This document discusses community organizing and social entrepreneurship. It provides examples of community organizing projects, including one in Marsh Farm where mismanagement of funds for a community project led to lost funding. It discusses the ideas of Paulo Freire, Saul Alinsky, and Clodomir Santos de Morais in guiding community organizing and entrepreneurship efforts. The document outlines principles for workshops on cooperativism and organizing communities to have more control over their development. Participants are encouraged to define objectives and critically reflect on their situation.

1. SWK 1048
Developing Enterprising
Communities
Tim Curtis and Al Bell

2. • Community Organising
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Social Challenges
• Means of access to finance-Credit Union
• Means of access to sustainable transport
• Means of access to property- assets

3. Guiding Lights
• Based on Paulo Freire (Brazilian educator) –
Pedagogy of the Oppressed –
listening, dialogue, consciousness-raising
• Saul Alinsky (Chicago rebel) – Rules for
Radicals, tactics for effective organising
• Clodomir Santos de Morais – A Future for the
Excluded – entrepreneurial awareness, wealth
creation by the poor
Drawing on these and other theory & practice to
create an indigenous English 21st century
community organising movement.

4. An example....
• In January 2000 dozens of Marsh Farm residents formed a partnership with Luton Borough
council and several other key agencies delivering services to the estate, in a bid to secure
NDC funding of £48.3 million to regenerate the community over 10 years
• £839,000 New Deal for Communities funding allocated in Marsh Farm was lost to the estate
following severe mismanagement (at least) of public funds by managers at the Marsh Farm
Community Development Trust (MFCDT) who are the delivery agency responsible for funding
the project.
• A complete absence of any effective financial monitoring systems allowed hundreds of
thousands of pounds to be spent without authority to cover up massive overspending by a
few multinational companies who were carrying out other works for MFCDT.
• This led to loss of the OW funds which were allocated by the board of MFCDT specifically for
job creation by and for unemployed locals.
• An internal inquiry held subsequently found that severe mismanagement of public funding by
Trust managers was responsible.
• A high court judge also made severe criticisms of the way public funding was handled, none
of which recovers the lost funding of course.
• This has been given to multi million pound companies who pay their executives more in
bonuses than the cost of our entire project...where's the justice in that?
• http://www.marshfarmoutreach.org.uk/PDF%27s/Final-OW-Business-Case-December-
2008.pdf

5. de Morais
• OW is a workshop that provides training in the ideology and
practice of cooperativism by problematizing and dismantling
the‘‘artisan consciousness’’ (conciencia artesanal) of the
cooperative’s membership, equipping them instead with the more
sophisticated and flexible worker’s‘‘organizational consciousness’’
(conciencia organizac-ional)
• defined, in contrast to the former, as the comprehensive
technical, social, communicative, and organizational ‘‘mentality’’
that a group of people re-quires in order to work together and run a
collectively owned enterprise.
• On the ground, this basic schematic ideally translates into short-
term, relatively large-scale workshops that emphasize an interactive
and pragmatic pedagogy, following Freire, in which participants
‘‘learn by doing.’’

6. • development specialists have also recognized the
limitations of the small-scale lending model, incapable as it
is of effecting structural change or giving rise to formal-
sector enterprises that are large enough to carve out a
competitive edge for themselves in the global
marketplace(Gulli 1998)
• real development cannot consist in a mere transferof skills
(i.e., learning), capital (i.e., redistribution), or power
(i.e., empowerment) from one party to another, whether
by dint of social assistance or poverty alleviation.
• Participants have at their disposal the tools of their own
liberation
http://highpoint.academia.edu/JoshFisher/Papers/757712/Building_Consciousness_The_Organization_Workshop_Comes_to_a_Nicaraguan_Cooperative

7. Civic and mutual respect
• “Civic solidarity is how one aligns oneself (ali-
nearse) and one’s attitudes toward the group,
recognizing that, regardless of disagreements
we might have, a common thread binds our
fates together. Sometimes that thread may be
strained by disagreements or outside factors,
but we’ve learned that in order to make it
strong we need to communicate and respect
one another”

8. Principles
• organizational reigns would be handed over to
the workshop’s participants;
• The ‘‘objective’’ of the capacitation was open
ended and was open to participants’
definition;
• the role of the facilitator was only to function
as an intermediary, encouraging the active
and critical reflection of the participants

9. So......
• This term- Community Organisers workbook
plus examples
• Next term- social entrepreneurship
workshops, driven by your ideas

10. Assignment
• Simple responses
to community
assets workbook
tasks - 80%
• Mini business
plan- 10%
• Mostly about
effort rather than
writing