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Comment by Caroline Oakes on February 13, 2012 at 12:16pm

Hi

Will be interested to see if you can do this.  Our village community wanted to keep our post office in the local shop and despite a  wide consultation with both community and local businesses and neighbouring communities who all used the Post Office.  The community was completely ignored, the MP has also been involved to no avail.  The post office was taken from the local shop and a mobile post office put in the village hall 3 afternoons a week (no use for local businesses as it closes at 4pm).  The Post office that runs it is at least a half an hour drive from the village.  The custom has dropped and talking to them it is likely to discontinue due to lack of custom.  The local shop keeper has offered to run it on a commission only basis and that has been turned down.  My warning would be that the Post Office don't listen and don't care about the sustainablilty of a community.  Sorry if this not positive but do be aware that it may not be easy.

Comment by Annemarie Naylor on February 13, 2012 at 12:07pm

Please contact The Plunkett Foundation - who benefit from a wealth of experience in supporting the establishment of community shops (including post offices) - http://www.plunkett.uk.net/shops 

Comment by Kirsty Clark on February 13, 2012 at 12:03pm

Hi All,

At ABSEN we have a collegue who is looking to set up a post office as a trading arm of their charity. They are looking for information regarding where they might be able to get funding, and also experience of anyone who has set up a post office as a trading arm. Is anyone aware of any groups who have been successful in a similar venture? Or can someone point us to any websites that may have useful information. Thanks

Comment by Nick Wilding on May 20, 2011 at 4:41pm

After a long pause... a message to all members of this group. The publication 'appreciating assets', which is the product of this group, has been printed and will be launched very soon. We're looking on leads for who should receive a copy - any feedback much appreciated. We're thinking particularly of newspapers, magazines and networks/blogs where it could be posted. If you're potentially able to volunteer to help distribute, let us know that too.
Best
Nick

Comment by David Aynsley on January 4, 2011 at 2:32pm

ABCD locked up!

 

Dear fellow Fiery Spirits,

 

A happy New Year to you all. As promised last year here is a summary of my recent work at the Council of Europe (CoEu) and my subsequent thoughts on implications for ABCD. For those of you who don’t know me I am a (soon to retire) police sergeant based in Cornwall and working in the field of “Youth Issues”; so you might appreciate the not very good joke in the title of this entry.

 

To give a little context of my work in Cornwall, the considerable European funding received by Cornwall as a European Region from the EU defines the region as “disadvantaged”. Cornwall is fortunate to have 12 areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty but unfortunate to have several areas of extreme (for Western Europe) unnatural child poverty. Generally speaking this child poverty goes unseen by people outside (and sometimes inside) Cornwall because, unsurprisingly, they look towards the picture postcard image of the AONB. As many of you Fiery Spirits know, this is not a problem exclusive to Cornwall!

 

Last December I was delighted to attend the Council of Europe’s Expert Seminar at the European Youth Centre in Strasbourg on ‘Youth Policy Approaches for Access to Social Rights of Young people from Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods, along with 40 delegates from European countries within and outside the EU. The multiple perspectives offered by the diversity of nationalities and cultures present taught me that compared to somewhere like Macedonia and parts of the former East Germany children’s experience in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the UK  are not  in the same league as some other countries. Therefore it is erroneous to compare ourselves with them. However, at the same time, I learned that the principles of alienation from neighbourhoods are the same across Europe – it is simply a matter of scale.

 

From this position I introduced ABCD as a lens through which to view children and young people’s access to their social rights. When we explored access in terms of ABCD it became apparent that by restricting children and young people’s access to rights, Local and Regional Authorities “lock up” children’s assets/gifts in ways which prevent them being made available for the good of their neighbourhoods.

 

For example:

 

• Local authorities build affordable housing to remedy the housing shortage and in some cases, are developing the tendency to build “affordable” housing by reducing the cost of the land under the house by using revenue intended for play and recreation to discount the land, thereby leaving no revenue to build play, recreation and community facilities – in short, the construction of modern-day slums. A quick look at Google Earth at your local affordable housing development might confirm this generalisation – I hope it doesn’t!

 

• Housing estates controlled by local authorities and housing associations often display signs stating ‘No ball games’. The threat being that if ball games are played then the tenants will be in breech of their tenancy agreements and liable to sanctions. This is often nothing more than a fictitious law because residents who own their own home in these estates are not subject to them (except in cases where local government by-laws apply).

 

This erroneous housing policy and legal fiction denies children the opportunity to integrate in their neighbourhoods and creates a brutal public sphere in which it is acceptable to deny children their rights to Leisure, Play and Culture under Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Human Rights Act 1998 and consequently Article 14 (right to receive equal treatment)of the European Convention of Human Rights. The degree to which these anti-integration “laws” diminish the freedom or rights of children is not, of course, an important concern for those who promote anti-play and/or anti integration laws and rules because they see themselves as the saviours of the housing shortage.

 

This denial of rights is serious enough; in terms of ABCD, children denied access to the right to play where they live will go elsewhere, probably breaking even more real and fictitious laws wherever they go. In other words, places are created where children cannot be because they cannot be in their own place!  When they do this their assets are effectively locked up within the child and not available to their neighbourhood. These locked up assets become deficits and may materialise in a negative context - a natural leader becomes a gang leader - or present themselves as problems – an intelligent child is illiterate. Transference between generations in this context becomes at best problematic and at worst almost impossible; neighbourhoods are put into decay by policies intended to take them into renewal.

 

Hence, those of us concerned with ABCD have to try and provoke the neighbourhood to build some kind of bridge between the children who have been inadvertently expelled from their neighbourhood by real and fictitious laws, in order to release their assets for the benefit of their neighbourhood. These bridges can take many forms, in my case it was the Tr14ers Community Dance Team; you will work with or know of many other fantastic schemes. But whatever we do it must be with the premise that we enter into a mutual learning environment with local people which enables us to exchange our assets as gifts for the benefit of all.

 

The Tr14ers were delighted to receive the Carnegie (UK) Trust Rural Sparks for England in 2009 and I hope to take some of them to the CoEu later this year to demonstrate how ABCD helped integrate them into their neighbourhoods and to discuss how their assets could be released and appreciated to secure access to their rights.

Comment by Helen Fairweather on January 1, 2011 at 1:18pm

Hi all

I've joined this group having just worked out what it meant. I agree with those who say all community development must be asset-based, certainly my own practice in rural and urban areas in the UK is based on finding the energy and the strengths in communities and their residents - otherwise what is there to build on.

Currently, since the Hill Holt Wood Convention and all I learned there, I am working with colleagues in different sectors to try & get a positive process going locally in Shropshire on the planning of public services.

I'm also involved in a bid for a Landscape Partnership scheme based on the AONB here, and I'm really interested in David Aynsley's European Landscape Convention work which seems very relevant. We are keen to emphasise the social dimension for an  LPS - the particular history of Welsh/English, incomer/local (waves of immigration) & how that's influenced landscape over the centuries. The influence and integration of landscape with people is a vital and central theme, I think.

Comment by mark woodhead on December 21, 2010 at 9:11am

Hi All,

I've been out of touch with Fiery Spirits for  a while. We are doing some interesting work in Wakefield District on asset based aproaches, especially in connection with health. We did one piece of work in the Eastmoor area, using a world cafe approach, which worked well - that work is continuing. We are now doing some asset based work in Knottingley, taking a different approach, using appreciative inquiry and also a photography project. I've been giving some thought to the best ways of evaluating such asset based work. We have been looking at a logic model of evaluation, which seems to have some strengths for this purpose. However, I'd be interested to hear from others about approaches you ahave used in evaluating asset based work.

 

best wishes,

 

Mark Woodhead

 

 

Comment by Tara O'Leary on November 3, 2010 at 9:12pm

Hi David
Thanks so much for the feedback and well done on your policy success! I look forward to hearing more about it in due course. A new report from IACD/Carnegie is due out shortly and we refer to the TR14ers and C2 in the South west as part of that. Final thing is you should check out the little film on this site from the TR14ers visit to Fife in late July this year.
Keep in touch and keep up the good work David!
All the best for now,
Tara
All the best for now
Tara

Comment by David Aynsley on November 3, 2010 at 8:51am

Dear All, I've been absent from the Fiery Spirits site for a while and am glad to be back. I've been concentrating on introducing ABCD principles into police youth justice practice and working with the Council of Europe (CoEu) on the Integration of Young People in their Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods using ABCD as the premis. I am delighted to report that the CoEu adopted Resolution 319 last week and that my reports (acknowledging Carnegie (UK) Trust are cited in the explanitory notes. I am going to the CoEu seminar on Young People's Access to Social Justice next month and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be swatting hard on ABCD. Once this is completed I will be contributing to the groups. Love to you all, Dave

Comment by Cornelia Flora on May 21, 2010 at 2:29pm

For so long community development has been based on the "felt needs" of local people, rather on the strengths of the assets that they have. By re-naming the way that we approach community development, we shift from what is Spanish is called an "asistancialista" mindset to one of mutual investment and empowerment. Of course, that is what many practitioners have done for a long time, but others still focus on needs.

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