Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
Malcolm X, 1965
There are many in the third sector who find themselves deeply uncomfortable with the notion of “empowerment”. It brings with it an implicit assumption of noblesse oblige. After all, if power can be handed down by Lady Bountiful then it can surely be withdrawn by her if her subjects fail to demonstrate sufficient gratitude. Yet we continue to talk lazily about “sharing power” as if doing so were an uncontested process. In fact, the history of social change is littered with examples not of “empowerment” but of “takepowerment”. It is a history of individuals and communities unwilling to accept the status quo and demanding to take back control of the things that matter to them. Their actions at the time often seem shocking and unacceptable to people of goodwill – including many in the third sector itself. Think Extinction Rebellion.
So the fact that there is no single word for “takepowerment” is instructive. Social scientists have long held to the so-called lexical hypothesis: the idea that the things most important to us are typically encoded into our everyday language. Perhaps it is because the successful redistribution of power in this way is simply too rare? I cannot accept this. That is why I support the Better Way Network and its call to oppose not just the policies and systems that divide and disempower us but the politicians and others who seek to hoard power. In their words we need to:
- create platforms and channels for everyone to influence what matters to them;
- build confidence and capacity for individuals and communities to take more power; and
- stop thinking national or big is best and realise the power of communities and place.
This is exactly the approach we are taking at Power to Change, the foundation for community business. We believe in our bones that when local people come together to address an unmet need, and when they do so in a democratic and business-like way, they not only improve their own lives, they improve the very neighbourhood in which they live. This claim – of “better places through community business” – is a bold one and it is fair to say that when Power to Change opened its doors in 2015 there was little by way of evidence to support it. Which makes it all the more impressive that our Board decided to set aside 5% of our £150 million endowment to establish a Research Institute to collect the evidence both for and against the proposition.
Some quibble about our use of the word “business” which, like the word “profit”, they seem to associate with bad things. Many would prefer we use the term “community enterprise” instead. Such nonsense misses the point. It is not what they are called that makes the difference, it is what they do. (As a small aside, it is interesting to compare the origins of words “business” and “enterprise”. The former comes from the Old English word bisignes for “care, anxiety, occupation”. The latter from the French word entrepreneur for “undertaker”. At Power to Change we see ourselves in the caring profession, not the undertaking profession.)
A good example of the sort of approach I am talking about is Bramley Baths in Leeds, a Grade II listed Edwardian swimming pool (with Russian steam room!) built in 1904 and run for many years by the local council. In 2011, the council announced its decision to cut the opening hours significantly and potentially close the facility entirely, citing significant annual losses.
The local community, horrified at the threat to a much-loved local treasure, stepped up and offered to take over the running of the baths. After two years’ negotiation, the council transferred the asset into community hands without the pool having to close for a single day. It has been running at full capacity ever since with regular, albeit modest, annual surpluses.
How did they do it? Well they brought in a series of professional managers with strong commercial experience, and of course the use of volunteers helped to keep costs down, but what it really came down to was a new spirit. They introduced a Swim-Along-Cinema (watch Jaws while you swim!), they put an orchestra on a pontoon in the middle of the pool for some light entertainment, they arranged photo shoots with the local arts college. Anything to increase footfall and monetise it. Not in an exploitative way – this is not a wealthy area – but creating a buzz and sense of being a place to go.
And here’s the thing, it’s nothing the council couldn’t have done itself. But this is where the magic of community business comes in. Whether it is running a local pub or shop, looking after the local park or library, or providing care to vulnerable neighbours, when local people put their minds to it there is little they cannot achieve. Nor is this about “rolling back the frontiers of the State”. It is about thinking differently; seeing a different relationship between governors and the governed.
All well and good but the real question is: so what? The staff and volunteers at Bramley Baths might be happier. The visitors to the pool and gym might be healthier. But is Bramley itself a better place because of the baths? It is more cohesive? More trustful? Less isolated? What can we say about the wellbeing of the area as a whole? This is where things get interesting. Where the Power to Change Research Institute – with the time and resource to look at such questions in depth – might just make a difference. You see, for the last two decades the Government has commissioned a nationwide Community Life Survey that explores all of these questions. And since 2017 the Research Institute has been working with DCMS and the survey company Kanter to run hyper-local boosters alongside the main survey. Bramley is one of those areas.
This allows us to do two things. First, we can use a technique called propensity score matching to take survey responses from the national survey and create a “counterfactual neighbourhood” that matches Bramley in every important respect. Second, we can track both the real Bramley and its counterfactual over time; in this case using data from 2017 and 2019. Putting the two together allows us to see not only whether things have got better or worse in Bramley between those years but whether they have got better or worse than would otherwise be the case. These sorts of difference-in-difference models are not the same as a properly constructed randomised controlled trial but they are certainly up there in the pantheon of serious statistical analysis.
The Research Institute will publish the results for Bramley later this year and it will be exciting to see what they show. And yet I can already anticipate the reactionary voices of certain sector leaders. People who, perhaps because they struggled with maths at school, seem to enjoy nothing more than tweeting dull clichés like “correlation doesn’t imply causation” and “you can prove anything with statistics”. The sort who think the best kind of research is a sparky collection of essays written by well-meaning Oxbridge graduates.
The really annoying thing is that, like all purveyors of cliché, their responses will contain a germ of truth. There may be all sorts of reasons why things have changed in and around Bramley that are nothing to do with the baths. But of course that is the point of research. It is not about producing meaningless word-cloud-style theories of change on a side of A4. It is not about producing ridiculously large SROI ratios that fool no-one. It is about the slow and painstaking triangulation of multiple sources of evidence – quantitative data from statistical models certainly but also qualitative insights from ethnography, grounded theory and mixed methods research.
I salute the many thousands of heroes who run community businesses up and down this country. I stand in awe of their spirit of “takepowerment”. I could not do what they do. Instead my contribution, through the work of the Power to Change Research Institute, is simply to build the best evidence base I can. This seems like a noble ambition for any charitable foundation. After all, in the words of Francis Bacon, patron of libraries and father of modern science, “knowledge itself is power”.
This article first appeared on the Better Way Network blog on 27 February 2020.