.  Organisations in receipt of funding are now asked to provide proof of the positive differences that they have made – and, on top of this, the funders themselves are increasingly getting involved in how an organisation reports on its social and community impact.  This may be very positive but I feel it is important to understand that there is now a shift in the relationship between funders and the recipients – and that this shift may not be entirely positive.

It comes down to who actually is guiding the social and community change.  Should it be funders with often limited staff most of whom have distribution and monitoring roles?  Or should it be the delivery organisations who know the social and community needs, the local situations and the way needs can be addressed?

As the UK currently appears to be turning its back on Europe and aping the culture and traditions of the United States, we are placing more emphasis on philanthropy as a substitute for state funding – especially in areas of social and community change.  Personally, I feel this is a very worrying trend as economically successful individuals are now resorting to use the profit they have gained from neoliberal business practices in doing ‘good’.  Often, they will want to give ‘something back’ through redistribution to those less well-off.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but the nature of the relationship between the philanthropic funder and the recipient requires more open understanding.

There are a number of factors that can considered in understanding this relationship:

• funders often want to fund organisations that are familiar to them in what they do, and how they practice
• funders are sometimes remote from the sharp end of delivery. What do they really know of juggling social and business objectives, of having to lay people off, of struggling to make ends meet?
• funders will often talk of working in partnership. But is it really a partnership when one partner wields financial power over another
• when it comes to reporting back on the difference made by the recipients of the funds are we really reporting on the ‘right’ things and the real change that has happened or just on a bunch of targets

So now turning to social impact.  In the Social Audit Network we believe that the monitoring and evaluation process should be owned and controlled by the organisation. Without doubt, the recipient of funds should report back to a funder on what has been done with the money and what difference has occurred – but the control of the evaluation should be empowering the organisation and not undermining it by funders pushing for only their agenda to be addressed.

We argue that accounting for social and community change is an integral part of what a social economy organisation should be doing.  And perhaps more controversially, we feel that funders are just one of a number of stakeholder groups that have to be reported to… They are often highly influential stakeholders but should not be dominant.

Another important element to reporting on social impact, is that mechanistic and highly structured impact reporting can miss the point.

I read an article from Australia recently called The politics of social impact: ‘value for money’ versus ‘active citizenship’.  The author, Jenny Onyx, argues that we can get too bogged down in filling out output, outcome and impact boxes that we miss the point of how a community-based organisation can have a wider impact on local and active citizenship – with all the socialistic, caring, roles and responsibilities attached to that….

So, having said all this – what’s to be done?  I met a representative from a large funding organisation in Scotland recently.  They stressed listening, partnership, exchange, trust, openness…and I agreed with them.  But the relationship is often precarious – but here goes with some suggestions:

• trust is often quoted glibly but it is crucially important as the basis between a funder and a recipient. The thing about trust is that it takes time and shared experience to build up and, unfortunately, can be broken easily and suddenly;

• linked to trust is for both parties to adopt a more enlightened attitude to failure. If funders recognised and accepted failure, more risks can be taken, new things tried, and importantly learning can result from failed attempts;

• if possible, funders should be less prescriptive in how an organisation reports on the difference it is making. Of course, some parameters need to be set down and agreed but the contextual situation should be understood fully by both parties;

• there is also an issue over size and familiarity. Generally, those providing funds want to deal with larger organisations with recognisable ‘business’ systems and procedures.  This is often to the exclusion of smaller organisations.  This tension around ‘size’ will not go away especially when neoliberal economic systems measure success by how much entities have ‘grown’.  There may be a way of getting round this – but I am not sure what it is…

Finally, and to go back to the quote at the beginning – arguably ‘he’ in the saying should learn from social economy organisations how to play the pipes and learn the tune before putting his hand in the funding pocket…

Alan Kay Social Audit Network (SAN)

www.socialauditnetwork.org.uk

Social impact: the use of language and why it matters…

In this world of a Trump election in the USA and Brexit in the UK – where facts and ‘truth’ are being stretched to a frightening degree, I am reminded of George Orwell and his concept of doublethink.  He writes…

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. (George Orwell, 1984)

This idea of words and language being used to manipulate thinking is at the heart of Orwell’s work.  He recognised that language and words are crucially important.

As we enter a world of post-truth and increasingly instantaneous information and communication, we are going to have to be more scrupulous in filtering out fact from a tidal flood of fiction which has been designed to influence the way we think.

Of course, language can be used to explain and clarify things.  The late James Cameron in an article in the Guardian in the 1980s wrote about how he did not really know or understand his opinion on things until he had tried to express it in words.  He relates how he became surprised at the opinions – often strong opinions – that he held which only really come to light when he put his thoughts into words.

This resonated with me at that time – and it still does – as it reveals the strong link between our culture – the way we think about things in the world, and the language we use to explain it to ourselves and to others.

But language can also be used to confuse and obfuscate the truth intended in the meaning.

Often there is a difference between what people say they are doing and what they are actually doing. This lack of a clear link with reality may just the absence of clear thinking, but it may be deliberate to manipulate how others think about things and what they do about it.

In the world of social enterprise, words are used in ways that intend to influence.  Indeed, the term ‘social enterprise’ originated from the French, ‘economie sociale’, and its early use was not to explain the impact of economic activity in ‘social’ ways or in benefitting people.  Rather the term was used to explain that the economic activity was owned by people.  For me this is an interesting distinction, and one that is often forgotten.  But, of course, the term has evolved from its roots into what we understand ‘social enterprise’ to mean today, that is, the impact on people.

Another example from the history of social enterprise…

A precursor to social enterprise in the UK was the Scottish community business movement that started in the 1970s with rural community co-operatives supported by the then Highlands and Islands Development Board (now Highland and Islands Enterprise).

The idea of community ownership of economic activity spread to urban areas with community-owned businesses supported by local authorities using Urban Programme funding. This movement flourished, became established and mainstream. In the early 1990s it came in for a lot of criticism (some of it quite valid) but this led to people changing the terminology – if not the concept.  They started to refer to these types of organisations as ‘community enterprises’.  Not the old guard, ‘community business’, but the fresh and new, ‘community enterprise’.

Similarly, in the early 1990s a range of versions of community-owned businesses emerged.  In my view, they were more-or-less the same thing but with a new twist: ‘development trusts’, ‘social firms’ – to name but two.  Old wine in new bottles.  The newly formed terms implied a new concept.

Turning to the world of ‘social impact’ there are similar things happening.

I have been actively involved in ‘social accounting and audit’ for many years.  We started to use this term in the early 2000s replacing ‘social audit’ as we felt the longer term more accurately described the two parts of ‘social accounting’ and ‘social audit’.  As you can imagine it is not a particularly popular term and we thought of changing it into something more immediately appealing like, ‘SEE Visioning’ or similar.

It was thought that a change of name might attract those that associated ‘accounting’ and ‘audit’ with arduous and stressful connotations.  For better or for worse we stuck with the accuracy of ‘social accounting and audit’.  You get what is says on the tin…

More recently I have become aware of a subtle change of word usage in the social impact field.

A few years ago, the term ‘impact measurement’ was on everyone’s lips.  We were being encouraged to ‘measure’ the change that happens on people, the environment and on the local economies.  If we could not, the argument was that the impact could not be managed – or so we were told.

The Social Audit Network has always disputed this and said that just because one cannot measure something, one can still put a value on it.  In fact, many of the things that most people personally would value in their lives, cannot be measured – like love, close friendship, the warmth of company, the delight in a beautiful view, the exhilaration of achievement, and so on.  Others in this area of social impact insisted that ‘measurement’ was key.

Inevitably, those that insisted on measuring things and often reducing the good things in life to a financial value are now recognising that they may have been wrong.  But instead of accepting that – yes, you are right – they change the words.  ‘Impact management’ has been introduced.  Recognising the absurdities of trying to measuring everything, which one cannot sensibly do, let’s change it to managing and understanding our impact.

Perhaps what is not so strange is that those advocating ‘impact management’ now are not a million miles away from what ‘social accounting and audit’ has been suggesting for decades.

So the use of language may just be a minor skirmish within the social impact.  But it is arguably a reflection of something much more important – that is, the way we use language and what we really mean.

I can see that in a future more nationalist, more fearful, more defensive and exclusive world, the connection between language and ‘truth’ will become more divergent.

The writing of Orwell will no doubt come back to haunt (or is it taunt us?).  In his work, ‘Politics and the English Language’, he writes…

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

I am not sure what a cuttlefish is, but there seems to be a lot of them about.

Alan Kay

Social Audit Network (SAN) www.socialauditnetwork.org.uk

Social impact and our peculiar understanding of ‘community’…

Many social enterprises, and perhaps more accurately, community enterprises, say that they are having an impact on The Community.  But do we really understand what we mean when we talk about ‘community’?

I have been involved with a number of EU funded projects over the years and conversations with European partners turns to semantics and discussion on whether or not there is a shared understanding of some of the major concepts that we in the UK bandy about with abandon.

One of those, and one that often forms a bit of a stumbling block, is the word ‘community’.  The Germans say it is untranslatable; the French use it in other ways; the British say it all the time in the hope that the others get their meaning.

Turning to definitions, the Oxford Living Dictionaries states that it is, ‘a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common’, which implies a ‘geographical community’.  But it also goes on to say that community can be, ‘the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common’.  This suggests more of a ‘community of interest’.

These discussions remind me of when I worked with community businesses in Scotland in the late 1980s.  Talking about a geographical community made sense as local people in hard pressed areas got together, formed an enterprise that created benefits for the locality by providing employment for long term unemployed and much needed services to benefit residents in the area.

But then ‘community of interest’ emerged.   This broadened the definition and at one meeting we realised that a golf club could be a community business serving the ‘community of golfers’.  Was this right?  And so the argument continued within, in those days, a smoke-filled room of activists…

Added to this are two critical dilemmas worthy of consideration.

The first is that ‘community’ is not a homogenous unit.  Within a geographical area there are a range of different people with differing values, outlooks, social and economic status, faiths and ethnic groupings.  How do we, as community-based organisations, whose central purpose is to work for community benefit, serve the whole community?

What are the priorities; how are they decided; and so on?   Local people on a Board of a community enterprise would be expected to understand the local community better than an outsider – but they may have their own interests and views that may not address the problem of all people living and working in the community.

The second is how the geographical community is defined.  Where are the boundaries outlining the community?   For some communities this is relatively straightforward as they may be islands, or particularly remote and self-defining, or they may be a housing estate squeezed into an area bounded by a major road or railway line.  But for many community based organisations this is an issue and one that has to be tackled and re-addressed.

Many community enterprises over the years have tried to report on the impact that they have on their community.  If they keep social accounts they are expected to draw out a local stakeholder map that charts the nature of the relationship they have with different stakeholder groups.

This is an exercise that many find particularly useful as it exposes many in their organisation to the dilemmas mentioned above.  Often there is not total agreement, but the discussion over stakeholder relationships can create a better understanding of differing positions within and around the organisation.

Also, as part of social accounting, there would be a need to consult or engage with the ‘community’ – some refer it to as the ‘wider community’.  This presents a problem as the community may be made up of thousands of households.  Through my involvement with social accounting and audit, I have tried to do and suggest a number of things.

One time we worked with a community enterprise in carrying out a survey that involved a questionnaire going to each household distributed in a community newsletter.  The returns were few.

Another time we worked on visiting a random selection of households in an area and conducted interviews.  This was more successful but fraught with difficulties over people being out, not wanting callers, not to mention fatigue and a wearing down of shoe leather…

However, something that did seem to work well, was the creation of a kind of ‘community jury’.  The community enterprise identified a local councillor for the area; a head of school, a local social worker, a prominent business person, a faith leader, a local MP.  These were people who were not close stakeholders but who would know about the community enterprise and a little about its work and impact.

Ideally this group would be brought together and issues about the performance and impact of the community enterprise would be discussed.  In practice this was very hard to achieve and the fall-back position was to interview these people with the same questions.

The consultation and engagement with a ‘community of interest’ may be clearer in some ways, as the community enterprise may only be consulting those people that have expressed an interest in what the enterprise is trying to do.  But that leaves out all the people that could be in the community of interest but do not know about or have never used the services provided.  Difficult or what?

I think defining and understanding ‘community’ is crucially important.  At a meeting several years ago a prominent member of the social enterprise sector in Scotland was asked what he thought was the future of social enterprise.  He said he thought it would be ‘community based enterprise’.  This harks back to the burgeoning community business movement in Scotland in the 1980s – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

I also think that community enterprises are going to be more and more important.They tend to be tenacious organisations due to their close connections within communities.  This is evidenced by the number of community co-operatives in the Highlands and Islands that are still around in one form or another.

Community enterprises are also like ‘anchor organisations’ – a conduit for local development.  They usually have a clearer purpose compared to the plethora of recent social enterprises that are currently emerging – which are not community-based and struggle to show their distinction from being traditional businesses with a philanthropic arm.

Finally, we all live in ‘communities’ in one form or another.  We are not only individuals but part of something that underlines the connections and relationships between us that make life worthwhile.  I leave you with a quote from Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993), an American labour leader and civil rights activist…

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

Alan Kay, Social Audit Network (SAN) www.socialauditnetwork.org.uk